I’m very pleased that my friends at Osprey have indulged me again, publishing today my account of the Mosquito raid on Amiens prison in a beautifully produced ‘Raid’ volume. I was lucky that the amazing Adam Tooby, who hides his light under a bushel, agreed to create some remarkable new paintings for the book.
The book sets out to explain the truth of the raid. There is one particularly silly theory swirling around that the attack was undertaken as part of Operation Fortitude to protect the secrets of the forthcoming invasion of France from the Nazis. In this account, the raid took place to somehow persuade the Germans that the invasion, when it came, would target the Pas de Calais. It’s not true: the remarkably detailed Fortitude files in the National Archives, while replete with considerable detail on every imaginable subject, are entirely silent on the issue of Amiens. In any case, the Germans never needed persuading that the Pas de Calais was the obvious invasion target. Another suggestion is that a ‘British agent’ with the secrets to the forthcoming invasion of Europe had to be ‘busted’ from the prison before the Nazis discovered his secret. This is also tosh. Only a tiny handful of people knew about D Day and all that it entailed and those who did know something about the arrangements (like Air Vice Marshal Basil Embry) were not allowed to even fly over enemy territory. The truth, as it so often is, is much more prosaic and lies in a remarkable set of human friendships developed during the war.
It all started with Operation Biting in February 1942 when the RAF’s Group Captain Percy ‘Pick’ Pickard first came into contact with the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) agent Gilbert Renault (aka ‘Remy’). Renault and his group of ‘résistants’ provided the first details of the German radar site at Bruneval and were the brains behind the successful attack on the German radar site. Later in 1942 Pickard went off to 161 Squadron to spend nearly a year flying secret agents in and out of France in Lysanders. One of his regular passengers was Renault, along with a many of his agents in Renault’s ‘CND’ group. Pickard and Renault became firm friends. One of Renault’s many sub-agents in northern France was an ex-army officer, Dominque Ponchardier. He, together with his brother, ran a network called ‘The Lookalikes’ (La Sosies), which provided information and intelligence to MI6 through the Free French intelligence organisation, BCRA, led in London by Andre Dewavrin. Renault was one of Dewavrin’s most important agents and Dewavrin in turn was one of MI6’s key assets. Without putting too fine a point on it, the BCRA was effectively an arm of MI6, as was RF Section of the Special Operations Executive.
But we don’t have time for that here. I detail all these relationships in my 2014 account The Jail Busters. From mid-1943 the Germans began to achieve quite dramatic success against the various networks of résistants across France, at a time when these networks were becoming especially important in the run up to the invasion of France. They were critical, for instance, in unravelling the secrets of both the V1 and V2 rocket campaigns against England, as well as uncovering the secrets of the Atlantic Wall. Many of those arrested found themselves in Amiens prison. At the same time, the new low level attack wing of the 2nd Allied Tactical Air Force was struggling to find targets to suit the fast, low flying Mosquito Mark VI’s with which it was equipped. In due course the V1 sites became perfect targets for 140 Wing. Then, at some stage in late 1943, at least two requests made their way to London (one came via Geneva) to ask whether there was any way the prison walls could be breached to release the prisoners. We know that one of these requests came from Ponchardier. One of his most valuable agents, a young man called Jean Beaurin, was incarcerated there. As a résistant he would either in due course be executed, or at best transported to the ‘night and fog’ of the concentration camp system somewhere in Germany or further east. Was there anything the British could do ?
We know – from Airey Neave – that the question of a low level attack on the prison was debated at length in MI6. Neave’s organisation, MI9, also part of MI6, had a number of its helpers in the prison. One of them, Dr Robert Beaumont, was tragically to die in the raid. We also know that Renault, Dewavrin, Pickard and another French friend, a navigator in the RAF, Philippe Level, met regularly in London to share a pint and a meal together. They had all become good friends. Renault was deeply exercised by the fate of Beaurin and the others, and repeatedly pressed Dewavrin and Claude Cohen, his MI6 boss, to find a way to free the prisoners. It would have been a subject of intense conversation by this group of men over their pints of ale. By this stage, Pickard was serving in 140 Group of 2ATAF, flying the Mark VI Mosquito, a fabulously effective and versatile aircraft equipped with cannons, bombs and machine guns. Although MI6 made a formal request to the Air Ministry to evaluate the possibility of a raid, it’s inconceivable to me that Pickard didn’t also discuss it with his boss Basil Embry. Embry, incidentally, had made a successful ‘home run’ from France after being shot down earlier in the war.
So it was that Embry was offered a low level target to test the mettle of his Mosquito crews, and the raid was conceived. It was never known by the British as Operation Jericho. It should have been. Soon after the war a film was made of the raid, with that title, and it has stuck ever since. Ponchardier and Renault (who incidentally had had a pre-war interest in film making) were advisers. It was too good a story not to be told. When it received its first showing in Paris many of those involved, including Embry, came to the launch. Tragically, this did not include Pickard, who lost his life in the attack.
The rest, as we are constantly being told, is history. Now all you need to do is to read the book to fill in all the gaps. Enjoy!
Ducellier's argument that the raid was part of Fortitude was never more than silly, obsessive conspiracy theory. The final nails in the coffin are the memoirs of Charles Carrington and Solly Zuckerman. Both knew the true D-Day bombing deception plan - twice the weight of bombs in the Pas-de-Calais as on Normandy - and knew about the Amiens raid from the inside, Zuckerman especially so. Neither had any motive to hide the truth and both discussed Amiens as a straightforward operation to free prisoners.
Thanks, Rob. I’m currently reading The Jail Busters as a warm up for Operation Jericho’s publication. Fascinating how the operation came about as a result of a fortunate combination of desperation on the part of the resistant meeting opportunity in the shape of 140 Wing needing low level targets for the Mosquito VI. Looking forward to Operation Jericho immensely. All the best.