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

by Orr Kelly

  As the plane approached the mountainous area of eastern France about 3 A.M. on 7 July, Heflin held his altitude at one thousand feet above the terrain. They flew closer and closer to their destination, until they were only minutes away. And still, because of the low altitude and surrounding mountains, Tresemer was unable to pick up a signal on his Rebecca receiver. Finally, when they were only four miles from the landing site, the signal came through. Moments later, they picked out four lights on the ground. A beacon down below flashed the coded signal, N (dash-dot). The plane responded with an R (dot-dash-dot). Heflin swung around and made a perfect three-point landing on the rough field.

  As Tresemer jumped down to guide the plane to a parking place, the first words he heard were: “Jesus Christ, Yanks, am I glad to see you!” It was a Canadian gunner whose plane had been shot down over France. An American lieutenant, who used only the name Paul, emerged from the darkness and directed the plane to a spot near a grove of trees at the foot of a thousand-foot cliff. As soon as Heflin parked, Maquis troops moved in and placed small trees in holes that had already been dug. Within minutes, the plane disappeared into the woods.

  For the next two days, the Carpetbaggers were honored guests of the French resistance. They toured the area controlled by the Maquis, distributing a resistance newspaper. And they ate and drank. At one party, they and their hosts did away with thirty-eight bottles of champagne.

  On the first afternoon of their visit, the Americans attended a ceremony at which Heflin reviewed Maquis troops marching by and then placed a wreath at the base of a monument to those who had died in the resistance movement. Standing by dejectedly at the ceremony was a group of German prisoners. The Americans were told of a Maquis policy: for each member of the resistance killed or tortured by the Germans, three prisoners would be killed. The previous day, they were told, fifty-seven Germans had been shot.

  On the first night, the Americans listened to the BBC for a signal giving them the go-ahead for takeoff. Their flight was canceled. The next night, they received the okay to return home, and Heflin made an instrument takeoff in a driving rain at 11:15 P.M. The passengers on the return trip were two American aviators; the Canadian gunner who had greeted them on their arrival; two British fliers; a British major who had been organizing the resistance; a young French girl and a Frenchman who were slated to attend a school for saboteurs in England; and two Hindus who had been rescued from the Germans by the Maquis.

  The plane came in for a landing at Harrington at 4:30 A.M. on 9 July.

  The Carpetbaggers soon received another C-47 and then, in mid-August, two more. Full-scale operations began late in August, with two to four planeloads of Joes and supplies delivered each night. By mid-September, when the advancing Allies had occupied most of the area served by the Carpetbaggers, the C-47s had carried out thirty-five missions to twelve different fields and delivered 78 Joes and 104,000 pounds of arms and ammunition. On the return trips, they brought back 213 Joes along with cargoes of mail.

  Almost all the deliveries made by the Carpetbaggers were warmly received. However, the reception committee at Nantua let it be known that they would just as soon have more arms and ammunition and not necessarily so many Joes. The resistance fighters also reacted with derision to one brilliant idea cooked up by someone in the OSS. The OSS produced thousands of one-shot .45-caliber pistols. The pistol cost two dollars to make and was called the Liberator. The theory was that, on D-day, each Frenchman and -woman would rise up and shoot one German. The word quickly came back: “If you can’t drop us something that shoots more than once, don’t bother.” Long after the war, Fish came upon thousands of the pistols stored at a military base in Washington.

  During these missions, only one plane was damaged, when it ran into a ditch on a rough field in France on 6 September. The propellers were bent and the nose was crushed, but no one was injured. The next day, a maintenance crew was flown in from England to repair the plane so it could be flown home five days later.

  During the hectic months of 1944, the Carpetbagger crews, whether flying B-24s or C-47s, knew they were making a significant contribution to the war effort and had heard anecdotal accounts of the activities of the resistance. But it was not until much later that a full picture emerged of what they had accomplished.

  In June, July, and August, special-forces agents and sabotage team members, who had been dropped onto the Continent by the hundreds, were credited with making 885 rail cuts and destroying 322 locomotives. German records indicated 295 locomotives were destroyed by sabotage in June alone.

  A major contribution by the saboteurs was to cut telephone and telegraph lines. This forced the Germans to communicate by radio—with the Allies listening in.

  While the battle raged in Normandy, major elements of eight German divisions were tied down in antiguerrilla campaigns. Several crack German divisions were specifically targeted by the saboteurs. When the 2d SS Panzer Division moved north from Toulouse toward Normandy on 8 June, sabotage teams dogged its heels all the way, delaying its arrival on the battle front by at least five days.

  Although it was certainly not their job, a few of the Carpetbaggers became actively involved in the guerrilla movement on the ground after crashing behind enemy lines. Perhaps the most notable was Lt. John B. “Johnny” Mead.

  He was a bombardier on the crew of Lt. Murry L. Simon. Their plane was caught by flak guns mounted on a blacked-out troop train a little after midnight on 5 May 1944. The plane was hit repeatedly and burst into flames, but all the crew members managed to parachute to safety. They landed near the town of Roanne, about forty miles northwest of Lyon in central France.

  Mead hid in a farmhouse for four days until a British agent known as Victor came for him. They bicycled to a Maquis headquarters in Roanne. The agent asked if Mead would stay and help him train a resistance unit. Mead agreed, and, later that month, they received a coded message of approval from London.

  At first, Mead was assigned to teach the French members of the unit how to use American equipment being dropped to them by the Carpetbaggers. On 29 May, he was at the drop zone for a delivery and talked over the S-phone to the crew of the circling B-24. Apart from the earlier secret message from the British agent, it was the first word the Carpetbaggers had received that Mead and other members of the crew were alive.

  Mead’s duties rapidly expanded beyond training and coordinating air drops from the Carpetbaggers. In late June, he was made commander of his own small guerrilla outfit—code-named Maquis Violette—operating out of a mountain headquarters southeast of Roanne. At one point, in late July, Mead’s unit was attacked by German police and French Milice working for the French puppet government in Vichy. Instead of standing to fight, they simply faded away, to rendezvous a week later. Their next assignment was to an area northwest of Roanne, where they carried out a series of attacks on German roads, telegraph and telephone lines, and railways.

  On one of their operations, a band of twenty-eight men led by Mead found themselves on a hill surrounded by what they thought were thirty or so Germans. He decided to stay and fight. But their information was wrong. Rather than facing a widely scattered force of thirty, they found themselves confronting an estimated six hundred Germans.

  As the enemy soldiers moved up the hill, Mead and his men slipped through their ranks down the hill. But there, they found their path blocked by a road patrolled by armored cars. Waiting until the cars were at the greatest distance, the men scooted across the road. One armored car turned and sprayed them with machine-gun fire, but one of the Maquis stood up with his submachine gun and silenced the enemy weapon.

  As soon as they crossed the road, the small group split up. Mead and one aide reached the Loire River, with the Milice close behind. The two men dove in and swam the river while their pursuers raked the water with bullets. They later joined up with other members of their group.

  On 20 August, the Germans abandoned the Roanne area. Mead received instructions to rejoin his unit in Engla
nd and set off on a circuitous route that took him to Lyon and then down to Italy.

  When Mead reached Italy, he was finally able to send off a wire to his wife, Dorothy, telling her that he was alive. She had been informed that he was missing in action, but, because of the secrecy surrounding the Allied work with the resistance, she was not informed that he had survived the loss of his plane even after members of his unit knew he was okay.

  In Italy, Mead received orders to return to France to work with an air force recovery unit involved in finding aviators who had been shot down by the enemy. It was not until 4 November that Mead finally returned to England to find that he had been promoted to captain and recommended for a Silver Star.

  With the Allies moving rapidly across France, the Carpetbaggers flew their last mission—for the time being—on 16–17 September and ceased operations over the Continent the following day. In their eight and a half months of almost nightly flights, they had dramatically increased their ability to deliver men and supplies to the Continent.

  In January, the Carpetbaggers had attempted 17 sorties but completed only 8 of them. In July, when they reached the peak of their operations, they flew on twenty-eight nights—including nights when there was no moon and the weather was bad—and successfully completed 397 sorties. In that month, the four Carpetbagger squadrons dropped 4,608 containers, 2,909 smaller packages, 1,378 bundles of leaflets, and 62 Joes.

  Although the Carpetbaggers ceased their nightly operations in September, the war for them was far from over.

  CHAPTER 9

  Jack of All Trades

  With the liberation of most of the drop zones they had served during much of 1944, the Carpetbaggers found themselves in a situation that would be very familiar to later generations of Air Force special operators. They were called upon to carry out a variety of tasks, from ferrying gasoline to the fuel-starved tanks of General Patton to smuggling a German V-2 missile out of Norway to serving as bait for enemy night fighters so British bombers could get to their targets.

  The fuel-lift to Patton began almost immediately after the cessation of flights to support the resistance. The last drop flight was flown on the night of 16–17 September. On 21 September, the first B-24 took off with fuel for Patton’s tanks.

  For these flights, the B-24s were quickly modified. Four five-hundred-gallon fuel bladders were installed in the bomb bay. Other tanks holding another thousand gallons were installed in the fuselage behind the bomb bay. The plane’s auxiliary wing tanks were blocked off so they, too, could be used to carry fuel. With these modifications, each plane carried twenty-five hundred gallons of eighty-octane gasoline for the tanks. This was in addition to its own one-hundred-octane aviation fuel.

  Although their routes carried them over areas already controlled by Allied armies and thus safe from enemy antiaircraft fire, the crews were still nervous with their highly inflammable cargo. The danger was increased by the fact that the fields they landed on in Belgium were either rough strips quickly prepared by army engineers or recently liberated German fighter-plane bases with short runways. At some fields, abandoned by the Germans only days before, the Army was still busy finding and exploding mines when the B-24s arrived.

  The crews quickly got into the fuel-delivery routine. As soon as a plane landed and pulled off to the side, engineers moved in with pumps to transfer the gas to trucks of the Red Ball Express, which then roared off to supply the tanks of the Third Army.

  Within a few weeks, the Carpetbaggers had delivered almost a million gallons of gasoline, preparing Patton’s army to resume its march to the east.

  The emergency fuel-lift was not cheap, however. Because the planes’ auxiliary tanks had been used to carry the lower-grade gasoline, they could not be used again for aviation fuel. Before the planes could be put back in service, the contaminated tanks would all have had to be removed and replaced. Instead, with new B-24s coming off the production lines at the rate of one an hour, the group was simply issued new airplanes.

  At about the same time the fuel operation was getting underway, the Carpetbaggers were also tasked with returning Allied crewmen who had been interned in Switzerland and Sweden, two neutral countries bordering the war zone.

  In the case of Switzerland, the 856th Squadron of the 492d Bombardment Group, the Carpetbagger unit, set up a processing center at the Hotel Beau Rivage on Lake Annecy in southeastern France. This occurred on 5 October 1944, as soon as the Allied armies had cleared the Germans from the border area between France and Switzerland. At that time, there were an estimated twelve hundred Americans interned in Switzerland. Most of them were aircrew members whose planes had landed in Switzerland or who had made their way across the border after crashing in France.

  With an Allied victory only a matter of time, the Swiss seemed unconcerned if the airmen escaped and might even have been happy to see them go.

  As soon as a man crossed the border, a car was sent from Annecy to pick him up. At the Beau Rivage, the men were given a hot meal, a hot bath, and new clothes. They were then carefully questioned about their experiences in Switzerland and any information they had about traffic between Switzerland and Germany.

  Some of the interned aviators had given their word that they would not flee the country. They were then free to move about as they wished. Fish, who was group commander at the time, recalls one visit he made to Annecy:

  “After a night’s rest at the Beau Rivage Hotel, we prepared to return to England. Several ‘escapees’ were brought to the field to return with us. One ‘escapee,’ a first lieutenant, informed me that he might not be a ‘legal escapee.’ After he was interned, he agreed to a Swiss parole which allowed him to attend the University of Zurich. He had left the university without resigning his parole. He was concerned. I told him not to worry. My job was to transport ‘escapees’ back to England, and he was obviously an ‘escapee.’ I took him to England and sent him to London for interrogation.

  “Two days later, I received a telephone call from our embassy in London. The caller told me to get that lieutenant back into Switzerland as fast as I could. The Swiss government was vigorously protesting that he had broken his parole. I explained the situation to our London air force headquarters, and they sent him back to Harrington. The next day, we carried him back to Annecy, took him to the Swiss border, turned him over to the Swiss border guards, and they placed him back in an internment camp. His parole was revoked and the Swiss were satisfied.

  “About five days later, he again escaped and came to Annecy. This time, he was a legitimate ‘escapee’ and the Swiss had no objection. We transported him back to Harrington, sent him to London, where he was processed and returned to the USA. The requirements of international neutrality had been satisfied.”

  Between October 1944 and mid-February 1945, the Carpetbagger mission at Annecy processed 783 persons. In February, as the Allies seemed on the verge of victory, the Swiss agreed to a repatriation plan according to which one American internee would be released for every two Germans. Since most of the Americans were highly trained aircrewmen and most of the Germans were middle-aged ground-force men, the United States got the better of the deal. On 17 February, a train carrying 512 former internees steamed from Geneva to Marseilles, and the Annecy mission was closed down.

  Late in the war, the Swiss relaxed their neutrality stance even further and, in March of 1945, began permitting Allied planes to fly across their territory. In a memoir written after the war, Douglas D. Walker recalled his first such flight. Walker settled in Tacoma, Washington, after the war and has since died. On his mission over Switzerland, he was a waist gunner-dispatcher on a B-24 flying out of Lyon into southern Germany as part of a renewed Carpetbagger operation.

  “By flying from Lyon to southern Germany over Switzerland, we cut the flying time considerably,” he recalled. “More importantly, we avoided flying over a considerable portion of enemy territory bristling with antiaircraft guns and night-fighter pursuit planes.

  “That ni
ght, as we flew over the jagged Swiss Alps, we were all spellbound by the majestic beauty of those lovely peaks glistening in the moonlight under their white mantle of snow and ice.

  “We were all a little nervous about flying over neutral Switzerland—even with their permission. We were concerned that instructions from higher Swiss authority not to fire on us might not trickle down to the Swiss gun crews in time to insure us a safe overflight.

  “As we flew towards the city of Geneva, we were awed by the sight of the blazing lights of the metropolis, sparkling by the side of Lake Geneva. It was a peacetime scene which we had not seen in some time.

  “We were accustomed to flying over totally blacked-out cities in the rest of war-torn Europe. It was such a drastic change to see brilliantly lit skies over neutral Switzerland’s cities.

  “We were all staring out of the Liberator’s window at this startling scene when suddenly the interior of the Lib was illuminated to almost daylight intensity!

  “The Swiss gun batteries around Geneva had thrown several searchlight beams on us. We felt naked and vulnerable as we held our collective breath, waiting for ‘friendly’ flak to hit us.

  “However, the word must have filtered down to the gun crews, and we flew on without a shot being fired.

  “On the way back to Lyon, after we had dropped our agent in Germany, Lt. [Robert] Swarts [the pilot] carefully avoided the larger Swiss cities, just for added insurance. Needless to say, we were relieved that our Liberator did not get shot full of holes—like Swiss cheese.”

  In the north, the Carpetbaggers had several quite different assignments.

  One of them was to fly a kind of off-the-record airline from Leuchars, Scotland, into Stockholm’s Broma airport. The American planes were unmarked, and the crew members wore civilian clothes. Since Sweden was neutral and still carried on some commerce with Germany, the Americans had the strange experience of sharing the airfield with German planes.