Tag Archives: Hockey

W/Cdr Ron Hockey

Friday, 29 August 1941

This is the first moon period during which operations straddle two calendar months, so we can no longer talk about (for instance) the ‘July moon period’.

Operation TROMBONE

F/O Ron Hockey opens the new moon period by dropping a Free French agent into the Unoccupied Zone. Hockey’s crew for this operation is unusual. As his second pilot he has taken along S/Ldr Charles Pickard, DSO, DFC, from 3 Group HQ at RAF Exning, just to the north of Newmarket. Pickard is one of Hockey’s wide circle of personal friends, possibly from his pre-war days at Farnborough. Already nationally famous as the laconic pilot of ‘F for Freddie’ in the film ‘Target for Tonight’, Pickard has recently been awarded the DSO for his leadership of No. 311 (Czech) Squadron, and is being ‘rested’. The sortie also appears to have been an opportunity for a spot of on-the-job Despatcher training, with three on board to launch one agent; the novice is LAC Bolt. There is no RAF aircrew ‘trade’ of Despatcher, and therefore no formal training; many are volunteer ground crew, flying on operations in addition to their normal duties.

Hockey takes off in Whitley ‘D’ Z6473, the aircraft prone to exactor problems, at 20.33. They cross the French coast at Grandcamp, near Isigny-sur-Mer, and fly via Tours to Châteauroux, which they reach at 23.42. Ten minutes flying-time east of Châteauroux they drop the agent from 500 feet. (The agent’s SOE personal file says 900 feet.) Hockey returns to base via Tangmere, landing at Newmarket at 03.54.

TROMBONE is Robert Lencement, a 34-year-old electrical engineer in a research job at the time of the Franco-German Armistice. He has taken a month’s holiday from his job at Vichy with the broadcasting service Radiodiffusion Nationale. He has made his way via Spain and Portugal to England, which he reaches on 12 August on only the eighth day of his holiday. He has been in touch with a Polish organisation, probably the intelligence organisation F2 which has links with Vichy Intelligence. In London he makes contact with ‘Colonel Passy’ and therefore becomes an RF agent. SOE’s aim is to return him to France before his leave is up, so that he can resume normal life without his absence being noticed.

With only a couple of weeks in England there has been no real time to give Lencement the training he needs as a clandestine agent. He has been debriefed on his telecommunications knowledge, and given a short parachuting course at Ringway (which he completes with ease). He is dropped about ten minutes’ flying-time to the east of Châteauroux. MRD Foot’s assertion that Lencement was dropped back near Vichy ‘without a moon to help him’ is doubly inaccurate: the moon would have set there at about 01.46 local time (GMT+3); Hockey drops Lencement at 23.52 Double Summer Time (GMT+2), 00.52 local, so the solo agent will have had about 50 minutes in which to get his bearings, bury or hide his parachute and harness, and get going before he loses the moonlight.

In December Lencement will be arrested by Vichy and sentenced to four years imprisonment. During his time in Clermont-Ferrand prison he makes contact with agents from the ALLIANCE intelligence circuit run by SIS. He is released in May 1942 and works for ALLIANCE. That circuit’s difficulties leads to his attempt to repeat his journey to England, but is arrested at Perpignan, interned at Fresnes and deported to Buchenwald and DORA. He survives, and is awarded the King’s Medal for Courage in the Cause of Freedom, a decoration awarded to several non-military resistance figures, especially those who survived Nazi hospitality.

Sources

TNA AIR 20/8334, Encl. 69A
TNA HS9/913/8: Lencement Personal File

Tuesday, 12 August 1941

Operation PERIWIG/MILL

This second attempt to drop the MILL team is combined with PERIWIG. Why hasn’t this been done in the first place? The previous attempts to complete PERIWIG and MILL have been in two aircraft on the same night, though the targets are only 70 miles apart. Perhaps it is because SIS takes a dim view of sharing air resources with SOE. It has a valid point: SOE’s overt intentions of creating havoc through acts of sabotage and assassination render its agents more likely to get caught. Intelligence agents, often under deep cover, are vulnerable to accidental recognition.

But the 12th is the last opportunity to complete outstanding operations before the end of the moon period. Each service will have provided an accompanying/escorting officer, who will not have been unaware of the situation. Perhaps it is a case of Knowles stating in his characteristically blunt manner to both parties something to the effect of: “There’s one aeroplane for Belgium tonight; if your agent’s on board we’ll try and drop him, otherwise that’s your lot until the end of the month.” That night Ron Hockey is flying SHE to the Dordogne, and Sgt Reimer is taking four separate operations to central France, so even if there were a reserve Whitley there isn’t a reserve crew. (Though W/Cdr Knowles dates two reports to the 12th, he has flown them earlier; he just doesn’t provide the date they are flown.)

PERIWIG is dropped first, Austin pinpointing at Ath before dropping Campion near Silly. They then fly south to Trélon, identifiable by its large surrounding forest, just over the border in France. They pinpoint again at Chimay before dropping the two MILL agents about a mile south of Salles. This target is less than four miles from Momignies, the site of the Leenaerts operation almost exactly a year before. (Verhoeyen records that they were in fact dropped near Cerfontaine, about 11 miles to the north-east.) The rear Gunner sees the two parachutes open, and the canopies are seen on the ground as Austin flies another circuit of the area. It is a night of good weather, with good visibility. On the return leg they are coned by about 20 searchlights as they crossed the coast, probably at Nieuwport. (The typed report has been hole-punched through the name.)

The folly of combining operations is demonstrated by Campion’s capture. Campion proceeds to denounce almost everyone he knows. According to MRD Foot, ‘his brother, his sister-in-law, his nieces, the doctor who had set his ankle’ – he had, unseen by the departing Whitley’s crew, broken it severely on landing – ‘the mother superior of the convent [that had sheltered him], everyone he had met during his training and all the reception committee.’ Sgt Austin’s despatchers – there are two on this sortie, one under training – are most likely instructed to keep the SIS and SOE parties apart, both before embarkation and in the confined space of the Whitley’s rear fuselage. Whatever strategem is used, it appears to work: the MILL party escapes the attentions of the Gestapo, providing an almost constant stream of intelligence material back to London right up to the Liberation. According to Debruyne, MILL is particularly effective at railway-based intelligence, concentrating their efforts in the Hainaut area. Some 700 agents and helpers are involved.

Operation LUMOND, ADJUDICATE, FABULOUS, CHICKEN

This is the first sortie as aircraft captain for Sergeant Alvin Reimer, a Canadian pilot. His reports are concise, and give little away. This night is the last opportunity to complete outstanding operations before the end of the early August moon period, and Sgt Reimer’s record shows that he is the sort to press on and complete his task if it is feasible. The attempt to mount the operations on this sortie, all for SOE, is decided only at the last minute.

Take-off is slightly delayed, therefore, and the Whitley’s rear fuselage is full. There are four agents, four W/T sets, and a single despatcher. ADJUDICATE is scheduled first, to drop Count Dzieřgowski and a W/T set near Limoges. CHICKEN is the Belgian agent Octave Fabri, whose mission is to sabotage an aircraft-engine factory near Antwerp, but the cultural antipathies that still plague Belgium may have ruled out a more direct drop into the Ardennes. He is to be dropped about ten kilometres north of Châteauroux. Finally, FABULOUS and LUMOND are to be dropped about ten kilometres further north. FABULOUS was ‘one man with a large W/T set’ to be dropped for Henri Labit and a new circuit he was trying to set up after the failure of TORTURE. LUMOND was ‘one man with a W/T set, and one large W/T set as a separate package’, but no more is known about this SOE operation.

Reimer and his crew take off at 21.30 and fly via Tangmere to Caen, crossing the French coast at 23.24. They arrive over Limoges an hour and a half later, but low cloud prevents them finding the pinpoint for ADJUDICATE. They set course northwards and drop CHICKEN. Fabri makes his way to Belgium after making a series of beginners’ mistakes that no-one harmful picked up, and he survives the war after a catalogue of misfortunes which would have done away with a less lucky man.

The Whitley then carries on towards its next target, about 10 kilometres further north, arriving about ten minutes later, which indicates that Reimer has tried to give his rear team time to prepare. But Sgt Moy, although an experienced despatcher, has had to rearrange and prepare FABULOUS (a wireless-operator and set for Henri Labit) and LUMOND (a wireless operator and two sets) in a cramped fuselage still encumbered with Count Dzieřgowski and his W/T set. Over the FABULOUS/LUMOND target Reimer assumes that his despatcher was ready, and presses the green light, but the two agents and their three sets are still not ready. Reimer is forced to make a circuit of the target, and the crew lose sight of it in the cloud. After this one circuit Reimer is forced to abandon the drop in order to be clear of the French coast before daybreak.

We have this information about the drop because on 14 August SOE writes to the Air Ministry for an explanation. Three days later Group Captain Bradbury passes SOE’s note to W/Cdr Knowles at Newmarket, demanding: ‘Please render your report without delay and return the attachment.’ Knowles’s explanation is not on file, so we have only one side of the story.

Operation SHE

Two nights after Jackson’s attempt at SHE, F/O Hockey flew his first operation as skipper. Hockey now skippers the second attempt at SHE. This is the only operational sortie he flies with his great friend ‘Sticky’ Murphy as his Second Pilot.

They set off shortly after nine p.m. and follow much the same route as Jackson. They make landfall at Grandcamp, a little further west along the Normandy coast. They cross the Loire at Saumur, and reach Périgueux at 00.50. Low and medium cloud have given way to clear weather with a slight haze, and Hockey drops to about 1,500 feet. At 00.58 they identify the target, and 15 minutes later they have completed the operation.

Hockey and his crew make their way to the Atlantic coast, pinpointing at Bigenos in Archachon Bay. Despite the cloud cover over the Bay of Biscay two ships fire at them. They make landfall in West Cornwall, and pass over St Eval before heading for Abingdon and Newmarket. The weather is reportedly poor at Newmarket, and they are now so short of fuel that they land at Abingdon.

Operation SHE isn’t a female agent, or even an agent: it is a W/T set for the ALLIANCE intelligence circuit run by Marie-Madeleine Fourcade. Each W/T set has a three-letter identifying code, such as KVL or OCK. In this case the set has the code ‘SHE’.

This ‘SHE’ set plays an ignominious role in the story of ALLIANCE, for instead of taking it to Brittany to operate with the local ALLIANCE cell, the traitorous agent Bradley Davis, nicknamed ‘Bla’, gives his escort the slip and takes it to the Abwehr in Paris. From there Davis and the Abwehr run a ‘funkspiel’ deception operation using SHE, purporting to pass vital military information about the Atlantic ports to London. Davis operates the set himself to prevent London from suspecting a strange Abwehr hand on the key.

‘Bla’ has been under a degree of suspicion almost from his arrival in France, but London backs him, citing the excellent information they have been receiving. Within ALLIANCE he is known to be a traitor after his network in Brittany is arrested. London confirms this because they have continued to receive information purporting to come from the blown network via SHE. Davis turns up in Marseilles, is trapped in a faked rendezvous, and is executed by the ALLIANCE team.

Tuesday, 5 August 1941

Operation LUMOND

LUMOND is a mysterious operation. The pilot, F/O Ron Hockey, reported it as completed on the night of the 5-6th August, yet a week later it is included with another operation to be dropped nearly 80 miles to the east. The LUMOND sortie on the 5th can be linked chronologically to the SIS-run ALLIANCE organisation, yet a second LUMOND sortie of the 12-13th, not completed, is linked with an SOE operation, FABULOUS. Another failed attempt at LUMOND, in the middle of the mid-August dark period, is linked with another SOE operation, DOWNSTAIRS.

From Hockey’s report and his logbook, the LUMOND operation on the night of the 5th appears to have been pretty straightforward, and he covers it in three short paragraphs. Take-off from Newmarket (22.24); via Abingdon and Tangmere to the coast (23.42) and over the Channel to Cabourg (00.23). Hockey dropped COLUMBA pigeons en route between Cabourg and Saint Pierre (presumably Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives, more or less on course between Cabourg and Saumur). The aircraft reached the target at 01.27, and completed the operation by 01.31. Hockey’s logbook recorded that the target was near Saumur, just down the Loire from Tours. It took Hockey only 1 hour 4 minutes from the Normandy coast, so the target cannot have been further south. They dropped the agent from 300 feet, half the normal height, to minimise the parachute drifting off-target in the strong gusty wind. (A later SOE ‘F’ Section agent, Ben Cowburn, was accidentally dropped from 300 feet. His canopy had barely opened when he hit the ground, and he was fortunate to walk away.) On the return leg Hockey and his crew dropped more COLUMBA pigeons between Vassy and Balleroy. They crossed the coast at Pointe de la Percée to Tangmere and Abingdon, landing at Newmarket at 05.05.

Despite its routine execution, this operation may have been the first parachute drop to ALLIANCE, one of the largest and most effective intelligence circuits of the war. Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, the circuit’s leader and chronicler, dated the arrival of her first agent from London, the agent she called ‘Bla’, to 5 August. The agent’s real name was Bradley Davis: he was dropped with his own set and some spares. Each set had a three-letter code, such as OCK or KVL.

Keith Jeffrey, in his official history of MI6, assumed that the agent was parachuted near Pau in the foothills of the Pyrenees, some 270 miles to the south of Saumur. (Pau was where Marie-Madeleine Fourcade had set up her headquarters. But Fourcade’s ‘l’Arche de Noé’ says that the reception party returned less than 24 hours later with the agent. So the drop-site was not round the corner, and Saumur was at least possible. It seems strange for the RAF to have dropped an agent in the Nazi-occupied zone if he was destined for the Unoccupied Zone, for this would have required the reception party (which SIS insisted on) to run the additional risks of crossing the demarcation line, not once but twice, and carrying W/T sets. In early August the few hours of darkness dictated how far south a sortie could be flown and still enable the aircraft to reach friendly skies before daybreak. Still, targets in the non-occupied Zone such as Chateauroux (target area for two August attempts at a later LUMOND operation, not completed) or Périgueux, (target for the ALLIANCE-related FIREFLY operation in November) would have been preferable to crossing the border.

So was Hockey’s trip to Saumur the right one? Aside from the date, there are some illuminating omissions from the abridged English translation, perhaps because, at the time of publication,  Special Duties operations were still nominally secret. (The preface to the English version of ‘Noah’s Ark’ was provided by SIS’s Kenneth Cohen. Make of that what you will.) The original French text includes a paragraph:

Coustenoble, dans la joie d’avoir aperçu un Whitley — “à moins que ce ne soit un Stirling”, dit-il toujours précis — à cent cinquante mètres.

While 150 metres (an unreliable estimate by a layman at night) was rather more than 300 feet, it was still low. Soon after being brought to Pau, Davis suffered acute appendicitis and was taken to hospital at Marie-Madeleine’s insistence. Some of her lieutenants were in favour of letting him die and stuffing him in a hole in the garden, for they were already suspicious. To Marie-Madeleine the likely cause (also omitted from the translation) was obvious:

On diagnostiquait à première vue une crise d’appendicite, traumatisme, vraisemblement provoqué par le saut en parachute.
(A first diagnosis was acute appendicitis, probably caused by the parachute drop.)

SIS seems to have had some peculiar ideas as to the correct dress for an agent, for (according to Fourcade) Davis was dressed as for a farcical village wedding – ‘la noce à Bobosse’ – a jacket that was almost a morning coat, striped trousers, a spotted cravat, a stiff shirt and wing-collar, a pointed goatee beard, pince-nez glasses and, to crown it all, a bowler hat. When he had been brought to Pau, Marie Madeleine wondered what British Intelligence thought a typical Frenchman wore. Her companions fell about with laughter.

For all his ludicrous get-up Bradley Davis would prove to be deadly. His pre-war association with Mosley’s Union of British Fascists had not been picked up by MI5’s rudimentary screening process; Davis had worked as a farm manager in France, and MI5’s parochial screening did not investigate beyond the English Channel. Davis betrayed ALLIANCE almost from the start. For more about ALLIANCE and Davis, look at Operation SHE a few nights later, and Operation FIREFLY on 6 November.

The problem with all of this is that on the 12th Sgt Reimer flew a sortie combining several operations. One of these was LUMOND, combined with SOE operations ADJUDICATE, FABULOUS, and CHICKEN. This LUMOND may have been more W/T sets for ALLIANCE using the same operation name. I could be completely wrong through relying on a coincidence of dates, but there is no other recorded air operation in August which remotely tallies with Fourcade’s date.

Sunday, 3 August 1941

The August moon period starts with three operations. F/Lt Jackson is non-operational after his crash, but F/O Hockey now has his own crew and the Flight is still able to field three crews.

Operation PERIWIG

‘PERIWIG’ is Armand Campion, about 31 years old. In 1940 he served with the French Foreign Legion in the Norway campaign, where he earned the Croix de Guerre. He is a trained wireless operator, so does not need to be dropped with one.

Hockey and his crew, which includes the Flight’s Lysander pilot F/Lt Nesbitt-Dufort, sets off for Belgium via Aldeburgh and Nieuwport. Unsurprisingly they meet with severe searchlight and medium flak opposition. Once the coast is behind them they release their quota of pigeons for Operation COLUMBA and head for Ath, but above cloud. Eight pigeons, re-dispatched from Belgium, appear to have returned to the UK from this drop.

After reaching the dead-reckoning position for Ath they alter course for the target to the east, but continuous low cloud makes it impossible to see what’s beneath them. They abandon the operation, and leave Belgium about three miles east of Nieuwport. If they hope to avoid the searchlights and flak they fail, and are picked up by a blue master-searchlight; the other lights fasten on to Hockey’s Whitley. They are coned and the flak is fierce and close. They make it home unharmed, despite being fired on by shipping off Harwich as a final indignity. Nesbitt-Dufort writes a vivid account of this flight on pages 98-102 of ‘Black Lysander’, but he confuses some of the details of this operation with another sortie he will fly with Hockey on 9 September, to Denmark. But writing after the war Nesbitt-Dufort will not have the benefit of looking at the contemporary pilots’ reports, and has to rely on his logbook to jog his memory. Memories tend to be precise about what happened, but ‘when’ and ‘where’ are different matters entirely.

Operation MILL

‘MILL’ is Adrien Marquet and his wireless Operator René Clippe. (Clippe seems to have been codenamed MILLSTONE, according to Verhoeyen.) They are the vanguard of a Belgian Intelligence Service operation sponsored and facilitated by SIS. As with the failed Leenaerts operation of mid-August 1940, Marquet’s task is to make contact with Belgians recruited by the ‘La Dame Blanche’ veteran Anatole Gobeaux during the ‘Phoney War’ period, when Belgium remained stolidly neutral. The agents are to be dropped near Chimay.

The first attempt is thwarted by low continuous cloud over the target area. Sgt Austin flies to the the target area via Orfordness, and crosses the enemy coast at Veurnes, between Dunkirk and Nieuwport. A 25-minute square search of the target area does not reveal a gap in the low cloud cover, so they are forced to abandon and return to Newmarket.

P/O AGW Livingstone (W/Op) joins Sgt Austin’s crew for his first Special Duties sortie. He has already completed a bomber tour with 115 Squadron.

Operation FELIX

The first attempt to drop a replacement W/t set to the FELIX intelligence circuit had been made on 12 July by Sgt Austin. The target has been changed to the Plateau les Trembleaux, about three miles north of the earlier target, just north of Montigny-sur-Loing. This is the clearing where Philip Schneidau had been parachuted in March, though on that occasion he had been carried by the wind, missed the clearing, and landed half-way up a tree in the dense woods to the west.

Knowles takes off at 22.18 (UK local Double Summer Time) and sets course for Abingdon. At 22.47 both exactors start to give trouble (which probably means that the airscrews cannot be put into coarse pitch after the initial climb), so Knowles abandons the operation; they wouldn’t have got far with the airscrews in fine pitch. They have difficulty finding Newmarket again, but pick up the Newmarket flare-path at 23.30 and land back at base at 23.48. It will be another month before the FELIX circuit receives its new set.

Saturday, 12 July 1941

Operation FELIX

This is the first trip for Sgt Austin’s crew after navigator David Halcro has received his commission with effect from 3 July, though Austin’s operations on the 6 and 7 July still list him as ‘Sgt Halcro’. Though the target is south-east of Paris they chose to enter France by the usual route over Cabourg/Dives-sur-Mer. It is a cloudy and thundery night, but the weather clears as they approach the target area.

Austin has been given the wrong target location. During Austin’s 50-minute search for the target, red lights attached to the nearby wireless masts at Videlles are switched on whenever the Whitley flies close. These masts are close to Barbizon, on the west side of Fontainebleau Forest. Barbizon had been the original target for dropping Philip Schneidau in January, but by the time Schneidau dropped in March it had been switched back to Montigny.

Austin claims to have found the pinpoint after searching for 50 minutes. He circles for a further ten, but sees no lights that can be construed as the prearranged signal. Hardly surprising: the reception party has been waiting for the drop more than a dozen miles away Someone has cocked up, a sortie has been wasted and lives risked.

Two unidentified operations

F/O Hockey flies his first operation as skipper. The sortie is recorded in Ron Hockey’s logbook, and is mentioned in the Stradishall Ops Officers’s log, but if Hockey wrote an operations report it is not on file. There is no mention of the operation name.

Hockey takes off at 22.35 but an hour later reports engine trouble. The Whitley lands successfully back at Newmarket at 23.48; Hockey records spending 1 hr 25 mins airborne. This was the same Whitley ‘D’ that had caused Knowles’s early return on the 10th, but Knowles used the same aircraft the next night. This time it had been the port airscrew’s exactor which had failed. Perhaps Knowles had been fortunate in that UPROAR was taken ill while airborne, and the sortie had had to be abandoned.

F/Lt Jackson plans to take off at 23.30 on another operation, also unidentified, in Whitley ‘A’ according to the Stradishall log. It has already been delayed by 45 minutes, but at 23.08 the operation is cancelled by the Air Ministry.