Military Secrets
Secrets have a way of justifying themselves beyond the point of necessity. Sometimes, especially in wartime, the military’s need for or obsession with secrecy is understandable. Other times, it is downright ludicrous. Still, on other occasions, a mission has been kept secret for so long it becomes firmly wedged between the dusty cracks of history and the forgotten. The Official Secrets Act became a handy catchall, but a much abused legal instrument.
In May 1943, Guy Gibson’s RAF Dambuster squadron flattened hydroelectric dams in Germany’s Ruhr Valley. The daring nighttime raid was largely a military success and a tremendous morale booster for the Allied war effort. But it was not without great sacrifice. Nine of 19 raiders, each with a seven-man crew, were lost. The very next day, the RAF sent up a specially equipped photo reconnaissance Spitfire to film the damage. The plane carried no armament and flew above 30,000 feet. The name of the RAF pilot who flew the Spitfire was kept secret.
Peter Elliott, Senior Keeper of the Royal Air Force Museum in Hendon, England, e-mailed me to suggest “the identity of the pilot would not have been revealed during the war for security reasons and to protect him if he were subsequently taken prisoner.” However, Peter Elliott went on to say, “I think it is highly unlikely that the RAF would deliberately suppress his name after the war — his flight should be recorded in his unit’s operations record book, which will have been open for inspection in the National Archives since the mid-1970s.”
Sounds reasonable. However, the RAF kept this pilot’s name secret for 60 years. He is in his early 80s and alive and well in Oxfordshire. Several months ago he was interviewed by a Daily Telegraph writer and recalled his flight over the dams.
A Canadian Mosquito pilot, the late William John “Bill” O’Connell, Ottawa, fell afoul of military secrecy in November 1943. He was flying a Mark VI Mosquito with 21 Squadron, RAF, and was nearing the end of his second tour of operations. He was leading a two-plane, low-level attack against a power station at Cleve, a small city in northwest Germany a few kilometres beyond the Dutch border. They planned to cross the Dutch coast at 12:05 noon, in a sector they had flown over the previous day. Then, there “wasn’t a sign of a German gun anywhere.” When they were still 6.4 kilometres out at sea, German ack-ack guns began firing at them at a fairly long range. The fire originated from an arc between their 10 o’clock position and their 2 o’clock.
Bill O’Connell began eyeballing the ground at 12 o’clock for an explanation for the firepower. Was the German ground battery protecting something new? O’Connell saw a low building that was a recent addition to the coast.
“Had the Germans not drawn our attention to the site with the gun-fire, there was a pretty good chance that we would have missed it.” He opened fire 1,829 metres away and poured 20 mm cannon bursts at the structure and machine gun fire as his range closed. When he had exhausted his ammunition he flew directly over the building and noted a vast amount of grey smoke and tangled antennae wires. Returning to base in Hunsden, Hertfordshire, he found himself in very deep doo-doo because he had abandoned the attack on his primary target. His Mosquito had suffered only one hit; a solid-ball 20 mm cannon shell had penetrated his starboard engine nacelle and punctured a tire on the right wheel. The undercarriage was intact and he managed to safely land the crippled plane, still carrying four 227-kilogram bombs. His senior officer raked him over the coals: “Why didn’t you go to Cleve as you had been briefed?” He dismissed the attack as “humph, a fish hut or something! You should know that there are no German radar stations in Holland.” A few days later, while debriefing O’Connell, a junior operations officer told him he had tried to pursue the attack for intelligence reasons, but had been ordered to “forget it.”
“A day or two later, that same junior officer sought me out in the officers’ mess and said they had received a message from the Dutch resistance about your operation. Group headquarters asked if we had any aircraft from 140 Wing on operations on November 30. Group was told ‘no, we had no aircraft on operations on that date.’ I should point out that two totally fictitious and consecutive entries appear in 21 Squadron Operations Record Book. Arthur [his navigator] and I are on record as the crew that failed to make an accurate landfall … at the Dutch coast. The fact is we were dead on track. We never missed a landfall. Someone seemed to be trying to represent to history that Arthur and I were an incompetent crew.
“No one at group headquarters would ever know that an aircraft of 21 Squadron got a tire shot out while it was not officially on operations.”
Years later, Bill O’Connell learned that the low building he destroyed was a key German Over-the-Horizon (O-T-H) radar installation. Single-handedly, he may have been responsible for crippling German plans to strengthen fortress Europe. Over-the-Horizon radar was a key element in their grand design. Bill O’Connell’s “target of opportunity” attack destroyed an experimental station and killed 16 technicians and soldiers.
“Did we change history that day? By reducing the German O-T-H radar to rubble, had we, in fact, also ensured the success of the Allied landings in Normandy on D-Day? It could well have been. With O-T-H radar near Calais, the Germans could have negated the sham force at Dover and they would have been able, perhaps, to pick up the true invasion force on the south coast of England.”
Bill O’Connell has “exchanged correspondence with Dr. Theo Boiten, a young Dutch historian who was writing a book entitled, Blenheim Strike.” Dr. Boiten unearthed oral confirmation from resistance members that a radar station had been destroyed in an attack on November 30, 1943. A Dutch lady who had dated a young German anti-Nazi naval officer when she was a girl, volunteered that the officer told her a major device for detecting aircraft had been destroyed and “created a great deal of concern among the German officers.” Another Dutch citizen who had been pressed into service as a German messenger was 91 metres from the building and saw two German soldiers get blown away. But he didn’t know what was in the building. So, there is no official or unofficial corroboration that the building was a radar base. There are no ULTRA code breakers’ reports in British defence department archives. Dr. Boiten’s contacts could not find copies of any resistance messages in the Dutch National Archives in Amsterdam.
Bill O’Connell wrote to German War Archives in Berlin and was told there was no record of a Mosquito attack on November 30, 1943. RAF records for station Sculthorpe in British archives are incomplete. Bill O’Connell maintains the names of two out of four operations room staff officers are missing. One name missing is that of the senior operations officer (OPSO).
“If he is still alive, maybe he could throw some light on these questions if he chose to do so. Or it may well be that the name of the other officer missing from the staff at Sculthorpe was the junior officer who approached me twice asking my permission to pursue a conclusion to our attack on a German radar unit. He’s the one who was told to ‘forget it.’
“Over the years, I have become more and more convinced that our target on November 30, 1943, had indeed been the world’s first O-T-H radar and the very first target that showed on their screens was ironically the last.” Bill O’Connell may never know if his strike shortened the war and guaranteed the success of the D-Day landings.
Official secrets, you know!