“We’ll find perfect peace, where joys never cease
Out there beneath a kindly sky
We’ll build a sweet little nest, somewhere in the west
And let the rest of the world go by”10
For Tom, the RAF gave him the opportunity to fly in every respect. He went to Canada to do his initial training and life became full of new and interesting experiences – he loved it, and felt a real sense of purpose. The invisible ceiling that tended to keep young men like him in trade and commercial jobs had been lifted and his dream of doing something truly adventurous was within reach. The adventure was a serious one though, and it required of him a level of skill and maturity that, in normal circumstances, took a lifetime to acquire. Being a team player by nature, he took very seriously the responsibility of flying six fellow crew members on dangerous missions night after night. By January 1944, the crew had 30 missions under their belt, and despite some nasty situations, their luck was holding.
Luck for Major Gordon Layzell, dropped into Albania by the Storey crew in November 1943, had not held. In early February, Lieutenant Colonel Norman Wheeler’s party were occupying two houses in the mountainside village of Staravecka when the house in which Layzell had been staying suffered a chimney fire. Thinking that the house was on fire, he quickly gathered his kit and slung his machine gun over his shoulder. The gun went off. Marcus Lyon rushed into the room to find that Gordon Layzell had accidentally shot himself in the head. He was tended by Jack Dumoulin, but died in the early hours of the following morning. Tragedy enough, but there was more. The aircraft bringing in the supplies, Halifax BB444 of 624 Squadron, piloted by the newly-arrived Flight Sergeant Tennant, suffered engine failure while circling for the drop, lost height, and crashed into a mountain.xvii Flight Sergeant Baker in the rear turret was the only survivor, and by the time Wheeler and Lyon had made their way to the crash site, someone had already stolen his boots. The dead airmen, who had been operational for less than a week, were buried at the crash site and later reinterred in the Tirana Park Memorial Cemetery. Gordon Layzell was buried in the corner of a meadow close to the village of Staravecka and also reinterred in the Tirana Park Cemetery.xviii
From February onwards, it is noticeable from the records that the Storey crew went from flying almost exclusively in Halifax JN888 (Rita) to flying a variety of different aircraft. This may have been organisational as the Squadron now came under 334 Wing, but it is also likely that with a limited number of aircraft, pressure was put on the available crews to man whichever aircraft was serviceable for that night’s operations. A typical crew’s day, provided they had not been flying that night, would be to rise at 0700, have breakfast, maybe do a bit of laundry and then go to the flight office to see if your crew was down for an operation that night. Engineer Charlie Keen and Wireless Operator Walter Davis usually went out to the aircraft in the morning; Charlie to check everything with the efficient and friendly ground crew, and Walter to conduct his daily inspection, calling on the wireless mechanics if required. These ground crews worked miracles to keep the aircraft fit to fly. After the aircraft checks there would then be time to kill, with perhaps a game of cards, or letters to write home, lunch, and then to the briefing at 1600 to find out the target for that night. The pace would then quicken with flight plans to make, gear to collect and, finally, the walk out to the aircraft. Take-off would be around 1900 and, all being well, the crews would be back at the base between 0230 and 0400 the next morning. Debrief was at 0500, followed by breakfast of poached egg and bread and then the men went to bed, exhausted, at 0600. Another crew would be just waking up and would fly the same aircraft that night.
So it was not in JN888 ‘Rita’, but Halifax BB381 that the Storey crew made their first flight to the northern Italian Alps, with supplies and four agents.11 This was the first night that the Squadron were to operate on Italian targets and they were joined at the briefing by a number of Americans from 62 Squadron, who were about to start supply dropping themselves. The met forecast had given fair spells for northern Italy, but ‘much vicious cloud to get through en-route’. Tom took off at 2020 and flew over the Adriatic at 2000ft. A couple of hours later he started to climb in order to cross the coast, but at 9000ft heavy icing forced him back down to 2000ft. He spotted a break in the cloud and began to climb again but found that icing made it impossible to get above 9000ft. All but two of the ten aircraft that had set out for Italian targets found similar conditions and returned to base with their loads. The crews were not yet familiar with the run up to the Italian Alps, which was tricky from a navigational point of view because of the long haul up the coast over water, and then, once over land, the mountain terrain generated dangerous up currents which threw the aircraft around violently and made the dropping grounds very difficult to spot. Only a small number of operations on Italian targets were successful in the first month, and bad weather hampered operations more generally, meaning many ‘grounded’ days for the Squadron.
Then news came through on the 24th February that they were to operate for the first time over Polish targets, and the competition amongst the crews, who all wanted to be selected for the job, was keen. One of the old Liberators, AL530, piloted by Flight Sergeant Horwood, was dug out of temporary retirement and six aircraft were fitted with overload tanks for the long round-trip to Poland. Eddie Elkington-Smith, ‘pinpoint Elk’, was aboard the Liberator as bomb aimer that night, and, although they reached their target, they were unable to see the ground, even from 2000ft. All the effort of that night – a round trip of ten hours – was for nothing, and Eddie hated the Liberator. “I don’t know why but whenever the Liberator flew they plonked me in as bomb-aimer. I didn’t like it. I hated the damn thing. No operation that I did in the Liberator was successful.”xix In fact all the Polish and Balkan operations failed that night because of bad weather.
Patrick Stradling
(Photo courtesy of Stradling family)
Twenty-three year old Air Gunner Patrick Stradling, from County Clare in Ireland, joined the Storey crew at the end of February, having flown 300 hours since joining 148 Squadron, most of it with Cyril Fortune. He would have continued flying with him except that Fortune had completed his tour of duty and was due some well-earned leave.xx So, at the end of February 1944, the final Storey crew of Tom, Hap, Eddie, Walter and Jim was joined by ‘the last despatcher on Fortune’s Coleen’, Patrick Stradling.
Notes
1 Operations Record Book. Every Squadron kept a record log and a summary log of operations
2 Elevator flaps control the aircraft’s orientation by changing the pitch of the aircraft, i.e. they make the aircraft nose-up or nose-down.
3 Sheared reduction gear.
4 Medical Officer 148 Squadron, History of the War for February 1944 (AIR49/223)
5 Flight Sergeant Roy Moller and Flight Sergeant Jim Rosebottom.
6 MACMIS.
7 Mission attached to Tito’s partisans in the Vojvodina region of Yugoslavia (bordering Hungary)
8 Albanian Mission headed by Squadron Leader Arthur ‘Andy’ Hands, based (in December 1943) in hills above the northern bank of the River Drin.
9 Head of Albanian SLENDER Mission
10 Let the Rest of the World go by. Music by Ernest R. Ball; lyrics by J. Keirn Brennan, M. Witmark & Sons publisher, 1919.
11 ACOMB, VITAL and FUNNY (dropping grounds in northern Italy)
CHAPTER 4
MARCH/APRIL 1944
The merciless winter conditions that had arrived over the Balkans in December, and persisted throughout January and February, continued to disrupt Squadron operations into early March. Things would improve in coming months, particularly once the American Dakotas began air-dropping operations, but weather and shortage of aircraft in the spring of 1944 made it difficult for the Squadron to maintain regular supply deliveries. Some areas had higher priority than others and signals from the field were getting tetchy; this from Basil Davidson’s SAVANNA Mission in Yugoslavia: “Now
two days since you advised delivery loads in reply to urgent call for support – STOP – Understand your difficulties but am relying on you to send loads on highest – REPEAT – highest priority”, and, “Try show some understanding of workings here and not just keep sending excuses”.i In northern Greece, the LAPWORTH Mission received no air drops for 115 days between February and June, and Head of Station Major McAdam1 reported that they had been snowed-in for days on end during those harsh months and, despite preparing for reception of aircraft every night with 150 mules standing by, none came, and so eventually stores were ferried to them by mule over the mountains from the GEOFFREY Mission station.ii
The Storey crew delivered one of those GEOFFREY loads in early March and the difficulties they had to overcome that night gives some idea of the problem, from both delivery and reception angles. They were in Halifax BB318, one of the older aircraft on the Squadron, their own being unserviceable, and the Daskhori dropping ground was in a deep valley. Tom thought his approach a bit too high and used full flaps to increase the rate of descent, bringing the aircraft down for a successful first run over the target. And then the unthinkable happened. Flying close to stall speed, wheels down and bomb doors open, the hydraulics failed and he couldn’t raise the undercarriage, flaps, or close the bomb doors. The ground was looking awfully close. “Guide me!” Tom called out to the bomb aimer, and Eddie helped him to steer through the pitch-black valley; “Raise your port wing Tommy – there’s a steeple coming up”, while flight engineer Charlie Keen rushed to the emergency hand pump and gradually managed to restore hydraulic pressure.iii They gained height and climbed out of danger, but they still had supplies on board, and so returned to the valley where they found that the reception group, thinking the full load had been dropped, had put out the fires and gone. Mechanical failure at such a critical point forced the crew to confront their worst fears, but each had gained reassurance from the steadiness of his comrades and the dependable conduct of the skipper, whose insistence on procedure and discipline had paid dividends. Walking away from the plane that night, one of the crew turned to Walter, who had a dry sense of humour and never took offence at the jokes, and said: “So, God not quite ready for you yet, Walter?”
It had been a bad night for the crew, but for the Squadron as a whole, poor weather, mechanical failures and the loss of an aircraft had led the wing commander to declare it a “calamitous” one2. Only three of the twelve crews on operations that night were successful, and before these returning crews could land in the early hours, the runway had to be cleared of debris left behind by a Polish aircraft which had crashed on take-off.iv The worst news of all was that the Botham crew, in Halifax HR660, had failed to return from northern Italy, and although Spitfires from 1435 Squadron were scrambled to do a sea-search up the coast in case they had ditched, no trace was found. When news did begin to come in, it wasn’t good. The aircraft had been hit by flak over Ancona and, with an engine on fire, Flight Lieutenant Botham had turned inland, reached his target, and then baled out the crew, leaving himself and Flying Officer Henry Lancaster, who was on his first operational flight, to stay with the aircraft to the end. Ten airmen had been on board that night; the crew of seven, plus three crew members fresh out from England who had joined the flight to gain operational experience as observers. Five of the crew perished and five survived, becoming prisoners of war.
The only encouraging news to come out of the night was that Flight Lieutenant Reynolds’ Halifax JN896, which had been fitted with the new Rebecca/Eureka ground-to-air-radar system, managed to drop to the GEOFFREY Mission despite no signals having been seen. The Rebecca part of the system was the direction-finding equipment in the aircraft, and the Eureka part a portable ground-based beacon. Delighted with this first success, the Reynolds aircraft headed back to Greece the following night for another trial of the system, but this time the weather and severe icing forced them back early. Nevertheless, it had been shown to work, and this augured well for the success rate of future operations. There was little patience or understanding on the ground for the failure of supply operations over this bleak winter, though, to be fair, much of this was directed at those who ordered and prioritized the air drops rather than the crews themselves. John Mulgan, a British liaison officer with the KIRKSTONE Mission in Greece recalled this period in early 1944, when the men on the ground felt abandoned by those who had sent them into the field with inadequate support, but who nevertheless remained grateful to the crews who tried hard to deliver.
“One night a plane came overhead and circled trying to find us through the cloud, but mist thickened to rain and, finally, we could hear the plane flying away westward. Later, in March, a plane found us. The weather was still dirty with clouds blowing across the moon, but they saw our fires and came down, then lost them again before they could drop the stores. There were high peaks around there and the ground was dangerous. So we waited in the mist and wind, listening to the drone of the plane above the cloud and knowing that they would not leave if possible without finding us again. We waited there for a quarter of an hour hearing the noise of the engine coming close and then disappearing, and thinking each time that perhaps it had been unable to stay and had left, until finally, there was a brief rift in the clouds and out of them down on to the fires came this Halifax, like a friend, and dropped all its stores in two brief circles and then flashed its lamp in farewell. In better times and weather, later on, aeroplanes with stores were more commonplace. This first one was salvation. We knew that we could be all right after this for a month or so, and could stop feeling like forgotten men.”v
It was the Edwards crew who had made that successful drop, stubbornly remaining over the target, a particularly hazardous one in mountain terrain, until a window in the clouds opened up and made a drop possible, but the perseverance and commitment of the Edwards crew was typical. The Storey crew had dropped at the same dropping ground back in December and encountered almost identical conditions of thick cloud right up to the target. Engineer Charlie Keen had taken an astrofix3 two hours in to the flight, and they arrived over the dropping ground at Anatoli on time, but received no reply to the flashed letter of the day and so headed back to the coast to get an accurate pinpoint before returning to try again. This time their flashed signal was answered and, just as the cloud cover began to close in, they spotted the nine fires in a square, as briefed, and swept down through the mist to drop the supplies in three runs. As they roared off into the night, the cloud closed in leaving the area completely obscured once again. John Mulgan wrote his words about the Halifax: “arriving like a friend” in a handwritten memoir that he posted to his wife for safekeeping in March 1945. A clever, sensitive and decent man, he died in an Athens hotel room the following month from a deliberate overdose of morphine. Not all the casualties of war appeared on the official statistics; there were some, like John Mulgan, whose peace of mind was not restored when the struggle drew to a close.
Failure after failure continued to dog the northern-Italian operations, and the reasons were many and various. Aircraft encountered heavy fire from the ground while flying over occupied territory en-route and, when they got there, unpredictable air currents generated by the mountains rendered aircraft almost uncontrollable. A selection of comments from the Operations Record Book makes it clear what the difficulties were from the crew’s point of view: “Unable to pinpoint because of cloud…Aircraft found to be off track impossible to define position”, and, “Target very difficult and unsuitable for non-moon periods”. In one case a group of personnel refused to jump when over the dropping ground. Wing Commander Pitt decided to interview a selection of pilots in an attempt to pin down the reasons for the poor results, and he found that, quite coincidentally, technical failures had been higher than normal and pilots reported high numbers of “No reception at target”. He sounded rather sceptical about the latter in his subsequent report, but lack of familiarity with the area was certainly a factor. Another was that Italy was more heavily Germ
an controlled than the Balkans, and it had been shown in Europe that this led to a high failure rate. The conclusions drawn at the end of the exercise were that better weather and moonlight were required for northern-Italian supply drops, and the obvious point was made that closer liaison should take place with the army as regards the selection of reception areas. The ABRAM dropping ground was an example of an unsuitable site, being in a deep valley and only visible when the aircraft was directly overhead. The wing commander concluded that “Insufficient thought was given to the flying limitations of a Halifax”, when the army was planning drop zones.vi
The detailed planning for an operation began as soon as the crew had been briefed on their destination for the night. The navigator would assess likely wind direction and the pilot would determine, in advance, the direction for the safest run in to the drop zone, i.e. parallel to a hill or mountainside. Once over the dropping ground the pilot would then adjust his controls to counter the effects of crosswinds. The bomb aimer, waiting to hear from the navigator that they were over the target, would then have to take all these competing forces into consideration when timing the release of parachuted containers, which could, in spite of meticulous planning and skill, still be carried off target by unexpected wind currents generated by the terrain. Eddie Elkington-Smith, experienced bomb aimer on the Storey crew, ruefully recalls getting it wrong on a drop in the Italian Alps. The aircraft was being thrown around by dangerous up-currents, and in spite of a well-practiced procedure the containers drifted off-course and were last seen tumbling over the edge of an Alpine plateau.vii Two stand-down days in March 1944 were used by the Squadron to carry out delayed-drop tests from 3000ft, to see whether the bombsight could be used to allow both for the forward travel of the load before the chutes opened, and also for the drift of the chutes after opening. Being able to estimate the strength and direction of the lower winds seemed to be the critical factor, plus the fabric of the parachutes, which were prone to rip with the shock on exit. Until further tests were complete, it seemed that success still depended on the judgement and experience of pilot, navigator and bomb aimer, but the high failure rate and waste of supplies was prompting efforts to refine dropping techniques.
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