"Operation Airthief"

Skua · Oct 3, 2004

I though this story, quoted from International Air Power Review Volume 3, would interest some of you :

By the spring of 1942 the Fw 190 had become an uncomfortably sharp thorn in the side of RAF Fighter Command. Obviously, if an airworty example of the Fw 190 could be captured and its secrets probed, that would be of inestimable value. Capt. Philip Pickney, a British commando officer, hatched a daring plan to gain that end.
In an operation of this type, two men might succeed where more might fail. Pickney suggested that his good friend Jeffrey Quill, chief test pilot at the Supermarine company, shoul accompany him on the enterprise.
The essentials of the plan were as follows. On Night 1 a Royal Navy motor gunboat, equipped with direction-finding radio, was to carry the pair to a point within about two miles of a selected beach on the French coast, where they would disembark into a folding canoe. The pair would paddle ashore, hide their boat in sand dunes and lie up during the following day. On Night 2 the pair would move inland to whitin observation range of the selected Fw 190 airfield, and hide up before dawn. During the daylight hours the pair would keep the airfield under observation and plan their attack. On Night 3 the pair would penetrate the airfield defences by stealth, and conceal themselves as near as possible to one or more Fw 190s at their dispersal points. The pair would then wait until the next day, when the ground crew arrived to run the engine of one of the fighters.
The pair would then break cover, shoot or drive away the ground crewmen, and Jeffrey Quill would jump into the cockpit and taxi the machine to the runway. As he did so, Pickney would be outside the plane warding off any attempt to interfere with the operation. Once Quill was safely airborne, Pickney would withdraw to a previoulsy prepared hide. On Night 4 he would return to the hidden canoe. Just before dawn he would launch the craft and paddle out to the sea, making radio transmissions so that the motor gunboat could home on the craft and pick him up.
Yet in a remarkable coincidence, on the very day Pickney submitted his proposal, the need for his risky operation disappeared. On the afternoon of 23 june an Fw 190 pilot had become disorientated in a dogfight with Spitfires over Southern England. He mistook the Bristol Channel for the English Channel and made a wheels-down landing at Pembrey airfield, south Wales (below). Thus, the RAF gained the coveted example of an Fw 190, without having to resort to the risky 'Airthief' operation.
Click to expand...

PMN1 · Oct 3, 2004

Pickney

The whole episode is described in Geoffrey Quill's book 'Spitfire - a test pilots story'. from what I remember of the book, Pickney was quite pissed off with the German pilot for spoiling his fun.

Ebar · Oct 4, 2004

I came across a similar story in a book about the Swordfish torpedo bomber. Two Bf109's of the most recent type landed on a British airfield. The teller of the story wasn't sure whether they got lost or were defecting but either way ground crews jumped on them before they could change their minds. A short time later a Swordfish landed at the same airfield. The first thing they saw was a pair of parked 109's and they immediately had a bit of an Oh Sh*t moment. They managed to turn the plane around and were all set to take off again before a ground crew managed to run out to stop them.

PMN1 · Oct 4, 2004

Landing on enemy territory

A Whitley of 77 Sqadron landed in Germany by accident in 1940 thinking it was France or Luxembourg but they got away in time, i'll dig the story out

Roel · Oct 4, 2004

I think we can make this a "wrong airfield" topic by now... Any takers?

Skua · Oct 10, 2004

What about how the British got their hands on the SN-2 radar and FuG 227 Flensburg homing device ?

The Ju 88G-1 of Obergefreiter Mäckle ( 7. Staffel, Nachtjagdgeschwader 2 ) suffered a compass failure on the night of 12/13 July 1944 and became lost. They finally found a radio beacon which seemed to come from the right direction and decided to follow this. And landed their aircraft at RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk. I don´t think the British even knew that the Germans had the FuG 227, a device which could home in on the Monica tail warning radars fitted to British bombers.

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