All this talk about Agent drops to Chindits etc. got me reaching for my copy of 'SOE in the Far East' by Charles Cruickshank. Can't find amny mention of Stinson L-5's, but below what he says about 'Dispatch and Reception' in the Far East.
FWIW Cruickshank had official access to SOE records about 10-years before they were released and available in the National Archives
Only Burma (from India and China) and French Indo-China (from China) could be infiltrated overland; but it was virtually impossible because of the length of the journey and the danger of attack by bandits. The alternatives were dispatch by submarine or aircraft. However, the Royal Navy considered that submarines were best used to attack shipping, and while they did land many agents, the operations were almost invariably fitted into routine patrols. Equally, the RAF gave priority to their own operations.
In May 1942 the India Air Landing School at Dinjan in Assam dropped two agents into Siam, and in the next twelve months carried out ten more agent sorties, six successful. In June 1943 No. 1576 (Special Duties (SD)) Flight was formed at Chaklala with Hudsons, and for the first time SOE and the other clandestine services had exclusive use of RAF aircraft. The Flight was re-formed in February 1944 as No. 357 (SD) Squadron (commanded by Squadron Leader J. R. Moore), succeeded in December 1944 by Wing Commander L. M. (later Sir Lewis) Hodges. The Squadron’s A Flight (Dakotas, Hudsons, and Liberators) was based initially at Digri in Bengal, and from September 1944 at Jessore. B Flight - Catalina flying boats - was at Redhills Lake in Madras. From April 1945 No. 357 (SD) Squadron operated a Lysander Flight from Meiktila in Burma, using jungle airstrips to deliver and pick up agents. The Flight moved south to Mingaladon in May after the liberation of Rangoon. It carried out more than 350 sorties, taking in 142 men and bringing out 282. The clandestine operations Liberator fleet was augmented in November 1944 by the formation of No. 358 (SD) Squadron (commanded by Wing Commander P. G. D. Farr). No. 628 (SD) Squadron, formed in April 1944 (commanded by Squadron Leader F. L. Godber) and disbanded in October of that year, operated Catalinas from Redhills Lake, as did No. 240 Squadron from December 1944 (Wing Commander B. A. C. Wood). No. 160 Squadron (Liberators) was transferred to special duties in January 1945 and from April operated full time from Kankesanturai and Mmneriya in Ceylon dropping agents and supplies in Malaya and Sumatra.
When Liberators became available it was possible to cover from India or Ceylon almost the whole of the SEAC operational area In January 1945 a Liberator Mark VI of No. 357 (SD) Squadron captained by Flying Officer J. Churchill DFC, carried stores for an SOE party in South Johore to a dropping-zone surrounded by tall trees and visible only from directly overhead. The aircraft was airborne for twenty-one hours fifty-five minutes and on the homeward journey had to land at Chittagong as its fuel was nearly exhausted. This feat was exceeded on 31 July/1 August 1945 when a Liberator Mark Vc of No. 160 Squadron (captain Flight Lieutenant J. A. Muir) flew from Minneriya to South Johore. being airborne for twenty-four hours ten minutes, and spending eighty-five minutes over the target area at Kota Tinggi, where alas no reception party was seen.
For these long flights 16,000 pounds of fuel were needed to carry a payload of 2,000 pounds; and the aircraft had to take off at well above the official safe weight. The crews, many on their first operational tour, were under great strain, having from May to October to battle against the atrocious weather of the south-west monsoon, to navigate across mountainous jungle country where the only helpful landmark was the occasional river, and to pinpoint dropping-zones of necessity hidden in the most unlikely places, difficult to identify even on the clearest moonlit night. The weather was by far the greatest danger and accounted for many special-duties aircraft. Of the twenty-seven lost by Nos. 357 and 358 (SD) Squadrons only one was shot down by enemy fighters, over Siam on a daylight flight. Six of the crew, two of the OSS agents on board, and their conducting officer, escaped with their lives. Four of the crew were interned by the Siamese, but two including the captain and the three OSS men were rescued by the party to which they had been delivering stores. A Dakota of No. 357 (SD) Squadron later brought out the survivors.3
The skill and daring of the Lysander pilots won the admiration of the SOE parties they served. They used makeshift jungle airstrips usually with a surface at the mercy of the monsoon rains although some were more elaborate. At Mewaing in Burma a six-hundred-yard all-weather strip was constructed from split bamboo; and in Siam two semi-permanent strips were laid down with the help of village labour. One of these was 1,000 yards long, and consisted of nine inches of rock covered by gravel and earth in which grass was sown. Catalinas, which could carry agents to within a few miles of their landing-beaches, made it possible to dispense with submarines.
Parties could be dropped ‘blind’, that is to say into an area where there was no one to receive them; or they could drop to a reception committee’. In the more hazardous blind drop the leader jumped in the middle of the group so that he would be well placed to marshal them on landing. When all had landed they flashed their torches to provide an aiming point for the aircraft to drop their stores. When all containers had arrived torches were extinguished, or covered with a blue filter, and the collection of stores began. Reception committees and aircraft crews sometimes failed to appreciate each others difficulties. In May 1945 Wing Commander Hugh Verity made a compilation of reception committee comments and the related pilots reports which “showed how both sides do their damndest to make operations a success, and how difficult it is for the man on the ground to assess the aircrew’s difficulties’, in the hope that each side would become more tolerant of the other.
Blind dropping was very much hit or miss. Information about the dropping-zone might be out of date; and even an area that looks safe from aerial reconnaissance could have changed, for example, through the planting of ‘panjis’, chevaux defrise of sharpened bamboo waiting to impale the agent as he landed. Seven Kachins dropped in the Shan States in Burma had a lucky escape from this defensive weapon. They overshot their intended dropping-zone, and later discovered that the whole area had been panjied. Another group in the Shan States was equally lucky. They landed in the only place for miles around ‘which was not staked against glider attack and sown with panjis against parachute landings’. Even slight panji wounds were liable to turn septic.
It was safer to go in to a reception committee whether by day or by night. The dropping-zone was delineated by pre-arranged signal fires, or torches, perhaps in the form of a T, with a torch flashing a letter in Morse code. At night fires could be seen a long way off, but in daylight pilots had to rely on smoke which might be dispersed by the wind or masked by the jungle. There was also the danger of confusion with ordinary village fires, and from time to time villagers received unsolicited gifts of foodstuffs and highly sophisticated explosive devices.
The reception committee could communicate with an aircraft in daylight by means of a visual code using three white panels. A single panel, looking like the figure ‘I’ from the air, was a request for a W/T set, ‘II’ for a W/T operator, ‘III’ for a doctor, and so on. Two panels making an arrowhead directed the aircraft towards a bombing target, other panels, each representing 1,000 yards, indicating the distance. Towards the end of the war in the Far East visual methods of communication were being replaced by the Rebecca/Eureka system which used radar in the aircraft (Rebecca) to help the navigator to locate a ground party equipped with the matching Eureka. An alternative was the S-phone through which the ground operator could talk to the aircraft, using a silent microphone which allowed him to speak in little more than a whisper. Some parties were equipped with these devices but neither had much success in the Far East.
Many agents - ‘Joes’, as they were termed in the aircraft captains’ reports - appeared to make light of the considerable ordeal of a parachute jump. One, dropping into French Indo-China, ‘went out calmly chewing a sandwich’. However, Major R. A. Rubinstein’s account of his drop into Burma in January 1945 probably epitomizes the feelings of most. Although he was a twenty-four-year-old veteran who had served with the Maquis the parachute jump was still a challenge.
Felt rotten all the afternoon and very frightened. Thought I would never face another op. after this, and was very annoyed at the offhand manner of the non-op types who kept saying ‘Don’t worry, old boy, the chute won’t open anyway’, all very funny . . . When the take-off came I felt much better . . . Was quite easy during the run and didn’t feel too bad on the slide . . . Felt much better when I heard the engine note change, and I went. . . The moon was very bright and even colours showed up. A grand reception, all fear gone and glad to have arrived. One never notices the fear going, it just does!
There were few fatal parachute casualties. One occurred when a man’s weight proved to be more than his parachute could cope with. There was a bizarre accident when a Liberator’s crew had to bale out over Burma. The radio operator could not find his parachute and was taken on the back of the second pilot, an Australian; but when the parachute opened the man lost his hold and fell to his death.5 Minor mishaps were not uncommon - bones could be broken, especially when men jumped from a low height. A whole party dropped into Malaya in February 1945 found themselves hung up on trees, and one member narrowly escaped strangulation. Another, carrying the W/T battery on his back suffered severe burns from leaking acid. The failure rate of parachutes carrying stores was much higher - round about 5 per cent.
There was an art in camouflaging the arrival of agents in enemy territory. Sorties could be synchronized with bombing raids to divert attention from them. Flares could be used to give the impression that photo-reconnaissance was the sole object of the mission. Leaflets could be scattered on the flight to and from the dropping-zone to make the enemy believe that the aircraft was flying a routine propaganda sortie. These methods were surprisingly effective. One dropping-zone in Burma no more than two miles from a Japanese outpost was regularly supplied for five months before the enemy became aware of it.
Before SOE could call on special-duties aircraft it had to rely on submarines for long-range operations. The Royal Navy approved these missions but usually only as part of their own routine patrols, a compromise that neither side liked. Submarine commanders’ reports are often scathing about SOE’s performance and are regularly endorsed: ‘Yet another wasted mission.’ In July 1943 Mackenzie asked for a submarine force for his exclusive use so as the present procedure whereby SOE operations must of necessity be secondary to submarine renders any precision of execution almost out of the question and has proved to react most unfavourably on SOE personnel whose despatch has frequently to be postponed at the last minute and who have to remain under conditions detrimental to their physique for longer periods than would be needful if they were allowed to proceed direct to their operational area.
Nothing came of this breathless sentence; but the need for a special submarine fleet disappeared when longer-range aircraft became available.