A Special Duty (2 page)

They carried out a series of wireless, electrical and fuel-consumption tests before taking off for their departure point, Hurn airport, but were barely twenty minutes into the flight when engine failure forced them to turn back. They made it at the next attempt, and ten days later received their final briefing for the flight to North Africa, during which they were warned to keep a sharp lookout for fighter planes over the Bay of Biscay, which was known to be a training area for new German pilots. Taking off at the same time was a Wellington Bomber, piloted by one of Tom’s friends, and there was a bit of nervous banter between the crews as to who would get there first before they took off on the nine-hour flight to Rabat, in Morocco. All went smoothly for the Storey crew, but the Wellington did not arrive and they were unable to find out what had happened to the crew.
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Mercifully they had little time to dwell on this before taking off for the second stage of the trip, which was to Castel Benito in Tripoli and then on to their final destination of Tocra, in Libya.

At Tocra they were met by Wing Commander James Blackburn, who, they noticed, wore no mark of rank or medals, and a Squadron Leader, both of whom were keen to examine the aircraft, which was a new Mark of the Halifax model. The modifications, as the crew had suspected, did indeed mean supply work, and it was explained to them that the Squadron, which came under Mediterranean Command, was involved in supplying and infiltrating personnel to the growing resistance movements in Greece and the Balkans. The aircraft of the Squadron, like their own, had been modified for supply work; the only armament being four Browning machine guns mounted in the rear turret. They flew alone at night and without fighter escort to remote locations with only fires and hand-held torches to guide them in when they arrived. The requirement for a good navigator became clear, as did the need for a skilled pilot. The winter of 1943/44 would prove to have the worst weather over Europe and the Balkans in twenty years and, with many of the dropping grounds in deep valleys, the pilot needed to be able to handle the aircraft in conditions close to its operational limit. Tom Storey, twenty-three years of age, had learned to fly in Canada, converting to heavy bombers back in England; his flying ability and nerve would be tested to the limit in the coming months. He had joined a group of elite crews flying missions that made no headlines at the time and, with the exception of a handful of memorials scattered through the Balkans and Poland, have received little recognition since.

Conditions at Tocra base must have come as a shock. The Squadron had recently moved there from Derna and the ops room was just a tent on the south side of the runway, with the crews billeted in a further scattering of tents around the perimeter. On arrival the navigator, being an officer, cycled off to the officers’ mess on the bicycle he had brought with him on the aircraft, while the rest of the crew, being non-commissioned officers, were given a tent and told to dig a trench around it (to cope with the heavy rains when they came). As they unpacked their belongings it became clear that they would have to get used to living with sand, particularly when the desert wind blew, as the red dust got into everything – eyes, hair, clothes and even food, but a lively sense of humour prevailed at the camp and, with the natural resilience of young men, they were soon making the most of a variety of activities such as football, whist drives and gramophone recitals. They had a mobile cinema with regular screenings and each canteen had a darts board to help pass the long hours between sorties and keep the homesickness at bay on this desolate stretch of desert far from home. Three years of fighting in the North-African desert had seen Italian, German and Allied forces chase each other back and forth across this hostile land but it was now firmly in the hands of the Allies. Italy had surrendered in September 1943, and although the tide of war was moving in favour of the Allies it was still necessary to tie up German divisions with the help of resistance groups in the Mediterranean and the Balkans, in order to relieve pressure on Stalin’s Eastern Front and divert attention from Allied plans to land in France (Operation Overlord).

Tom’s arrival on the North-African coast coincided with a general stand down of operations because of the bad weather, but on the 2
^nd
November, he and his bomb aimer Peter Crosland were given the opportunity to join Flight Lieutenant Brotherton-Ratcliffe, affectionately known as Brother Rat, on a six-hour sortie to Greece. This was their only opportunity to observe an experienced crew in action before beginning their own tour of duty, and it was probably just as well they didn’t have long to think about it as the heavy and intense flak encountered during that initial flight must have given them pause for thought. Having returned to base at 0600 from that flight, they were considered ready for ops and took to the skies at dusk with their own crew of Storey, Crosland, Nichol, Davis, Keen, Hughes and Fidler. They were bound for Macedonia and a supply drop to MONKEYWRENCH, one of two very secret Missions that had dropped into the mountainous area of eastern Albania the previous month; the other one being MULLIGATAWNY. These two Missions initially shared drop zones and wireless communications as they made their way into Macedonia to rendezvous with Tito’s General ‘Tempo’
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, though their Missions would eventually go their separate ways. MULLIGATAWNY, headed by Major Mostyn Davies, would head for the Bulgarian border and attempt to contact and organise factions of the Bulgarian resistance, whereas MONKEYWRENCH would remain in Macedonia, carrying out sabotage operations on vital installations, such as the chrome mines at Skopje. The following cipher from Special Operations Executive HQ in Cairo reveals the nature of the sabotage raids and the subsequent pressure on the Squadron to deliver explosives and equipment to Mission staff and their partisans on the ground:

“London most anxious cut off German supplies chrome RPT chrome. Send soonest details position Allatine mines. Can you initiate attacks against mine power houses or trains carrying ore? If so what stores required.”
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Followed by:

“Most urgent put SKOPLE-VELE-DJEVDJELIJA line out of action. Treat as first priority target. What is earliest date you can attack? Say whether you need sapper assistance.”
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Ammunition and explosives were requested by MONKEYWRENCH for partisan sabotage activities, but Mission staff also asked for personal items such as pipes, tinned soup, water bottles, boots, novels and boiled sweets.
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Supply drops were their lifeline but on this particular November night, though they could hear the drone of the Halifax and had lit their fires, the crew in the aircraft above could see nothing. Navigator ‘Nik’ Nichol believed they had passed over the target a couple of times but visibility was too poor to spot anything, so they circled for almost an hour looking for a break in the clouds before fuel began to run low and the task was abandoned. They returned to base, where the concern that night was not the success or failure of supply drops, but the fate of the popular and highly respected Passmore crew, who had taken off for Yugoslavia in Liberator AL509, and failed to return. It was a great loss for the Squadron, who continued to send wireless transmissions to the crew in the vain hope that they would respond. They could not – Flight Lieutenant Maurice Passmore, aged 23, and his entire crew had perished on a mountainside on their way to drop supplies to the FUNGUS Mission in Croatia. When news of the crash reached FUNGUS headquarters, Majors Hunter and Reed made their way to the scene where, with the help of their partisans, they buried the dead, marking the grave in a nearby cemetery with a simple cross bearing their names. It was particularly poignant for Reed because it was the Passmore crew who had dropped his Mission
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into Croatia three weeks earlier and taken such trouble to ensure that his party went out over the correct location, circling down and down through the mist until, through a gap in the clouds, the lights of the signal fires were spotted.
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The loss of this fine crew was mourned by all who knew them and they were later reinterred in the Belgrade War Cemetery.

The following night the Storey crew were the first of three crews to take off for Macedonia and another attempt to drop supplies to MONKEYWRENCH. Weather conditions were poor throughout the flight and cloud obscured the drop zone, giving them little hope of success. Then, unexpectedly, they spotted the fires through a break in the cloud and, after an exchange of the correct recognition phrases
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and several dummy runs, they dropped fifteen containers, fourteen packages and twenty-three kitbags, amongst which were flares for a Very pistol.
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Flight Sergeant Brown in the following Halifax had been forced back by poor weather but Brotherton-Ratcliffe, with supplies for MULLIGATAWNY at the same target, was guided in by the pistol flares which had just been dropped by the Storey crew. This prompted a congratulatory message from the receiving party: “Congratulate pilot MULLIGATAWNY 5 - we directed him in with Very lights from plane load before him.” The bad weather that night had forced four of the Squadron Halifaxes back to base and damaged the only remaining Liberator, but there were no casualties and the Storey crew recorded their first successful operation with 148 Squadron.

Having flown three consecutive nights, the crew had a couple of days off, no doubt making good use of the hot showers which had just been set up in the courtyard of Tocra Fort, the new headquarters, made fit for purpose by the hard-working Royal Engineers. The men were issued with half a bar of soap each month for washing themselves and their clothes, so a certain amount of frugality was still needed, but the shower facility was a big improvement. They were also issued with personal first-aid packs by the medical officer, who worked tirelessly to get conditions improved for them. Then, on the 12
^th
November, after a brief period of respite, the crew took off for a special delivery of personnel and supplies to the SPILLWAY Mission of Brigadier ‘Trotsky’ Davies in Albania. Sitting on the floor of the aircraft were five of the eight-man team, who were to be dropped that night, including Lieutenant Jack Dumoulin, a newly-qualified doctor, whose medical stores were packed and ready for despatch with him in the fuselage, and Captain Marcus Lyon, an intelligence officer hand-picked for the mission by Davies himself. The rest of the party, led by Colonel Norman Wheeler, and split between the Storey and Fairweather aircraft, comprised two wireless operators, a paramilitary expert, a Corporal of Horse
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and Major Gordon Layzell, who would die in a horrible accident within weeks of the drop. A sandstorm had blown up during the afternoon but four crews, including Storeys, got away before Wing Commander Blackburn judged conditions to be too dangerous and suspended operations. During take-off, Tom Storey’s Halifax JN888 burst a tyre, as a result of debris on the runway, which also damaged the starboard inner propeller and the fuselage, but with the aircraft full of high octane fuel, he decided to press on with the flight. As they crossed the Greek coastline, there was a loud bang as flak hit the aircraft, but again they carried on and got as far as the Albanian border before severe icing finally forced them to abandon the operation. During the return journey, the crew briefed the passengers that, because of the damage to the wheel they may have to jump out, and it was then up to the pilot to balance the risk factors, bearing in mind that parachutes did occasionally fail to open and, if weather conditions and topography were favourable, it might be safer to land the aircraft with everyone on board. Things were further complicated by the crash landing of a Halifax belonging to 463 Squadron at Tocra, which was obstructing the runway and all returning planes were being diverted to Benina, an airstrip near Benghazi.

Tom made the decision to land the aircraft, and received instructions to jettison the entire load, except for a green container, which he did. There was a lot at stake, with twelve lives resting on his ability to put the aircraft down safely, and this may have prompted his attempt to puncture the good tyre by hanging out through the drop hatch into a 160 mph slipstream and shooting at it with his revolver. The attempt failed. He climbed back into the cockpit and, with all the skill and calm concentration he could muster, brought the aircraft in on a long, low approach over the treeless desert and managed to make a successful three-engine, one-wheel landing
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with minimal damage and no casualties. Jack Dumoulin, the young medical officer on board that night, commented that crash landing in Libya with one engine out and a large hole in the fuselage was “not a lot of fun”!
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A landing such as this could never be rehearsed in training; the decisions Tom took that night and the skilful way he handled the aircraft earned him well-deserved praise.
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Dumoulin and his shaken colleagues made another attempt to drop to Brigadier Davies’s SPILLWAY Mission in mid-November, 1943, but weather conditions were so atrocious that it was decided to drop them into southern Albania and hope that they could eventually link up with Brigadier Davies in the North. They were successfully dropped in during December,
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but the plan to move north was thwarted by the SPILLWAY Mission Station being attacked and overrun by the Germans a few weeks later.
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Following the crash landing, Tom’s trusty Halifax JN888 was patched up by the efficient ground crew and quickly back in service taking Captain Bill Felton, a Royal Army Medical Corps doctor, and Private Goodyer to the Triklinos dropping ground in central Greece. The country was seeing an upsurge in resistance at the end of 1943, following the withdrawal of Italian forces, but as the Germans moved in and took over, they launched ruthless attacks against the guerrilla bands. Added to that, the various factions of the resistance movement were at odds with each other and long-standing hostilities had finally broken into full civil war. Mission staff were constantly on the move to keep ahead of the Germans and to avoid the factional fighting breaking out around them. It was into this cauldron that Halifax JN888 prepared to drop Felton and Goodyer. Tom was concerned that the target, over Triklinos, didn’t match the one given at the briefing, but the three signal fires were correctly placed and the letter ‘G’ flashed from the aircraft was answered correctly. After circling for some time the men jumped out from three-thousand feet and their parachutes were seen to open safely. The first patient for Captain Felton was Captain Monetti McAdam, head of the TINGEWICK
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Mission, who was sick with malaria in a nearby village, having been forced to flee from his station by the movement of German tanks. He had sent an advance party to set up a new headquarters in a safer area, but was too sick to accompany them and decided to wait in the village of Prianza until he was well enough to travel which, thanks to the intervention of good medical care, he eventually was.
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