A Special Duty

by Jennifer Elkin

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Thursday 23rd April 1964

  Chapter 1: Arrival at Tocra

  Chapter 2: Christmas at Tocra

  Chapter 3: 148 Squadron Moves to Brindisi

  Chapter 4: March/April 1944

  Chapter 5: Sunday 23rd April 1944

  Chapter 6: Rescued by Partisans

  Chapter 7: With Russian Partisans

  Chapter 8: The Journey Home

  Chapter 9: Home

  And Finally

  Afterword

  Appendix 1

  Appendix 2

  Appendix 3

  Appendix 4

  Appendix 5

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Copyright

  For

  Rita, Pat and Susan

  ‘The Team’

  With someone like you, a pal so good and true…

  Rita, Pat, Susan and Jennifer (The Team), Ludlow 1951

  FOREWORD

  There was a widespread and popular belief, at the start of World War II, that to be a pilot, a man had to be tall, blond, blue eyed, very handsome and required to wear at all times a white silk scarf wound loosely round the neck with one end free to catch the wind. Seriously though, with the rapid expansion of Air Forces at the outbreak of World War II, the attributes for those who opted for flying training were thankfully less idyllic and more relevant to the urgency that existed. This allowed me to get a foot in. All ‘would be’ aviators had to volunteer first, then pass stringent health checks, a maths exam, and have a minimum length of leg. You may well ask! It was to reach the rudder pedals in some aircraft.

  Flying training required the pupil to attain proficiency in placing the aircraft in every possible configuration of aerobatic manoeuvre with the utmost accuracy and safety, whilst obeying every air regulation in the book. This included a total ban on low flying, a most dangerous and often fatal practice. As a fully trained pilot, Tom Storey, flying a four-engine Halifax aircraft, was assigned to an RAF squadron engaged in secret Special Duties. This type of operation required him to deliberately ignore the low flying safety regulation, descending to very low altitudes in hilly or mountainous terrain, deep into enemy-held territory. These clandestine operations of between seven and ten hours’ duration, under cover of darkness, required the skills of flying and accurate navigation to determine success or failure.

  Tom captained the crew of seven, a lone, independent unit of very young men who had to grow up fast.

  Larry Toft

  World War II Special Duty Halifax Pilot

  INTRODUCTION

  This is an account of a young RAF pilot, Tom Storey, during six months of operational flying with 148 Special Duty Squadron in the Mediterranean, the Balkans and Poland during World War II, and an attempt to understand the reasons for his death twenty years later. These aircrews were brave and skilful beyond their years and my admiration for them has grown throughout the progress of this work. This story is personal because Tom Storey was my father, but many families had their lives unravelled by the trauma that war leaves in its wake; it is a story as relevant today as it was seventy years ago.

  One of the reasons I wanted to write a story about my father’s time with 148 Squadron was that first, I have acquired quite a lot of information over the years and it seemed wrong just to sit on that and do nothing with it and, secondly, it is a personal journey for me, an attempt to lay some ghosts to rest. My father never talked about his wartime experiences, maybe because of the inherent secrecy of the work, or maybe because he could not bear to recall that time, so I have little first-hand information other than a discussion with Charlie Keen, flight engineer on my father’s crew, and written accounts by other crew members; bomb aimer, Eddie Elkington-Smith and wireless operator, Walter Davis. I met Walter Davis in 2013 and he and his daughter, Anne Black, not only shared photographs and letters with me, but gave me access to his flying logbook, which contained a record of all the flights, more than forty, that he had made with Tom. Paul Lashmar, journalist and documentary maker, generously shared the research material he had gathered about my father’s last flight, and Mike Bedford-Stradling, son of crewmember Patrick Stradling, kindly provided me with material from his father’s archive. It is the personal nature of this story which I hope will convey adequately the magnificence of ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances.

  I have tried to present, as accurately as possible, the context in which my father and his crew were operating, and the conditions in which they lived. I believe the truth is in the facts. I have used a combination of Squadron operational records, personal accounts, and information gleaned from an excellent selection of books written on the subject. I hope I do those authors justice in my own account, and, more importantly, honour those profoundly brave young men, who operated in secrecy and, until very recently, with little in the way of recognition or memorials.

  THURSDAY 23rd APRIL 1964

  I remember running very fast downhill to the telephone box. Running so fast that my heart nearly pounded out of my chest, but I couldn’t slow down, I had to go faster still. I was 16 and had come home from school on the bus with my sister Susan. We dropped our schoolbags on the kitchen floor and ran upstairs to say hello to Dad. He had been in bed for a couple of days – it being the anniversary. The anniversary meant getting very drunk most years, but this year he was out of work and there was no money for drinking. He had found oblivion in a bottle of sleeping tablets and we skipped into the room to find him dead, lying in bed with the covers pulled up and one arm hanging over the side. Lots of shouting, Mum rushing upstairs, an untouched cup of tea on the floor by the bed, “Get an ambulance, quick”. I could barely find breath to get the words out. “Come quickly, I think he’s dead.” The sirens reached the house before I did. Resuscitation failed, doctor serious and resigned, hope falling away and desperation filling the room, he was gone. The coroner decided the balance of his mind had been disturbed, and he was right to think that, but not right to say that he took his own life. He simply couldn’t face that day, the 23rd April, and needed to blot it out – his inner turmoil reached an unbearable pitch on that day every year.

  I can’t say what caused such pain because he didn’t talk about it, and even if he could tell us what he had done during that winter and spring of 1943/44, perhaps the pain was from what he failed to do, or what he felt he should have done, rather than anything he actually did. Maybe the pain was because those events of 1944 were a high point of madness and thrilling adventure, never to be recaptured in the peacetime world of work and family. Did working as a commercial traveller for a soft drinks company suck the remaining life out of the returning hero? Or did he feel he was lucky to have any job, and berated himself for having thrown it all away because of the memories. For twenty years he had been troubled, and we had grown quite used to it. Life in our home always carried on with as much normality as possible thanks to the strength and resourcefulness of Rita, my mother. She didn’t understand either, but loved her husband enough to take up the cup of tea that lay cold at the bedside, when she could have said: “For goodness sake get up and stop feeling sorry for yourself”. Doctor Brown, in his struggle to find comforting words for us said that it was: “Maybe for the best”, and, although he meant well, he was quite wrong. It was not for the best at all. The despair didn’t die with him – we had breathed in too much of it to ever be fully free ourselves. Yet we survived – our little team of Rita, Pat, Jennifer and Susan.

  I can never know what lay behind such strong feelings about the 23rd April, but it was a day that held terrors to be escaped from in any way possible. I would like to understand, but I may just have to tell the st
ory of those months – the winter and spring 1943-44 – and accept that sometimes a person’s experiences are so unique and personal, that not even a loving daughter can unravel the threads.

  CHAPTER 1

  ARRIVAL AT TOCRA

  F/Sgt Tom Storey 1943

  Tom Storey left Bournemouth’s Hurn airport on the 23th October 1943, bound for Tocra on the Cyrenaican coast of Libya, with a fresh, young crew, a modified Handley Page Halifax Bomber and little idea of what he had volunteered for. He had returned from pilot training in Canada to complete the final stage of training for four-engine heavy bombers in the United Kingdom and was expecting to be posted to one of the bomber squadrons, when a briefing officer came looking for two volunteer crews with good navigational skills for overseas work. Tom’s navigator was a commissioned RCAF1 officer, who had been an instructor in his native Canada, and Walter Davis, the wireless operator, felt that this made them ideal for the assignment and enthusiastically persuaded Tom, the pilot, to sign them up. Walter always said he coerced Tom into volunteering, but I suspect it was an attractive proposition to them all, particularly as the life-expectancy for bomber crews was four missions. Maybe the ‘unknown’ was more attractive than the ‘known’. They were accepted for the work and went to RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire for further training, to collect their aircraft, and to receive instructions for joining their new Squadron, which was based in North Africa. They still had little idea of what they had volunteered for, but there were clues when, on the 2nd October, 1943 they collected their aircraft, a Handley Page, Mark II Halifax (number JN888), which appeared to have some strange modifications. The mid upper turret had been removed; there was no nose armament and a huge hole had been cut into the floor with opening doors. This, they suspected, pointed to supply work, but the briefing officer had told them: “I can say no more”. So they didn’t ask.

  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.2 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 2nd 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’3, 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.”i

  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.”ii

  Ammunition and explosives were requested by MONKEYWRENCH for partisan sabotage activities, but Mission staff also asked for personal items such as pipes, ti
nned soup, water bottles, boots, novels and boiled sweets.iii 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 Mission4 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.iv 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 phrases5 and several dummy runs, they dropped fifteen containers, fourteen packages and twenty-three kitbags, amongst which were flares for a Very pistol.6 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.