page_title: Christopher Lee
section_title: Military service during the Second World War
hierarchical_section_title: Christopher Lee / Military service during the Second World War
caption_attribution_description: English: Flying Officer C F C Lee in Vatican City, 1944, soon after The Liberation of Rome
context_page_description: Sir Christopher Frank Carandini Lee, CBE, CStJ was an English actor, singer and author. With a career spanning nearly seven decades, Lee was well known for portraying villains and became best known for his role as Count Dracula in a sequence of Hammer Horror films. His other film roles include Francisco Scaramanga in the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun, Count Dooku in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, and Saruman in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy and the Hobbit film trilogy.
  Lee was knighted for services to drama and charity in 2009, received the BAFTA Fellowship in 2011, and received the BFI Fellowship in 2013. Lee credited three films “for bringing me to the fore” as an actor, A Tale of Two Cities, in which he played the villainous marquis, and two horror films, The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula. He considered his best performance to be that of Pakistan's founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah in the biopic Jinnah, and his best film to be the British cult film The Wicker Man. He frequently appeared opposite his friend Peter Cushing in many horror films, and late in his career had roles in five Tim Burton films.
context_section_description: When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Lee had enrolled in a military academy and volunteered to fight for the Finnish Army against the Soviet Union during the Winter War. He and other British volunteers were kept away from the actual fighting, but they were issued winter gear and were posted on guard duty a safe distance from the border. After two weeks in Finland, they returned home. In a later interview, Lee stated that he knew how to shoot but not how to ski and that he probably wouldn't be alive if he had been allowed to go to the front line. Lee returned to work at United States Lines and found his work more satisfying, feeling that he was contributing. In early 1940, he joined Beecham's, at first as an office clerk, then as a switchboard operator. When Beecham's moved out of London, he joined the Home Guard. In the winter, his father fell ill with bilateral pneumonia and died on 12 March 1941. Realising that he had no inclination to follow his father into the Army, Lee decided to join up while he still had some choice of service, and volunteered for the Royal Air Force.
  Lee reported to RAF Uxbridge for training and was then posted to the Initial Training Wing at Paignton. After he had passed his exams in Liverpool, the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan meant that he travelled on the Reina del Pacifico to South Africa, then to his posting at Hillside, at Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia. Training with de Havilland Tiger Moths, Lee was having his penultimate training session before his first solo flight, when he suffered from headaches and blurred vision. The medical officer hesitantly diagnosed a failure of his optic nerve, and he was told he would never be allowed to fly again. Lee was devastated, and the death of a fellow trainee from Summer Fields only made him more despondent. His appeals were fruitless, and he was left with nothing to do. He was moved around to different flying stations before being posted to Southern Rhodesia's capital, Salisbury, in December 1941. He then visited the Mazowe Dam, Marandellas, the Wankie Game Reserve and the ruins of Great Zimbabwe. Thinking he should "do something constructive for my keep," he applied to join RAF Intelligence. His superiors praised his initiative, and he was seconded into the Rhodesian Police Force and was posted as a warder at Salisbury Prison. He was then promoted to leading aircraftman and moved to Durban in South Africa, before travelling to Suez on the Nieuw Amsterdam.
  After "killing time" at RAF Kasfareet near the Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal Zone, he resumed intelligence work in the city of Ismaïlia. He was then attached to No. 205 Group RAF before being commissioned as a pilot officer at the end of January 1943, and attached to No. 260 Squadron RAF as an intelligence officer. As the North African Campaign progressed, the squadron "leapfrogged" between Egyptian airstrips, from RAF El Daba to Maaten Bagush and on to Mersa Matruh. They lent air support to the ground forces and bombed strategic targets. Lee, "broadly speaking, was expected to know everything." The Allied advance continued into Libya, through Tobruk and Benghazi to the Marble Arch and then through El Agheila, Khoms and Tripoli, with the squadron averaging five missions a day. As the advance continued into Tunisia, with the Axis forces digging themselves in at the Mareth Line, Lee was almost killed when the squadron's airfield was bombed. After breaking through the Mareth Line, the squadron made their final base in Kairouan. After the Axis surrender in North Africa in May 1943, the squadron moved to Zuwarah in Libya in preparation for the Allied invasion of Sicily. They then moved to Malta, and, after its capture by the British Eighth Army, the Sicilian town of Pachino, before making a permanent base in Agnone Bagni. At the end of July 1943, Lee received his second promotion of the year, this time to flying officer. After the Sicilian campaign was over, Lee came down with malaria for the sixth time in under a year, and was flown to a hospital in Carthage for treatment. When h
caption: Flying Officer C. F. C. Lee in Vatican City, 1944, soon after the Liberation of Rome
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