Tag Archives: SOE ‘RF’

SOE ‘RF’ (Gaullist) section

Sunday, 11 May 1941

Operation JOSEPHINE B

The first attempt at Operation JOSEPHINE had ended badly for the Whitley’s crew, with two fatalities and three seriously wounded, including the pilot, F/Lt Jack Oettle. The Polish agents had not been seriously harmed, but the delay had allowed time for three Frenchmen from Brigadier Gubbins’s newly-established RF Section of SOE to be prepared for the operation. Sgt J. Forman (who had made it back remarkably quickly from Operation SAVANNA), Sous-Lt Raymond Varnier, and Sous-Lt Raymond Cabard were the agents. The scale of the operation was half that of the earlier attempt, but the intended outcome wasn’t impeded.

Jackson and his crew took off from Stradishall half an hour before midnight, but had to circle Abingdon while the wireless-operator checked out a fault with his set. On such a long-range flight the W/T equipment was essential for navigation, it being used to take bearings from home-based radio beacons and, once over France, from foreign radio stations. These were fed to the Navigator. A strong German Forces’ transmitter at Rennes, in Brittany, was especially useful.

Once over Tangmere, course was set for ‘Ile Deke’ (Jackson’s version of the Île d’Aix, between the Île d’Oléron and the mainland). They flew at 8,000 feet above 10/10th cloud until they passed 48°30’N (roughly level with Avranches), the cloud cleared, replaced by low mist and haze.

They eventually spotted La Rochelle to port, and changed course for the target area. Once over the Bordeaux area the crew was expecting some kind of diversionary raid (such as 2 Group had laid on for SAVANNA) to cover their parachuting activity, but there was none. The three agents were dropped at about 01.30, and were seen to have dropped safely with their container near a wood.

After dropping the agents the Whitley headed west, away from trouble into the Bay of Biscay, then north to Ushant, and so to St. Eval, which they spotted by searchlights playing on the underside of the cloud-base. It’s not clear whether St Eval was guiding them in; it was quite common practice for searchlights to shepherd an errant bomber to its base in this manner.

A final comment in the report: “the W/T installation was unreliable for HF/DF assistance” indicates that their only navigation aid beside the aircraft compass was little use. All things considered, the crew did well to find their target, and almost as well to find their way back. It took only a small error, or series of small errors, for an aircraft without W/T aids to miss the south-west peninsula and end up in the Irish Sea. Hence the searchlights over St Eval.

To find out how the operation went after the agents’ landing, I suggest you look at the Wikipedia page on Operation JOSEPHINE.

Saturday, 10 May 1941

Operations AUTOGYRO D/E and JOLLY

AUTOGYRO D and E are circuit organiser Pierre de Vomécourt (Lucas) and Louis Lefrou de la Colonge (Bernard), sent by ‘F’ Section; JOLLY is Pierre Julitte, a Gaullist agent sent by Dewavrin.

Sqn Ldr Knowles, with F/Lt Murphy as 2nd pilot and navigator, takes off from Stradishall at 21.24, and takes the standard route to the coast via Abingdon and Tangmere, which they circle an hour later. They climb to 10,000 feet and cross the French coast at Isigny at 23.10. Twenty minutes later the rear gunner, Sgt Burgin, reports an aircraft approaching from the stern. The Me110 opens fire, and Knowles put the Whitley into a weaving dive to 2,000 feet. On the way down Sgt Burgin continuously shoots at the Me110 until it explodes. They resume their course to Tours, which they pass shortly after midnight.

They then head south-east for Chatillon. About 11 km south of the town, and approximately 40 km from both Valençay and Chateauroux, the agents are dropped on the pinpoint, somewhere between the hamlets of Fromenteau and Villiers. Large areas of woodland nearby would have stood out as dark patches in the moonlight. Though Georges Bégué has been cited as being present to receive them, this may be due to a misreading of Bégué’s original report in his personal file (see below).

Knowles then heads for Châteauroux and Le Châtre, passing over Châteauroux at 00.42. They circle Le Châtre for about ten minutes before dropping Pierre Julitte with a wireless set at 01.06, about one mile south of the town. In his operation report, Knowles headlines JOLLY as JOOLLY, which he corrects in the text. This may have been a subconscious mis-typing: Knowles may have met Pierre Julitte as one of Dewavrin’s staff from his time at the Air Ministry. Knowles mentions nothing about reception lights; Julitte is dropped blind.

Knowles and crew retrace their route to Châteauroux, where they drop leaflets before setting a return course via Tours and Isigny. However, they cross the French coast north of Caen, some way east of track. They then head for Tangmere and Stradishall, where they land at 04.44.

London

The Luftwaffe takes full advantage of the nearly full moon to launch a devastating attack on the West End and many other parts of the capital. London burned. Many years ago I read Richard Collier’s 1959 account of this night: ‘The city that wouldn’t die’. If you can get hold of a copy, read it. This attack was the last, flailing, all-out blow of the Blitz that had started the previous September. Hitler’s attention was now firmly fixed upon the east, on the Soviet Union.

Sources

TNA AIR 20/8334, encl. 11A
TNA HS9/115/2, Georges Bégué SOE personal file

Thursday, 10 April 1941

Operation JOSEPHINE

The Pessac power station supplies electrical power to the Bordeaux area, which hosts a submarine base built for the Italian Navy known as ‘BETASOM’, from which its submarines will account for more than half a million tons of Allied shipping. Damaging the power station would cripple both base and local industry: the Bloch aircraft company and Ford France have factories in the area. Bomber Command has attacked Bordeaux several times in 1940 and 1941. The local airfield at Merignac, home to Condor long-range bombers that another menace to the Atlantic convoys, would also be disrupted.

Six Polish Army saboteurs are selected for the operation. Though they might seem an odd choice, a considerable portion of the Polish Army had escaped to France during the ‘Phoney War’ of 1939-40, and during the collapse General Sikorski had established his headquarters at Libourne, 25 km to the east. The presence of Poles in that part of France is therefore not uncommon, even after the armistice, and many soldiers who have escaped to England with Sikorski know their way around the area. Explosives expertise cannot be acquired quickly, and at the time the Free French Forces do not have such experts to hand.

The Whitley, T4165, is one of the pair from the Tragino Aqueduct raid, Operation COLOSSUS. These aircraft had been prepared in haste for COLOSSUS at Ringway, and on that raid there had been several container hang-ups over the target; one, crucially, had held many of the explosive charges. On this night, however, the problem isn’t a hang-up but a falling-off: en route to the target, shortly before midnight, an electrical fault releases one of the containers. Without the limpet-mines it carries there is no point in continuing with the operation, and Oettle returns to Tangmere.

By the time the Whitley arrives over Tangmere at about 03.30 much of its fuel has been used up. On take-off the heavy fuel load has masked the effect of the saboteurs’ weight on the Whitley’s centre-of-gravity (C-of-G). Now that most of the fuel had been used up, the C-of-G has moved dangerously aft.

As the Whitley approaches the runway Oettle is too high, too slow. Even if he elects to go around this is a dangerous procedure in a Whitley: the Merlin X engines are underpowered and cannot be wound up quickly. Also, in the final stages of a normal landing there is little elevator control, for the tailplane falls into the turbulent wash behind the wings. The Whitley stalls, and crashes heavily.

Of F/Lt Oettle’s crew, Sergeants Cowan (Observer) and Morris (Rear Gunner) are killed. Jack Oettle is seriously injured, as are P/O Wilson (2nd Pilot) and Sgt Briscoe (Wireless Operator). The agents escape serious injury: the rear fuselage is an inherently safer place to be than the cockpit area, but their escape may also be due to the cushioning effect of their swaddling parachute gear, the sorbo-rubber floor-mats, and stacks of bundled propaganda leaflets. Stradishall does not list P/O Molesworth among the injured; he is probably the Despatcher, back in the rear fuselage with the Poles. Although most despatchers are airmen volunteers from the ground trades, it is not uncommon for an officer from Ringway to perform this role.

Tangmere is a busy Fighter airfield, and there are many witnesses to the accident. The several personnel seen emerging from the rear fuselage are bound to arouse comment. One of the witnesses is Jimmy McCairns, a fighter pilot at Tangmere, later a noted Lysander pilot with 161 Squadron: the fiction put out is that the six agents are newspaper correspondents returning from covering a raid. Thin cover, given the eastern-European accents of the ‘newspapermen’, but it has to do.

Saturday, 1 February 1941

Stradishall – Ringway

F/Lt Keast flies with seven crew to Ringway in Whitley T4264. They stay for the next three days, almost certainly undergoing Ringway’s formal training course in dropping paratroops. This includes dropping a stick of several paratroops, a process unfamiliar to those used to dropping single agents. (In June, Sgt John Austin takes his crew on the Ringway pilots’ course, and records the flying syllabus in his logbook.)

Ringway is only just recovering from the daunting preparations for Operation Colossus, a planned attack on the Tragino viaduct in Apulia, south-east Italy. The purpose is to deny the arid province its supply of water, supplied by aqueduct from the mountains of the wetter west coast. The preparations have involved training the paratroops of ‘X’ Commando and eight selected bomber crews from Nos 51 and 78 Squadrons, and modifying their Whitley bombers for paratroop operations. Preparations have been intense, as the attack has to take place at the next full moon. The operation is to be mounted from Malta.

Operation Savanna

The reason for Keast and his crew to undertake this training becomes clear from a letter written the same day by Sir Charles Portal, The Chief of the Air Staff, to Sir Gladwyn Jebb, Hugh Dalton’s Assistant Under-Secretary. Portal’s subject is a plan to assassinate the aircrews of KG 100, the Luftwaffe’s forerunners to the RAF’s Pathfinders, as a means to stymie the Luftwaffe’s ability to devastate city targets through cloud by means of radio beams. In mid-November 1940 this unit marked the targets in Coventry; their accuracy ensured the city-centre’s destruction.

The plan is for a small team of agents to be dropped near the Luftwaffe base at Meucon, in southern Brittany. The pilots have been reported as using a bus to carry them to their billets in the nearby town of Vannes. The plan is to ambush the bus and kill the highly-skilled aircrew inside.

Though he must have sanctioned the raid, Air Marshal Portal is unhappy about the use of his aircraft and crews for an operation that does not comply with the rules of war:

I think that the dropping of men dressed in civilian clothes for the purpose of attempting to kill members of the opposing forces is not an operation with which the Royal Air Force should be associated. I think you will agree that there is a vast difference, in ethics, between the time-honoured operation of dropping of a spy from the air and this entirely new scheme for dropping what one can only call assassins.

In 1916 Portal had served with No. 60 Squadron, RFC. At that time the squadron was involved in some of the early agent-landing operations.

Portal also makes his opinions clear to Gubbins in a meeting at about the same time. Soldiers in uniform are allowed to kill enemy forces in uniform, but soldiers in civilian clothes are not. Gubbins points out that there is not room in the containers for uniforms to enable the agents to change into uniform, and in any case the agents (referred to as ‘operators’) might refuse to go on these terms. As the ‘assassins’ are on loan from De Gaulle, they know that their Free French uniforms will merely ensure their capture and execution. As Frenchmen in civilian clothes they might at least stand a chance of melting into the background.

Thursday, 14 November 1940

Morlaix, Brittany

F/O Oettle (as skipper) and F/Lt Keast fly the first RAF insertion operation for SOE (or SO2 as it is known for several months after its formation).

Whitley T4264 is airborne from Stradishall at 21.00. Its target is near the town of Morlaix, in Brittany. The agent comes from de Gaulle’s Free French, from what will later become known  as SOE’s ‘RF’ (Republique Française) Section.

The Whitley arrives over the target, but when it comes to the moment for the agent to jump, he refuses. He certainly isn’t the last, but he is the first. Later refusals are sometimes for valid reasons, such as snow on the ground, which would reveal the agent’s tracks leaving the DZ, but the reason for this refusal remains unknown.

The crew has no choice but to return to base. The agent is returned to staff duties. In his SOE in France, Professor MRD Foot saw no reason to identify the agent, saying that he later ‘did well’. Foot was an SAS parachutist himself, dropped into France in 1944, so he knew what he was about.