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

by Orr Kelly

  The SONNIE Project, as it was called, carried supplies for the Norwegian underground. The planes also carried spare parts to repair Allied planes that had landed in Sweden. A major part of the work of the secret airline was to bring passengers back to England. From 1 April 1944, when the operation began, to 25 June 1944, 4,304 passengers were carried from Sweden back to the United Kingdom. They included interned airmen and a large number of Norwegians to be trained as aircrews.

  One of the biggest intelligence coups of the war occurred with the cooperation of the Swedes. Operating from their test base on the island of Peenemünde, the Germans fired two test models of their secret weapon—the V-2 ballistic missile—northward to land in Swedish territory. So confident were they of Swedish fear of attack by Germany, they boldly inquired where their missiles had landed—and asked for them back.

  “You fired two?” the Swedes asked. “We only found one. Maybe the other one landed in a lake or the sea.”

  The wreckage of the other one was carefully gathered up and hidden away. Word was flashed to London, and a Carpetbagger crew was dispatched to pick up the rocket and bring it back.

  A B-24 was sent for the pickup, but the rocket wouldn’t fit through the bomber’s small doors. So a C-47 stationed at Prestwick, Scotland, was stripped down to the bare fuselage. Lieutenant Colonel Keith Allen flew the C-47 to Sweden, and the V-2 was loaded in through the plane’s larger cargo door. Allen flew back to Scotland, and Maj. Dave Schreiner then flew the rocket on to a British laboratory in London.

  The Carpetbaggers were thus able to boast that they had landed the first V-2 on British soil. Because of their exploit, the Allies were able to study the enemy’s new weapon and understand how it worked.

  Unfortunately, they couldn’t do much about it. The V-2 was a much more difficult weapon to counter than the earlier buzz bomb. The buzz bomb was like a small airplane—in effect, an early-day version of today’s cruise missile—and flew so slowly it could be shot down by a fighter plane. People on the ground could hear it coming and tell, when its engine shut off, that it was about to plunge to the ground.

  But the V-2 was quite different, the predecessor of today’s intercontinental ballistic missiles. Rocketing off from a base along the coast of the Continent, the V-2 climbed high into the stratosphere, following a path much like that of an arrow fired high into the air, and then plunged down toward its target without warning. The Allies had no defense against such a weapon, and the V-2 not only caused severe physical damage but battered the morale of the war-weary British people. Even today, defense against such a ballistic missile is a very difficult technical problem.

  On 20 September 1944, a short time after the V-2 mission, Allen and Schreiner were on another operation that had a tragic ending. Schreiner described it in a memoir written after the war:

  “Our intelligence people had ascertained that the German battleship Tirpitz was hiding in one of the fjords in the uppermost tip of Norway. Our intelligence headquarters wanted to keep it under surveillance. They proposed we parachute a two-man team in the mountains on the north tip of Norway. This team would have a radio with which they could notify British intelligence headquarters if the Tirpitz tried to escape.

  “We installed two bomb-bay gas tanks in a B-24 to enable us to make the extremely long trip to the top of Norway and return. We were to take off at 3 P.M. on 20 September 1944 and return to Leuchars by 9 A.M. on 21 September 1944. All went well during the first half of the journey. We made the drop, but when we started to bring our wheels up and our flaps up for our return trip to Scotland, we lost power on our number-three engine. We had to feather the prop. Now what to do?

  “Should we try to go back to England over the North Sea on three engines, which would be an eight-hour flight, or should we go to Russia, which was our ally and only two hours away? We had the proper flares in our signal pistol to identify ourselves as friendly to the Russians. We decided to go to Russia. We went out over the water and turned east. When we arrived at the Kola Inlet, we headed south for Murmansk, flying at fifteen hundred feet with our lights on.

  “We had about ten miles to go to reach Murmansk. At Vaenga, the sky lit up. Every Russian ship in the harbor was firing at us. We caught fire. Colonel Keith Allen would not leave the aircraft. The rest of us bailed out, some landing in the water and some landing on land. I was in the water … for quite a while before the Russians picked me up.”

  Allen stayed at the controls while the other crew members got out. He died in the crash. Schreiner and the rest of the crew survived. They returned to Scotland on a British ship.

  The mission on which Allen was lost was one of a series that proved among the most difficult of all the Carpetbagger operations: delivering agents and supplies to the Norwegian underground. The weather—especially in the winter of 1944–45—and the rugged Norwegian terrain were at least as much a challenge as the German defenses, although they also played a role.

  Douglas Walker later recalled one such mission:

  “Lieutenant [William H.] Hudson’s crew and our crew—Lieutenant Swarts’s—took off on a dual mission to drop American commandos of Norwegian descent, together with munitions and supplies, into the Jaevsjo Lake area northeast of Trondheim. This was a point near the Swedish-Norwegian border.

  “The commandos were under the leadership of Maj. William E. Colby [later director of the Central Intelligence Agency], and their objective was to cut the north-south railroad line in that area, thus hampering Nazi troop movements. They were to blow up the rail lines and railroad bridges and then retreat into the mountains to evade the inevitable German pursuit.”

  The two planes flew to Scotland to pick up the commandos and refuel and then headed across the Norwegian Sea. As they neared the drop zone, they ran into severe snowstorms and turbulence. After trying for an hour to penetrate to the target, Swarts turned back and dropped off the commandos. He and his crew then flew on to their base at Harrington and waited in vain for Hudson’s plane to return.

  After several days of uncertainty, a radio message from the Norwegian underground reported that Hudson’s plane had crashed into a mountain in the blizzard. The Norwegians located the wreckage the next day and buried the eight crew members.

  “In all, two Liberator aircrews from Harrington crashed in the attempt to land those commandos in Norway, due to the severe winter weather conditions in January and February 1945,” Walker wrote.

  “Finally … sixteen of the original thirty-six commandos were successfully dropped near Jaevsjo Lake and, although outnumbered ten to one, they completed their mission with honor. They teamed up with a local group of Norwegian resistance forces and blew up several rail bridges and four miles of heavily guarded rail lines.”

  Fish made three attempts to deliver agents into Norway—and each time, he was forced to turn back by icing and impenetrable weather. On one mission, he came within thirty miles of his destination before finally swinging around and heading back to England.

  Fish clearly recalls his first such mission in early 1945:

  “We entered Norway at a point west of Oslo at an altitude of eight thousand feet. The night was very clear, and the moon was very bright. We would have been a very easy target for a night fighter in the moonlight. Fortunately, we encountered no fighters.

  “I vividly recall the beautiful grandeur of the snow-covered mountains in the moonlight. It was almost as bright as day.

  “About fifty miles short of our drop zone, we began to encounter scattered clouds. A few more miles and we were in solid cloud. We turned back to the clear area in an attempt to go in under the cloud. It was impossible because the clouds covered the mountains and filled the valleys. More cloud cover was rolling in from the west. There was no way we could get into the high valley to our target location. We had no choice but to return to England.

  “The weather was turning bad as we flew southward toward the North Sea. We were flying at eight thousand feet as we crossed the coastline. Just as we crossed
, there was a loud explosion in the number-three engine in the right wing. My first reaction was that we had taken an antiaircraft shell in that engine. We immediately pushed the propeller-feathering button and the propeller came to a full feathered position before the engine stopped.”

  While feathering the propeller, Fish threw the plane into violent evasive maneuvers to avoid further damage from antiaircraft. He quickly decided the problem was a blown cylinder in the engine rather than gunners on the ground and leveled off to check the condition of the plane.

  “By that time, we were in clouds over the North Sea, and we began to pick up ice on our wings. Because we were now reduced to the power of only three engines, I knew we could not continue flying at eight thousand feet with a heavy load of ice forming on the aircraft,” Fish says.

  He dropped down to a thousand feet, skipping in and out of clouds. Between breaks in the clouds, the crew members caught glimpses of whitecaps on the water down below.

  “Our navigator reported that we were flying into a seventy-mile-per-hour head wind,” Fish says. “This wind would extend our flight time back to Leuchars by almost an additional hour. We just had to sit there and hope we didn’t lose another motor. If we did, we faced the probability of a forced landing in a rough sea driven by seventy-mile-an-hour winds. Our chances of surviving such an event were practically nil.”

  Fortunately, the three remaining engines kept running. They landed in Scotland just at daybreak.

  Even though the war was, by that time, going badly against the Germans and they were short on aviation fuel, they were still able to make life tough for the Carpetbaggers on occasion.

  Walker, again flying as a gunner-dispatcher on Lieutenant Swarts’s crew, recalled one moonless night in March 1945 when they dropped supplies to a Norwegian resistance unit:

  “We made our first pass over the zone and dropped our large containers from the bomb bay. As we made our turn for the second pass to drop our smaller containers from the waist, the tail gunner, Ralph Schiller, reported in on the intercom and said, ‘Tail gunner to pilot. Bright lights just came on over to our right—it looks like an airport—and there is a plane taking off with its landing lights on.’

  “We had stirred up a real hornets’ nest. The Nazi airfield was only a few miles away and they had obviously sent a night fighter pursuit plane to zero in on us.

  “We completed our second pass in a hurry and turned toward the North Sea. When we were over the water a few minutes later, we began to relax, feeling the night fighter had missed us. Just then, Ralph spoke up again: ‘There is a plane directly to our rear. I can see the glow of his exhaust and his faint silhouette.”

  Swarts, the pilot, threw the Liberator into a steep dive toward the ocean. He leveled off a few hundred feet above the water, zigzagging violently. After about five minutes, with no further sign of the fighter, he climbed back up to cruising altitude.

  Another crew was less fortunate a month later, on the night of 20–21 April 1945. Twelve B-24s joined a flight of British planes in a large-scale drop of supplies to the Norwegians, preparing to force the surrender of the Germans in Norway.

  One of the American planes was piloted by Lt. Ralph W. Keeny. Just after they crossed the coast, they were attacked by a night fighter and heavily damaged. Keeny set a course for the nearest point on the Swedish border, hoping to come down in neutral territory. But before they reached the border, they flew into a flak trap and were hit again. Keeny sounded the bail-out alarm.

  The entire crew managed to get out of the plane before it crashed. But in an incident remarkably similar to that involving Lieutenants Sanders and Callahan, recounted in Chapter Seven, Lt. Stephen J. Marangus could not reach his parachute. He jumped while clinging to SSgt. H. H. Brobec. But Marangus lost his grip shortly before they reached the ground and fell to his death. The other crew members all survived, although some of them were injured, and remained in German custody until the war ended on 7 May.

  Perhaps the most unusual task given to the Carpetbaggers was in the spring of 1945, when about a dozen of the unit’s B-24s were assigned to assist the Royal Air Force. Since the Carpetbagger crews were used to flying at night—as distinguished from most of the other American bomber crews, who flew in the daytime—they were called on to serve as decoys for the RAF night bombers.

  Flying without guns in the nose and lower ball turret—the normal Carpetbagger configuration—they were assigned to mingle in with a stream of RAF night bombers and then peel off toward targets of their own, hoping to lure the German night fighters away from the main bomber stream.

  In most cases, the American planes were accompanied on their feint by a larger number of RAF bombers and planes carrying metal “chaff,” which was dropped to make the formation look larger than it really was on German radar.

  This was in the period when Allied air power reached its peak and German defenses were increasingly strained. The nightly raids by the RAF and the daytime attacks by the Americans were a deliberate attempt to undermine German morale and will to resist by crushing and burning down the enemy’s cities. Feints such as those carried out by the Carpetbaggers against cities that were not the main target not only drew night fighters away from the bomber stream but also caused the German firefighters to rush down the autobahns to the wrong place.

  The most famous such raid, carried out by both British and American bombers, was the destruction of Dresden, with the loss of more than thirty-five thousand civilian lives, on 13 and 14 February 1945. But Dresden was only one of many German cities subjected to massive bombing and firestorm as the war drew to a climax.

  In March of 1945, the Carpetbaggers were involved in night-time raids against Münster, Dortmund, Emden, Freiburg, and Wiesbaden, which, ironically, later became United States Air Force headquarters in Europe.

  Following a raid on the night of 9—10 April, a British air vice-marshal sent a teletype praising the American involvement: “The operations last night provided an outstanding example of the valuable degree of support that can be afforded to bomber command by our special operations. The enemy reacted strongly and with great determination but in the wrong place, with the result that the main force, despite its great strength, was unmolested, whilst the whole of the enemy’s considerable fighter effort was expended on the feint force.… To add to his discomfort, he lost three night fighters destroyed and one damaged to British night fighters.”

  One of the Carpetbagger aircrew members took a more jaundiced view of the operation. In a memoir written after the war, James Darby recalled:

  “The night-bombing pathfinder missions with the RAF were pretty grim. Four or five of our B-24s flew in trail with the RAF bomber streams of aircraft. We were mixed in with the RAF Lancasters and Wellingtons. As soon as the German Luftwaffe night fighters were committed, we were instructed to turn back to England. We were required to carry bombs and to drop them on German targets on the way home. We were required to do this just to say that the United States was engaged in twenty-four-hour bombing operations. This was stupid. We did no damage to speak of, and our lives and aircraft were in extreme danger for no reason except public relations.”

  Late in the war, the Carpetbaggers, using new planes and flying from bases in France, were to return briefly to their original job of delivering Joes to the Continent—this time into the heart of Germany itself. But, meanwhile, a similar operation had grown to major proportions supporting resistance movements in Italy, Albania, Greece, and, most important of all, Yugoslavia.

  CHAPTER 10

  Action in the South

  Aid to resistance movements in southern Europe got off to a slower and rockier start than the operations conducted by the Carpetbaggers in northern Europe. Shortage of equipment, Official indifference, if not outright hostility, and the diversity of the resistance movements, both politically and geographically, all played their part in the slower pace in the south.

  But once the assistance to guerilla fighters behind the German lines beg
an to build momentum, it grew, especially in the case of Yugoslavia, into a major undertaking that vastly exceeded the efforts of the Carpetbaggers in the north.

  There is still a tendency among Carpetbaggers, and even among some of today’s special operators, to think of the operations carried on in the south of Europe during World War II as somehow outside the mainstream of the air commando tradition. Because the southern operations were slower starting and more widespread, they did not have the neat cohesiveness of the Air Commandos’ Burma campaign or of the Carpetbaggers’ nighttime flights in northern Europe. Perhaps the main reason that some tend to disregard the southern operations is that they involved a major contribution by the conventional air force, primarily in the form of hundreds of missions flown by C-47 crews of the Air Transport Command.

  But, measured in terms of innovation and the bravery of those involved, the operations in the south of Europe fall well within the bounds of the air commando tradition, and, in geographic scope and sheer magnitude, they were significantly larger than those in Burma and northern Europe.

  As early as December 1942, General Donovan and the OSS received permission from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to deliver men and equipment into southern Europe by both air and sea. The plan approved by the JCS provided for an average of three bomber-type airplanes available “per each moon night of the month.”

  The decision by the JCS was exactly what the OSS outpost in Algiers had been waiting for. This seemed to mean they could quickly begin conducting clandestine operations into southern France. But approval in Washington and what actually happened in North Africa were two different things. Lieutenant General Carl A. “Tooey” Spaatz, the highest ranking air force general in the European conflict and commander of the Northwest African Air Forces, simply said, “No.” He didn’t have enough planes for such diversions. An aide flatly labeled the OSS plan to create an American special operations unit “undesirable.”