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***image1***The early 1930s, when war clouds were beginning to gather on the horizon in Europe and Asia, saw the development of some of the worst ideas in military aviation history.
One of these ideas was an “Army Cooperation Aircraft,” whose rather unclear duties included spotting for artillery, light ground attack, dropping supplies and transporting maps and messages between units, using a hook to scoop
message/map bags off the ground. “Army cooperation” was especially important to Britain’s Royal Air Force because as an independent, separate service, it was viewed with suspicion by the British Army.
In 1935, the RAF asked for a new Army cooperation aircraft and the Westland Company offered the Lysander – a single engine, high-gull wing monoplane designed to operate from small spaces, to be controllable at very low speeds and to have excellent cockpit visibility.
It was very ugly and large – bigger than a Spitfire – and the wing had “high tech” automatic wing slats and flaps and an unusual shape, angled slightly forward so that the pilot’s cabin was in front of the leading edge of the wing with a gunner/radio operator behind him. The wings were supported by V struts attached to large landing gear in streamlined spats with small, removable stub wings to carry light bombs or supply canisters.
When World War II began in the fall of 1939, the RAF had seven Lysander squadrons and four were quickly moved to France. This was unwise; when the German attack began in May 1940, the slow-flying Lysanders were brutalized by German fighters and anti-aircraft.
On one mission, 16 Lysanders were sent out on a supply sortie over Calais and 14 aircraft and crews failed to return. One hundred eighteen of the 174 Lysanders sent to the continent were lost, along with 120 crew members, before the remaining Lysander squadrons were withdrawn to the United Kingdom.
Most of the surviving Lysanders were sent to the Middle East and India, but the few Lysanders that remained in the UK got a new lease of life in August 1941 when No. 138 (Special Duties) Squadron was formed to carry out Winston Churchill’s “Set Europe Ablaze” directive.
The 138th was directed to conduct clandestine operations in France at night for the Special Operations Executive and, to this end, it began to specially modify some Lysanders.
These modified Lysanders, the Mark III SCW, carried a 150-gallon centerline auxiliary fuel tank, improved radio equipment, an armored floor and a large access ladder to an enlarged rear cockpit with provision for two people in very tight conditions.
Painted matt black, flying from secret airfields on moonless nights without navigation equipment other than a map and a compass, landing on short strips of land marked out by a few flare pots, Lysander pilots used its remarkable short landing and take-off capabilities to fly agents on and off the continent or to bring back members of downed aircrews.
The first Lysander squadron was so successful it was joined by another and by the end of 1944, when the fighting had moved to Germany, Lysander squadrons had brought in or taken out almost 1 thousand people from occupied France.
