A Special Duty (6 page)

The crew of Halifax HR674 had been familiar with the Albanian drop zones and their loss, which has never been fully explained, illustrates the danger that all Special Duty pilots faced. The partisans chose remote areas as drop zones – small valleys enclosed by mountains and, in the darkness, what might appear to be a hole safe to use for descent, could well be a hilltop or protruding mountain peak. I remember Charlie Keen telling me that on some drops, particularly in Yugoslavia, the heavy aircraft, laden with supplies, would have to spiral down inside a bowl of mountains, do a low-level drop and then spiral out again. He recalled the steady voice of the navigator over the intercom as they came in for the final approach: “you can do it Tommy, you can get in there.” Mechanical failure or a fire at this stage of a drop (which is what was suspected for the SAPLING crash) could only have one outcome.

At Tocra the general stand-down of operations and arrival of Christmas meant a rare opportunity for the crews to relax and enjoy three days of well-planned festivities, starting with much drinking in all section canteens, which had been specially decorated with Christmas trees and streamers, followed by midnight mass in the HQ Block. Christmas Day was a complete stand-down for everyone except the duty pilot, but even he was given three hours off to have his Christmas lunch of ‘Crème a la Tomato, Roast Turkey and Xmas Pudding’.
8
Buffet dinners in the various sections that evening were visited by both the outgoing Wing Commander Blackburn, and the incoming Wing Commander Pitt, with much good cheer all round. Walter Davis, who was ‘duty pilot’ that day, remembered that the mess staff had been hosted by the officers during the course of the day, and were rather the worse-for-wear by the time it came to providing supper in the Sergeants’ mess. He described the meal as “a rather poor effort!”
9
Nevertheless, a convivial atmosphere prevailed as they signed each other’s menu cards with good humoured messages. Pat Stradling, who carried his signed menu card in his wallet long after the end of the war, got a note from Paddy Fortune: “Good luck to you and many thanks for help in a dangerous position”. And from Jack Easter, wireless operator on the Fortune crew: “Your smiling mug on the other side of the hole is always a great help to me – good dropping”. Tom Storey, whose crew he would join in a couple of months, wrote: “For pete’s sake, don’t forget to let go Paddy.”
xxiv
The following day, as the weather stand-down continued, a Squadron Concert Party was held in the concert hall, and so ended Christmas 1943 at Tocra airbase. A crew change saw Canadian Oscar ‘Hap’ Congdon join the crew as navigator, replacing Flying Officer Nichol, and the crews of 148 Squadron prepared for a January move to Brindisi, on the south-east coast of Italy.

¹
Ivor Porter, in his book ‘Autonomous’ says that the aircraft carrying de Chastelain in November was a Liberator, but the Squadron Records state that it was a Halifax, piloted by F/Lt Brotherton-Ratcliffe.

²
Greek People’s Liberation Army.

³
SCULPTOR.

⁴
Did not complete operation.

⁵
148 Squadron ORB Summary 17
^th
December 1943

⁶
Their sacrifice is also commemorated on the Runnymede Memorial.

⁷
Words of eyewitness Austin DeAth (from
The Wildest Province
, Roderick Bailey, Page 195)

⁸
Menu preserved by Patrick Stradling

⁹
My Grandad’s Story
, a Memoir, Walter Davis and Sharon Spencer

“T
here is not the slightest prospect of finding suitable weather for dropping on any of the available areas tonight,” was the view of the Met Officer, Flight Lieutenant Rowles, as the New Year began, and it wasn’t much better the following night, with operations limited to areas north of Latitude 43N. Consequently six aircraft were briefed for Serbia and took off at nightfall with supplies for MULLIGATAWNY, the Mostyn Davies Mission, which had been making its way to the Bulgarian border, dodging hostile German, Bulgar, and Albanian forces, and up against the most atrocious winter conditions. This doomed operation was being stoically endured on the ground by a handful of brave men who, on this cold January night, would wait in vain for their air-drop of supplies. All six aircraft failed, either because the cloud cover was too thick, the signals, when spotted, were incorrect, or in the case of Tom Storey’s Halifax, because of mechanical trouble. “Altogether a very abortive night,” was the summary in the ORB
1
for that night. Tom’s aircraft had climbed continuously after take-off to try and get above the dense cloud layer, but icing at 14,000ft prevented them getting any higher and, as they began to descend, the elevator stick jammed forward and stayed jammed until they got down to 5000ft, when it finally released.
2
Engineer Charlie Keen then noticed that the oil-pressure had dropped and, suspecting that the excessive vibration from the jammed elevators had caused a leak, Tom decided to return to base, where this was confirmed by the ground crew.

The following day, as the crew caught up on some sleep in preparation for a 1730 take off to Albania, another drama was unfolding close to base. A Wellington of 38 Squadron had failed to return to its base near Benghazi, and a call came into 148 Squadron to see if it had landed at Tocra. It had not, but later in the day two Arabs arrived at the officers’ mess bringing a message from one of the Wellington crew to say that they had crashed on an escarpment along the coast at Ptolomais, and urgently needed medical assistance. Flight Lieutenant Scott, the medical officer, raced off in his ambulance to the crash site to find one crew member dead and the others injured, the aircraft having apparently flown into a hillside in the dark. 38 Squadron was involved in reconnaissance and anti-submarine operations from their base at Berka, (Benghazi, Libya) and January was to be a bad month for them with the loss of two Wellington crews just a few days later.

JN888 was barely airborne for Albania that afternoon when a mechanical problem
3
forced Tom to abandon the flight for a second night running. For pilots, the decision of whether to plough on regardless with engine failure was one they were required to make on a regular basis. A Halifax could fly on three engines and so the decision would need to take a number of factors into consideration – height, weight of load, strength of headwinds, terrain at the drop zone, distance from base, and the likelihood of encountering night fighters, which would find the slow-manoeuvring aircraft an easy target.
i
An inner-engine failure would make it difficult to hold course with the aircraft skidding through the air, losing performance and manoeuvrability. An outer-engine failure would increase these effects, so that the pilot would have to fly ‘hands on’ – something that required real physical effort. The exhausted pilot flying like this for many hours on the homeward flight would not then be at his best for a three-engine night landing. Tom was lucky on this occasion in that the engine failure occurred early in the flight, making the decision to turn back possible. Flight Lieutenant Brotherton-Ratcliffe and his crew were not quite so lucky when, a few nights later, they suffered double engine failure close to their dropping ground on the Greek-Albanian border. They lost the outer engine on the way to the drop but continued, only to lose the inner engine on the same side as they manoeuvred in mountainous terrain for their second drop. Flight Lieutenant Morris, the navigator, guided his skipper through the twists and turns of the valley but, trapped in between mountains, they were forced to turn to the dead-engine side, which increased the rate of descent and, with no hope of gaining height, the crew baled out, leaving Brotherton-Ratcliffe to crash-land the aircraft in a field. The crew destroyed the aircraft as instructed and were then whisked away to a hideout in the hills by Captain Ian Hamilton, an agent they had dropped on a previous operation.
ii
It was only a matter of weeks since this same crew had jumped to safety from their Halifax after the failed AUTONOMOUS drop with de Chastelain, and to hear that against all the odds the entire crew had survived another such incident must have given heart to their fellow crews at Brindisi. They spent ten weeks in Albania, eventually making it back to Brindisi in a motor torpedo boat, with the swashbuckling Brotherton-Ratcliffe sporting a huge ginger beard, and looking very much the guerrilla fighter he had become.

Activities back at base were now focused on the impending move to Italy and all leave was cancelled from the second week of January. The final operation from Tocra for the Storey crew was another attempt to drop supplies to Mostyn Davies and his MULLIGATAWNY Mission, which was now very close to the Bulgarian border, having walked through the mountains with their pack mules for eleven weeks, battered by wind, rain and snow and badly in need of supplies. The Chalk and Harding crews had been the last to get supplies to them on the 20
^th
December, but the noise of the aircraft had caught the attention of the Bulgarians and the team on the ground were caught up in a skirmish, which forced them to bury most of their stores and move on
iii
. Now, on the 18
^th
January, five aircraft were heading back to the desolate border region of Eastern Serbia to drop supplies and infiltrate a support Mission by the name of CLARIDGE, comprising Major Frank Thompson and Signalman Watts, who were to be dropped at the same Dobro Polje dropping ground. With Thompson and Watts on board the Fortune aircraft and the Storey, Edwards, Harding and Botham crews carrying supplies, they each arrived over the target to find thick cloud-cover, and none of them were able to spot signal fires. Tom descended to 7000ft in an attempt to get below the cloud, but decided to abort when he spotted a mountain peak penetrating the cloud layer. He would not have seen the fires anyway because they had not been lit, owing to a mix-up between Cairo and the Mission, and all five aircraft turned back and landed at Brindisi. JN888 was declared unserviceable after the sortie and the crew returned to base as passengers on the Edwards aircraft, leaving JN888 to be flown back to Tocra a couple of days later by Group Captain Rankin, officer commanding 334 Wing, who was busy making arrangements for the Squadron move to Brindisi. The ferrying of stores, equipment, and personnel now began in earnest, with the Halifax crews making a couple of trips each, and Flight Lieutenant Tupper in the Squadron’s Liberator, making eighteen trips. Most of the personnel were transported this way, with the remainder going by sea. The upheaval meant that there was no operational flying at all between the 22
^nd
and 31
^st
January. So with 148 Squadron out of action, it was down to 624 Special Duty Squadron to drop the CLARIDGE Mission of Thompson and Watts, and this they did on the 25th January, with the aircraft of Pilot Officer Garnet carrying the personnel and two further aircraft carrying the supplies for MULLIGATAWNY
iv
. As these crews arrived back at their Brindisi base having successfully completed the operation, a new crew had just arrived from England – that of Flight Sergeant Edward Tennant, whose time with the Squadron was to be tragically short.

Further supplies for MULLIGATAWNY and CLARIDGE were flown in by the Storey, Fairweather, and Chalk crews when the Squadron resumed operations at the beginning of February, but this minor relief could not save MULLIGATAWNY and CLARIDGE from complete disaster. Apart from the impossible task of supplying these operations adequately over the winter months, the strength of partisan support had been misjudged, and they met with strong opposition, which they were unprepared for. They had been set an impossible task. Mostyn Davies was killed in a skirmish the following month and, although Frank Thompson narrowly escaped on that occasion, he was wounded and captured very soon after when he moved over the border into Bulgaria with his partisan group. He was later shot by firing squad, along with his partisan leaders and villagers who had helped them. The entire MULLIGATAWNY Mission, with their courageous leader Mostyn Davies, perished in Bulgaria, as did the young Frank Thompson of CLARIDGE Mission.

The Fairweather crew, who had brought relief to that embattled Mission, were themselves killed just five months later on a disastrous night when the Squadron lost four crews, including that of Squadron Leader Surray Bird. Tom Fairweather’s Halifax JP292 was hit by a Dornier night fighter over Serbia, and one of the pilots flying that night, Jack Pogson, recalled seeing the flashes away in the distance as the Halifax (which he had flown with to the dispersal point) came under attack from German night fighters. “They were catching hell”, said Jack, who had moved away from the formation and was heading for his target in Poland. Squadron Leader Bird, in Halifax JP286, had been carrying the four-man DEERHURST Mission, into Hungary, and had safely dropped the agents before being hit by a Messerschmitt night fighter on the homeward leg. The DEERHURST team were to link up with a resistance group north-west of Lake Balaton, and although they were dropped before the aircraft was hit, they landed alongside a Jewish Labour Camp and were rounded up by the guards, who subsequently handed them over to the Gestapo.
v
They managed to convince the Germans that they were paratroopers and, after interrogation, were sent to a POW camp for airmen, Stalag Luft VIII at Limburg. Two of the men were later killed in an Allied bombing raid on a rail yard whilst being transported by train.
vi
The bodies of the Fairweather crew, all less than twenty-five years of age, were recovered by German forces and eventually interred in the Belgrade War Cemetery.
vii
Squadron Leader Bird, aged twenty-four, and his crew are buried in the Budapest War Cemetery.
viii

With the move to Brindisi complete, the most pressing problem for the airmen was overcrowding. The priority had been to get the runway serviceable, and the construction of wooden huts by the Italian labour-force was a long way behind schedule. The first arrivals were once again put up in tents and left to construct their own beds from a frame, some wire and mattress material.
ix
Wireless Technician Roger Alves took a photograph of the tented camp, with his Agfa Billy Zero camera, which captures better than any words the living conditions for airmen on arrival at Brindisi. In an attempt to maintain a basic level of hygiene, airmen were ordered to shake their blankets and put them out in the sun for at least two hours a day and each man was to take responsibility for the cleanliness of his bed space and take it in turns to clean the rest of the floor. The Medical Officer commented, in his Report for February 1944, that “Officers mostly have hired Italians to do the cleaning!”
4
The men were rationed to one bath a week and sanitary facilities were very basic, but they were now quite used to a level of discomfort and the temperate Italian climate combined with the proximity of Brindisi town and its ice-cream parlour were a definite improvement. Flying rations however were a sore point with the crew, and in February, the senior medical officer, having had frequent chats with aircrews on the subject, made an official report on the unsatisfactory situation: