by Jim Eames
And since the drops were to be carried out at low level, the margin between success and fiery failure was extremely narrow. The altitudes and speeds required to deliver up to six or seven paratroopers and their supplies in a jungle clearing tell the story in their own way. The stalling speed of a Liberator is around 217 kilometres per hour, or a ground speed of 60 metres per second. On the basis that it would take around ten seconds to exit four parachutists over a distance of around 600 metres, Z Special Unit aimed to reduce that to an exit time of a maximum of eight seconds over the drop zone. Any longer risked an aircraft stalling at its level of 500 to 1000 feet above the treetops. Thus the development of the rapid-fire-exits technique through the ‘slippery dip’.
In order to achieve the delicate balance between preventing the aircraft from stalling and maintaining a suitable drop speed, the technique adopted was for first a ‘dummy’ run to judge wind speed and direction from flares or smoke provided by fires by those on the ground. This would be followed by the delivery run, which would start at around seven or eight hundred feet with the inboard engines shut down and the outboard engines at full power, with full flaps, the run finishing often as low as 100 feet. It certainly wasn’t for the faint-hearted.
The normal radar set in each aircraft had been replaced by what was known as Rebecca/Eureka, a short-range radio-navigation system which consisted of a Rebecca airborne transceiver and antenna designed to calculate the range to its Eureka counterpart, a ground-based transponder used by the commandos in the jungle or mountains below. The timing of the return signals from the Eureka transponder would assist the crew in determining the most suitable dropping point.
As the crews gathered and honed their techniques early in 1945, their base-station arrangements at Leyburn were anything but satisfactory.
Early CO reports describe ‘extremely difficult conditions owing to lack of accommodation and essential equipment’ and the absence of sealed, hard standing areas, making it unsafe even to jack up the aircraft for inspection. Living conditions were primitive with most of the personnel staying in tents while they waited for two other squadrons already based at Leyburn to move out. Added to that, Leyburn was over 64 kilometres from the nearest major centre and the unit lacked even reasonable vehicle transport to pick up supplies. As the weeks passed and demands for low-flying and parachute training increased, along with the long-range missions, maintenance crews would eventually work double shifts to keep the Liberators flying.
There were positives, however, with the development of a close relationship with the men of AIB’s 3 Para Wing, which had been permanently based at Leyburn to provide training and parachute packing for the Z Special Unit personnel. As for the latter, 3 Para Wing, under the command of a former member of the British SOE, Major H. Everard Ellis, had arrived at Leyburn after training at their secret Fraser Island base on what could be termed a ‘one-way ticket’. Billeted at an isolated farmhouse 8 kilometres from the airfield, they travelled to 3 Para Wing each day to familiarise themselves with various parachute techniques as well as practising on a crude wooden structure designed to simulate exiting through the B-24’s ‘slippery dip’.
Despite difficulties associated with aircraft maintenance, living conditions and supplies, 200 Flight crews were ready for their first mission, codenamed SEMUT 1, to take place on 15 March 1945.
SEMUT 1 called for the insertion of two groups of four Z Special Unit commandos into a dropping zone in Central Borneo. Beyond the latitude–longitude coordinates for the site, 200 Flight knew only that it comprised a cleared area of paddy fields roughly 2000 feet above sea level. Pockley would lead the mission, with Frank Ball commanding the second aircraft and Cox’s B-24 providing backup support. The flight plan called for the aircraft to fly via Darwin to Morotai in the Halmaheras, where Z Special Unit had its advanced headquarters, then to the American air base at Mindoro, off Luzon in the Philippines. From Mindoro they would fly back south-west towards Bareo in Borneo, using Palawan Island as their right-hand landmark. At an overall distance of more than 4828 kilometres, it was believed to be the longest operational flight ever undertaken.
Pockley’s aircraft would carry British Army Major Tom Harrisson, the leader of the ground party, whose role would be to encourage the local native population to deny food and any other assistance to the enemy, and to gather information on Japanese troop movements which might aid the assault by Australian 7th Division planned for June 1945, along with harassing patrols. Ellis, 3 Para’s leader, would also be on board to help with the drop.
As it turned out, 200 Flight’s first mission was to have unforseen and tragic consequences which would result in the loss of their commanding officer and his crew. Harold Graham Pockley would become something of an enigma in the annals of 200 (Special Duties) Flight, not least because of his tragic early departure from the scene, coupled with the high degree of secrecy involved in the unit’s work. In fact, despite the relatively high public profile he had gained in the war in Europe, some of those who came after him to work with the unit would not even be aware that he had been with the group. While doubtless he had courage and tenacity, several of those who had flown with him in the lead-up to the unit’s operation had reservations about the suitability of his appointment, believing he had shown signs of what one of them referred to as ‘post-operational crisis’.
During their training at Tocumwal, Pockley had chosen Flight Lieutenant John Thompson as his navigator. While Thompson had tremendous admiration for Pockley’s valour, he noted that his commanding officer tended to drink heavily at night, a habit Thompson regarded as a direct result of operational stress. Thompson would later recall:
I admired Pockley a great deal because he had a very good strength of command, but he should never have been sent on missions after his overseas trip to Europe. He should have been given a desk job.
Thompson believed that resultant hangovers from the night before contributed to his frequent outbursts of anger over a sometimes minor mistake, often delivered over an open intercom in the aircraft for everyone to hear, to the obvious embarrassment not only of the unfortunate target of the tirade but the rest of the crew as well. Thompson would later comment:
Many’s the time I had to intervene on the intercom when he got churned up and abused the crew when they didn’t do this right or that right and I took him to task on this on several occasions.
As it turned out, Frank Ball was to be an early recipient of one of Pockley’s verbal tirades. Take-off from Leyburn on their first operational mission would be at night, with Pockley’s aircraft to be the first away. All three aircraft were heavily laden and, due to the fact that only the main runway was lit by oil flares, Leyburn’s gravel taxiways could not be used so the Liberators had to use the runway to taxi to the northern end, execute a 180-degree turn and take off into a slight southeasterly breeze.
Pockley’s aircraft was already airborne when, as Ball turned to line up his aircraft on the runway, the port wheel of his B-24 ran off the hardstand into soft earth on the runway’s edge and stuck fast. At first Ball tried to move the Liberator under its own power, but when that failed the nearby ground crew leapt aboard a one-tonne truck and hooked it onto the aircraft. The weight of the ground crew on the truck, combined with the truck power and the B-24 at full throttle soon had the aircraft back on the hard runway surface, quite an achievement in the dark of night with the lights of only two nearby jeeps.
None of that effort, however, was to resonate with Pockley who, as the three aircraft formed up and set course for Darwin, delivered a scathing verbal assault on Ball and his crew for all to hear. With classic understatement, one of the recipients would later describe the incident as, ‘hardly conforming to text book R/T procedures’. What the eight Z Special Unit operatives on board, on their way into the depths of enemy territory in the care of these airmen, must have thought of it is not recorded.
Arriving at Mindoro on 18 March, Pockley set out on the first reconnaissance flight to Borneo t
he following morning. On board were two of the Z personnel, party leader Harrisson and Lieutenant Rick Emeades, leader of the four to be dropped from Ball’s aircraft, and Ball himself. They spent two hours over North-Central Borneo but could not locate the drop zone. Poor weather conditions over Central Borneo led to another abortive attempt several days later.
Finally, early on the morning of 25 March Pockley’s and Ball’s aircraft left McGuire Field, Mindoro Island, flew down the east coast of Palawan Island to North Borneo then along Borneo’s west coast before turning inland to the target area. It was about 8 a.m. when they arrived over the drop zone. Cloud was already closing in, leaving little time for the drop. Pockley did a quick low-level sweep across the zone then was seen to successfully drop his four troops. Frank Ball then lined up his aircraft, trying to drop as near as possible on the same clearing. Pockley came in again to drop the commando’s stores then fired a Very cartridge over the site and instructed Ball to ‘drop over my signal’. Ball was forced to make two attempts when the bomb bay doors of his B-24 failed to open on the first run.
One of those who parachuted from Pockley’s aircraft, Sergeant Fred Sanderson, later remembered looking up and seeing the two Liberators circle the drop zone before ‘waggling their wings in salute’ and flying off. What followed would lead to numerous theories and conjecture about the fate of Graham Pockley and his crew after Pockley called Ball on the radio as they left the area and asked, ‘Where to?’ to which Ball replied, ‘Follow you.’ Not long after that the two aircraft parted in cloud, with Ball landing back at McGuire Field at around 1.30 p.m. When Pockley had not reported in by 5.30 p.m. the US Navy at Mindoro immediately began to organise a search-and-rescue mission.
Both US Navy aircraft and 200 Flight’s B-24s searched for two days, covering a wide area across Pockley’s assumed route. The most promising report had come from a US Catalina flying boat crew who sighted a B-24 which might have been Pockley’s at 5000 feet north of Jesselton just after 10 o’clock that morning. Both aircraft waggled their wings at each other and flew on. Nothing was heard of Pockley again. In one of those ironic twists of war, Flight Lieutenant John Thompson, whom Pockley had chosen as his navigator, was not on the fateful flight. He’d been stricken down with a sinus attack and had nominated the next most senior navigator, Flight Lieutenant Len Day, to take his place.
The speculation which has followed the incident appears to have much to do with Pockley’s reputation as a ‘man of action’. According to one of the Z Special Unit men who had jumped from his aircraft, Pockley had to be constrained by the commando leader from carrying out an attack on a train they had sighted as they approached the dropping area, brusquely telling Pockley over the intercom that he could, ‘Do what you like after you have dropped our chaps, but not before.’ A member of Ball’s crew claimed the same train was sighted after the drop on their return to the coast and was strafed by Pockley’s aircraft until it entered a tunnel. Although there is no record of Frank Ball ever confirming this, his report mentions he last saw Pockley ‘flying low’.
At the end of the war, Tom Harrisson, who jumped from Pockley’s aircraft that morning, returned to London for a short time before taking a job as curator of the Sarawak Museum in 1946. In a book on his SEMUT memoirs, World Within: A Borneo Story, Harrisson believed that Pockley had decided to attack what looked to be a harmless vessel but proved to be well-armed with anti-aircraft guns, although where his theory originated was never explained.
Whatever the fate of Graham Pockley and his crew, the loss of its leader on the unit’s very first mission was a severe setback for the men of 200 Flight. Inevitably, thanks to the very nature of their operations, more losses were to come.
With Pockley missing, Frank Ball would undertake SEMUT 2, again a paratroop drop with stores similar to SEMUT 1, into Central Borneo with three aircraft, one as a backup, in early April. Again it was an early-morning take-off, the three B-24s—each grossly overloaded with men, stores and equipment—lumbering down Leyburn’s 2133-metre runway and into the air under the watchful eyes of their ground crews. Indeed, waiting for interminable seconds for a heavily laden B-24 to get airborne always carried some degree of anxiety for those involved. While Phil Dynes, in his unit history, acknowledges the attributes of the B-24, he recollects one wag suggesting a heavy Liberator, ‘needed help from the curvature of the earth to take off!’
During their transit of Darwin the flight received word that Harrisson’s SEMUT 1 party on the ground in Borneo had sent an urgent message for additional supplies so Ball asked permission for the third aircraft in his flight to also take part in the drop itself. By the time the three aircraft arrived at McGuire Field, Mindoro on 14 April, Z Special Unit headquarters had received a further message from Harrisson, regrettably garbled and almost indecipherable. Three words, however—‘NOT COME IN’—were easily readable.
This suggested to Major Toby Carter, leader of the commandos, that Harrisson might be either on the run or had already been captured by the Japanese. With the element of danger in the current mission now raised alarmingly, Carter gave each of his men the option of withdrawing. None took up his offer.
Cloud obscured the drop zone on the morning of 16 April but they managed the drop with some difficulty. Flying Officer Arch Clark, piloting the support aircraft, even made a fourth run to drop a ‘special package’ prepared by the crews for the ground parties, but they watched in dismay as the package partly separated from its parachute and landed hard. Intended to celebrate the arrival of the SEMUT 2 newcomers, it contained a dozen bottles of beer stacked around two bottles of whisky. The hard landing shattered the beer bottles, but to the delight of those below the whisky arrived intact.
For several of the descending parachutists, a few smashed beer bottles were the least of their worries. Warrant Officer Don Horsnell found himself chasing his Bren gun, on a separate parachute, over the sky and it was some time before he rejoined the rest of the party. Major Bill Sochon, who jumped from the second aircraft, had an even more sobering experience. His first feeling after leaving the aircraft was one of relief as he felt the tug of the parachute opening, but when he looked up he was horrified to see seven of his chute’s panels had been ripped from top to bottom. By the time he reached the ground, fourteen panels—or half the entire canopy—were flapping in the breeze.
There’s little doubt that had the jump been anything other than low level, Sochon’s luck would have well and truly run out. As he gathered what was left of his chute and his supplies, Sochon vowed to make someone pay for his narrow escape. To his disgust he learned that higher authority in AIB had decreed that, since the Z Special Unit’s operations were something of a one-way street as far as new parachutes were concerned, only chutes which had been used at least a dozen times in training would be utilised. Fortunately someone on board Ball’s aircraft had photographic evidence of Sochon’s flailing panels so the practice of using second-hand chutes stopped abruptly.
The completion of the SEMUT 2 drops marked a significant change for 200 Flight when AIB decided that future missions would be operated out of Morotai, where AIB and the Services Reconnaissance Department (SRD), which had direct control of Z Special Unit, both had their advance headquarters.
In comparison to the earlier missions, where Pockley and Ball had flown virtually blind into the terrain to find their drop zones, by now Ball and most of the crews had added to their knowledge of the region and were familiar with several of the mountain peaks, which included Kinabalu at 13 000 feet and a peak they named ‘Mt 200’ for want of any knowledge of its identity. This peak, around 7000 feet, was only a short distance from Bareo and became a useful navigational aid since its highest point was most often clear of cloud. It would later be identified as a mountain known by locals as Batu Lawi.
While SEMUT 2 was underway, other 200 Flight crews and their SRD colleagues were undergoing intensive training for the next project, codenamed AGAS, which would involve the insertion of Z Unit people into
North Borneo. Flying Officer Colin Walker and his crew carried out the first AGAS on 20 April and although Walker missed the drop zone in the dark he then spotted signal fires on the ground and the drops were deemed successful.
Eight days later Walker was called on to resupply Harrisson’s SEMUT 1 party and his later report contains probably the most memorable account of the dangers inherent in such low-level operations. The drop was to take place in a narrow valley surrounded by mountains, but when they arrived overhead cumulus clouds covered the mountain and the valley itself was shrouded in fog. The following day, 29 April, they set out again and after circling for some minutes one of the aircraft’s gunners sighted a smoke flare in a break in the cloud. With mountains all around Walker decided the only way in was to descend in a series of tight spirals inside the tiny cloud break. His own words best describe the scene:
On reaching the floor of the valley there was much waving from the ground and a few rather hairy moments while we lined everything up for Jack Durant (Z Special Unit) to execute the drop. After one quick circuit to check where things landed we were back in the cloud climbing furiously in tight circles.
They eventually broke through the cloud at 11 000 feet. Lieutenant Ray Irish from the Para Wing at Leyburn, who was acting as an observer on the trip, later commented: ‘Those blokes all deserve a VC. My blood ran cold.’ Harrisson, when he later met Walker, told him he would recommend him for a DFC for his effort that morning but nothing ever came of it.
By now 200 Flight had a new CO to replace Pockley. Likewise, 3 Para Wing also had a new CO, Canadian Major J.R. ‘Shorteye’ Wooler, to replace Ellis, who had been lost with Pockley. Wooler’s earlier experience would help him refine 200 Flight’s parachute techniques and the preparation of materials for drops. Both COs would not only work closely together but would begin a friendship which would last well beyond the war.
