Moon Squadron (5 page)

One learned by experience. To Squadron-Leader Conroy, TROJAN HORSE looked like a piece of cake. So
much a piece of cake did it seem to be that he made an appointment with a young woman for luncheon in the Berkeley next day. Twelve forty-five for one o’clock in the Buttery.

The Lysander was ready for take-off. The Joe was accompanied by his conducting officer, driven in a closed car to the tarmac and briefly introduced. For a moment, pilot and passenger chatted.

"You don't stay long on the ground?"

"No fear." Squadron-Leader Conroy smiled. "Three minutes is my maximum. Time to cook a very soft-boiled egg, brush your teeth
or make a swift pass at a popsy. Well, if you're ready, we'll get cracking."

The Joe took a long all-embracing gaze at the darkening English countryside. It was a thing most of the Joes did. Squadron-Leader Conroy had often noticed them doing it and he knew why. In the months to come, the English scene they had seen would remain constantly in their vision, a fountain of strength and inspiration. The Joe, having looked his fill, lifted one hand, let it fall and climbed into the aircraft. Operation TROJAN HORSE was underway.

Simulation had been reduced to an art. In this case, the Germans spared no detail. Tradition was exactly followed.

At one end of the field, a small knot of chilled persons in civilian clothes waited. They talked in low tone
s, speaking in French. It was somewhat guttural French but it was nonetheless French. Occasionally, a bottle of Armagnac was passed round and the watchers took grateful swigs. If cigarettes were smoked, their glow was hidden in the hollows of hands and the stubs and match-ends buried. Up the road, a sentry had been posted as if ready to warn the conspirators of the approach of the wicked Germans. The minutes passed slowly and there was always a strained searching of the sky. Torches were tested. They were bright but not obviously so. If the miniature flare-path were to look like the
Champs
Elysees
in peace-time, the pilot might readily become suspicious and not land. As the estimated time of the Lysander's arrival drew nearer, the Kommandant made his final round of the field.

The machine-gunners, hidden in the hedges, were alert and their sited weapons only awaited the pressure of a finger. It was clearly understood that the British aircraft shoul
d not be destroyed but disabled. Yes, it was understood. The Aldis lamp, already trained on the spot where the Lysander would come to a halt, was ready. The knot of seeming civilians broke up as each armed German tiptoed away in the darkness before moonrise to take up his allotted place. All was ready.
Nun
,
Du
Iieber
Gott
, only let the British come...

The moon rose. Men eased
their safety catches forward as a faint, far-away droning sound stole into the silence of the night. It increased in volume. The ragged flare-path glimmered and shone steadily. Suddenly, the Lysander was there. She had appeared from nowhere, skimming lightly over the hedge at the dim end of the field, her undercarriage pushed out like a heron's legs. The Kommandant, his hands shaking with excitement and triumph, flashed the known recognition signal. The Lysander flew low over the field, banked steeply and came back. Once again, the Kommandant flashed his reassuring signal. There could be nothing to alarm the British pilot, nothing. The Lysander lifted her heron's legs over the hedge and touched down. She ran three-quarters of the length of the flare-path and turned and taxied back and halted, ready for instant take-off. It was at that moment that the Kommandant gave his order. The Aldis lamp blazed, whitely illuminating the aircraft.

At the same instant, two machine-guns opened up on their target. A spatter of bullets ripped into the fuselage by the half-opened door. The door slammed. Within a split second, the Lysander's engine was revving and she was surging forward. Followed by burst after burst of machine-gun fire, she twisted herself drunkenly into the air. Holding a handkerchief to the bullet w
ound in his neck, Squadron-Leader Conroy just managed to clear the topmost branches of a copse of trees. As a one-handed feat of piloting, it was beyond belief. But he did it, and brought his Joe and his bullet-riddled aircraft safely home.

A new record for shortness of stay on the ground had been achieved. The time was now down to 12.5 seconds.

Chapter Seven

WALLS HAVE EARS

The art o
f security has been defined as ‘not talking unnecessarily’.

It is a good definition. It acknowledges the fact that it was frequently necessary to speak of secret matters with those qualified to hear them. At the same time, it imposed a ban on the offerin
g of any extraneous information, even to those known to be in the know. It confined all discussion to the matter in hand and to that matter only. One told as much of one's job as was necessary to make the conversation comprehensible and then quietly dropped the subject. There is no one so insecure as the person who makes it obvious that he or she is being secure and that his or her lips are sealed. To move in an aura of secrecy is to invite comment and speculation. The normal was the ideal. Tiger skin rugs and Chanel Number 5 were ‘out’; utility folk-weaves and lavender water were ‘in’.

What went on at Tempsford was one of the best-kept secrets of the war. The members of the War Cabinet knew about it. Only those members of S.O.E. who were directly concerned knew the full tale. Others who worked in Baker Street were, of course, aware that some sort of organisation existed whereby agents and supplies were being delivered to resistance groups from the Arctic Circle to Yugoslavia. They never enquired as to the whereabouts of this organisation or its methods. They were security trained and they minded their own business. The men who flew the aircraft and their crews saw the thing piece-meal. Each operation that they carried out was an individual task, unrelated to anything else. They never saw the whole countryside for the poplars. Their safety and the success of their missions depended on one thing more than anything else
- secrecy. Here, surrounding them, was a situation where an incautious sentence, a normally justifiable reminiscence told in the Mess over a tankard of beer, could change success into disaster. It was a frightening thought-the incalculable consequences that could follow even a minor indiscretion. "From a drop of water," said Sherlock Holmes, who also lived in Baker Street, "a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara." The Germans were expert logicians.

There was never a leak from Tempsford. There was never a breach of security. Month after month, the aircraft took off on their special missions. Agents and arms were delivered to those who eagerly awaited them. Foreign politicians and V.I.P.s were mysteriously whisked away from under the noses of the alert Gestapo and vanished-literally-into thin air.

"I took off one night," said Wing-Commander Bob Hodges, "to pick up a bunch of foreign Joes from a field in mid-France. By then, it had become a pretty routine sort of job and this one was in no way exceptional until long afterwards. The flight was uneventful in every way. I flew in a Hudson and found the field dead on time. The Joes were waiting. My passengers nipped out and the Joes nipped in. We took off without any bother at all and flew home to Tempsford. I do remember that there was a certain amount of hoo-ha going on when we landed, a lot of chaps embracing and saluting and kissing each other on both cheeks and that sort of thing, but I didn't give it another thought. I hadn't a clue who the Joes were-until 1945. Then I had a message from the French Embassy in London, inviting me to go along and have the Legion of Honour pinned to my bosom. I couldn't think why they'd picked on me. Then I discovered that one of those Joes I'd picked up that night was Monsieur Vincent Auriol, President of the French Republic. I don't think he'd mind being called 'a Joe’, 'Joes' were pretty good types . . ."

It took a long time, even for the chosen few, to find out what went on in this quiet expanse under the Gannocks in rural Bedfordshire.

“He was posted to Tempsford in the summer of 1942," said Pilot Officer Tim Hilgrove. His name is not Tim Hilgrove, for the highly respectable firm of solicitors in which he is now a partner would be profoundly shocked if they knew that ‘our Mr. so-and-so’ had once been engaged in cloak-and-dagger activities. "I was very happy where I was at the time and the bleak, typewritten slip that read
'Posted
to
Tempsford
for
special
duties'
came as a considerable bind. Nobody in the mess had ever heard of the place and neither had I. And what 'special duties' meant, well, I simply hadn't got a clue. Neither had anyone else. The Squadron Commander, a sardonic type, said that it very likely meant the Air Ministry and that I'd spend the rest of the war polishing the seat of my pants in Whitehall and pinning bits of paper together and passing them on to somebody else for action.

"Anyway, I g
loomily got all my kit together including a tankard I'd won at darts and set off for what I feared was a sort of ante-room to an office. Arrived at Sandy rail way station and found that they'd sent transport to meet me. 'This,' I said to the driver, 'is an unexpected honour. What's the place like?' The driver's answers were short and un-informative. He was perfectly polite and all that but he told me nothing at all. Every time I asked anything about where we were going, he seemed to get an unaccountable fit of deafness and would branch off into something else. 'Fair enough,' I thought, 'I don't suppose he likes the place and doesn't want to talk about it. Fair enough.

"When he got to Tempsford itself, the people at the gate were unusually thorough. They went over my papers with a small tooth comb and I thought to m
yself 'bags of bull, old boy, bags of bull!' Then they finally let me inside and that's when I got my real shock. I thought that this must be some elaborate leg-pull for, at first glance, the whole place looked derelict. There was a huddle of buildings roughly the shape and size of Nissen huts but they looked like cowsheds. In fact, they
were
Nissen huts built within the walls of cowsheds, but I didn't know that until much later. They were grouped around a farm. Its name was Gibraltar Farm. That's another thing I didn't find out until later, that its name was Gibraltar Farm. Even if I had known, it wouldn't have meant anything. There were some hangars, so superbly camouflaged that it took me quite a time to realise that they
were
hangars. But there were no aircraft about. There were runways, strangely narrow ones channelled out of fields of vegetables. You hardly notice them. The whole place was odd, very odd. Not exactly up to standard, I thought, as I gave the starboard wing of my moustache a five degree tilt and went into the mess to have the tankard I'd won at darts filled up with beer.

"Mess life was normal enough. Met the C.O. who seemed a good type. I say 'seemed' because all I got was a brief hand-shake and the remark that he hoped to find me a job sometime. All very vague. The chaps in the mess were friendly enough but no one had a word to say about the work of the Squadron. Every time I asked tentatively what all this was in aid of, the conversation seemed to peter out or someone else would come up and interrupt and we'd start talking about something else. Two things I
did
notice. There was more than the usual sprinkling of decorations. I wondered if it could be a sort of rest-camp for people who'd done a lot of ops. and needed a quiet breath of country air. The other thing was the good food. Real eggs bubbling on the plate, real ones with yolks to them!

“
The days passed pleasantly enough but I was puzzled.

“
There were guards in the cowsheds that looked like Nissen huts and guards on the hangars. I was never allowed into either. I knew that there were aircraft in these hangars because I heard them taking off, sometimes in the small hours, and I heard them coming in. But I hadn't a clue as to where they'd been or what they'd been doing.

"Gibraltar Farm was a real farm. No doubt about that. But instead of land-girls, those popsies in the green jerseys, there were more guards hanging round the muck-yards. And there was a duck-pond. A duck-pond with live ducks quacking on it. And another thing that struck me as being very curious. On the nights when I heard aircraft going out, I couldn't use the telephone. No calls allowed
. If I went to a public call box, that had a socking great chain and padlock on it.

"I suppose I'd been there for about three weeks and was getting pretty browned off at doing nothing, when the C.O. sent for me. He had my whole service life history before him on the desk and he went through it, asking me questions. Training, number of flying hours, experience in low flying, previous squadrons I served in, knowledge-if any of foreign languages. Couldn't help him much there.
La
plume
de
ma
tante
was all I could offer and
amo
,
amas
,
amat
. At the end of a long interview, he sat back and said: “I suppose you're wondering what all this is about?”

“As a matter of fact, sir,”
I said, “I was just trying to summon up enough courage to ask you for a posting back to flying duties.” “No need for that. I can give you all the flying time you want here. And you haven't a clue as to what goes on?" “Not a clue, sir.”

“
Good. Then I'll tell you. And every word I use from now on is TOP SECRET. I want that to be clearly understood. It's TOP SECRET - and that includes wives, mothers, girlfriends, the lot. It even includes the girl you rang up' he looked at a sheet of paper-the girl-friend you rang up from the pub in Sandy on Thursday last at thirteen minutes past eight, the one you called "Pam".

"I was pretty livid at this. I thought nobody knew about Pam. The C.O. went on, talking casually. He told me the most fantastic things. Special duties ... helping the Resistance ... France ... Norway ... Poland ... Holland...Germany itself . . . secret agents . .we call them 'Joes' ... arms parachuted in ... V.I.P.s brought out ... hand-picked personnel ... every soul in Tempsford vetted and re-vetted.

"If we even go into the private lives of the charwomen,” he said, “it's hardly surprising that we were curious about your Pam.” What is she, by the way? Blonde or brunette? We couldn't tell by the sound of her voice on the telephone.”

“Redhead,”
I said.

“Ah, that explains everything.” He got up. He said to me, “
Now you know some of the things that have to be known. Don't ask any questions-and, above all, don't answer any. We'll find you a job fairly soon …”

"So they did. Within a matter of forty-eight hours, I found myself on operational duty as second pilot. Two or three hours later-it was a clear moonlight night, I re member, with a mackerel sky-we made landfall on the Norwegian coast. We had three Joes on board and we hunted up and down the hills and valleys till the skipper who knew the form backwards-spotted a tiny glimmer of torches. Our Joes jumped out. They must have landed bang into the arms of the reception committee. Then we came home to Tempsford to a lovely breakfast of eggs and bacon. There had been nothing to it. Nothing at all.''

"Tim Hilgrove" smiled. He rubbed his clean-shaven upper lip, no longer adorned with a luxuriant moustache with wings to port and starboard. He went on with a chuckle.

"That morning, I remember, a new officer turned up at Tempsford. He wandered into the mess, looking puzzled and finally came over and sat beside me. 'Pretty dead-end beat,
this,' he said, 'what goes on?'”

I felt fairly smug. Sleepy because I'd been flying all night but smug because I'd been let in on Tempsford. I answered his question with all the candour of a deliberate lie.

“’I haven't a clue,' I said. Been here myself for three weeks and I simply haven't a clue. Seen this month's "Men Only?"

There was no traceable breach of security from Tempsford. But two apparently unrelated incidents might possibly be related to show that the Germans had developed an ardent curiosity about what might or might not go on in these somnolent acres in Bedfordshire. The existence of the Moon Squadron was well known in Berlin. Neutral Dublin was a sounding board for the Axis and it is possible that the hint came from there. No one will ever know. But its activity had become a thorn under the finger-nail of Hitler himself and it was his dominant wish to find and destroy what he called, with an original turn of phrase, “this nest of vipers." The competing talents of the many competing Nazi Intelligence Services were bent to the task. To isolate this secret airfield would be a sure passport to the Fuhrer's indulgence, to fail to do so would produce yet another of those hysterical and irresponsible outbursts, the sadistic result of which nobody knew. His Chiefs of Staff went fearfully to his conferences, aware of the flaying to come. Only pin-point the place and the legions of the
Luftwaffe
would be massed to blot it out-at no matter what cost. Were his officers dolts? Were they worthy of him? Towards the end of 1942, the first of these two incidents occurred which indicated that the Germans, in their sharp-edged game of ‘Hunt the thimble’ might be ‘getting warm’. After the second, they searched unsuccessfully elsewhere.

One night a solitary aircraft came in over England from the North Sea. It droned steadily over the eastern counties, making, it seemed, deliberately for Tempsford. Not one of the Moon Squadron's aircraft was flying that night and, as the warning was telephoned from observation post to observation post, a score of guns was trained on the marauder. Over the seemingly deserted farmland, it slowly and leisurely circled. Then, neatly and with precision, it dropped a line of flares along the main runway. The night
was misty and the gunners could not be absolutely certain of a kill - so, like Brer Rabbit, they lay low and said nuffin. Had the guns spoken and missed, the secret of Tempsford would have been revealed. For minutes on end the German circled while fingers itched on triggers below. There could be no question but that this was an airfield. But the flares that had illuminated grassland and fields of roots and the dim shapes of farm-buildings were dying. Their long shadows slanted on empty countryside. The German clearly decided that what had once been an airfield was now derelict. He wheeled over the Gannocks and flew away to the east. For reasons only known to himself, he bombed an orchard several miles away. The sound of the distant, harmless thumping was as music in the ears of Tempsford's defenders. Restraint had kept their secret.