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

by Orr Kelly

  By the fall of 1943, with preparations for the invasion of the Continent well underway, key officers in England were becoming increasingly convinced that the OSS was right: well-armed, properly led resistance fighters could make a dramatic contribution to the success of the Allied landings. But they remained convinced it would be a mistake to pull bombers out of the effort to carry the air war to Germany in order to aid the resistance. It was then that a bit of unexpected luck came into play. It happened this way:

  During the decade of the 1930s, the navy spent heavily on aircraft carriers and carrier-based planes, but it simply didn’t buy the long-range, land-based planes needed for finding and destroying enemy submarines lurking off the coasts of the United States and Europe. The job of antisubmarine warfare (ASW) patrols fell to the air force.

  One of the units assigned to this task was the 479th Antisubmarine Group, with four squadrons of B-24 Liberators. It first patrolled off the United States coasts and then moved to England in 1943 to hunt for German subs in the waters near the British Isles and the Bay of Biscay.

  It was not until the fall of 1943, nearly two years after the United States entered the war, that the Navy took delivery of its own version of the B-24—a model with a single tail rather than the twin tail of the air force model—and declared itself ready to begin assuming the ASW role in October.

  Suddenly, the air force found itself with extra B-24s that, at first glance, weren’t good for much of anything. Many of them lacked the oxygen system and other equipment needed for high-altitude bombing, and their crews were trained to fly alone at low altitudes rather than up in the stratosphere in formations with hundreds of other bombers. But those limitations made them almost ideal for the neglected job of aiding the resistance in northern Europe.

  Once the potential value of these units was realized, the air force moved with a speed that seems almost unbelievable to one accustomed to the lethargic pace of the peacetime military. In late August, Lt. Gen. Jacob L. Devers, the senior American officer in England, signed off on the plan to set up two special operations squadrons and quickly received an okay from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. On 12 October 1943, an OSS colonel produced a detailed memo outlining plans for aid to the resistance. Actually, such plans had been sitting on the shelf in the OSS London headquarters since January. Although the original OSS plans had called for eighteen planes, flying out of both England and North Africa, there would now be two squadrons, with thirty-two planes, available in England for this special mission.

  On 24 October, officers of the antisubmarine unit met with OSS officials at the Bovingdon air base, west of London, to be told of their new mission. Among those attending were Col. Clifford J. Heflin, commander of the 22d Antisubmarine Squadron, and Maj. Robert W. Fish, his deputy.

  It was at that meeting that the name Carpetbagger was picked at random from a list of approved code names.

  The very next day, a small group of Americans was assigned to the Royal Air Force base at Tempsford to learn about British flights into the Continent. By that time, the British were using not only the Lysanders, for landing to deliver or pick up agents, but also twin-engine Whitley bombers and four-engine Halifax bombers to parachute agents and supplies. They were ranging all over the western part of occupied Europe, from Norway to Greece.

  The Americans quickly began flying with the British—and learning of the dangers of their new assignment. On the night of 3 November, eight Americans took off with the British, one in each of eight Halifax bombers. One crew failed to return, and Capt. James E. Estes was listed as missing in action—the first Carpetbagger lost to enemy action.

  While the Americans learned their new role, their planes were sent to a depot for modifications. The ball turret, in the belly of the plane to the rear of the bomb bay, was removed, and a hole was prepared for use by agents parachuting. It quickly became known as the Joe hole. The men who were dropped were known as Joes and the women as Janes. The Joe hole was fitted with a metal shroud through which the parachutist slid out of the plane. The shroud was forty-four inches in diameter on the inside and flared to forty-eight inches at the exit. During flight, the hole was covered with a plywood panel that could be folded back out of the way.

  Flame arresters were installed over the exhaust ports so they could not be seen. Similarly, the muzzles of the machine guns were masked so, if they were fired at night, they would not give away the position of the plane to a night fighter.

  The instrument panel was reconfigured to place the instruments the pilot would need for flying at night at three hundred or four hundred feet off the ground directly in front of his face. Special navigation and communication equipment was installed to help the crews find delivery zones and communicate with those on the ground.

  At first, the planes were painted a dull black to make them harder to see at night. Later, however, it was determined that a glossy black paint made them more difficult to pick up on radar, so the paint scheme was changed.

  The planes were stripped of their armor plate and their nose and waist guns, as well as the lower ball turret. The few remaining guns were left on more for morale purposes—so the crews wouldn’t feel entirely defenseless—than for fighting. The crews were told to avoid firing their weapons so as not to give away their position and to rely on their low altitude to avoid German radar, which was ineffective below about three thousand feet. By flying low, they were also relatively safe from night fighters. Even during the day, German pilots were reluctant to fly as low as the Carpetbaggers.

  The removal of the guns permitted reducing the crew from the ten men normally carried on a heavy bomber to eight: pilot, copilot, bombardier, navigator, engineer, radio operator, dispatcher—as the waist gunner was called—and tail gunner. The ball turret gunner and one of the waist gunners were eliminated.

  The crews were, at least in theory, volunteers. Fish, who now lives in an Air Force retirement village outside San Antonio, had the job of welcoming new members to the squadron.

  The new crew members gathered in a Quonset-hut briefing room. Fish took the podium and described their new mission. The crews had been trained to fly in formation at high altitude during the daytime. In their new assignment, Fish told them, they would be flying their four-engine B-24s at three or four hundred feet above the ground … alone … at night.

  “You’re going to be flying that airplane at that altitude with the wheels and flaps down to slow it down so people can jump out. You’re going to do this alone in the dark of night, flying at ten miles above stalling speed,” Fish continued. If any of the crew members didn’t want to be involved, he told them, they could simply get up and walk out. There would be no black marks in their records. Then he left the room for a few minutes.

  Every time he returned, all the young fliers were still sitting there. Later, some of them told him they were ready to walk out but didn’t want to be first. “So,” he says, “they all got sucked in.”

  The two new special operations squadrons were called the 36th and 406th Bombardment Squadron (Special) and attached to the 482d Bombardment Group (Pathfinder) as the “special project” at the Alconbury airfield, north of London. Heflin was named the commander. In March, the unit, by then known as the 801st Bombardment Group (Provisional), settled in at its “permanent” home at the Harrington airdrome. Later, on 13 August 1944, the designation of the unit was changed again and it became the 492d Bombardment Group. Carpetbaggers usually refer to their unit as the 801st/492d Bombardment Group.

  By the beginning of 1944, the Carpetbaggers were ready to go to war.

  CHAPTER 7

  Enemy Territory—in the Dark

  Even before Heflin’s crews flew the first mission on their own, on 4 January 1944, the Carpetbaggers thought of themselves as something special—and they were.

  While most bomber crews flew in huge formations—as many as a thousand planes—of B-17s and B-24s penetrating deep into Germany in daylight at twenty to twenty-five thousand feet, the Carpetbagger crew
s flew by themselves, at night, close to the ground.

  Heflin was given extraordinary authority over his command. On 9 April 1944, he was given full authority to accept or reject missions for the Carpetbagger group. No other group commander in the Eighth Air Force had such control over his operations.

  The Carpetbagger commanders, working with the OSS, picked their own targets. Once airborne, each aircraft commander was in charge, selecting his route and his altitude and deciding whether to make his drop or abort the mission. The Carpetbaggers even had their own weather experts and sometimes flew when the rest of the Eighth Air Force was grounded.

  “We had three weather people,” Fish recalls. “The captain was an artist. The lieutenant was a mathematician. The master sergeant was just a plain career weather guesser. When those three guys got together, we could almost always bank on their forecast being true.”

  Their skill was tested in the winter of 1944, when the weather was so severe that the entire Eighth Air Force was grounded. The Carpetbaggers looked at the weather map. The storms flowing in off the Atlantic were losing ferocity as they moved down over the Continent. Many of the places in southern France where agents and supplies were to be delivered were clear. Unlike the Eighth Air Force bombers, the Carpetbaggers didn’t have to worry about forming up in large formations. Even with the weather socked in, they could take off and get to their targets. The problem was finding a place to land when they returned to England.

  The three weather experts studied the storm pattern and found there was usually a break of at least a few minutes as one front followed another across England. There would be some airfields open, at least for brief periods of time.

  Heflin and Fish decided to fly. They laid on a dozen single-plane missions the first night. All of them returned safely—although none of the planes got back to its home field.

  “We did that the second night, same damn routine,” Fish recalls. “Got everybody back safely. On the third night, the weather stayed the same. We had missions we could have flown, but I lost my nerve. I figured, if we do this a third time and we do lose an airplane, I’ve had it.”

  On many of their missions, the Carpetbaggers dropped both cargo and people—Joes and, occasionally, Janes. The relationship between the aircrews and their passengers was a strange one.

  The Joes were delivered to the airfield about four hours before the scheduled flight time. Each person was carefully searched by an officer from the British customs office and required to sign a sworn statement that he or she was not carrying anything not approved by the OSS. A memo to Heflin gave this reasoning behind the security precautions:

  “The personal safety of every resistance worker demands that he should not carry on his person articles which betray his stay in England. As the time for action approaches [the D-day invasion], it also becomes more and more important to prevent leakage of information to the enemy. A careless word in a private letter or even in an official document might give the enemy valuable information.”

  Many of those scheduled to be dropped onto the Continent were natives of the area where they would land, and some had been brought out to England to receive special instructions or training. Later in the Carpetbaggers’ operations, they delivered many “Jedburgh teams,” whose job was to work with the resistance, providing training, leadership, and a link to England. Jedburgh was a randomly selected code word that had no particular meaning. The three-man teams were made up of one OSS officer, one member of the British Special Operations Executive, and a Free French officer or enlisted man. Still later, larger sabotage teams of as many as thirty men were delivered to the Continent.

  When the agents arrived at Harrington, they were taken to dressing huts near the flight line. There, the plane’s dispatcher was in charge of getting them ready for the jump. The dispatchers had all received special training for their job—including two low-level parachute jumps. They were warned not to question the agents about themselves or their mission—or to let the Joes think they were new at this business. They were also told not to talk about the flight—what their route would be or how high they would fly.

  The agents first donned a baggy pair of coveralls that looked more like a clown suit than apparel for a mission behind enemy lines. It was covered with pockets and pouches to store knives, guns, a compass, money, and other items. The rear of the suit was padded with sponge rubber to protect the jumper on a hard landing. The suit was topped off with a rubber helmet and goggles. Special boots were padded to cushion the shock of landing. The parachute harness was fitted over the coveralls. By that time, according to one account, the person “is a grotesque, top-heavy figure who lumbers about like a Frankenstein monster.”

  Some of the agents sat by themselves, quietly smoking, thinking not only of the dangers that lay ahead but, sometimes, of the reunion, a few hours later, with family, loved ones, and friends. Others worked off nervous energy, clowning around in their cumbersome garb.

  Before going to the plane, the agents were briefed again and provided with a handful of pills. Some were for air sickness; some were to help a person sleep and others to keep him awake. And some were lethal, in case the person fell into enemy hands.

  Packages, weighing up to 150 pounds, were delivered to another section of the base by the OSS. They were fitted with parachutes, carefully sorted to make sure each package went to the right plane, and then loaded into the planes in the afternoon before the flight.

  Before each flight, the navigators carefully plotted their planned course to avoid known antiaircraft—or “flak”—positions. In this, the Carpetbaggers were better off than the bomber crews. While the bombers routinely attacked heavily defended targets, the Carpetbaggers made their drops in fields away from cities and military targets. But they shared with the bomber crews the problem of penetrating the German coastal flak belts.

  The Carpetbaggers’ standard tactic was to approach the coast only a few hundred feet off the water, under the German radar, climb rapidly to about eight thousand feet to get over the coastal guns, and then drop back down to low level.

  Most, if not all, operations before D-day, in June of 1944, were conducted on moonlit nights to make it easier to navigate and to identify the target.

  Fortunately, the crews had excellent maps, showing woods, streams, even individual houses. Lakes and streams stood out particularly well, shining silver in the moonlight. Forests appeared as distinctive black blobs. The bombardier, sitting in the Plexiglas nose, watched the scenery unfold a few hundred feet below and was primarily responsible for identifying checkpoints. But the rest of the crew members kept up a constant watch for significant terrain points and for other aircraft—especially enemy night fighters. The navigator, in his own compartment in the nose, kept track of the plane’s progress by estimating the time and distance that had been flown and ticking off checkpoints as they were spotted by other members of the crew.

  Navigation was aided by the Gee box, a system that pinpointed the plane’s position by comparing signals from three radio stations in England. It was accurate to within a quarter of a mile in England but less accurate over the Continent. The Gee box doesn’t measure up to today’s standards for navigational accuracy, but in World War II, a navigator could claim a perfect mission if he ended up within three miles of his destination and within three minutes of his estimated time of arrival. The new radar altimeter, just becoming available, told the pilots how far they were from the ground and also helped to identify prominent terrain features.

  In some cases, the agents insisted on being dropped into unmarked and unmanned drop zones. That way, they could be almost certain not to be greeted by German soldiers. But, in most cases, drops of Joes and cargo were made where members of the resistance movements were waiting on the ground. Finding the right place and making sure that the right people were waiting down there in the darkness were critical.

  The planes had several systems for communicating with those down below. The most primitive was an exchange of c
oded signals by flashlight or small signal lamp. But there were two more sophisticated means of communicating between the approaching plane and those waiting on the ground.

  The S-phone was a kind of powerful walkie-talkie radio with a range of eight to ten miles. As soon as the ground operator heard the plane, he could talk to the crew, guiding them into the drop zone. An advanced version of the S-phone, known as the homing S-phone, sent out a signal that permitted the navigator, using his radio compass, to home in on the transmitter.

  During 1944, the Carpetbagger planes were gradually equipped with the Rebecca-Eureka system, which used radar pulses reflected off the ground system—Eureka—to guide the plane, with its Rebecca device, to the target. The Eureka operator could also vary the intensity or frequency of the radar blips to transmit a coded identification signal to the plane.

  The reception committees on the ground used three different systems of signal lights to mark the drop zones. The first system consisted of a triangle formed by three white lights with a single red light at the apex of the triangle flashing the recognition signal for the day. The red light was placed downwind, and the plane would approach from that direction, against the wind.

  The second system was similar, except that one white light flashed and three red lights formed the triangle.

  In the third and most commonly used system, three red torches were set out in a line with a flashing white light at the downwind end. Sometimes, bonfires were used instead of torches.

  In an ideal situation, the pilot spotted the lights, lined up properly, and swooped over the drop zone, delivering Joes and cargo in one pass.