Morale is everything in war. History is dirty with examples of militaries that were amply equipped yet complacent or discouraged and fell to inferior forces deftly led and well-motivated. When a war goes on for years, it is a struggle to keep spirits in a fighting form.
Ukraine is a good example. In the first few months after the Russian invasion, Ukrainian flags were flying everywhere around the free world. Folks flocked from all over to join the fight against tyranny and despotism. Though hopelessly outgunned and lyrically outnumbered, the beleaguered Ukrainians prevailed against long odds.
Now years into the Russians’ Special Military Operation, support has flagged, and the Ukrainian people are justifiably exhausted. The war has devolved into a gruesome slog akin to some of the bloodier campaigns of World War 1. Zelensky’s challenge today is keeping the world energized in the face of widespread compassion fatigue. Battlefield successes are understandably exploited for propaganda purposes.
Dark Days
The French found themselves in a similarly dark space during World War 2. In the Spring of 1942, the hated Germans occupied all of France. Wehrmacht officers wandered about Paris like they owned the place. Regular military parades and brutal repression served as omnipresent reminders that the French were a beaten people. At that point in the war, hope was a rare commodity thereabouts.
Benjamin Hodkinson Cowburn was an agent with the British Special Operations Executive who had ice water for blood. This maniac guy created and ran the Tinker network of French Maquis near Troyes, France. The veteran of four different long-term deep penetration missions into occupied France, Cowburn was the longest-serving F-section (French Section) SOE operator of the war.
While working in Paris, Cowburn observed that the Germans conducted a parade of uniformed troops down the Champs-Élysées every day between 1215 and 1245. The Germans, for all their well-documented moral failings, were typically diagnosably punctual. These parades served as a practical reminder to the people of Paris that the Germans were in charge. Using Ben Cowburn’s reports as a basis, Air Chief Marshal Sir Philip Joubert de la Ferte crafted a plan. He was going to transform this daily parade into a gory resistance spectacle. To do so, he required a seriously crazy pilot. His first choice was Flight Lieutenant Alfred Kitchener Gatward.
Origins of Gatward, the Airborne Lunatic
Alfred Kitchener “Ken” Gatward first drew breath in the summer of 1918. His father was the local Chief Inspector of Police. Young Ken was born in an apartment above the Hornsey police station. When he came of age, Gatward took a job making wallpaper at a company called Coloroll. In 1937, with war clouds looming on the horizon, Gatward joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve.
By 1939, Gatward had earned his wings as a sergeant pilot. The following year, he was commissioned. He began the war flying twin-engine Bristol Blenheim medium bombers. In 1941, he transitioned into Bristol Beaufighters. In short order, Gatward had amassed significant experience flying low-level raids into enemy-held territory with No 236 Squadron. That experience, along with a reputation for being willing to try anything once, put his name on the desk of Air Chief Marshal Sir Philip Joubert de la Ferte.
Operation Squabble
The original plan was to fly a trio of Spitfires low level across Paris, trailing red, white, and blue smoke. However, Spits lacked the range to get to Paris and back. What they came up with was markedly more audacious.
Joubert de la Ferte described the proposed mission as “unsafe” when he first made the pitch to Gatward. The plan was for FLT LT Gatward and his navigator SGT Gilbert “George” Fern to take their Beaufighter solo and unsupported into the heart of Paris at noon. At the time, Paris sported some of the most advanced antiaircraft defenses in the world. Gatward was to fly his Beaufighter at extreme low level through downtown Paris down the Champs-Elysees, drop one enormous French tricolor flag onto the Arc de Triomphe, and then deposit another over the Ministre de la Marine (the previous headquarters for the French Naval Ministry). Along the way, they would strafe the daily German military parade. What could possibly go wrong?
In addition to demanding some simply spectacular pilotage, Operation Squabble demanded balls of steel. This was arguably the most dangerous place on the planet for an Allied aviator, and the Air Chief Marshal was asking Gatward and Fern to undertake this mission in broad daylight alone. The most probable outcome was that they would be blown to pieces in the skies over France. If they were shot down and survived, they would undoubtedly find themselves in the clutches of the Gestapo. Joubert de la Ferte was most likely asking these two young men to give their lives just to drape a flag across a monument. Gatward and Fern agreed without hesitation.
The Plane Gatward Flew
The Bristol 156 Beaufighter was affectionately referred to as the Beau by its pilots and crews. Powered by a pair of 1,600-hp Bristol Hercules XVII 14-cylinder air-cooled, sleeve-valve radial engines, the Beau sported a top speed of 280 knots or 320 mph. Like all multi-engine British combat aircraft, the Beaufighter was designed to be flown by a single pilot. In this case, he was supported by a navigator/gunner.
Purposes
While the Beau could carry two small 250-pound bombs, it was primarily a gunship. Principal armament consisted of four forward-firing 20mm Hispano Mk II cannon clustered in the belly, each carrying 240 rounds of high explosive ammunition. Additionally, the plane packed half a dozen .303-caliber Browning machineguns in the wings. Curiously, these mountings were not symmetrical. There were four guns mounted in the starboard wing and two in the port. The extra space on the left was consumed with long-range fuel tanks. There was also one more .303 Browning fitted in a Perspex dorsal turret.
It’s tough for modern military pilots to imagine just how austere these early combat aircraft were. At the time Operation Squabble was being organized, it had only been 39 years since the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Warplanes of this era carried a compass and paper maps, but navigating was crude by today’s standards. Getting from one place to another was a matter of time, distance, and heading, or just basic map reading. Add to this that the weather over Europe was notoriously foul, particularly in the Springtime, and you were asking a lot of these two brave young men.
Preparation
Gatward and Fern studied maps of Paris exhaustively, committing the best ingress and egress routes to memory. They also practiced their strafing runs on an old shipwreck in the English Channel. The RAF obtained an enormous French Tricolour from Portsmouth Harbour, and parachute riggers cut the flag into two equal pieces. These they fitted with pouches and weighted down with iron scrap.
Gatward and Fern did test drops off of their hangar roof to see how the cloth naturally fell. The plan was for Fern to eject each flag through the Beaufighter’s flare chute at just the right moment to have it unfurl and drape across these two Parisian icons. Fern also brought along a handheld camera to document the event.
Just imagine what this must have felt like. These two brass-balled guys strapped into their gunship on 13 May 1942, fully realizing that the result was likely going to be death or worse. With that in mind, they went ahead and did it anyway.
The Mission
That first attempt got scrubbed due to ghastly weather over France. However, the following month on 12 June, they got through. The takeoff weather at RAF Thorney Island was completely overcast at 2,000 feet, but things improved over the continent. By the time they reached the Paris suburbs, the skies were clear and perfect. At 12:27, Gatward wheeled his big Beaufighter around the Eiffel Tower at low level just to get everybody’s attention. That’s when disaster struck.
As luck would have it, Gatward caught a big French crow in the radiator of his starboard engine while skimming the Parisian rooftops. The impact shook the plane and the engine oil temperature began steadily climbing, but the prop kept turning. With no reasonable alternatives, the two British aviators continued the mission.
Tragically and uncharacteristically, it seemed that the Germans picked this one day to be late. When Gatward and Fern arrived over the parade route, the daily contingent of turned-out Krauts was nowhere to be found. As a result, Fern dropped his big French flag successfully across the Arc de Triomphe as Gatward banked toward the Place de la Concorde.
Once at the Ministre de la Marine, Gatward strafed the building and the associated German guards with 20mm cannon fire. SGT Fern then dropped the second flag across the smoldering structure. Eighty-three minutes later, Gatward and Fern touched down intact at RAF Northolt. The only Allied casualty of the audacious operation was that one French crow.
Aftermath For Gatward
Ground crews extricated the dead bird’s corpse from the Beaufighter’s starboard engine. Gatward, Fern, and the staff at RAF Northolt held a formal service for the creature and buried it on the airfield with honors. Subsequent reports from the Resistance explained that the Germans had been forming up for their daily parade at the time of the attack but had been dispersed by the arrival of the British warplane over the city.
This was how FLT LT Gatward described the mission in his logbook: “Paris – No cover – 0 ft. Drop Tricolours on Arc Triomphe & Ministry Marine. Shoot up the German HQ. Little flak, no E.A. (Enemy Aircraft). Bird in STBD oil radiator. Returned to Northolt and on to Command 61 photos. Heavy rain over England. France fair to light. Northolt to Thorney, Thorney return base. Air Test.”
Ruminations
All military flying is a bit edgy and inherently dangerous. That’s honestly one of the big reasons I loved it so. Great effort is expended to mitigate that risk. However, all combat aviators appreciate that bad things can happen when you push high-performance aircraft through dangerous spaces, particularly at night, in bad weather, and around lots of other stuff specifically designed to kill you. There is a reason those who do such stuff for a living are invariably young. More seasoned stick wigglers might just call it a day and go home.
READ MORE: The Football War: When Two Sovereign Nations Went All Kinetic Over a Soccer Match
Statistically speaking, it was safer to be a combat Marine during WW2 than it was to be an aviator. Fully 51% of British aircrew perished due to accidents or combat action. Gatward and Fern knew the odds were stacked against them from the outset.
In June of 1942, with the entire world aflame, these two brave young English aviators risked their lives to poke Adolf Hitler in the eye with a metaphorical stick. Their mission to deposit the French Tricolour flag across a couple of famous Paris landmarks served to remind the French people that they were not alone and that liberation was coming. In so doing, they brought their Allies hope. In war, hope is often the most powerful weapon of all.
*** Buy and Sell on GunsAmerica! ***
Read the full article here