part0007

A dumpy black aeroplane, barely visible in the fading autumn moonlight, but highly audible, circles a desolate patch of French farmland at a height of about 300 feet. The silhouette of its pilot’s rounded head can just be seen through the cockpit glass craning towards the ground, scouring the terrain. The plane makes another circuit, then another. Lights begin to appear in the windows of one or two of the neighbouring farmhouses — it has been overhead now for more than fifteen minutes. Finally, its wings level out, the throttle opens and it begins a climb towards the north. Almost immediately, the engine revs fall again and the plane banks sharply to the right. Nearly a mile from where it had been circling, a light on the ground is flashing a regular dash, dash, dot — the letter ‘G’.

There are two short bursts on the throttle from the aircraft, now making straight for the light and, in response, the light switches to a steady beam, then two more lights appear, completing a flare path. After one circuit of what appears to be a very small grass field with a road and a line of tall trees at the windward end, the pilot makes his approach, dropping almost vertically from the sky. The plane thumps down onto the turf just to the right of the first torch, bounces forward drunkenly over the heavily pitted surface and halts abruptly after scarcely fifty yards. With its propeller still tearing at the night air, the aircraft turns and taxis back to the marker light furthest from the line of trees. In an instant, one man has clambered out of the rear cockpit and another is installed, strapping himself into his harness as the revs pick up.

The engine is now screaming as if in panic as the pilot tries to gather speed on the rough terrain. Each bump checks the acceleration and the trees at the end of the field are now only 100 yards away. The wheel hits yet another hummock but this one throws the plane into the air. It climbs at an improbable angle but the trees seem to have grown in height. Then there is a blinding flash and the aeroplane wobbles for a second in its trajectory. But its engine roars on and, with the undercarriage thrashing through the treetops, heaves itself clear. As the plane climbs northwards and disappears into the blackness, hanging limply from a nearby pole, a severed high-tension electricity cable and a finer telephone wire snake among the fresh leaves and broken twigs that now litter the field beneath the trees.

An hour and a half later, the same aeroplane is 14,000 feet above the north coast of France. Its sedate progress is suddenly broken as it makes a tight diving turn to the left. Passing about 300 feet overhead are two German night-fighters on patrol, their green starboard navigation lights clearly visible. As they reach the end of their patrol line, they turn in neat formation through 180 degrees and retrace their original route. The unlit black aeroplane, which had initially headed evasively back into France, has turned now once more towards the Channel as it makes a steep dive towards the water, pulling out when just a few feet above the waves. Only when the pilot is certain he has remained undetected does he pull up to 2,000 feet and head for home.

Home is not welcoming. A low-lying fog covers the runway, but the approach lights are just visible on the ends of their poles above it. The plane sinks into the fog, nose high, feeling for the ground so the tail wheel touches the tarmac first. A jeep escorts the aircraft to a safe parking place and when the pilot descends stiffly from his cockpit — he has been in the air for five hours and forty minutes — he peers at the undercarriage and disentangles a length of telephone wire and puts it in his pocket to keep as a souvenir.

The aircraft in this, the first clandestine operation of No. 138 Special Duties Squadron, on the night of 4 September 1941, was a Westland Lysander Mk III SCW, or a ‘Lizzie’ as they became fondly nicknamed. The pilot, Flight Lieutenant John Nesbitt-Dufort, had skilfully demonstrated in his very first trip just how well-suited the Lysander was to the business of ferrying secret service agents in and out of France during the occupation. On this occasion, its ability to land and take off in a confined space was tested to an unreasonable extreme. The incoming agent and his assistant had been delayed in leaving their hotel by a police inspection of all the guests’ papers. When still a mile from the pre-selected landing field, they could hear the Lysander circling it and guessed that it was unlikely to stay around long enough for them to get there on their bicycles. They therefore chose the nearest likely field and began their signalling. No one had spotted the power lines in the darkness.

The history of the Westland Lysander, prior to its adoption by 138 and later 161 Special Duties Squadrons, had not been a particularly happy one. If not precisely a camel invented by Air Ministry committees, the aircraft certainly did not fulfil the purpose for which it was primarily intended. The idea had been to replace the aging Hawker Hector biplane which had been used by the RAF as an army co-operation aircraft, spotting artillery, collecting messages by scooping bags off the ground and occasionally dropping small bombs on the enemy.

Four companies were invited to submit designs for the new plane in 1934 and it was Westlands of Yeovil, a company which had developed from an agricultural engine manufacturer to an aircraft builder in the run-up to the First World War, which came up with the winning bid. Their chief designer, W.E.W. (Teddy) Petter, grandson of the firm’s founder who went on in later years to design English Electric’s Canberra and Lightning jets, spent considerable time talking to RAF pilots about their requirements. At the top of their somewhat inconclusive list was a plane with good all-round vision for pilot and observer, which could handle well at low speeds and which could land and take off on rough ground in as short a distance as possible.

By June 1936, Petter’s prototype was ready to take her maiden flight. Considering that the sleek forms of the Hawker Hurricane and the Supermarine Spitfire had already taken to the air, the carrot-shaped fuselage of the Lysander, with its hefty fixed undercarriage and its high wing, gave it an awkward and antiquated appearance. But there were innovatory aspects to the design, not least the slats which extended automatically from the leading edge of the wing as the aircraft slowed towards stalling speed. The slats controlled automatic flaps which made landing approaches at slow speed much simpler for the pilot and allowed him to pull up in less than fifty yards. The angle of the entire tail plane was also adjustable to assist short take-off and landing. The undercarriage was a single inverted V-shaped piece of virtually unbreakable alloy, imported specially from Switzerland and built to withstand the impact of heavy, steep landings on uneven terrain. Perhaps the design’s most visually characteristic feature was the pair of bulbous aerodynamic spats which covered the wheels and these, along with a machine-gun mounted in the rear cockpit, carried the Lysander’s means of attack — forward-facing machine-guns and optional stub wings for dropping bombs. The single radial engine was an 870 hp, 9-cylinder Bristol Mercury which allowed the aircraft a very modest maximum speed of 212 mph.

It was for the want of speed that the Lysander largely failed in the role for which it had been built. Four squadrons were sent to France and Belgium to assist the British Expeditionary Forces but when, in May 1940, Germany launched the Blitzkrieg , the lumbering Lysanders were no match for the 400 mph Messerschmitt 109s. Although records show that one Lysander crew destroyed a Messerschmitt 110 during an air battle and returned safely to base while another accounted for a Henschel 126 and a Stuka on the same sortie, the contest was dreadfully one-sided. As the BEF retreated to the beaches of Dunkirk, the depleted Lysander squadrons were withdrawn to British soil when some were deployed on missions back over the Channel to supply the beleaguered army. In one of these operations, sixteen Lysanders were sent and only two returned. All told, of the 174 Lysanders used in the battle over France and Belgium, eighty-eight were lost in air combat while thirty were destroyed on the ground. Between September 1939 and May 1940, 120 Lysander crew members lost their lives.

The RAF had also sent Lysanders to other parts of the world such as Egypt, Palestine and India, where they all played a front-line role to a greater or lesser degree. Even here, though, they were fairly soon replaced by fighters such as the Hurricane and the last offensive action seen by Lysanders was in 1943 over the jungles of Burma. Back in Britain, apart from some air-sea rescue work for downed pilots, the aircraft was relegated to the prosaic task of target towing, a far cry from the critically tight manoeuvring for which it had been so carefully designed. It was thus a fortunate coincidence when the RAF discovered that they possessed in the Lysander the perfect vehicle to carry out the clandestine task which, since the fall of France, they were increasingly asked to perform by the SIS and SOE.

The practice of placing agents behind enemy lines and of retrieving them by air was not an entirely new one. The flamboyant French aviator, Jules Védrines, winner of many early international air races, is renowned for his daring flights in a small monoplane across the German defences during the First World War, to land and pick up intelligence agents. The first such operation by the British was attempted by a Captain Thomas Mulcahy Morgan in September 1915, but both he and his clandestine passenger were badly injured after their plane crashed on landing and they were both captured. Other more successful missions were completed in the ensuing weeks and months.

From its Royal Flying Corps roots, the RAF therefore had some idea of what was required and, in September 1940, established No. 419 Flight, which comprised three Lysanders and two Whitley twin-engine bombers adapted for parachuting purposes. Originally based at North Weald near Epping in Essex, the flight was moved following a damaging German bombing raid to Stradishall in Suffolk only a month after its formation. One of its first ‘customers’ was the SIS agent Philip Schneidau, a man raised in Paris of two British parents, who played international hockey for France before choosing British nationality at the age of 21. His mission in France was to last ten days. The plan was for him to be dropped by parachute from a Whitley and recovered at the end by the squadron’s commander, Flight Lt Wally Farley, who would land a Lysander on a pre-arranged field to the south of Fontainebleau. The two men had designed the inverted ‘L’ shaped pattern of lights on a table cloth at Oddenino’s restaurant in Regent Street — a device that never needed improvement throughout the war.

Thick cloud and heavy rain prevented Farley from setting off from Tangmere on the predetermined night of the pick-up, but the following evening, 19 October 1940, he left in equally poor weather as he was concerned that Schneidau would believe he had been forgotten. Fortunately, the skies cleared over France, but not before the radio in the rear cockpit had been put out of action by the rain — Farley had left the sliding roof open to make it easier for Schneidau to clamber in. The pick-up went without a hitch, Schneidau using the fixed ladder he had invented for rapid embarkation. Someone on the ground had spotted them, however, because, shortly after take-off, a bullet shot through the bottom of the fuselage, passed between the pilot’s legs and hammered into the compass.

Back over the French coast, the weather worsened and almost immediately, with no view of the ground, no compass and no radio, they became utterly lost. Although he realized his passenger was freezing in the open cockpit behind him, Farley felt his only option was to fly on until they could see something. They flew on for several hours, all the time fearing that the strong south-westerly wind had carried them over Belgium, Holland or even Germany. With all fuel spent and dawn breaking, they finally saw a coastline and Farley, gliding now, brought the Lysander down at the top of some high cliffs. The aircraft lost both wings on touching down thanks to poles which had been erected to prevent such landings, but both occupants were unhurt. Still not knowing whether they were on home or enemy territory, Farley decided he would go to find help and told Schneidau to strip naked and be ready to throw his incriminating civilian clothes over the cliff if he returned with a German escort. When he did eventually come back, accompanied by two armed and uniformed men, he greeted his shivering friend: ‘I can’t understand a word they are saying, but it appears we are in Scotland — somewhere near Oban.’

No further calls for clandestine night landings were made on the Lysanders of the re-numbered 1419 Flight for the next six months. Then, in April 1941, Flying Officer Gordon Scotter successfully retrieved an agent from a field north of Châteauroux, in spite of an encounter with night-fighters fitted with searchlights and a narrow escape from Vichy police on the ground. The following month, he flew to Fontainebleau to collect Philip Schneidau who had returned to France to set up an intelligence ring in Paris. The operation proved a far smoother affair than Schneidau’s first return to Britain.

Demand now began to grow for special duties air operations, and the RAF expanded its facility accordingly. First, in August, the flight took on squadron status, No. 138, and moved to Newmarket, using the heath beside the racecourse as its runway. By December 1941, after four more Lysander operations, including John Nesbitt-Dufort’s close encounter with a power cable, the squadron comprised eighteen aircraft. In February of the following year, a second special duties squadron was formed, No. 161, which, from its eventual home of RAF Tempsford near Sandy in Bedfordshire, it would bear responsibility for all the Lysander pick-ups in France until the end of the war.

By the end of 1941, the Lysander pilots had begun to perfect their routines both in solo navigation by moonlight and in reducing the time spent on enemy soil to a minimum. All the Lysanders in the squadron had been specially adapted for the purpose which, as well as Schneidau’s ladder, included an additional torpedo-shaped 150-gallon fuel tank slung beneath the fuselage to give them the range required to get deep into France and back. The Mk III SCW, as it was known, carried no armaments and sported an all-black colour scheme for night-time camouflage. The paint pattern was later modified with the underside remaining matt black but with the top of the wings and fuselage reverting to dark green and pale grey, a better camouflage against night-fighters approaching from above in moonlight.

The pilots chosen to fly the Lysander missions had to be utterly self-reliant by nature. Even the training for the job was a do-it-yourself process. The minimum qualification was 250 hours of night-flying experience, and an ability to speak French was desirable if not essential. So too, albeit unstated, was an acceptance of very adverse odds on surviving any operation. One man, Hugh Verity, recruited into 161 Squadron in November 1942, described his training in his definitive post-war account of the Lysanders’ special duties, We Landed by Moonlight .

I took stock of the situation. I had done about 850 hours, of which about 250 were by night. I had been trained as a navigator as well as a pilot, but I had not done very much pilot-navigation, and none of that had been at night. The others showed me how they prepared their route maps and worked out their flight plans, but I knew I needed a lot of practice .

Before his first flight, Verity sat in a Lysander cockpit with the twenty-page pilot’s notes and taught himself how to locate all the controls by touch alone. He also learnt all the drills, checks and limits by heart. After that, he was ready to take the plane up. Strapping himself into his seat and sliding the cockpit canopy shut, he primed the engine and started up. Waiting for the oil temperature to rise to 5˚C, he tested the flying controls and brake pressure. Then, against the brakes and the chocks, he opened up to 1,800 rpm and changed the pitch of the propeller to coarse. Noting the large drop in revs, he returned to the fine pitch position and throttled back. Now, almost ready to go, he checked that the tail plane trim wheel was set for take-off, that the fuel mixture control was at ‘normal’ and that the gills were open to increase air-flow over the engine. Finally, with chocks removed, he taxied onto the runway, eased the throttle fully open and, travelling at a speed of 80 mph, pulled the stick back and climbed away.

The next stage of his training was to practise the landing and take-off routines repeatedly in daylight on a grassy field at Somersham, not far from his Tempsford base, using yellow flags in place of torches. Then he tested himself landing at night and on one occasion accomplished eight landings in a space of forty minutes. In barely a week, he had become completely at ease with bringing a Lysander down in darkness with the aid of three pocket torches marking a landing site just 150 yards long.

Much of his earlier flying with the RAF had been done with the luxury of a navigator so, as part of his training, he took himself on extended flights over England by both day and night to improve his path-finding ability. Apart from one panic-inducing moment during a night-flight when he thought for a while that he had become completely lost and would have to face the ignominy of radioing for his position, he generally kept his bearings, including during a three-hour, non-stop round trip between Tempsford and Exeter.

The last part of Verity’s initiation came when he went to join the other Lysander pilots of the squadron who had moved to their advance base at Tangmere for the moon period operations. To prove his ability in finding an exact position over enemy territory, he was given a pin-point to fly to, south of Saumur, on the Loire. He was shown how to make his way through a corridor free of flak and how to cut strips out of 1:500,000 maps, showing the track he was to follow with about fifty miles on either side for easy reckoning. The corridor did not prove to be flak-free, but he watched the tracers just miss him as he carried on, following his course with little difficulty. When he reached the given position, he was astonished to see a brilliantly lit rectangle which he took to be some kind of prison camp. On his safe return to Tangmere, he reported this strange sight amid all the blacked out darkness and was immediately told he had passed the final test as it proved he had actually been to where he was meant to go. The camp was the same gipsy prison which had so disconcerted Guy Lockhart on his flight out with Renault the previous March.

If the success of the Lysander missions depended on the exceptional skills of the pilots, they could have accomplished little without a practised reception party in France. This was achieved by getting prospective agents and pilots together for training both at Tempsford and at nearby Somersham for practical work. The agents, all dressed as British Army officers, were taught how to set up a flare path into the wind with the man in charge and the waiting passengers posted nearest to lamp ‘A’, the touchdown point. Lamp ‘B’ should be positioned 150 metres further upwind with lamp ‘C’ fifty metres to the right of it, completing the shorter length of the inverted ‘L’. The flare path needed to begin at least 100 metres from the nearest hedge on a clear, firm, level strip of ground, a good 600 metres from hedge to hedge. There could be no trees of any height in the way of the approach or take-off zones and any cart tracks needed to be well away from the landing area. Short-grazed grass was the ideal surface but a firm field of stubble would do. Mud had to be avoided at all costs. During part of the week-long course, agents would be driven around the local countryside and asked to point out to the pilots fields which they believed fitted their specifications. Back in the classroom, they would learn how to draft descriptions of their chosen landing sites for the wireless messages sent back from France. This was important, not only for the Lysander pilots themselves, but for the daytime missions that would be sent in advance to take high-altitude photographs of the proposed sites for approval by the RAF.

The landing routine itself began with the agent in charge flashing the predetermined signal letter on lamp ‘A’. Once the Lysander had acknowledged this, the agent or his assistant, if he had one, would light the other two lamps. They were taught how to lash these three torches to sticks, pointing downwind and slightly upwards. They would then rehearse a three-minute turnaround on the ground whereby the last outbound passenger would pass down his own luggage and load that of those leaving France before he left the aircraft, then the new passengers would clamber aboard and, with the canopy slid shut, the pilot, receiving a thumbs up from the man in charge on the ground, would open up the throttle and pull away.

The Lysander was used in 204 separate operations over France between October 1940 and August 1944 and was unarguably the principal instrument in the task of ferrying men and women in and out of occupied France. There was, however, another aircraft flown by 161 Squadron for the same purpose which should not be overlooked. This was the American-built Lockheed Hudson, a military conversion of the commercial airliner, the Lockheed 14 Super Electra, perhaps most famous for conveying Neville Chamberlain to and from Germany during his ill-fated pre-war shuttle diplomacy with Hitler. The main reason the squadron had a Hudson at its disposal appears to be that its first commanding officer, Wing Commander E.H. (Mouse) Fielden, who had just come from the job of pilot to the King, had brought the plane with him from the King’s Flight .

A low-wing monoplane with twin Cyclone radial engines, the Hudson was recognizable particularly by its long tail-plane with twin pear-shaped fins and rudders near the rounded ends. The nose of the plane was fitted with Perspex windows for the bomb aimer and a gunner’s turret projected from the top of the rear fuselage. Most of this reconnaissance bomber’s wartime service was spent over the Atlantic, giving protection to convoys against submarines.

For the clandestine purposes of 161 Squadron, the Hudson was a far less subtle instrument than the Lysander. It was about three times heavier and came in to land a good ten knots faster, needing a flare path of 350 metres in a field no shorter than 1,000 metres. It was therefore a considerable headache for agents in France to find suitable landing sites and required many helpers, including armed guards at the perimeters as the larger planes attracted far more attention than the agile Lysander. The advantage was the plane’s greater range and, above all, its capacity as it could take up to ten passengers and their luggage. As the war progressed and the intelligence and SOE networks grew, increasing numbers had to be flown in and out of France and it was therefore preferable to use one Hudson rather than three or even four Lysanders on a single operation. Another considerable advantage to the pilot of a Hudson was that there was space for a navigator on board. In all, the Hudson was used in thirty-nine missions to deliver and collect agents.

In one of these operations, the greater range of the Hudson led to an unexpected and, in political circles, unwelcome outcome. In May 1943, Winston Churchill was very keen for the SIS to organize the retrieval from France of General Georges, an anti-Vichy ex-five-star Army Chief of Staff. Churchill felt, if he could speak to the general before he saw de Gaulle, he could persuade him to act as an influential go-between who, by his military seniority to de Gaulle, might even persuade him to take some orders.

Hearing that such an important passenger and his entourage needed bringing out of France, 161 Squadron’s commander, Group Captain ‘Mouse’ Fielden, insisted that he should carry out the task himself in a Hudson. It was, he felt, the sort of job tailor-made for the pilot to the King. However much the others in the squadron admired him, they wished that he had given the job to a younger pilot and one more experienced at landing by moonlight. Although Fielden had been in charge of the squadron for more than a year, he had only attempted three previous landings in France, all in a Hudson and all aborted for one reason or another .

The target was a long way south in France, an aerodrome near Florac among the mountains of the Cevennes and not far from the Mediterranean coast. The group captain found the airfield, duly marked out by the resistance reception party, and landed with no difficulty just after 2 o’clock in the morning. There was a ten-minute wait for the General’s car convoy to arrive, by which time Fielden had made the cautious decision to take the long route home via Algiers and Gibraltar rather than risk flying back over northern France as daylight broke. The decision was justified in as far as he got home safely, but not as far as Churchill was concerned. The prime minister’s precious General Georges was not on board; he had disembarked in Algiers to ally himself with General Henri Giraud, who had taken on the leadership of the liberation movement in French North and West Africa.

As quite often happened to the special duties pilots, Fielden was presented with gifts by his grateful passengers during this trip. Among them was a bottle of good wine which Fielden decided he should present to the King on his return. The King apparently shared the bottle with Churchill who was in turn mystified as to how his monarch had come by a 1941 vintage French wine and infuriated by the King’s refusal to reveal its provenance. He might have been even more infuriated had he known.