Refreshing Time News

A PREVIOUSLY unknown account of fighting with Lawrence of Arabia on top-secret missions 92 years ago emerged yesterday – thanks to a pensioner’s chat with his cousin.

James Hynes, 80, was speaking to cousin Ellen when she revealed that she had a typed journal of her father George Hynes’s experiences with the enigmatic British Army officer Lt Col T E Lawrence during the First World War.

The diary features stories of espionage and air bombing campaigns known as “X Flights” which were led by Lawrence across the Turkish Ottoman empire.

In his sorties in 1918 against the Turks, Lawrence was accompanied by a hand-picked team of colleagues including the sixth Earl of Winterton, then a sitting MP.

One excerpt tells how Lawrence’s aristocratic team burnt breakfast for the squadron after being ordered to cook a full English fry-up in the desert. The secret missions helped Lawrence to capture Damascus, where he became instrumental in setting up an Arab government.

But the flights were so sensitive that the RAF was said to have known nothing of them – and they remained a secret. They were not even known by researchers for the 1962 David Lean film starring Peter O’Toole as Lawrence.

The diaries reveal their author, who died in 1973 aged 78, as one of Lawrence’s closest aides during the Arab revolts and will be a must-read for experts.

In one entry, Hynes, a flight sergeant, wrote: “All who took part in the Desert Operations had a great respect for Lawrence the amateur soldier.”

Yesterday James Hynes, a retired English lecturer in Mold, North Wales, who has written a book based on his uncle’s diaries, said: “Ellen had 220 pages from Uncle George. He had typed them in the 1930s from his original notes.

“It was amazing to see details of the X Flights. The only people that knew were the people conducting the war in the desert. It was so secret in fact that after George had been demobbed in 1919 he tried unsuccessfully for two years to get back-pay for taking part in the flights. But they didn’t get it because the RAF knew nothing about it.”

Jerry Rice and Emmitt Smith (and others) get their yellow jackets tonight. Travesty. What’d either of them ever accomplish?

Little has stopped fretting over the notion that being the only great player on a very bad team was being held against him, even though he produced numbers comparable to other great players who entered the Hall of Fame with much stronger supporting casts. He is focused on the possibility that other forces could have been at work all these years.

“Maybe it was in God’s plan for me to be in at this moment,” Little said. “I come in on the 44th Super Bowl, I come in with the 44th president, I come in with my son being 44, (and there were) 44 voters (on the selection committee).” [NFL.com]
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