Airborne Espionage E-Book

David Oliver

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 481

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2005

Beschreibung

Operating in all weathers, invariably at night, often at low level and usually without fighter escort, Allied 'Special Duties' (SD) squadrons and units played a vital role in the Second World War. By their very nature, these operations went unreported in wartime and for considerable time thereafter, but their importance in prosecuting the war of resistance in Occupied Europe was immense. Emerging from a time of rudimentary communications and transport, dedicated air units had been established by 1939 to fly agents into enemy territory, but their aircraft were hand-me-downs and the SD was considered a poor third to fighter and bomber operations. However, the tasks undertaken by these men and their aircraft were often more hazardous and demanding than any other type of wartime flying: for every SOS, SIS or OSS agent who lost their life in the field, at least one RAF or USAAF airman was killed while flying SD operations. Here, David Oliver examines the exploits of British, Commonwealth, American, Free European, Soviet, German, Italian and Japanese airmen and units, supported by first-hand accounts and archive photographs.

Leseprobe

Front cover illustration: Westland Lysander © Ad Meskens via Wikimedia Commons.

First published 2005

This paperback edition first published 2024

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© David Oliver, 2005, 2024

The right of David Oliver to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 714 8

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Behind the Lines

2 Lighting the Flame

3 The Cloak and Dagger Mob

4 New Branches of ‘The Firm’

5 Ablaze and Betrayed

6 Build-up to Invasion

7 Liberation and Retribution

8 The Flames Reach Berlin

9 The Setting Sun

Postscript

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Of the many people who assisted me in writing this book by providing personal anecdotes and photographs, I would like to extend particular thanks to the following individuals and organisations:

François Prins, who provided me with a constant stream of contacts, information and photographs; the late Bruce Robertson, who, as always, was a vital source of information and photographs – he will be sadly missed; Sir Lewis Hodges, Reginald Lewis and Roy Buckingham, who flew with the RAF ‘moon’ squadrons; Ron Clarke of the Carpetbagger Museum at Harrington; Ian Frimston, Cliff Knox, Richard Riding, Andy Thomas, Richard Chapman and Bo Widfeldt for providing photographs; Bill Stratton’s International Liaison Pilot and Aircraft Association; Peter D. Evans’s Luftwaffe Experten Message Board; and the Royal Australian and Royal Norwegian Air Forces’ excellent archives.

Introduction

The twentieth century witnessed not only man’s first flight in a heavier-than-air machine, but also the use of that machine as a powerful weapon of war. First as an airborne scout, then for dropping bombs on the enemy, it became a platform for shooting down enemy scout and bomber aeroplanes; and last but not least, and perhaps surprisingly, it became as a mode of transport for men and equipment.

There were plenty of opportunities for developing these roles in a century that will go down in history as witnessing the outbreak of no fewer than two world wars and countless local wars. These times of conflict and intrigue also brought an awareness of the value of another weapon – intelligence: in particular what we now know as HUMINT (human intelligence) but which was previously known as ‘spying’.

At the start of the First World War, the transport by aeroplanes of spies across enemy lines was not seen as a priority by the combatants, but this would change as the conflict dragged on into its second year. At the beginning, there was no organisation for these flights, no reception teams at the drop zone and – most importantly – no communications network between the air forces and the agents, apart from homing pigeons or an occasional snatched telephone call.

The situation had not improved to any great extent by the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. Although dedicated ‘Special Duties’ air units had been established to fly the spies, or ‘agents’ as they were then known, their aircraft were hand-me-downs and the role of their aircrews was considered a poor third to the more glamorous fighter and bomber operations.

However, the results ultimately achieved by these men and their aircraft were in many ways more hazardous and demanding than any other type of wartime flying. Finding a drop zone behind enemy lines at night, or actually landing in a remote field they had probably never seen before, with the only landing aids being the moonlight and a few hand torches, required a special type of expertise. Often flying an unarmed aircraft, and with the knowledge that being shot down and captured might end in summary execution, also called for a particular type of dedication and courage. Operating in all weathers, at low level and without escort, the Special Duties units paid a heavy price in aircrew killed and missing. By the very nature of these operations, their exploits were unreported during wartime, and for some considerable time thereafter; in fact, to this day, the official records of many of their flights have never seen the light of day and may never be released.

What is still relatively unknown is the fact that nearly all the Second World War combatants carried out clandestine flights to a greater or lesser extent. In the following chapters the exploits of British, Commonwealth, American, Free European, Soviet, German, Italian and Japanese airmen and units are recorded. The role played by the long-suffering ground crews who kept the Special Duties aircraft in the air, often in appalling conditions, must also be recognised as an integral part of the unsung backroom team which supported the individual agents and special forces who chose to operate in that most dangerous of wartime environments – behind enemy lines.

CHAPTER 1

Behind the Lines

On a crisp moonlit night in the third winter of the Second World War, a dozen people took up their positions around a snow-dusted field in central France. Among them were local farm workers, a storekeeper, a pharmacist and a teacher. They had broken the six o’clock curfew to risk local police and German checkpoints, travelling by foot, bicycle and delivery van to their windswept rendezvous. A few were armed with ancient shotguns, while others carried only battery-operated pocket torches. Two of the men and a young woman clutched battered suitcases.

Here they waited in silence, listening for the sound of an approaching engine. If it came from one of the roads leading to the nearby farm, they would be in mortal danger and would have to flee for their lives. But it came from the air, and soon a small, single-engined aircraft circled the field while the reception committee’s chef de terrain aimed his torch in its direction and flashed a code letter in Morse. When the pilot flashed back the agreed code letters with his landing light, the reception committee laid out three pocket torches in the shape of an inverted L shape 150 yards long. The aircraft, a black-painted, high-wing Royal Air Force Lysander, touched down at the first torch, bouncing on the frost-hard earth and kicking up flecks of snow in its wake.

It ended its short landing run between the two torches that marked the end of the flarepath. Here the pilot gunned the engine, swung the Lysander around in a 180-degree turn and taxied back to the first torch. The plane came to a halt facing into the wind, with its engine idling. The rear cockpit canopy slid open and a figure in civilian clothing climbed down the short, fixed ladder and jumped to the ground. A second passenger passed down two suitcases and a bundle of packets, while the three figures waiting in the shadows moved forward and passed their luggage up to him. He quickly stowed it and climbed out. When the new passengers were aboard and the sliding canopy closed, the chef de terrain passed a string bag of bottles to the pilot and gave him the ‘thumbs up’ to take off.

As the aircraft lifted off after a run of less than 50 yards, the remaining men, all members of a local resistance network, melted into the winter night to make their hazardous journeys to homes or safe houses. Having been on the ground for less than five minutes the unarmed Lysander, carrying three Special Operation Executive (SOE) agents, faced a dangerous two-hour night flight over occupied France towards the safety of an airfield in southern England.

* * *

The Second World War was not the first time that intelligence agents had been flown behind enemy lines. A quarter of a century earlier, soon after the outbreak of the First World War, one of France’s most remarkable pioneer aviators became the first pilot to fly these dangerous special missions.

Jules Védrines, born to working-class Parisians in 1881, grew up with an interest in all things mechanical, becoming a chauffeur/mechanic before learning to fly at Pau after witnessing Wilbur Wright’s demonstration flights at Le Mans in 1908. The ill-mannered, bad-tempered Védrines proved to be a natural flyer, and in 1911 he embarked on an extraordinary series of record-breaking flights. He began by winning the Paris to Madrid race in a Morane-Borel monoplane, flying over the Pyrenees to arrive in the Spanish capital after being airborne for a total of 15 hours, spread over three days. With no instruments, Védrines narrowly missed winning the Circuit of Britain race in July 1911, but over the following year he was to make the World Absolute Speed Record his own.

Flying a revolutionary Déperdussin monoplane with a highly polished, wooden monocoque fuselage, Védrines pushed the speed record from 90 to 108mph in seven separate attempts, becoming the first pilot to break the 100mph barrier at Pau on 22 February 1912. He also won the prestigious Gordon Bennett race of that year in the United States, and in November 1913 made the first overland flight from France to Egypt – a total distance of 2,500 miles – in a two-seat Blériot XI.

When war was declared Védrines was one of the first to volunteer to join France’s Aviation Militaire (the French Air Force). However, hardly had the war begun when the French authorities ordered that the fragile Blériot and Déperdussin monoplanes be withdrawn from service, leaving many experienced pilots, including Védrines, without aircraft to fly. Adding insult to injury, at the age of 33 he was also considered to be too old for front-line service. Undaunted, his navigation skills and experience of flying over unknown terrain were soon in demand to fly secret agents to and from behind enemy lines. Védrines was also one of the few pilots who had experience of flying by moonlight, another prerequisite of a special mission pilot. Early flights were made using a two-seat Déperdussin monoplane, the pilot risking not only capture by the Germans, but also being fired upon by French soldiers when crossing the lines.

Two experimental Blériot monoplanes were delivered to the Aviation Militaire in late 1914, one of which was acquired by the French intelligence service for Védrines to fly. Powered by a 160hp Gnome rotary engine, the Blériot had a bulky, streamlined fuselage made of papier mâché covered with linen fabric, prompting Védrines to christen it La Vache (The Cow). Unusually, the engine and two tandem cockpits were protected by 3mm-thick chrome-nickel armour plating, and a door was fitted on each side of the fuselage under the wing to enable the observer to fire at targets on the ground. When used for special missions, however, these doors proved to be a convenient method of entry and exit for an agent in a hurry.

In 1915 Védrines taught a young pilot, Georges Guynemer, who would later become France’s second most successful air ace, the skills required to fly behind the lines. Serious, ascetic and frail, Guynemer was the exact opposite to the assertive and bombastic Védrines, but he was never lacking in courage. Posted to Escadrille MS3 in May 1915 soon after gaining his wings at Pau, he carried his first ‘spy’ across the lines in a two-seat Morane-Saulnier Type L parasol monoplane. The experience led him to acknowledge the dangers faced by those who flew regular special missions, such as Védrines, and others who would remain unknown. However, one of these anonymous heroes left a graphic account of the dangers faced by these early adventurers well behind enemy lines.

I had flown to the outskirts of Laon. There was a deserted corner, a sort of hollow basin where an aeroplane could stay without attracting too much attention. It was also an excellent strip for taking off. No main road passed nearby, and the only roads around were seldom used. It was impossible to find a better place to land for an operation of this kind. My mission was to pick up a passenger. The agreed signals were given and I let myself down to the ground to let him come aboard. He was late, and you can imagine the anguish that gripped me. I risked capture at any moment and could not stay there indefinitely. He was, however, the bearer of precious and compromising documents, and had no other means of safety than my aeroplane. What would happen to him if I were forced to abandon him?

A half an hour passed by, which seemed like half a century. I expected to see him come out of a clump of trees located nearby. The full moon was shining over the entire terrain, and under its pale light, objects seemed to come alive and move. Attentive to the slightest noise, I watched the horizon at the same time. Suddenly I heard steps, and behind the thickets two shots followed in quick succession. A man was running. Nervously I triggered my carbine, which never left my side, and, ready for anything, I awaited the fight. I finally saw my man appear.

He was running with all his might, and behind him several shapes were already in view. Without a doubt he had been followed, and I, for my part, fired away in order to take the pressure off him. I owe him this, that in such great peril he thought only of me. Still out of breath from his running, he shouted to me, ‘Quick, leave! There they are!’ I told him to get in, and with a gesture, I showed him the empty seat. There was barely enough time. I realised, once in the air, that several metal plates had been pierced. Fortunately, the petrol tank was intact, but my companion was wounded. ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘I am not ready to go back there again. I wouldn’t go back to that place for 100,000 francs.’

Special missions were not the sole preserve of the Aviation Militaire, and the longer the war continued, the more important human intelligence became to all sides in the conflict. A few weeks before British and French armies began the battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916, a Royal Flying Corps (RFC) two-seat aeroplane landed at an airfield a few miles north-east of Amiens on the Western Front. Lahoussoye was the base for No. 3 Squadron, equipped with a varied collection of French Morane single- and two-seat reconnaissance machines; but the visitor was an anonymous BE2c, an artillery observation biplane that had been among the first British types to be deployed to France two years earlier. The BE2c taxied up to the furthest hangar away from No. 3 Squadron’s crew hut and parked, with its engine idling. A few minutes later a ‘civilian’ hurried out of the hangar and climbed into the empty observer’s position in front of the pilot, who turned the aircraft into wind and took off from the grass airfield, heading east. The ‘civilian’ was a French spy who was being flown across the lines and landed in enemy territory.

A few miles north of Lahoussoye at Boubers-sur-Canche near Arras, the home of Naval Airship Detachment No. 4, a young Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) midshipman, Victor Goddard, was preparing for clandestine, long-range operations to insert and extract secret agents to and from behind enemy lines. Trials had been taking place at RNAS Polegate near Eastbourne, using Submarine Scout (SS) airships powered by a wingless BE2c suspended beneath in which the crew sat. Its young crew, led by Sub-Lt W.P.C. ‘Billy’ Chambers with Goddard assisting, conducted a series of trials with a new airship, SS 40, specially designed for its clandestine role; it was painted with a matt-black overall finish and had a silenced engine. These trials impressed the War Office so much that SS 40 was sent to France on 6 July 1916.

After a protracted flight to Boubers due to a broken oil-pipe, a Lt C.R. Robbins parachuted safely from 1,500ft, along with a number of homing pigeons in baskets, on 13 August. Several high-altitude, night-reconnaissance flights were made across the lines, of between three and four hours’ duration, but night landings without the aid of a handling crew met with less success. During the summer of 1916 the Somme was being lashed by storms that turned the battlefield into a quagmire, and Chambers and Goddard were forced to abandon their attempts to carry any spies over the lines. SS 40 was flown back to England in October, never to return.

Meanwhile, the more conventional way of inserting secret agents – by aircraft – continued. On 3 August 1916 Lt C.A. Ridley of No. 60 Squadron who – according to British ace James McCudden VC, DSO, who had flown with him as an observer the previous year – was ‘a dashing and enterprising pilot’, picked up a French spy at Vert Galand, north of Amiens. Soon after crossing the German lines, the Le Rhône rotary engine of his Morane BB two-seater failed. Having made a successful forced landing, Claude Ridley and the agent managed to avoid capture for more than three weeks before making their way towards the Belgian border. There, the Frenchman left him to his own devices; speaking neither French nor German, and by now wearing civilian clothes, Ridley himself was liable to be shot as a spy if captured.

By bandaging his head and smearing it with iodine and blood from a cut in his hand, Ridley pretended to be an injured deaf mute. He managed to board a train travelling towards the Dutch border, but was arrested for having no papers or tickets. As it slowed down, he knocked out his captor and jumped from the train. He hid during the day and walked another 50 miles at night, navigating by the stars, having little food and being in constant danger of capture. Almost eight weeks after he took off for his two-hour mission, he was discovered asleep by a sympathetic Belgian, whom Ridley persuaded to find a ladder so that he could climb over the electrified border fence into neutral Holland. On 9 October he rejoined his squadron, which had by then moved on to Savy on the outskirts of Arras, bringing with him much valuable intelligence.

Lt William Harold Haynes of Military Intelligence was a British agent who had been flown behind the lines, and who had also escaped across the Dutch border on more than one occasion. After a year as an agent in the field he transferred to the RFC, learned to fly and in 1917 joined No. 44 Home Defence Squadron, flying Sopwith Camel night fighters from Hainault Farm in Essex. Its role was to intercept German Zeppelin airships and Gotha bombers carrying out night raids on major cities in south-east England. Flying aeroplanes at night was then in its infancy and, after much trial and error, the home defence squadrons devised a simple but effective flarepath. It comprised several two-gallon petrol tins cut in half and filled with cotton waste soaked in paraffin; these were placed in an inverted L, with the long arm pointing downwind and the short arm marking the limit for the landing run. They were lit when the returning fighter was heard over the airfield.

Bill Haynes’s training as an agent stood him in good stead, and so when a ‘well-connected’ Norwegian joined the squadron and soon became notorious for the lavish entertainment of his fellow pilots, his suspicions were aroused. After Bill had alerted his former colleagues in Military Intelligence, the Norwegian was posted away and later charged with espionage and imprisoned. But by then Capt Haynes had met a tragic end, just two months before the war ended. Serving with No. 151 Night Fighter Squadron, he had climbed out unhurt from his overturned Camel after clipping a ditch during a night landing at Vignacourt, and was standing in front of the wreck, when his mechanic accidentally fired a round from the Lewis gun while checking it to make sure it was safe. William Haynes was 23 years old.

Although by no means a common practice, the RFC and RNAS undertook many ad hoc clandestine flights at the behest of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), or Military Intelligence Department 6 (MI6). There were no dedicated units or aircraft assigned to the role, but it is interesting to note that when RFC Commander-in-Chief, Maj-Gen Hugh Trenchard, asked for parachutes to be made available for RFC trials in France, the request was refused. However, twenty Calthorp parachutes were authorised to be issued for dropping agents behind the lines. The most popular type of aircraft used for clandestine flights was the obsolete BE2c, whose main virtues were its inherent stability and docile handling, both important factors when attempting night landings on unprepared surfaces. During the last year of the war the rugged and adaptable two-seat Bristol F2B Fighter (Brisfit) was favoured. With pilot and observer positions close enough for easy communication, the Brisfit’s rear cockpit was large enough for agents to parachute from in safety. By this time a special duties flight had been established under the command of Lt Jack Woodhouse, a pre-war motor cycle racing champion.

The British and French were not the only First World War combatants to carry out clandestine flights into enemy territory. In May 1918 an Italian Air Corps observer, Tenente Camillo de Carlo, was dropped behind Austro-Hungarian lines from a Voisin two-seater. He then spent three weeks sending back information, in the form of ground signals that were photographed by Italian reconnaissance aircraft flying overhead, during the build-up to the decisive Battle of Piave River in northern Italy.

Later in the war the French used at least one captured German aircraft for over-the-lines reconnaissance and for dropping agents. A Rumpler two-seater in German markings was retained at Toul for clandestine flights, during one of which its French-Alsatian crew landed at a German airfield, demanded that the plane be refuelled, and departed for home undiscovered. The Germans replied in kind when Leutnant Hans Schroeder, an Air Service observer and intelligence officer, used a French two-seater to visit a number of RAF airfields on the Western Front in mid-1918. The aircraft was a Breguet 14B2 reconnaissance bomber, flown to the German lines by a defecting French pilot in May 1918; serialled 1333 and wearing the markings of Escadrille BR 117, it was a new machine he had collected from a delivery park near Paris.

Schroeder, a former infantry officer who had joined the German Air Service after being wounded in the knee, served as an air observer on the Russian front before training as an intelligence officer in February 1918. Speaking excellent English and French, he was flown by the French deserter to British airfields, where he posed as a French officer, and to French airfields where he posed as a British officer. He would visit the local town or village before departing at dusk, having dined as a guest of the officers’ mess. While interrogating a captured RAF pilot in September 1918, Schroeder claimed to have dropped in on No. 5 Squadron at Acq, No. 56 at Valheureux and No. 60 at Boffles, all within a few weeks of the last Allied push on the Western Front.

The Eastern Front was the preserve of another British spy who was also an intrepid aviator. A pre-war businessman in Russia, George Hill was on holiday in Canada when war was declared. Having joined a Canadian army unit, he was sent to France as an interpreter, but after being wounded while serving in the trenches, Hill was posted to Military Intelligence at the War Office to be trained in the gathering of espionage. Being fluent in several languages, including Russian and Arabic, he was sent to the Balkans in June 1916. While attached to the British Intelligence Headquarters at Salonica in Greece, he persuaded the local RFC unit to teach him to fly in order to be able to drop spies into enemy territory. With very little flying experience, he managed to ‘borrow’ a BE2e aircraft for his clandestine adventures. Hill later recalled:

Nico Kotzov was one of my first passengers. He was a Serbian patriot who had been in the enemy’s country nine or ten times and always brought back valuable information. We wanted information from an inaccessible part of the country, and as this information was urgently needed it was decided to drop him by aeroplane. I took him up for a couple of trial flights, and although he did not enjoy the experiences very much, he was quite determined to go. He knew the country where we were going to land, and I explained to him I wanted the landing ground to be as much like our aerodrome as possible.

As we climbed into the machine at dawn on the day of the drop, the sergeant in charge of the pigeons brought along a little cage with six of our best birds in it. I ran up the engine. Everything was all right. I signalled the sergeant to pull away the chocks and we taxied out into the dark aerodrome. I opened the engine full out and we were away. I had to do a stiff climb in the air in order to be able to cross the mountain range, and the higher I got, the less I liked the job before me.

The flight was uneventful. I picked out the various objectives that were serving me, together with a compass, as a guide, and got over the country that we were to land upon in the scheduled time. It was getting light as I throttled back my engine, so that it was just ticking over, in order to land. We lost height rapidly and I could faintly make out the ground before me, which seemed fairly suitable. As a precautionary measure I made up my mind to circle it just once more.

Suddenly I noticed that the whole of the field selected by Nico for our landing was dotted with giant boulders. To land in the field would be suicide. I climbed into the air again, and when I had got sufficiently high, switched off my engine to be able to make Nico hear me and I told him that his selection was no good as a landing ground. He said simply that I had told him nothing about boulders, and that he imagined we would hop over them. All hope of landing that morning had to be given up, but as it was rapidly getting light I hoped to be able to pick out a suitable landing ground for the next day and through my glasses located a dry river bed which promised to be the best place for landing, and back we went to the aerodrome.

Next morning we made the trip again and I safely landed my passenger. Within ten days he had dispatched all six pigeons and on the return home of the last one, I took over a further cage of pigeons and dropped them by parachute over the spot where I had landed Nico. These also returned home safely. In all, I dropped Nico three times over the line.

On one occasion, Hill had landed a man called Petrov behind the lines when his aeroplane hit a furrow which jarred the BE2 and stopped the propeller. While Petrov climbed out to swing the propeller, an enemy cavalry patrol spotted them on open ground. ‘I think at first they thought it was one of their own machines. Then they must have got suspicious, for they started trotting towards us. Suddenly the engine fired and Petrov raced round to the fuselage and leapt into his seat. The cavalry patrol broke into a gallop and called upon us to stop. I opened the throttle and we were away, but before we left the ground the patrol opened fire. Their shooting was good, as we found when we got back to the aerodrome with half a dozen holes in the fuselage.’

In July 1917, Capt G.A. Hill was ordered to join the RFC mission at Petrograd in Russia, but before he had a chance to resume flying special missions the aeroplanes were withdrawn to Archangel, and so he travelled overland to Moscow as imperial Russia descended into anarchy and revolution. As the monarchy collapsed and the Bolsheviks seized power, George Hill continued his career as a spy, which he considered as a ‘joyful adventure’.

Another officer renowned for his subterfuge in the field was T.E. Lawrence, whose Arab irregulars were harrying the Turks in Palestine and Trans-Jordan. Attached to the British Military Intelligence Department in Cairo called MO4 in December 1914, Capt Lawrence spoke excellent Arabic and had built up close contacts with various Arab leaders during his pre-war archaeological and mapping expeditions to the region. His brief was to contact and encourage Arabs in Turkish-controlled Sinai, Syria and western Arabia to carry out a campaign of guerilla warfare in support of the Allies. Lawrence realised very early on the value of air support in order to keep in touch with his Arab irregulars, and to gather accurate intelligence from behind the Turkish lines.

A BE12a of the Australian Flying Corps, the type used by ‘X’ Flight, a detachment of No. 14 Squadron AFC, to support Col T.E. Lawrence’s Arab irregulars fighting the Turks. (Bruce Robertson)

The first experience of British aircraft operating behind enemy lines in the region fell to the RFC air unit in Mesopotamia (Iraq), when British troops captured a Turkish garrison at Kut el Amera on the banks of the River Tigris, midway between Baghdad and Basrah, in September 1915. A Turkish counterattack cut the British supply lines, and by the beginning of 1916 the garrison was surrounded and under siege. The one and only way to ensure the survival of the 10,000 soldiers was to supply them by air, something that had never been done before, and No. 30 Squadron, based at nearby Ora, was allotted the task.

Its ubiquitous BE2c aircraft braved German Fokker Eindekker monoplane fighters and Turkish ground fire to cross enemy lines carrying food, medical supplies and ammunition to the besieged force, and flying out their sick and wounded. Three RNAS Short 827 and Farman floatplanes that could operate from the River Tigris joined No. 30 Squadron at the end of February to drop supplies from low level, without parachutes, to the British troops below. During the 143-day siege, more than 13 tons of supplies were delivered in the world’s first airlift, half of which was delivered over a 14-day period; but it was not enough and General Townsend’s garrison was forced to surrender on 29 April 1916.

However, it was not until the end of 1916 that No. 1 Squadron Australian Flying Corps (AFC) arrived in Egypt and T.E. Lawrence first met one of its flight commanders – Lt Ross Smith, an ace with twelve confirmed kills – and plans could be made to set up an air base behind enemy lines at Jauf, in western Arabia. Supplies and fuel had been stockpiled en route when irregulars of Emir Feisal, one of Turkey’s staunchest allies, captured Wejh on the Red Sea and plans for the covert air base had to be abandoned.

In 1917 a detachment of No. 14 Squadron AFC moved to Aqaba equipped with three BE12 reconnaissance aircraft, a development of the BE2c. Manned by Australian pilots Lts Ross Smith and C.H. Vautin and observer 2/Lt L.W. Sutherland, who had been credited with seven kills, the unit became known as ‘X’ Flight and was put at the disposal of Lawrence and his Arab irregulars. His Arabs being prone to inaccuracy or exaggeration, Lawrence himself regularly flew over the Turkish lines to carry out his own assessment of enemy positions, especially along the Hejaz Railway that stretched for hundreds of miles across the desert between Medina in the south and Damascus in the north.

The railway was crucial to the Turks and a constant target for Lawrence’s guerrilla fighters. His spies were also dropped behind the lines by ‘X’ Flight, while its pilots often landed in enemy territory to pick up agents or rescue downed aircrew who were in danger of capture – the Turks offered £40 in gold for every Allied airman delivered – or worse, were dying of thirst. In August 1917 Lawrence and his Arabs prepared an airstrip at Kuntilla in the Sinai as a forward operating base for RFC aircraft based at El Arish. On 18 September General Allenby launched an offensive against the Turks at Beersheba in Palestine, and six weeks later Jerusalem fell to British troops, ending 730 years of Muslim rule.

Ross Smith, now flying Bristol F2B Fighters with No. 1 Squadron AFC, was based at Guweira, flying reconnaissance missions over the Turkish stronghold at Jurf el Derwish on the Hejaz Railway. In May 1918 he flew Lawrence, now a lieutenant-colonel, to Allenby’s headquarters in his Brisfit to discuss the preparations for a final push to chase the Turks out of the Middle East. The attack was launched on 19 September and within five weeks British and Arab armies were within sight of the Turkish border at Aleppo, having taken Damascus and Beirut.

Two Bristol Fighters were assigned to Lawrence in support of his Arab irregulars behind Turkish lines, one of which went unserviceable; the other, flown by Lt Junor, fought a number of dogfights with Turkish aircraft. Ross Smith flew spares and fuel for the Brisfits into Emir Faisal’s headquarters at Umm as Surab in a twin-engined Handley Page 0/400 long-range heavy bomber. The giant aircraft, the only one of its type in the Middle East, did much to reinforce the Arab irregulars’ belief that Allah was, indeed, on the side of the Allies.

On 30 October 1918 Turkey signed an armistice with the Allies, and 12 days later the First World War was over. The aftermath of the Great War saw most of Europe in turmoil. The victors wreaked economic and political vengeance on the vanquished, and on Germany in particular. The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires imploded and nationalism and revolution spread from eastern Europe to Asia Minor. New countries were carved out of old – Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Civil wars broke out in Russia and Poland, while Finland declared war on Russia and Greece attacked Turkey. As Great Britain and France battled to hang on to their empires, monarchs were deposed and fascists vied for power with communists. The seeds of another ‘great’ war in the twentieth century were being planted.

By the 1930s Russia had become part of the Soviet Union, ruled by a communist dictator; Italy and Germany had fascist dictators; and Japan had a fascist government under an emperor without an empire. All were looking to expand beyond their borders, as the world slid into economic depression following the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

The first to move was Japan. On 18 September 1931 the Japanese Army invaded Manchuria, and a year later attacked Shanghai. Europe’s meltdown began when the Italian dictator, Mussolini, invaded the African kingdom of Abyssinia in October 1935 and, less than a year later, civil war broke out in Spain. Suddenly government intelligence departments were working overtime to recruit agents from wherever they could be found, in a frantic effort to cut through the confusion of world events. It was a time of unprecedented opportunity for the freelance spy, who could sell his or her services to the highest bidder. However, there were a few who passionately supported one side or the other for ideological reasons, while many were gentleman spies who craved only the excitement and danger they expected from the murky world of espionage. Some of the latter also had the advantage of having another skill then in great demand, that of being a qualified pilot.

Many of the founder members of the select band of special mission pilots were now dead. Jules Védrines died in August 1919 when his Caudron G4 crashed near Lyonss during an air race from Paris to Athens. Three months later Capt Ross Smith and his brother Keith won the first air race from England to Australia, when they flew their Vickers Vimy bomber from Hounslow to Darwin in 11 days to claim the £10,000 prize – and a knighthood. Sir Ross Smith was killed in a flying accident near Brooklands aerodrome on 13 April 1922. There was, however, no shortage of adventurous pilots prepared to pick up the gauntlet. One such was a Swedish aristocrat, Count Eric von Rosen, whose aunt Karin was married to German First World War fighter ace, Hermann Goering. Von Rosen was earning his living as a stunt pilot when Italy invaded Abyssinia in 1935. He volunteered to fly for the Red Cross delivering doctors and medicines to remote mountain passes, risking Italian anti-aircraft fire in the process. After the fall of Addis Ababa, von Rosen had stopped in Cairo on his way back to Sweden to raise money for the Abyssinian resistance when he was contacted by British intelligence officers. For the next few months, von Rosen agreed to fly arms and supplies, using his single-engined Fokker F VIIa, from British airstrips in Egypt to Abyssinian guerrilla fighters.

Cecil Bebb, a captain with Olley Air Service Ltd flying charter flights from Redhill aerodrome in Surrey, was another adventurer pilot. In June 1936 he was asked to fly a DH.89 Dragon Rapide, a rugged, eight-seat, twin-engined biplane, to the Canary Islands to pick up a passenger for a clandestine flight into Spanish North Africa. After flying to Las Palmas via Bordeaux, Lisbon and Casablanca with three decoys aboard – a well-known member of the British hunting and fishing fraternity and two of his young so-called lady friends – Bebb was met by two Spaniards, code-named Mutt and Jeff after well-known cartoon characters of the time, with secret instructions about the mission. These included the name of a contact in Las Palmas, but after landing there the mission was nearly compromised when Bebb was accused of entering the Canaries without official permission from the local governor. However, his contact was able to defuse the situation and Bebb’s special passenger, introduced as a prominent Rif leader of the Berber Arabs, finally boarded the Rapide on the afternoon of 18 July 1936. The following day it flew on to Agadir and Casablanca before touching down at Tetuán in Spanish Morocco at dusk, where the mysterious passenger, code-named Father, was greeted by a throng of excited Spaniards. Father was in fact Generalissimo Francisco Franco. The Spanish Civil War was about to begin.

The Olley Air Service’s Dragon Rapide used by Capt Cecil Bebb to fly Franco from Las Palmas to Spanish Morocco in July 1936 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. (Richard Riding)

On his return flight to Croydon, Bebb was questioned about his flight to Tetuán by the French authorities at Biarritz, and was given permission to take off only after assuring the French Air Ministry that he was no longer working for Franco’s agents. Many years later Gen Franco awarded Cecil Bebb the Spanish Order of Merit, and Dragon Rapide G-ACYR is today exhibited at Madrid’s Military Museum.

The Civil War unleashed a frenzied search by Nationalist and Republican agents for aircraft and aircrew to fly them, and these were often bid for by both sides at the same time. When the British and French governments prohibited the export of aircraft to either side, Spanish emissaries resorted to begging, borrowing or stealing anything that would fly. More than 500 civil aircraft were clandestinely imported into Spain, many of them by a weird collection of agents of spurious companies extending from Mexico to China. One of the most popular types was the Dragon Rapide, which was flown by both sides, some being converted into bombers; another was the fast Airspeed Envoy, an eight-seat, twin-engined light transport monoplane. Four of the latter had belonged to the French airline Air Pyrenées, which maintained a regular service between Biarritz and Bilbao during the war until two of its Envoys were shot down by Nationalist fighters in 1937. The surviving aircraft were taken over by the Société Française de Transports Aériens, which was owned by agents for the Republican government.

A Beechcraft B17R ‘staggerwing’ single-engined biplane, also a former Air Pyrenées aircraft, was used in an abortive Italian plot to kidnap the Abyssinian emperor Haile Selassie in 1935. Two years later it was used by the defeated Basque President Aquirre to escape to the south of France, and was impressed into the Luftwaffe after the fall of France in 1940.

The Spanish Civil War attracted volunteers and mercenaries from all over the world and from many backgrounds and persuasions. Acclaimed French writers who rallied to the cause included André Malraux, who raised money to buy French aircraft and pay pilots to fly with the Republican Escuadrilla España, with which he himself flew several missions over central and southern Spain; and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who flew with Air Pyrenées. Airspeed’s co-founder N.S. Norway, subsequently better known by his pen name Nevil Shute, became involved with emissaries from both sides who were offering large amounts of cash for his company’s Courier, Envoy and Viceroy airliners. The American writer Ernest Hemingway flew in and out of war-torn Spain on several occasions and claimed to have based his best-selling book For Whom the Bell Tolls on his exploits as a soldier for the Republican cause.

Numerous members of Europe’s aristocracy played their part in stirring the Spanish cauldron. The Anglo-Hungarian racing driver and amateur pilot, Count Zichy, flew British agents out of Burgos in his DH Puss Moth G-AAXY and was reportedly rewarded with a flight in a Nationalist Fiat CR.32 fighter. Polish Count Lasocki was killed at Biarritz while trying to smuggle one of four former British Airways Fokker F XII airliners to the Nationalists at Burgos. His tri-motor was attempting to land at the French airfield during a violent thunderstorm. After three aborted landings the Fokker stalled, crashed on approach to the airfield and caught fire. Lasocki died in the flames. The Fokkers had been subject to rival bids soon after the war began and sold to one of Franco’s agents, the Marqués de Rivas de Linares, for £38,000 in gold pesetas! The other three aircraft were prevented from flying out of Bordeaux airfield by Republican sympathisers.

Racing driver Count Zichy’s Puss Moth G-AAXY, in which he claimed that he flew a British spy out of Spain during the Civil War. (Richard Riding)

At the time, the marqués was being flown between Burgos and Lisbon in a Puss Moth piloted by the 1934 Mac-Robertson England-to-Australia air race winner, Tom Campbell Black. Black also assisted Spanish aircraft designer Don Juán de La Cierva to buy aircraft in England on behalf of the Nationalist Gen Emilia Mola, and to fly them from Heston to Burgos. Cievra had excellent contacts in England, owing to the fact that his unique C-30A autogiro was being built for the RAF under licence by Avro in Manchester as the Rota 1.

Taking a more active role in the war was a titled Belgian, the Comte Rodolphe de Hemricourt de Grunne, a private pilot who flew Nationalist Fiat CR.32 fighters and became one of the few non-Germans to fly Messerschmitt Bf 109Ds with the famed Condor Legion. Known by his colleagues in Spain as ‘Dolfo’, he claimed to have shot down fourteen Republican Polikarpov I-16 Rata fighters in less than a year, and was destined to meet his former colleagues again in the next European conflict.

As the Nationalists tightened their stranglehold on Spain during the spring of 1938, Adolf Hitler’s troops were marching into Austria to force a union, or Anschluss, between the two nations. Threats to invade Czechoslovakia provoked the Munich Crisis in September 1938 that culminated in the Munich Agreement, signed by Britain, Germany, France and Italy. Under its terms, the Sudeten territories of Czechoslovakia would be ceded to Hitler in return for his assurances that he would renounce claims to other disputed regions of Europe. In reality the agreement did nothing to curb Hitler’s appetite for enlarging his empire, but it did buy time for the four signatories to build up their forces for the inevitable conflict to come. During and following the crisis commercial aviation continued without interruption, shuttling agents of various national intelligence agencies between European capitals. Deutsche Lufthansa (DLH) services to London’s Croydon aerodrome and British Airways flights from Heston to Berlin’s Tempelhof were fully booked by ‘commercial travellers’ and ‘tourists’, both excellent but obvious covers for agents seeking to make new contacts or simply go sightseeing.

One such commercial traveller was in fact just that. Sidney Cotton came from a wealthy Australian family and served with the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) during the First World War, flying BE2cs and Sopwith Pup scouts. He had an inventive mind, one product of which would benefit his fellow aviators when he had military tailors Robinson and Cleaver of London make him a one-piece flying suit to his own design. Lined with fur and silk, with the outer covering made from material supplied by Burberry’s, he registered the suit as ‘the Sidcot’, using the first three letters of each of his names. Cotton’s invention was taken up by his fellow officers and soon became standard equipment for the RFC and RNAS pilots.

Having crossed swords with the RNAS chief of operations, Cdre Geoffrey Paine, about the practicality of flying photographic missions over the German naval base at Wilhelmshaven in DH.4 bombers, Cotton resigned the service. The Admiralty reacted by issuing a report that stated, ‘He is of a difficult temperament and unsuitable for employment in a uniformed service.’

After the war Cotton became a mail and survey pilot in Newfoundland, and by 1923 had five aircraft operating for his own flourishing seal- and timber-surveying business. Having made and lost a fortune in Canada he played the New York stock market in the late 1920s, again losing as much as he made. Cotton then returned to England. While indulging his wife’s interest in expensive fast cars – she took part in four Monte Carlo rallies – he had a chance meeting in France with a Madame Durand, the widow of a film manufacturer who had developed a new colour film called Dufay-Chromex, the first tri-pack transparency material generally available to the enthusiast.

Cotton acquired the marketing rights to the process, but when he tried to break into the lucrative United States market he came head to head with the giant Eastman Corporation that produced the rival Kodachrome colour transparency film – and he lost. By the beginning of 1938 Sidney Cotton was once more back in England and again facing bankruptcy. However, another chance meeting in France would change his fortunes, and his life.

During a conversation with Parisian businessman Paul Koster, Cotton told him of his attempts to get the German Agfa company to use the Dufay negative, involving frequent visits to Germany and contacts with important trade officials. Koster sounded him out on the Nazi menace, something that Cotton had given a great deal of thought to during his trips to Germany, and these conversations led to his being approached by Wg Cdr F.W. Winterbotham, head of the Air Section of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Fred Winterbotham was a former RFC pilot who had learned fluent German as a PoW after being shot down over the Western Front. He had also travelled extensively in Germany in the early 1930s, gathering intelligence on German rearmament following Hitler’s rise to power. One of his many European contacts was Paul Koster, who mentioned his meeting with the Australian pilot who had more than a passing interest in aerial photography, knew Germany well and who was looking for a new adventure. In September Winterbotham asked Cotton to meet him at his Whitehall office to discuss a ‘project of mutual interest’.

Winterbotham had discussed the importance of monitoring the mounting threat with his French counterpart at the Deuxième Bureau, Georges Ronin. They agreed that covert aerial photography of Germany’s military build-up was vital, but their respective air forces were unwilling to undertake such missions, which could be construed as acts of war. The answer was to use high-performance civil aircraft and it was agreed that two should be ordered in early 1939, one each for the French and British intelligence agencies. They chose the American Lockheed 12A Junior Electra, a sleek, all-metal, twin-engined monoplane seating six people. It had a top speed of over 200mph, faster than many fighters of the day, and a maximum range of nearly 1,000 miles. In order to disguise their real purpose, the contract for the two aircraft was placed under the cover of British Airways, which was subsidised by the British government. The Deuxième Bureau paid for its aircraft in cash. The first Lockheed, G-AFKR, was delivered by sea and assembled in great secrecy at Heston aerodrome.

This was a former private airfield near Southall in West London, which had recently been acquired by the Air Ministry and where a company called the Aeronautical Research and Sales Corporation was formed as a front for the operation. Once the Lockheed had been flight tested by Cotton, he was asked to train a French pilot to fly it. However, as the Frenchman did not speak any English, and in Cotton’s opinion was not a competent pilot anyway, Sidney insisted on flying the first Deuxième Bureau missions himself. These were flown at 10,000 feet along the Franco-German border and carried a French fashion photographer who operated a large plate camera. When Cotton was finally allowed to see the results of this first mission he considered the photographs next to useless, so when the French refused to let him overfly Germany at higher altitudes, he left the Lockheed at Le Bourget in Paris. Cotton then set about converting the second Lockheed 12A, G-AFTL, as a ‘spy in the sky’. Ironically, three German 35mm Leica 250 cameras were fitted in a recess hidden behind a sliding panel in the floor of the fuselage. These were fitted with large film magazines which took 10 metres of film stock taking, as the name suggests, 250 exposures. Known as ‘the Reporter’, the Leicas also had electric motors to advance the film, a tremendous bonus for the planned operations.

During trials it was discovered that warm air from the cabin’s efficient heaters flowed across the lenses and prevented condensation. Although 35mm frames were acceptable, finer detail was required. Winterbotham, with the assistance of Gp Capt Laws, head of the RAF Photographic Section, obtained three F.24 cameras and lenses of different focal lengths. Fitted with an automatic timing device to take photographs in sequence according to the height and speed of the aircraft, these were installed in the Lockheed’s fuselage.

One of Sidney Cotton’s two Lockheed 12A Junior Electras registered to the Aeronautical Research and Sales Corporation, at Orly Airport. (David Oliver)

It was important to disguise the cameras and a special cover was made in the form of a spare fuel tank, so that anyone looking under the floorboards should have no reason to suspect anything out of the ordinary. An additional Leica was fitted in each wing, pointing downwards and rearwards. All the Leicas could be operated by the pilot from the cockpit, and the F.24s by an operator in the cabin. Trials with the camera installations from 20,000ft produced spectacular results, better than had been so far obtained by the RAF. Cotton had discussed with experts the camouflaging of the Lockheed, but came up with a solution by chance. He was at Heston when the Maharajah of Jodhpur’s private aircraft, painted a pale duck-egg green, took off and was lost to sight a few seconds into the climb. Cotton seized on the colour and had the G-AFTL painted the same shade, which he patented as ‘camotint’.

Winterbotham agreed to the hiring of a Canadian former bus driver, Robert ‘Bob’ Niven, as second pilot/navigator, and Cotton himself recruited his mistress, 23-year-old Patricia Martin, to act as camera operator. The blue-eyed blonde daughter of a wealthy landowner, Pat Martin had always been something of a tomboy. She had been born with a club foot, which Cotton later paid to be operated on, but her strong-minded independence and her love of horses had attracted her to Cotton, who was twenty years her senior.

After a series of trial flights over Germany, during which Cotton met with his German business contacts, his team prepared for their longest mission yet. On 14 June the Lockheed, with extra fuel tanks fitted in the cabin, flew to Malta and then to Algiers where, with the help of Ronin, permission had been granted to fly up the coast to Tunis and on to Tobruk, ending up at Djibouti in French Somalia. During the 15,000-mile round trip Italian military facilities in Eritrea, Italian Somalia, Sicily and the Italian mainland were photographed. In the event of being questioned, Cotton had been given papers by SIS to show that he was a feature film-maker looking for suitable European locations.

When the new Lockheed first visited Berlin, without cameras, it had been searched, but afterwards Cotton was allowed to come and go as he pleased. He would refuel at various points en route to Berlin so that he could vary his flight to cover new airfields, factories and installations and photograph them. Cotton was welcomed by the Nazi hierarchy and on 28 July attended the Frankfurt Air Rally, where the Luftwaffe’s latest aircraft were on display. There was even a suggestion that he fly Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering to Britain to meet with Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, to avert a war; but Winterbotham was unimpressed by the scheme and distanced the SIS from an obviously ill-conceived and impractical mission.

However, Cotton and Niven had already flown to Berlin when the covert mission was cancelled. Initially, the Germans would not allow the Lockheed to take off; it was 24 August 1939 and tension was rising, but they relented and Cotton set course for home. This time he flew over Wilhelmshaven, where the German battle fleet was at anchor, but unfortunately Niven was armed only with a single, hand-held camera and a golden opportunity was missed on the eve of war.

A few months later, Sqn Ldr, acting Wg Cdr, Sidney Cotton was in command of the RAF’s first dedicated photo-reconnaissance unit at Heston.

CHAPTER 2

Lighting the Flame

Operation ‘Weiss’ began when Hitler’s forces invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, and two days later Britain, Australia and New Zealand declared war on Germany. The Second World War had begun. Although it had been obvious that war was inevitable since well before the Munich Crisis, the security services of both Britain and Germany were caught almost totally unprepared.

Adm Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, the intelligence arm of the German Armed Forces High Command, had a number of Kriegsorganisationen (KO) operating clandestinely in foreign countries, including Britain. The small number of agents planted in Britain were, however, pre-war sleepers, mostly German nationals and a few Irish citizens; virtually all were interned at the outbreak of hostilities.

Canaris had been recruited by the German intelligence service in 1915 following his dramatic escape from a Chilean internment camp on the desolate island of Quiriquina, near Valparaiso. He was one of the few survivors from the naval battle of the Falkland Islands in December 1914, when the British fleet destroyed Adm Graf Spee’s squadron. After undertaking spy missions in Switzerland and Spain, Canaris finished the war as a successful U-boat captain. He rejoined the German Navy in 1931 and was appointed head of the Abwehr four years later.

At the outbreak of war Hitler was reluctant to allow agents to be sent to the British Isles, as he still clung to the hope that Britain would agree to peace talks. This left the Abwehr with little choice but to attempt to establish networks within the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Welsh Nationalist movement. The problem was that members of both these dissident organizations were well known to Britain’s SIS and Military Department 5 (MI5), and only a handful of such agents were to prove of any value. What was less obvious was whether the Irish Free State, which declared neutrality in 1939, would allow Germany to set up U-boat refuelling bases along its remote west coast.