D-DAY SPECIAL - The Story of Albemarle P1442

Because of the impact his death had upon my mother, I grew up in the knowledge that her brother had been a victim of the recent war.  He had died on the Burma Railway.  It wasn't long before I also learned of my eldest cousin, the firstborn of my father's eldest sister, who had also died on active service.  Not until many years later, though, when I began seriously to look into my family history, did I discover that he had actually died on D-Day, 6th June 1944, and I started to piece together the circumstances of his death.

Wilfred Thomas Francis was born on 4th January 1922.  I know nothing of his life up to the days before his death, save that he had joined the RAF, and had earned promotion to the rank of Sergeant.  He had been posted to 42 OTU (Operational Training Unit) at RAF Ashbourne in Derbyshire. Ashbourne, and its satellite station Darley Moor, came into existence during the early years of World War II, and their history forms the subject of a book "RAF Ashbourne and Darley Moor - A Tale of Two Airfields" by Noel Ryan and Chris Percy (Wildtrack Publishing, 2007).

As the war progressed, the importance was recognised of using gliders for the precise delivery of equipment and personnel into a combat area.  The Armstrong Whitworth "Albemarle" was originally designed as a twin-engined medium bomber but, by the time it came into service, superior bombers were already available with proven ability.  The Albemarle was reclassified as 'general reconnaissance with bombing capability'; variants were produced as 'GT' (general transport) or 'ST' (special transport), and some of the 'ST' models were fitted with the necessary equipment to enable them to tow gliders.  After brief initial use with operational squadrons, Albemarle P1442 was converted from GT to ST in July 1943, and was one of those supplied to RAF Ashbourne when it was equipped with the Albemarle in September.

As part of the preparations for the D-Day invasion, planes and personnel were gathered from training units like Ashbourne to swell the numbers available in existing operational squadrons.  One of the first stages of Overlord was a preliminary strike against key bridges in Normandy, control of which would deny the enemy an easy route to counter-attack.  Paratroops for this mission were to be flown in Albemarles from RAF Harwell in Oxfordshire.  On 2nd June, 'C' Flight, 42 OTU was sent 'on temporary duty' to Hampstead Norris, Berkshire, which was a satellite airfield of Harwell.

In 2005, ex-WAAF Dorothy Drabble, of Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Notts., shared her wartime memories on the BBC 'People's War' site.  She celebrated her 21st birthday with a hangar party at Ashbourne, and continued to serve there as a flight mechanic (airframes), until the base closed at the end of the war.  She wrote, "Just before D-Day I was one of only 3 WAAFs and 32 airmen chosen by W/O Juffs for a special job. . . . We were bussed to Hampstead Norris, a Fleet Air Arm station where our Albemarles appeared decked out in black and white stripes.  Even then we were not too sure about what was happening; only that something big was afoot.  Big - and back-breaking - for we loaded and unloaded, then re-loaded tons of window in and out of those Albemarles before they finally left.  My aircraft, flown by Paddy Flynn, failed to return."

'Window' was the name given to bundles of thin strips of aluminium, dropped at timed intervals, two bundles at a time, designed to 'fool' enemy radar.  If dropped correctly, they would together present on the radar screens a picture of an aircraft that was totally fictitious.

More than sixty years had taken their toll on Dorothy's memory; the pilot's name, all records agree, was Flt Lt J A Finn; the other crew members were Flt Lt D C Morgan, DFM (navigator/bomber); F/O D F Smart (navigator/ bomber); P/O G R Wellsman (navigator/bomber); F/O A L Andrews (wireless operator/air gunner); F/Sgt R Dunk (wireless operator/air gunner) and Sgt W T Francis (air gunner).  In their book, Ryan and Percy suggest that "the duplication of 'trades' within the crew reflects the fact that they were all volunteers for this mission, a hastily assembled 'scratch' crew." Wilfred's sister once told me proudly, "He volunteered for that mission; he hadn't finished his training."

By contrast, Flt Lt Finn was a staff pilot at Ashbourne, and very experienced, while Flt Lt Morgan had joined the RAF volunteer reserve in 1939, was called into the regular service on the outbreak of war, and had won the DFM in a bombing raid in 1941, prior to his promotion.  One of the significant contributors to this section of "A Tale of Two Airfields" was his son-in-law, Len Simms, as a result of whose resources it appears that Mrs Morgan was living at (or had been evacuated to) an address in Letchworth only a couple of streets from my present home!  The letter she received there from the Air Ministry in September 1944 attempts to shed some light on the fate of P1442.

Albemarle P1442 (courtesy of
Imperial War Museum)

It refers to a report received from the International Red Cross saying that, "at 1.0 am on 6th June, an Albemarle was shot down and that the seven unknown occupants were killed.  The place of the crash and the burial place are not stated."  It then goes on to mention another Albemarle, also missing that night, also with seven occupants.  This plane did not leave Hampstead Norris until 2.29 am, however, so the Air Ministry had concluded that the report referred to P1442, which had taken off at 11.48 pm.

A number of threads have been discovered on internet forums concerning these two Albemarles that were lost from Hampstead Norris that day. Particularly informative are two exchanges on a forum called Royal Air Force Commands.  The first was in June 2004, and seeks information about a list of 14 names, half of which were the crew of P1442, and the remainder the crew of that other Albemarle, V1745, from ORTU  (Operational Refresher Training Unit), RAF 38 Group, which was based at Hampstead Norris.  All 14 were listed as 'missing' in the London Times Royal Air Force Roll of Honour on 2nd September, just 3 days before the letter was sent by the Air Ministry to Mrs Morgan.  In this exchange it is stated that V1745 crashed 5km SW of Saint-Valery-en-Caux at 01:00.  As a point of interest, this location is - in a direct line - about 100 km from the beaches where the landings were to take place!

An online database of lost aircraft states that this plane left Hampstead Norris at 2.29 am on 6th June, as does the Air Ministry letter.  However, it also confirms the place of loss as Saint-Sylvain, which is indeed near Saint-Valery-en-Caux, and cites the burial place of the crew as the local churchyard there. In further searches I discovered another website, which not only gives full details of the flight and the crew, but also includes pictures of their graves in the churchyard.  There is also a link to another site where there are pictures of a memorial elsewhere in the village.  The only disagreement is in regard to the crash time.  1.0 am is common to both the Air Ministry and the forum exchange, but is clearly not possible with a  2.29 am take-off.  The source quoted on the forum for this crash time spoke of a German report, but the reference quoted proved false, and refers to an American bomber that crashed on 12th July.  To my mind, the reference in the Air Ministry letter to the International Red Cross also indicates an enemy source.  Given the hectic circumstances, I'm inclined to believe that, whatever the truth of the original report, a single error was replicated, and that the true identity and outcome of the 2.29 take-off is as evidenced by the references here.

Another exchange on the same forum in November 2007 confirms all these details, and refers to "another [Albemarle] said to have crashed near Caen at 5 am".  A reply from Bruno Lecaplain, founder of a website dedicated to the memory of 38 Group, RAF, states categorically that V1745 crashed near St Valery (as detailed above), and that "P1442 of 42 OTU should be the one which crashed near Caen."

The elimination of V1745 still leaves the fate of P1442 undecided.  In their book, Ryan and Percy present two possible ultimate destinies of P1442 and its crew, and I can do no better than to quote this passage verbatim.  "Many [aircraft that were shot down] met their fate in the shallow valley that stretches between Falaise and the southern approaches to Caen.  These aircraft would have fallen at great speed.  On impact, they usually buried themselves many feet underground leaving only a crater and the odd piece of surface wreckage scattered as surface debris.  In northern France in 1944, whilst the local farmers were beginning to gather in the early harvest, they witnessed many air crashes.  When a plane crashed onto arable land the farmer, despite his grief and sorrow regarding the plane and its crew, could not afford the time or labour to extract the wreck from deep underground. Having a living to make, they would simply fill in the crater and sow new seed over the wreck.  Unless P1442 was lost over the English Channel, it can only be speculated that it may bave been entombed in such a way."

I find it impossible to recollect what was going on in my own life at the age of 22 years, 5 months and 2 days - which makes me all the more grateful for the sacrifice made by Wilfred and thousands of other young men on D-Day.