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