Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces

by Orr Kelly

  As the plane lined up on the lights, the pilot spoke over the intercom to the dispatcher in the waist of the plane: “Running in.” This meant the plane was about two minutes from the drop zone. The dispatcher folded back the covering over the Joe hole and signaled the agent to scoot up to the edge of the hole.

  Just before the plane reached the drop zone, the bombardier or the pilot toggled the salvo switch, dropping the cargo. At the same moment, the pilot told the dispatcher: “Action station.” This meant the drop signal would come in two to five seconds. The Joe swung his legs into the hole and prepared to jump.

  The pilot said, “Go” and switched on a green light in the waist. The Joe dropped through the hole in the floor. If he hesitated, the dispatcher gave him a helping shove. In some cases, more than one Joe was dropped in a matter of seconds, so there was no time for the Joe to sit in the hole and have second thoughts.

  The system was dangerous both for those being dropped and for those doing the dropping. Fish recalls one tragic incident:

  “Down in France one night, I killed the leader of a team. We were coming in, in the hilly country in southeast France. We came to the drop zone. The lights and everything were there. We went in to drop. We got the packages out. The first parachutist went out and he landed okay. The second parachutist went out and he broke a leg. The third went out and he hit the ground before his chute got open.

  “What had happened was, when you’ve got the B-24 sitting there at 135 miles an hour, with flaps and wheels down, you’ve got zero maneuverability. These people had put the drop zone on a hillside, so I was going into the rising hillside as we made the drop. I couldn’t see that until we got into it.

  “About the time the first guy went out, I saw my atmospheric altimeter was constant, but my radar altimeter showed I was getting closer to the ground. There’s only one possible answer for that: the ground’s coming up to meet me.

  “I poured the coal to it, but, shucks, you had no maneuverability. I probably didn’t pick up five miles an hour. By that time, things were happening fast. They had been told to go! And they went: bang, bang, bang. By that time, the ground had come up to where he didn’t have the six hundred feet he thought he had. When he hit the ground, it killed him. Our biggest enemy was the ground, not the Germans.”

  On a number of occasions, planes circling in the darkness met up with that deadly enemy.

  On the night of 27–28 April 1944, a B-24 piloted by Lt. George W. Ambrose approached a drop zone in a mountainous area near the village of Saint-Cyr de Valorges in France. According to accounts later pieced together from survivors and members of the resistance party on the ground, the plane circled three times and then clipped a tree or the ground with one wing. Ambrose managed to keep the plane flying for a few more moments and then lost control and crashed.

  Ambrose and four other members of the crew were killed, but three members of the crew either jumped or were thrown from the plane in the seconds before the crash and survived. One of them was so badly injured that he was turned in to the Germans so he could receive medical treatment. But the other two survivors—Sgt. George W. Henderson and SSgt. James J. Heddleson—escaped from the crash area, linked up with the resistance, and managed to avoid capture until mid-July, when they were picked up by a British bomber and returned to England.

  Even though the ground was the ever-present enemy, the crews could never stop worrying about the danger posed by enemy guns and fighter planes. On every flight, there was the possibility that it was the enemy, not a friendly group of resistance fighters, waiting down below in the darkness.

  On 5 April 1944, a plane piloted by 2d Lt. William W. Nicoll took off from Harrington at 10 P.M. and followed the usual routine of crossing the channel at about five hundred feet, under German radar, and then climbing over the coast. Suddenly, the bombardier, sitting in the Plexiglas nose, saw a burst of flak directly in the plane’s path and shouted: “Hard right!” But it was too late; they were caught in a flak trap. The first blast hit the tail, killing the tail gunner. Then the nose was hit. The bombardier shouted: “Get out! Get out!” By then, the plane was out of control and on fire. Two men managed to parachute at about eight hundred feet and survived, but the others died in the wreckage.

  On the night of 28 May 1944, a Carpetbagger crew made a routine drop of supplies to a Belgian resistance group. The next night, Lt. Ernest B. Fitzpatrick and his crew took off from Harrington at 11 P.M. with another load of supplies destined for the same group. They reached the drop zone at 1 A.M. and began to circle, looking for the expected signal lights. Suddenly, gunfire erupted from a mobile flak battery, and the plane was hit. Fitzpatrick banked sharply to escape the antiaircraft fire and flew right into the path of a waiting JU-88 night fighter, which raked the B-24 with 20mm cannon fire.

  With the plane on fire, Fitzpatrick sounded the bail-out alarm, pulled up to about seven thousand feet, struggled to hold the plane level until his crew jumped, and then put the craft on autopilot and jumped himself.

  The Germans, alerted by the drop on the previous night, had set a deadly trap for Fitzpatrick and his crew, moving in so quickly that the Belgians did not have time to flash a warning to the Carpetbaggers. Fitzpatrick and his crew were fortunate, however. They parachuted safely and then were hidden by the Belgians until Allied forces liberated the area later that summer.

  Attacks by night fighters against the Carpetbaggers were relatively rare, for two reasons. The major reason was that the fighters were engaged in a desperate battle to fend off the Royal Air Force’s nightly raids on German cities. As the British attacks mounted in intensity, the Germans built thousands of radar-equipped ME-110, JU-88, and DO-17 night fighters and laid out a string of ground control intercept radar sites to guide the fighters to their targets. In 1943 alone, the night fighter pilots were credited with 2,882 confirmed kills of Allied aircraft. Most of the night fighters were deployed along the primary route followed by bombers flying toward German cities—over Belgium, Holland, and Denmark. This left few of the fighters to patrol the areas in France where the Carpetbaggers conducted many of their missions.

  The Carpetbaggers also gained a good deal of protection from the fact that they flew so low—below the coverage of the German radar, which was focused primarily on the highflying bombers.

  It thus came as a very bad surprise when a Carpetbagger crew learned—usually by the impact of cannon shells—that they were under attack.

  On the night of 27 June 1944, a Liberator crew was conducting a training mission near their base in England when the plane suddenly shuddered violently. It was not until that moment that the crew realized they were under attack by a night fighter that had penetrated almost into their home landing pattern. The bombardier, 2d Lt. Robert L. Sanders, scrambled back through the nose of the plane to reach his parachute, which was lying behind the pilots’ cockpit. Normally, bomber crews wore only a parachute harness rather than the more cumbersome back or seat packs. In an emergency, a chest pack could be snapped quickly to fasteners on the front of the harness. But when Sanders tried to reach his chute, his way was blocked by fire. He turned and saw the navigator, 2d Lt. Robert Callahan, preparing to jump through a hatch in the nose of the plane. Callahan sensed Sanders’s predicament and motioned to him to hang on to his back.

  “I sat down and slid out of the plane with the bombardier on my back,” Callahan later told the United Press. “I pulled the ripcord as soon as we left the plane, and there was only a slight jolt when the ’chute opened.”

  As they floated down, Sanders worked his way around in front of Callahan so the two could hold on to each other. They hit the ground hard. Callahan suffered a broken ankle and Sanders a sprain. But they were fortunate. Only one other crew member, the badly burned radio operator, managed to escape before the plane crashed.

  The incident involving Callahan and Sanders occurred in the days immediately after the 6 June Normandy invasion, a period when the Carpetbagger operations were reaching a crescen
do. The crews were hearing dramatic accounts of how their support for the resistance, and the earlier British operations, were paying off.

  On 15 January 1944, the London Daily Express carried an item under a Geneva dateline with a headline saying, “Patriots Wreck Railways.” It reported:

  “French patriots last night attacked the German-held Annecy railway depot and blew up several locomotives. At Rumilly, in Savoy, patriots stopped a train, forced the passengers to alight, then sent the train rushing uncontrolled along the line until it overturned. In Belgium, patriots, complying with directions given them by the Allied Command, carried out forty-one acts of sabotage in one week on the railway tracks in the province of Hainaut. They stopped trains and started them again without drivers, placed bombs on the tracks, unbolted rails, destroyed signal boxes, and put pumping stations out of action.”

  On 17 May 1944, a leader of a French Maquis unit in the Haute-Savoie Department of south-central France visited the Carpetbagger base at Harrington. He was a short, slightly built man in his thirties, wearing horn-rimmed glasses.

  Crew members crowded into the ready room to hear his first-person account of the situation on the Continent. He told them that all trucks on main or subsidiary roads were stopped and searched and about 40 percent of what the crews dropped ended up in German hands. The danger of this happening increased, he said, when a drop was not made directly on the target, disrupting the plans for moving the material from the reception site.

  Most of the material, such as weapons, was distributed almost immediately; ammunition and explosives were stored, but they were broken up into small amounts as quickly as possible, he told the airmen.

  One of the crew members asked if trucks seen on the road after the 10 P.M. curfew could be assumed to be German. The Maquis chief said they could—but in a convoy, one or two of the trucks could also be assumed to be driven by members of the resistance.

  With support from the air, the French resistance movement eventually came to control entire regions of the country. As the time for the D-day invasion approached, the resistance was a significant force to be reckoned with by the Germans. And the Allied high command, at first reluctant to provide the planes and aircrews for the Carpetbaggers, became wholeheartedly supportive. On 2 May 1944, a little more than a month before the landing in France, General Eisenhower ordered the Eighth Air Force to make another twenty-five B-24s available for the Carpetbaggers, increasing their force to sixty-four bombers.

  CHAPTER 8

  D-day and Beyond

  In mid-May, three weeks before the Normandy invasion, the tempo at Harrington was clearly on the upswing. The two new squadrons assigned to the group by General Eisenhower arrived on 17 May, one of them fresh from the States, the other reassigned from high-altitude bombing.

  With the sudden doubling of crews and aircraft, the base was overcrowded. The newcomers were assigned, grumbling, to tents, while the crews already present lived in relative luxury in Nissen huts—dome-roofed structures that looked like half of a giant corrugated metal barrel.

  On the night of 3 June, three nights before D-day, the Carpetbaggers flew seventeen successful missions, the largest number in a single night thus far.

  On 6 June, the secret warriors gathered around radios to follow the course of the invasion. The group diary noted:

  “H-hour of D-day is arrived at last! The Allied invasion of northern France is the sole topic of conversation. All men of the Group are in a state of high excitement over this latest and greatest step toward Victory. And there is a new determination to deliver a maximum of supplies to the resistance groups, who are bound to play an important role in the liberation of the occupied countries.”

  Even before the invasion, a listener to the BBC could have guessed that something was about to occur. Strange little coded messages began to fill the airwaves, signaling to resistance movements to prepare to strike at the enemy from behind when the Allies hit the Normandy beaches.

  The assignment of two more squadrons of B-24s was only one indication of the seriousness with which the top brass now took the potential of the resistance movement to disrupt the German defense while they were trying to respond to the Allied landing.

  In the weeks after D-day, with the suddenly intensified fighting, many of the resistance units were running dangerously low on supplies.

  By that time Gen. James Doolittle, the leader of the famous bombing raid on Tokyo two years before, had replaced Ira Eaker as commander of the Eighth Air Force. He diverted 180 four-engine B-17 Flying Fortress bombers from the bombing campaign to bolster the Carpetbaggers’ effort to deliver supplies to the resistance movement. The crews were given a crash course in Carpetbagger techniques for parachuting supplies.

  On 25 June, in an operation code-named Zebra, the 180 bombers took off, with fighter escort, and made a daylight drop of supplies at four drop zones behind enemy lines. Each of the five wings involved in the operation was able to deliver enough rifles, machine guns, rocket launchers, ammunition, grenades, and small weapons to arm one thousand to thirteen hundred men.

  The second mass drop, code-named Operation Cadillac, took place on 14 July as the battle for Saint-Lô was reaching its climax. In this operation, nine wings of 36 B-17s—a total of 324 planes—accompanied by 524 P-51 and P-47 fighters, dropped supplies at seven points in three regions. The goal of this mass infusion of supplies was not only to hamper the German defense at Saint-Lô but also to disrupt the movement of men and supplies from other areas to the battle zone.

  A third mass drop—Operation Buick—was conducted on 1 August when 192 B-17s delivered 2,281 containers to resistance units in eastern France. A final drop, by 72 bombers, occurred on 9 September.

  In an implied criticism of the Carpetbaggers, a report by the 3d Air Division, which conducted the mass daylight drops, concluded that such missions were “not only possible but were more economical and practical than nighttime operations conducted for the same purpose.”

  This would not be the last time that the big, conventional Air Force looked down its nose at the unconventional special operators.

  In this case, the Carpetbaggers had clearly filled a role that would have been inappropriate for the massed bombers, even if large numbers of bombers could have been diverted from the bombing campaign against Germany. In the months preceding the invasion, the Carpetbaggers had helped build the nucleus for an uprising against the Germans. In that period, daylight drops by large formations of planes would have been like a beacon, calling attention to the location of resistance units. Once the uprising occurred and resistance units were out in the open, the demand for supplies outstripped the capacity of the Carpetbaggers, with their single-plane nighttime missions.

  For the Carpetbaggers, the invasion was the signal for a much greater effort devoted to delivering agents—Jedburgh teams and other larger teams—to France.

  With the delivery of larger numbers of agents, the Carpetbaggers were faced with a new challenge for which they were not equipped: picking up agents, downed fliers, and members of the resistance and bringing them back to England. The four-engine bombers flown by the Carpetbaggers were too big to land in the rough open fields and cow pastures that served as airfields behind enemy lines. The British had been carrying on a small-scale airline service using their single-engine Lysanders and twin-engine Hudson bombers. But something better was needed.

  The Carpetbaggers turned to the C-47—the same rugged twin-engine workhorse that was doing such a good job serving the Chindits at Broadway, Aberdeen, and White City. The officers of the Troop Carrier Command were reluctant to give up any of their planes for this new operation. General Doolittle broke the impasse by giving up his personal C-47. Someone forgot, however, to spread the word that the plane no longer carried the general. When a Carpetbagger crew picked up the plane and flew it to a depot for modifications, they were met by an honor guard of colonels, ready to welcome General Doolittle to their base.

  In preparation for their C-47 o
perations, the Carpetbaggers experimented and practiced for more than two months. Heflin began the tests on 1 May by taking off from Harrington and landing on a short stretch of the runway marked only by seven men holding ordinary flashlights. Captain Wilmer L. Stapel made as many as twenty landings a day to determine how short a landing field could be used for landing and takeoff with a C-47.

  Meanwhile, reconnaissance planes photographed potential landing sites so the crews could familiarize themselves with the fields they would have to approach in the dark.

  The night of 6 July was chosen for the first flight, code-named Mixer One. Heflin took the controls as aircraft commander with Stapel as his copilot. Major Edward C. Tresemer, probably the most skilled navigator in the group, flew as navigator. A bombardier and radio operator filled out the five-man crew. The cargo consisted of eleven agents trained to disrupt German operations plus three thousand pounds of supplies. Since no fuel would be available where they landed in France, an extra fuel tank was installed in the fuselage so the plane could carry a total of 906 gallons of gasoline for its thousand-mile round-trip.

  The destination for the flight was a partially harvested wheat field near the town of Nantua in a Maquis-controlled region in southeastern France only about twenty-five miles west of the Swiss city of Geneva. That meant flying diagonally across France, much of which was still under German control.

  Because of the distance involved, Heflin flew from Harrington to the Bolt Head airdrome southeast of Plymouth to refuel before taking off at 11 P.M. and heading out across the Channel. They crossed the coast at eight thousand feet without seeing any sign of enemy activity and entered what they knew to be the enemy’s night-fighter belt.

  The C-47 had no armor and no guns, and its fuel tanks were not self-sealing. Most worrisome of all, the plane, unlike a bomber, did not carry a tail gunner who might detect and fend off a night fighter. Instead, Stapel, the copilot, stood in the astrodome—a Plexiglas dome on the top of the plane normally used by the navigator to observe the stars while relying on celestial navigation. This gave him a 360-degree view of the sky above the plane.