Operation Jericho

Freeing the French Resistance from Gestapo jail, Amiens 1944

Robert Lyman, Adam Tooby

• Publisher: Osprey Publishing
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781472852069
• eBook ISBN: 9781472851970
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

This is the story of Operation Jericho, the spectacular prison break staged by an elite group of British, Australian and New Zealand bomber pilots, who flew a daring low-level mission to blow holes in the walls of Amiens jail and free French Resistance prisoners under the sentence of death during World War II.

With D-Day looming, early 1944 was a time of massive intelligence activity across northern France, and many résistants were being captured and imprisoned by the Germans. Among the jails full of French agents was Amiens, where hundreds awaited likely execution for their activities.

To repay their debt of honour, MI6 requested an air raid with a seemingly impossible brief: to simultaneously blow holes in the prison walls, free as many men and women as possible while minimizing casualties, and kill German guards in their quarters. The crews would have to fly their bomb-run at an altitude of just 20ft. Despite the huge difficulties, the RAF decided that the low-level specialists of No. 140 Wing had a chance of success.

With the aid of first-hand accounts, explanatory 3D diagrams and dramatic original artwork, the eminent historian Robert Lyman explains how one of the most difficult and spectacular air raids of World War II was pulled off, and debunks some of the myths over why the raid was ordered in the first place.

THE RAID

Take-off

Out on the exposed tarmac of Hunsdon airfield, the snow was being driven in violent flurries by the spinning propellers of the 19 twin-engine Mosquitos that were lined up in pairs on the taxiway running parallel to the airfield’s long single runway. For the two-man crews perched in each cramped cockpit, visibility was a matter of yards, the aircraft ahead a blur only 75 yards away. For the ground crews huddled in the open, watching with jealous pride their carefully prepared charges waiting to take off, the roar of the deep-throated Rolls-Royce Merlin engines was even more deafening than usual, somehow redoubled by the closeness of the weather. Pilot Officer Max Sparks later observed that the weather was so bad that when the order to ‘fly in this stuff’ was given he thought it was ‘either some form of practice or some form of practical joke’:

So we went outside and looked at the weather again. It was terrible! Snow was still falling, sweeping in gusts that every now and then hid the end of the runway from sight. If this had been an ordinary operation we were doing it would pretty certainly have been scrubbed – put off to another day. But this was not an ordinary job; every day, perhaps every hour, might be the last in the lives of those Frenchmen. We got into our aircraft, warmed up the engines, and sat there thinking it was no kind of weather to go flying in, but somehow knowing that we must. And when we saw the Group Captain drive up in his car, and get out of it and into his own Mosquito, we knew for certain that the show was on.

To avoid the chance of mid-air collision in conditions of near-zero visibility, each pair of aircraft had been instructed to take off at five-second intervals and to make their way independently through the low cloud to rendezvous above Littlehampton, on England’s south coast between Bognor Regis and Worthing, where it was known that visibility that morning was much improved. From there they would cross the English Channel, flying in formation and accompanied by their Typhoon fighter escorts from Nos 3, 174 and 198 Squadrons towards their target in occupied France. The role of the escorts was to protect the Mosquitos when they were at their most vulnerable during the raid, which meant being at their wing tips when crossing the English Channel and sitting above them as they launched their attack. The German fighters at the nearby airfield at Glisy were an especial concern, but the Luftwaffe were also known to fly continuous combat air patrols across this area, not just to protect the V1 sites being constructed across the Pas-de-Calais but also to catch the lumbering bombers that almost nightly made their way to and from the Reich.

A still of the prison from the film made by the FPU Mosquito, ‘O for Orange’. No. 140 Wing had developed the process of taking a Mk IV Mosquito from the RAF’s Film Production Unit (FPU) along on its raids to film the attack. Piloted by Flight Lieutenant Tony Wickham, it was the navigator, Pilot Officer Lee Howard, who operated the camera equipment. (IWM C4735)

The second Mosquito squadron was to depart from Hunsdon three minutes after the first, and the third, No. 21 Squadron RAF, was to follow ten minutes later. Pilot Officer Lee Howard, navigator in the Film Production Unit (FPU) Mark IV Mosquito DZ414 (‘O for Orange’), piloted by Tony Wickham, which accompanied the raid, recalled:

I just had time to check over my cameras, and then were taxying [sic] for the take-off. A moment or two after the second six had gone we, too, belted down the runway in a shower of fine snow. Airborne, we climbed to 300 feet and set course. The aircraft ahead were invisible; the ground below us could be seen only vaguely through the swirling snow.

The first aircraft to leave Hunsdon and disappear into the murky sky was piloted by Wing Commander ‘Black’ Smith. Max Sparks took off next. ‘By the time I got to 100 feet I could not see a thing except that grey soupy mist and snow and rain beating against the Perspex window,’ he recalled. ‘There was no hope of either getting into formation or staying in it, and I headed straight for the Channel coast.’ Pilot Officer Arthur Dunlop was Sparks’s navigator:

The Wing Commander and No. 2 went up the runway to take off. They got to 50 feet and disappeared into cloud. We then went up the runway and took off, and similarly went into very, very dark cloud. The snow was going horizontally past us and it was impossible to see anything in front: we were behind the Wing Commander, about half a minute behind, so we couldn’t see any navigation lights. We had decided that we wouldn’t turn immediately on our ETA [Estimated Time of Arrival] at Henley because of the risk of collision and we would overshoot Henley slightly. We did this, keeping a very close look out making sure that there was nothing in our path, and proceeded down towards Littlehampton. The cloud was just as thick and the snow just as heavy and we saw absolutely nothing: we were in a little world of our own. I think it must have been somewhere south of Petworth when the cloud became grey rather than black and lighter and ultimately before we reached Littlehampton we came out into the grey overcast but out of the snow, out of the clouds, which was now above us, and the ground was visible. We looked ahead of us but there wasn’t a Mosquito in sight. Thinking we were way behind schedule and we were going to miss our 12 o’clock target time we increased our speed but after we had gone a comparatively short time I discovered that there was another Mosquito – two in fact – flying on our port side, behind, and this turned out to be Wing Commander Smith with No. 2. So we got back into formation, got down towards the sea; we had to decrease our height to go to Littlehampton. Now because we could see where we were going, we went out over the coast right down on the sea and out to pick up the Gee line the coordinates of which I had set on the Gee set that would take us in to Tocqueville.³ Visibility now was improving and you could see 5–7 miles, possibly a little bit more, and we came in towards Tocqueville right in on course.

Lee Howard was very pleased to meet the Typhoon escort at Littlehampton. Because of the poor weather, not all of the planned escorts were available that day. The FPU Mosquito arrived off Littlehampton about three minutes later than planned:

This was the first time I had experienced the joys of a fighter escort; normally Mosquitos operate alone, being well able to take care of themselves, but this target was very near to an enemy-occupied fighter airfield and the boys needed a free hand to ensure their doing a good job of work, so the powers above had provided us with two Typhoons each to chase away inquisitive Huns.

In addition, we were to be given further fighter cover of two [sic] squadrons of Typhoons which would be around and about the target when we got there. Being a few minutes late at our rendezvous with the Tiffies I thought perhaps we might miss them. As we tore over the coast – we were going pretty fast, in an endeavour to catch up with the second six – both Tony and I saw aircraft ahead, and as we gained on them we were able to identify them as Mosquitos and Typhoons, we were still belting along when, as if from nowhere – I made a mental note of it, to remind me how easy it is to be ‘jumped’ by fighters if one doesn’t keep a good look out – a couple of the Typhoon boys were sitting, one on each of our wingtips … They stuck to us like glue; I’m sure if we’d gone down a railway tunnel they would have come right with us.

As we crossed the Channel the weather changed, and nearing the French coast it was quite sunny. We climbed to cross the coast, and as we went over France lay spread before us, carpeted in white. It altered the appearance of the ground quite a lot but this didn’t seem to trouble the leading navigators, who found their way unerringly to turning point after turning point, finally bringing us right on to the main Albert–Amiens road, which led straight to the target and provided an unmistakable guide.

Squadron Leader W. R. C. ‘Dick’ Sugden later recorded that it was possibly the most atrocious weather he had ever encountered. It was very nearly his last flight. Coming out of the cloud over Littlehampton another Mosquito flashed across his path. Shocked, he shouted into his microphone: ‘Get the hell out of it, you bastard!’ As it turned in front of him he saw that the aircraft was Pickard’s. He spent the rest of the flight worrying about the reprimand he would surely receive when he returned to Hunsdon, not just for abusing his commanding officer, but for breaking radio silence. New Zealand Pilot Officer Merv Darrall recalled that ‘it was a sticking day, snow most of the way. You had to hang on by your eyeballs to keep in touch with the joker in front of you.’ Pilot Officer Arthur Dunlop recollected:

Just before we reached Tocqueville Wing Commander Smith suddenly began climbing. Although this wasn’t in the flight plan, and although No. 2 went up with him we didn’t manage to do it and we were about 2,000 feet below him. He went up to about 4,000 feet because he suddenly had a thought that they might have moved their light ack-ack into Tocqueville because we had used this for a couple of months to go in to bomb the rocket launching sites. We crossed the coast right about 2,000 feet but we didn’t experience any gunfire at all and we were supposed to go to Doullens … but we short-cutted because the first two were coming down from a greater height at a faster speed so we reformed at Senarpont. We turned there south eastwards to Albert. The visibility at this point was very much improved. There was snow on the ground but it made things stand out very clearly. The air itself was very clear. It was at this point that a Typhoon shot straight through the formation. I initially thought it was a Focke-Wulf 90 but was relieved to find it wasn’t when I could get a good view of it and we turned at Albert along the Albert–Amiens Road, which is about 7 miles long, and from the moment we turned I could see the prison building standing on the north side of the road. We throttled back to 220 miles an hour and got really down on the ground, because the aim was to be below the level of the 20-...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Origins
• The Plan
• The Raid
• Aftermath
• Bibliography
• eCopyright