Moon Squadron (21 page)

Chapter Fifteen

Gentlemen
of
the
shade

Minions
of
the
moon
.

SHAKESPEARE

When that brilliant soldier the late Marshal Foch was a young officer, already singled out for high promotion, he was appointed to deliver a series of lectures at the
Ecole
Suphieure
de
Guerre
, the French equivalent of the Staff College at Camberley. These lectures would lay down a policy and indicate a framework within which the new French armies would be formed and were thus talks of the greatest importance. Foch read every book on war, tactics and strategy on which he could lay hands. He amassed a staggering and mentally bewildering collection of ideas, theories and historical facts. He had read and pondered so deeply that nothing cold, hard and realistic emerged. Bemused and wrestling with his spirit, he withdrew at Eastertide into his native woods in Brittany and there, with only the sound of the wind and the singing of birds to disturb him, he thought again, seeking simplicity. Like a bubble wavering slowly upwards from a river's bed to its placid surface, the simple question he sought wavered upwards from his subconscious and burst in clarity.

"
De
quoi
s'agit
-
il
?"

What is it all about? What is the problem to be solved?

It seemed to Foch that that simple question crystallised everything about which he had been in such mental turmoil. It seemed to point the way to success in warfare as it did in every other form of human activity. It cut away all the in-essentials and revealed the core. In 1940, when the tide of war forced Britain out of the Continent of Europe, there were those who remembered Foch. Dazed and bewildered, they asked themselves:
De
quoi
s'agi
-
il
? The answer was contained in one word: Survival.

It was the immediate and the most urgent of all problems. Could England survive? Those whose duty it was to guide the nation in those sombre hours saw clearly that our only chance of survival was indissolubly linked with the fate of our friends and allies in the occupied countries. If they lived, we lived; if they sickened or starved, we sickened and starved; if they died, we died. The minute-to-minute difficulty was to find a means first of reminding them of the resilient existence of England and of convincing them by deeds and not words that the lion's tail had begun to twitch and that it would soon begin to lash. The fact that Great Britain intended to survive and to fight was demonstrated by the Moon Squadrons.

In the beginning, the operations were mounted by British airmen. They were very swiftly joined by the Poles, men who had already proved their gallantry in the Battle of Britain. Then, with the success of Allied arms, the scope and area of these Special Operations was vastly extended and, as time went on, men of almost every fighting country sat in the cockpits of the Moon Squadrons. Before Pearl Harbour, these men were mostly Europeans. But in 1944, the United States 8th Air Force contributed two squadrons of Liberators. The Americans were quick to learn the long and painfully acquired technique and they brought skill and a cool, casual daring to their sorties. The little pioneer Flight 1419 that had met at North Weald in August, 1940, had grown indeed. During the last months of the war, aircraft were taking off from half a dozen different airfields in this country alone. Crews were briefed for sorties to half a dozen different countries on the same night. On one occasion, after D-day, more than seventy four-engined aircraft with fighter cover took off for the same target. All returned. There had to be a separate operational headquarters for the Mediterranean countries and the Balkans, as well as one for South East Asia.

In May, 1945, General Eisenhower had these words to say: "While no final assessment of the operational value of resistance has yet been completed, I consider that the disruption of enemy rail communications, the harassing of German road moves and the continual and increasing strain placed on German war economy and internal security services throughout occupied Europe by the organised forces of Resistance, played a very considerable part in our complete and final victory."

Perhaps the thoughts of Field-Marshal Lord Wilson of Libya were turning towards Gibraltar Farm and the flat fields of beet and kale at Tempsford when he wrote:

"It is always easy to get a show going when you are winning and I do think we owe a token of commendation to those who started the movement before we were winning. It is to those early people who went unknown and blind into these countries that the credit must go..."

The Moon Squadrons are no more. The last needle on the last cockpit dial has sunk back to Zero and the engines have cooled. The men who flew these aircraft, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon, have long ago bidden their farewell to arms. Their task was done. They had seen the beginning, the middle and the end. Now they have beaten their flying helmets into bowlers, their propellers into ploughshares. Outwardly indistinguishable from their fellows, they meet once a year and make merry and remember. The seasons flow over the Gannocks and the ancient arable and pasture of Tempsford. The unhurried life of farming goes on as it has gone on since Aethelflaed, sister of Edward the Elder, came on to storm the
buhr
and rid the land of the upstart Danes. Pigs are born there, are fattened and are killed. Their blood scents the wind. A thousand years is little time.

Author’s Note

When I first discussed this book with the Air Ministry, I was warned in the most kindly fashion of some of the difficulties ahead. The captains and crews who flew the aircraft of the moon squadrons were scattered far and wide. Practically every sortie was given a code name and, after the passage of the years, these names would have become meaningless both to those who planned them and to those who undertook them. To identify one operation out of so many - unless it were associated with memorable triumph or disaster-would be almost impossible. Records, because of the secrecy that cloaked the work of the squadrons, were meagre, but, such as they were, the Air Ministry put them at my disposal. A senior officer, one who had himself flown continuously by moonlight, was appointed to help and to guide. To him, I am deeply grateful. The Air Ministry ask me to withhold his name. I do so with reluctance. But he appears in the pages of this book and many of his friends will at once identify this modest and courageous officer.

I have consulted many books and persons. My thanks are due to Denis Richards, author of
The
Royal
Air
Force
1939
-
1945
(H.M. Stationery Office); to the anonymous contributors to
The
Unseen
and
Silent
(Sheed & Ward); to the Committee of the Polish Air Force Memorial Book
Destiny
Can
Wait
(Heinemann); to Patrick Howarth, editor of
Special
Operations
(Routledge and Kegan Paul); to Maurice Buckmaster, author of
Specially
Employed
(Batchworth); to the B.B.C. for the text of the broadcast
They
Flew
By
Moonlight
; to Colonel Francis Cammaerts, to Harry Ree, to Vera Atkins, Gordon Thomas, Leslie Montgomery and Wing Commander Nesbitt Dufort; to Austin Kark for his patient research. If I have left anybody out, I apologise. It has been a privilege and an honour to write this unavoidably fragmentary account of a great undertaking and I hope that omissions will be forgiven me.

JERRARD TICKELL

If you enjoyed reading
Moon Squadron
you may be interested in
Churchill’s Flights
by Jerrard Tickell, also published by Endeavour Press.

Extract from
Churchill’s Flights
by Jerrard Tickell

Prologue

AT about eight o'clock in the evening of May the 26th, I943, a strange aircraft roared out of the steeps of the sky and alighted on the North Front at Gibraltar.

Many pairs of binoculars were turned on her and the barrels of the Rock's Ack Ack batteries were swift to follow her course. They were lowered when it was observed that she wore the roundels of the Royal Air Force. But nobody on the Rock had ever seen anything like her before. She had the wings, tail, wheels and four engines of a Lancaster and she was in bomber camouflage. But her fuselage and square windows were distinctly odd and she was unarmed. She was flown by two Wing Commanders - two! - and her interior was fitted out with what amounted to luxury in those austere days.

The Nazi duty spy at La Linea watched her excitedly through powerful glasses. Normally he would have expected forewarning of the advent of such a.
rara
avis
. Since the time of the Spanish civil war, Goering's influence had been marked in General Franco's air force. Two radio stations - at Seville and Corunna - fed La Linea with information. It was even suspected that Kondors on Atlantic patrols were quietly refuelled on Spanish airfields. In addition to these professional aids, the duty spy's chain of bribed onion-selling muleteers constantly patrolled the coasts of Spain. All of them had hidden short wave transmitting sets and their orders were to report aerial activity of any description. This one must have kept well out of the sight of land. By straining his eyes, he could just make out the name painted on her nose.

The Nazi spy was connected by direct land-line to Berlin. Within minutes, he was making his report. A strange British aircraft with square windows had landed on the North Front at Gibraltar; she looked something like a Lancaster bomber but she was not a Lancaster bomber; she carried neither cannon nor bombs and hers was obviously a transport role; when his agents employed on the North Front had had time to examine her interior, he would telephone full details. In the meantime, her name was
Ascalon
. He would repeat that at dictation speed-

A-S-C-A-L-O-N. Heil Hitler!

A staff officer in one of the several Intelligence Services which squabbled incessantly within the Reich had been a pre-war Rhodes Scholar at Oxford where he had read Greats.

The word
Ascalon
struck a chord and he looked it up in his classical dictionary.

Ascalon
was the name of the spear with which Saint George slew the dragon.

Chapter
One

SOME five weeks before the touch-down of this odd bird of passage in Gibraltar, a young R.A.F. officer had sat looking glumly at the IN and OUT trays in an office in the Air Ministry. Flight Lieutenant John Mitchell, D.F.C., was reluctantly 'flying a desk' in the Directorate of Navigation Training in London-and London, he felt, was not the place for him when great events were shaping all over the warring world.

Arica had been all but won. The long menacing shadow of the Allied Armies slanted over Sicily towards the Italian mainland. The tide of war had surely turned and the R.A.F. penetrated even more and more deeply into Hitler's crumbling Reich. It was galling indeed for John Mitchell to foresee several more months of Air Ministry duty before he could hope to be posted back to an operational squadron. But wholly un known to the subject of their enquiries, faceless men had been probing John Mitchell's private life, loyalties and service record for several weeks. This is what they found out.

John Lewis Mitchell was born in Sanderstead, Surrey, on the 12th of November, 1918, twenty-four hours after Armistice Day; he was educated at Bancroft's School Woodford Wells, Essex, where he had shown a predilection for science and mathematics. When he left school, he served His Majesty's Honourable Board of Customs and Excise, happily specialising in breweries, gin factories and bonded warehouses. Like thousands of other patriotic young men, he entered the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve early in 1939 where his easy grasp of mathematics led him towards navigation. On September the 1st, 1939, he was mobilised for fulltime service and, after a period of training, was posted to 58 squadron R.A.F., then stationed at Linton-on-Ouse in Yorkshire.

At dusk exactly one year later to the day, Flying Officer John Mitchell led his crew of four non-commissioned officers to a Whitley Mark
5
bomber, registration number N 1427. Their target was Genoa which involved crossing the Alps twice and being air-borne for some ten and a half hours. It was, at the time, one of the longest and most arduous raids of the war. N 1427 reached and successfully bombed its target and turned for home, battling against strong head winds over the Alps. The fuel gauges dropped ominously and the young navigator knew that it would be a miracle if they reached home. The miracle was not granted and at dawn, N 1427 was ditched in the sea a mile or so short of North Foreland. Saturated in sea water and petrol-a few more gallons in the tank would have taken them to Manston-Captain and crew scrambled aboard a rubber dinghy and started paddling for the shore. Battered N 1427 cocked up her tail and sank. By the time the five shivering and sodden men squelched ashore, they looked back over an empty sea.

Margate was largely evacuated while the Battle of Britain snarled and crackled overhead. The Superintendent of Police took the involuntary mariners under his benevolent, constabulary wing. Their first visit was to a gas works to dry out what was left of their clothes. John Mitchell then had a blissful hot bath-in an evacuated girls' school-which rid his body of that incredible irritation which a mixture of petrol and sea water can provoke. It also did much to restore his sense of humour. This was strained to the uttermost when he was driven to the Police Mortuary and invited to take his pick from a heap of garments whose original owners obviously had no further use for human raiment. With macabre hilarity, he chose an ancient frock coat, a silk scarf, an elegantly curved top hat and a pair of white plimsolls. His uniform trousers were just wearable. In his mortician's finery, he led his laughing crew into the town, stopping at a street corner to appeal to the isolated inhabitants for contributions to the Spitfire Fund. Silver rained into the top hat while an enter prising newspaper photographer recorded the scene for posterity.

Meanwhile the Superintendent of Police had telephoned to the R.A.F. at Linton-on-Ouse to report that Whitley N 1427 was in a watery grave but that her crew were safe and well and required transport back to base. It was arranged that they should be flown to Linton by the already famous 24 Transport Squadron, stationed at Hendon. 24 Squadron's D.H. 89 arrived late owing to prolonged daylight attacks by the Luftwaffe on Manston. This meant that John Mitchell and his crew would have to spend the night at Hendon. They arrived. The rest of the crew departed to the Sergeants' mess and John rubbed his hands at the thought of dinner and a glass of wine. It had been quite a night and quite a day, one deserving of modest celebration.

Alas, his frock coat was his undoing. The Station Commander, who held the dizzy rank of Group Captain, frigidly refused to allow John to enter the mess on the grounds that he was 'improperly dressed'. The fact that he had been in the sea a few hours before was of less importance than sartorial correctness. Sadly the navigator of the late N 1427 ate a solitary sandwich in his room and drank a cup of coffee. He felt rather like the isolated bacillus of an infectious disease and only wished he could be with his crew in the welcoming Sergeants' mess.

Next morning, September 3rd, 1940, all were flown back to Linton for immediate return to operations.

Four days later, on September 7th, John Mitchell took off with a full load of bombs for Stuttgart. His introduction to 24 Squadron had been most inauspicious. He had no reason to believe that he would ever enter Hendon's formal portals again. He was wrong.

Flying Officer John Mitchell of 58 Squadron went on bombing Hitler's Reich during the winter nights of 1940 and the spring nights of 1941. On the nth of February of that year, he was awarded the D.F.C. In 1942, he was posted to a specialist navigation course in Canada and promoted to Flight Lieutenant. Subsequently, he joined the staff of the British Air Commission, Washington D.C. for duty with Link Aviation Devices Incorporated of Binghamton, New York. He returned home to keep a most happy and felicitous appointment with Brenda Marjorie Stroud. They were married on the 19th of September, 1942.

These were the bare bones of the
curriculum
vita
? on which the faceless men worked. The human flesh on the bones was fit and muscular, the eyes were calm and very shrewd, the manner quiet and reserved. The episode of the frock coat and the top hat in Margate argued a sense of humour. In emergency, he was unruffled and there was abundant evidence of personal courage. The final analysis of the faceless men was so satisfactory that Flight Lieutenant John Mitchell was unexpectedly summoned to the Director General of Postings and instructed to report at once to 24 Squadron at Hendon 'for special duty'. The nature of that 'special duty' would be revealed in due course.

John smiled wryly. On the only previous occasion when he had visited 24 Squadron at Hendon, he had been confined to his room for being improperly dressed. This time, he felt, his reception would be somewhat different.

He was right.

The aircraft that stood in the closely guarded hangar at Hendon was of a type which neither John Mitchell nor anybody else in the R.A.F. had ever seen before. Her number was LV 633 and she was one of the prototype Yorks, the third of her kind ever to be built and the first to be delivered to the R.A.F. She had four Rolls-Royce Merlin 20 engines and, like an overdue baby, was hopelessly overweight. This strange aircraft had been flown from Chadderton to Hendon by a most skilful test-pilot of Messrs. A. V. Roe and put down on the very short runway for the completion of her interior furnishings.

John Mitchell walked slowly round her. She was in bomber camouflage, brown and green with black undersides. The wings, undercarriage and tail-unit were from the Lancaster production line and she had a square, box-like body designed in the first instance, it was said, to carry petrol stacked in jerricans to beleaguered Malta. But that was no longer her purpose.

Within, she was fitted out as a yacht-and that was how her future 'owner' liked to regard her. She was his aerial yacht, ready at all times to sail at a moment's notice through calm or stormy skies. There was a forward cabin, a dining saloon, an 'Owner's' state-room, a galley and a spacious luggage compartment - not to mention three lavatories of the Elsan type, the Owner's being of an intricate, self-circulating hydraulic design which might well have been conjured up by Emett. There was also an electric urn and a water tank and strange piece of equipment-a hay-box, presumably to keep already cooked meals warm. No provision had been made for the cooking of fresh food in flight. The remote reading compass had been installed in the tail of the aircraft - which meant that the Navigator, John Mitchell, would have to pass through the cabins, the galley and the luggage compartment to check it from time to time. LV 633 herself and all those concerned with her were rated as being top security. There was no doubt whatsoever as to the identity of the Owner.

He was Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain and Minister of Defence.

Hitherto Mr. Churchill's war-time flights had of necessity been made in aircraft which were not wholly suited either to his purpose or to his position. First, in his critical flights to France in 1940, he had used Flamingoes of 24 Squadron. Later a Liberator named 'Commando' had been put at his disposal from R.A.F. Ferry Command at Dorval, Montreal. This was most ably commanded by an American, Captain Van de Kloot with Squadron Leader Charles T. Kimber of the R.A.F. as navigator. In it, the Prime Minister had flown to Moscow, to Casablanca and to Adana. Here a significant mishap had occurred. Taxiing out 'Commando' had slipped off the taxi-way into soft mud and been bogged down. This meant that Mr. Churchill had had to transfer himself, his party and his luggage into another Liberator, the backer-up. Comfort and a place in which to work had been meagre in 'Commando'. In the alternative aircraft they were non-existent.

Mr. Churchill's next flight had been by British Airways

Boeing Clipper flying boat from Bermuda to Britain. These aircraft were suitable for trans-oceanic flight but not for Russia or the Middle East. All had gone well. But by now it was felt increasingly strongly and voiced in the whole Cabinet that this great Englishman should have his own aircraft, specially equipped to his own most exacting needs and flown by an all-British crew from the R.A.F. The availability of the York LV 633 in 1943 made this possible. By happy choice, she was named
Ascalon
.

The first Captain of
Ascalon
was the late Wing Commander B. Collins, D.F.C. A brilliant ex-Imperial Airways pilot, 'Dad' Collins had over twelve thousand hours of flying to his credit, bashing through turbulent, tropical skies to Africa and the Far East. He was large of build with a ruddy complexion and a dark piratical moustache. His sight was fantastic and his stamina prodigious. He could be convivial or the reverse but the challenging Irish twinkle was seldom far distant from the pupils of his eyes.

*****

'Dad' Collins, as he was affectionately known to the crew by virtue of his age, was a brilliant natural pilot. Brought up in the hard school of the early days of the Empire Air Routes he was a very self-sufficient captain and always conscious of his responsibility for the aircraft and the Prime Minister. He supervised us, his crew, with the minimum of fuss and drove us with a very light rein. He had earned his D.F.C. by flying in ammunition to the besieged Guards fighting desperately near Calais in 1940 in an unarmed 'Ensign' airliner, lately of Imperial Airways.”

*****

A pre-war member of the Royal Air Force Reserve, 'Dad' Collins had been drawn into 24 Squadron at the outbreak of hostilities. During the dread summer of 1940, he had flown Winston Churchill to France in D. H. Flamingoes on more than one occasion while the battle had still raged on the ground and the Prime Minister had pleaded with the nerveless French to remember their dignity and their stature and to fight on. Collins was promoted from Fight Commander to be the Squadron's C.O. in 1942 and was the obvious, natural choice for the York.

His co-pilot from May 1943 until June 1944 when \le took over command was Squadron Leader Ernest George 'Bill'

Fraser, A.F.C. Short and slightly rotund, the jovial Bill had become a first-class pilot by sheer hard work.

Married, now, with two children, 'Bill' Fraser had joined the R.A.F. in the thirties as an apprentice and, while serving in the Middle East, had been recommended for a Sergeant Pilot's course at No. 4 F.T.S. Abu Sueir. This in itself was a remarkable achievement. Very few airmen were chosen for this course and those who passed out were even fewer for the training syllabus was long and difficult. 'Bill' achieved the equivalent of an Honours Degree and was posted to No. 70 Middle East Transport Squadron, then equipped with Vickers Victoria Troop Carriers. At the outbreak of war, he was brought home, commissioned and joined No. 24 Squadron. He was a Flight Lieutenant when hand-picked to be the co-pilot o£
Ascalon
.

A meticulous planner, he brought his mathematical genius, his ever present slide rule and his immense powers of concentration to bear on the problems of aircraft performance. With his subordinates,
he was firm and clear, seeming to radiate his own quiet confidence. He was to become a close friend of John Mitchell's, both in the air and on the ground.

Jack Payne was the Flight Engineer.

Sidney Sylvester Payne - the nickname 'Jack' came naturally-had joined the R.A.F. as an Apprentice in the twenties, left to enter the motor industry and rejoined. He had wide knowledge and flair and knew every nut and bolt in
Ascalon's
engines and airframe.