> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.battlefield-witness.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Operation Jericho - URL: https://www.battlefield-witness.com/operation-jericho/ - Published: 2026-08-07T13:59:40.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-07T13:59:40.000Z - Author: Anders Lawerny - Tags: de Havilland Mosquito, Operation Jericho, WW2, Percy Pickard, Bill Broadley, historical record, RAF, Australians, New Zealanders, Englishmen, Amiens, Mosquito, France, historical, research-driven, novel, story # The Straight Road *A story of the de Havilland Mosquito. Based on the true events of Operation Jericho, 18 February 1944\. The Amiens raid, its squadrons, timings, and the deaths of Group Captain Percy Pickard and Flight Lieutenant Bill Broadley are drawn from the historical record. Flying Officer Tom Garrety, his navigator Alec Voss, and their exchanges are fictional — a composite crew of the kind that flew that day, invented to carry the reader inside a cockpit no camera ever reached.* --- ## I At four in the morning the frost had a smell to it, mineral and clean, and under the frost was the other smell, the one that never left RAF Hunsdon: dope and glycol and the raw resinous breath of birch plywood, because the whole aerodrome was built around wood the way a shipyard is built around iron. Flying Officer Tom Garrety stood in the dark outside the crew hut with his hands jammed under his arms and watched the snow start. It came sideways at first, thin as static, then thickened until the sodium lamp over the flight office had a halo you could have hung a hat on. Somewhere out on the pan a fitter swore at a cowling latch. Somewhere else an engine turned over, coughed, caught, and settled into that particular flat snarl that no other aeroplane on earth made — because no other aeroplane on earth had two liquid-cooled Merlins bolted to a fuselage built like a violin. "They'll scrub it," said Alec Voss, coming up beside him with two mugs of tea that had gone the colour of creosote. He was Garrety's navigator, a Yorkshireman four years older who had flown Blenheims until the Blenheims stopped being sent anywhere useful, and who took a dim, professional interest in weather the way other men took an interest in horses. "They won't." Garrety took the mug. "Pick briefed it himself. You don't brief it yourself and then scrub it." "Pick" was Group Captain Percy Pickard — DSO and two bars, DFC, a face half of England knew from a cinema newsreel two years old, in which he had flown a Wellington called F for Freddie through a film about bombing Germany that was somehow more famous than most of the actual bombing. He commanded 140 Wing now, three squadrons of Mosquitoes, and an hour ago he had stood in front of a model of a prison wall built out of sugar cubes and matchsticks and told a room full of Australians, New Zealanders and Englishmen that at exactly noon they were going to blow a hole in it. Voss looked up at the snow, which by now had stopped pretending to be gentle. "Man's mad," he said, without much heat. "Whole of northern France is under this. He wants to fly formation at fifty feet through it." "He wants to get eighteen aeroplanes to one road junction at the same minute, in daylight, without being seen from six miles up," Garrety said. "That's not mad. That's just extremely difficult, and he's chosen us to do it because he'd rather do it himself and can't be in three places." "Comforting." "I didn't say comforting." They drank their tea and did not talk about the part of the briefing that had gone quiet — the part where the intelligence officer, a thin man with a Bible-black moustache, had said that inside those walls at Amiens were something over seven hundred men, and that among them were résistants who had, in the delicate ministry phrase, *information the enemy still requires*, and that the Gestapo's patience with that information was understood to be finite, and that a date had been mentioned. Executions had been mentioned. That was the whole of the operation, when you stripped the sugar cubes away: get there before the date did. Garrety's aircraft was HX922, letter 'S' for Sugar, a Mark VI fighter-bomber of 464 Squadron, and by the time he and Voss reached her out on the frozen grass, the groundcrew had already been at the engines with the oil dilution switches, thinning the Merlins' blood with raw fuel so the pistons wouldn't seize in a cold start. It was routine below minus ten, and this, with the wind coming off the fens like a blade, was well below minus ten. Once she caught, she'd need ten unhurried minutes at two thousand revolutions to boil the petrol back out of the oil before he dared ask anything of her. Corporal Higgs, who had chalked S-Sugar's cowling with a cartoon wasp wearing boxing gloves, patted the black-green flank of the fuselage the way another man might pat a horse's neck. "She's cold-natured, sir, mind the supercharger switch don't jump to Auto on you till you're past seven thousand feet. Merlin 25 in this one, she wants to change gear early if you let her have her head." "I know her, Higgs." "I know you know her, sir. I'm telling you anyway." Voss had gone quiet in the particular way he did before a long trip, running his own private inventory, and Garrety let him have it. He knew roughly what was in it. Somewhere behind the Yorkshireman's flat competence was a sister-in-law's brother, a Frenchman married into the family before the war, who had gone into the Resistance around Amiens and out of correspondence entirely sometime in 1942, and about whom Voss had said exactly one sentence, eight months ago, over a beer, and never another word since. Garrety hadn't asked whether the man's name was on the list the intelligence officer hadn't read aloud. He suspected Voss didn't know either, and had decided, in the disciplined way navigators decided things, not to let the not-knowing show in his sums. There was a rhythm to walking out to a Mosquito before a low-level job that Garrety had come to trust the way a man trusts a superstition he privately knows is only habit. Check the hydraulic reservoir sight-glass — full, both engine-driven pumps sound, though if a bullet found one of them over France the other would still walk the gear and flaps down, slower, laboring, but down; and if both went, there was the hand pump bolted under his own seat, four minutes of a pilot's full strength to crank the wheels into a locked position while the ground came up to meet him regardless of how tired his arm had got. He didn't expect to need it. He checked it anyway, the way he checked everything he didn't expect to need. Garrety put a bare hand flat against the plywood skin, just below the cockpit, out of habit — a thing pilots did with the Mosquito that they never did with metal aeroplanes, because metal told you nothing and wood told you everything. Under the frost-slick outer varnish he could feel, or imagined he could feel, the internal grain of it: birch skins laid diagonally over a core of Ecuadorian balsa no thicker than a loaf of bread, the whole shell built in two halves like a canoe and glued and screwed together around him and Voss and the wireless set and the camera and four 20-millimetre cannon, so that the aeroplane he was about to fly to France had, structurally speaking, more in common with a cello than with a Spitfire. He had heard a rigger call it "furniture that goes five hundred miles an hour," and had never found a better description. "Ten minutes to start-up," Voss said, checking his watch against the Formation Leader's board chalked outside the flight hut. "Briefing said cross the coast at nought feet, so I hope you've had your porridge." "I hope you've done your sums." "I've done my sums." Voss had, in fact, done them three times, tracing and re-tracing a chinagraph line across a map that ran from the Hertfordshire coast — not that Hertfordshire had a coast, but the joke was old and comfortable between them — down across the grey slab of the Channel to a headland east of Dieppe, and from there inland along a single arrow-straight thread of a road, the old Roman route from Albert to Amiens, planted the whole of its length with poplars like a colonnade, that would, if God and the compass agreed, walk them by the hand directly to a set of iron gates in a wall eight feet thick, at one minute past noon, give or take. "It's a strange kind of navigating," Voss admitted, folding the map into his knee pocket. "Ordinarily I'm hiding us. Today I'm meant to find the one road in France the Germans can see from the moon and fly straight down the middle of it." "That's the idea. Nobody expects a raid to announce itself." "Nobody sane, no." --- ## II They went at three minutes to eleven, eighteen Mosquitoes lifting off Hunsdon's frozen grass in sixes — 487 first, New Zealanders, who would carry the delay-fused bombs meant to open the wall; then 464, Garrety's mob, Australians who would put their bombs into the main building itself, timed, the intelligence officer had said with a kind of surgical distaste, for the hour when the German garrison would be gathered at its midday meal, concentrated and unsuspecting in one room instead of scattered through the building where a stray five-hundred-pounder might do the résistants' work for the Gestapo; and last, in reserve, 21 Squadron, RAF, who would do nothing at all unless the first two waves failed, in which case their orders were to level what remained rather than leave the prisoners to a firing squad. Percy Pickard did not lead any of the three sixes. He flew alone, at the tail of the formation, in a Mosquito he had named — inevitably, everyone agreed, inevitably — F for Freddie, with his own navigator, Bill Broadley, in the right-hand seat. His job was to watch. Whether the walls came down. Whether the timing held. Whether, God forbid, he had to send 21 Squadron in to finish what the bombs had started. The Channel that morning had no colour in it at all, a sheet of hammered pewter under a sky the same shade, and Garrety flew S-Sugar at a height where the propeller wash kicked spray visible off the wave crests. Sixty feet, perhaps less. Voss, folded into the navigator's half of the shared cockpit with his knees against the instrument panel, called headings without looking up from his stopwatch, and neither of them spoke of the obvious thing, which was that at sixty feet there was no room in the entire universe for an engine to falter. The snow found them a third of the way across. It did not arrive so much as simply exist, all at once, the horizon closing like a hand around the aeroplane until Garrety could see perhaps four hundred yards of grey water ahead and, on either side, nothing — no wingmen, no wave, no France. He held the compass heading Voss had given him and flew by instrument and by faith, and somewhere in the white he understood, without being able to prove it, that the formation had come apart, that eighteen aeroplanes flying wingtip to wingtip in zero visibility could not possibly still be flying wingtip to wingtip, and that whatever happened at Amiens at one minute past noon would happen in whatever order the storm allowed rather than the order Pickard had briefed. "Lost the New Zealanders," Voss said, flat, professional, the tone he used for facts he had already decided not to be frightened of. "Lost everybody. It's just us, Tom." "Coast in four minutes, if your sums are honest." "My sums are always honest. It's the weather that lies." The French coast, when it came, came the way the Channel had gone — not gradually, but as a sudden dark line low in the white that resolved, appallingly fast at their speed, into dunes, then a sea wall, then a scatter of roofs that had a German flak position dug in among them and did not, this once, get a shot away before S-Sugar had already crossed the beach and was gone, hedge-hopping now, low enough that Garrety saw a farmer straighten up from a cattle trough and stare, low enough that a flock of rooks came up off a ploughed field in a black detonation directly in his path and he hauled the stick back a half-second before feathers would have been in the radiator. Voss had the map open again, thumb tracking a line as fast as the ground unspooled beneath them. "There." He didn't point; there was nothing to point at yet but a smear of straighter grey through the white ahead, but his voice had changed, gone taut with the particular satisfaction of a man whose sums have just been proven. "That's her. That's the Albert road." And it was — a single, dead-straight avenue running to the horizon between two files of bare poplars standing at attention in the snow like something out of a child's drawing of France, the most legible line of navigation the country possessed, built by Romans and finished by God for exactly this purpose, though neither Roman nor God could have imagined it. Garrety put S-Sugar's nose on it and flew, and the poplars went past the wingtips close enough to count, and somewhere ahead of them, invisible still, was Amiens. --- ## III They came up on the prison at a few seconds past the hour, and there was no more time to be afraid, which Garrety had noticed before was the great mercy the Mosquito's low-level work gave you: fear needed a moment's idleness to breed in, and there was none. The wall came up grey and enormous, higher than he'd pictured it from the sugar-cube model, and past the smoke and snow he saw the New Zealanders' work already done — a black wound low in the stone, rubble thrown across the yard, figures in prison stripes already visible against the white ground, running, some of them, some simply standing in the gap as if disbelieving it. 487 had found the target after all. The storm had scattered them and God had put them back together at the one place that mattered. "Bomb doors," Garrety said, and felt rather than heard the pneumatic thud beneath his feet as the pressure system — the same system that fed his cannon, that fed the radiator shutters, that would, if it ever fell below a hundred and fifty pounds a square inch, sacrifice everything else in the aeroplane to keep his brakes alive on landing — cycled open the doors and armed the racks. Voss had the bombsight, such as it was at this height, which amounted mostly to judgement and the length of the building filling the windscreen. "Main block, dead ahead," Voss said. "Steady — steady —" The mess hall was a low wing off the main building, and Garrety had been told, and made himself believe, that the men inside it at one minute past noon on this day would be guards and not prisoners, because prisoners at Amiens did not eat at noon, they ate when they were permitted to eat, and the whole grim arithmetic of the plan depended on that single fact holding true. He did not have time to be sick about it. He held the aeroplane level through a filthy crosswind funnelling between the buildings, felt Voss's hand tap his knee — *bombs gone* — and hauled back on the stick with everything his arms had, because the ground that had been forty feet under the wheels was now the only thing in the world, and the Mosquito, light and quick and utterly unlike anything German radar had been built to catch, stood up on her tail and went over the rooftops with a margin Garrety would not have believed possible six months earlier and now took, grimly, on trust. Behind him the world came apart in a soft double concussion that he felt through the airframe rather than heard, a shudder that ran up through the spruce spars and the bakelite mounting plugs and into the seat of his trousers, and when he banked S-Sugar hard to bring the target back into view there was a second breach in the wall, black smoke standing almost straight up in air that had, for one strange, still moment, stopped moving. "Camera's running," Voss said — the cine-gun had triggered automatically off the bomb release, exactly as briefed, exactly as it had a hundred times on the gunnery range, one more small mechanical certainty holding in a morning that had precious few of them — "get us a strafing run on the wire before the flak wakes up, then we're away." Garrety put the nose down again. Along the base of the wall, tangled where the outer perimeter fence had buckled but not fallen, men in stripes were caught against the wire, and he understood in the space of a half-second why Voss had said it in that voice — not an order to attack the fence, God, no, but to put four seconds of cannon fire into the gun position on the corner tower before it found the range on the prisoners now streaming across open ground. He thumbed the firing button and felt the aeroplane buck faintly under him, four 20-millimetre Hispanos hammering in the wings hard enough to feel through the rudder pedals, and watched the tower's silhouette dissolve into brick dust, and then he was past it, climbing, turning, looking for the sky instead of the ground, because the ground, for now, had done all it was going to do for him. --- ## IV He found the sky full of other Mosquitoes. They came out of the snow in ones and twos, the storm loosening its grip as if satisfied, and Garrety counted without meaning to — a habit every pilot developed and none of them admitted to — and lost count somewhere around eleven, which was not eighteen, and knew better than to let himself think about what that meant yet. High above the wreck of the wall, at perhaps five hundred feet where by rights nothing should have dared to loiter, one Mosquito circled alone, unhurried, banking gently to keep the prison in view. There was no mistaking whose aircraft it was; the letters were painted large enough to read from Garrety's height, and besides, everyone in 140 Wing had known for a week that Pick meant to watch it himself rather than take a man's report of it afterward. "That's him," Voss said. "That's F-Freddie. What in God's name is he still doing down there?" "Counting," Garrety said, and understood it even as he said it, because it was exactly what he himself had been doing with his own formation a moment before, only Pickard was doing it with the entire raid, with the wall, with the reserve squadron still holding position miles behind them with their fingers on triggers that could finish the demolition Pickard had started, or could, God forbid, come in and drop their bombs on ground now crowded with the very men they had crossed the Channel to save. The wireless crackled — three words, no more, in a voice Garrety had heard three hours ago in a briefing hut and would have known anywhere. *"Red, Daddy, Red."* Voss's pencil stopped moving. "That's the recall," he said quietly. "That's him calling off Twenty-One. He's seen them getting out." Garrety looked down, banking S-Sugar to keep the scene in view a moment longer than duty required, and saw it too — the pale, ragged movement of men crossing the snow-covered fields beyond the wall in every direction, unescorted, unshepherded, simply *running*, some of them falling and getting up and running again, and understood that Pickard had just made, from five hundred feet and in perhaps four seconds of watching, the single decision the entire operation had been built around: that enough of them were out, that the wall had done its work, that Twenty-One Squadron's bombs were no longer needed and could only now do harm. It was, Garrety thought later, the bravest order he ever personally witnessed given, precisely because it required nothing more dramatic than restraint — the refusal to finish a job that no longer needed finishing, made by a man circling low and slow over a target that still had guns in it, when every instinct built by four years of war would have told him to climb, turn for home, and let the formation do as briefed. He was still thinking it, still watching, when a shape came out of the northern haze fast and flat and grey, and he had perhaps a full second to register *fighter* before the Focke-Wulf was past F-Freddie and past him and gone again, and F-Freddie was no longer flying level. "Tom—" Voss's voice, for the first time all morning, cracked on the single syllable. The Mosquito's tail was gone. Not damaged — gone, sheared away as cleanly as a design drawing with a line struck through it, and the aircraft that had circled so patiently a moment before now fell out of its bank in a long, almost gentle, entirely unrecoverable spiral, trailing a thin dark thread of smoke, down through the last of the snow toward the fields north of the city, toward a village neither of them had a name for yet and one of them — Garrety, months later, over a beer he did not want, from a Frenchman who had walked ten miles to tell an Australian pilot he'd never met that he was sorry, so sorry — would learn was called Saint-Gratien. He did not see it strike the ground. He had already put S-Sugar's nose down and around, an instinctive, useless lunge toward the falling aircraft that Voss's hand on his arm — hard, sudden, entirely correct — stopped before it became a second wreck for the Germans to find. "There's nothing," Voss said. His voice had gone very quiet and very level, the tone of a man deliberately building a wall around something before it could get out. "Tom. There's nothing. We can't put her down there and we can't do a single thing from up here except be the next one they take. Climb. Climb and get us on a heading home, that's the only useful thing left to do." Garrety climbed. --- ## V The debrief hut at Hunsdon that evening smelled of wet wool and cigarette smoke and, underneath it, faintly, the same birch-and-glycol smell as the flight line, because nothing at Hunsdon ever quite escaped it. Intelligence officers moved between tables with notebooks, taking each crew's account in turn — height, timing, results observed, aircraft lost — and building, sentence by contradictory sentence, the single approximate truth that eighteen separate cockpits had each seen only a fragment of. The numbers, when they were finally read out, were the kind that made a room go quiet in a particular way — not the quiet of grief exactly, not yet, but the quiet of men doing arithmetic they didn't want to finish. Something over two hundred and fifty men had gone out through the breaches Voss's stopwatch and Garrety's hands had helped to open, résistants among them, men who that morning had a date written against their names and by evening did not. And a hundred or more had not survived the raid that freed them — killed by the very bombs, or by German fire in the chaos after, the ledger too raw and too fresh that night for anyone to pretend the accounting was final, or ever entirely could be. Garrety gave his report in the flat, factual register the intelligence officer's questions demanded — height at the target, seconds of gunfire, the second breach observed — and left out, because there was no box on the form for it, the particular way the world had gone soundless for him in the half-second before F for Freddie's tail came away, and the particular weight of Voss's hand on his forearm afterward, gripping hard enough to bruise, which neither of them had mentioned since and neither of them, Garrety suspected, ever would. Voss had gone to the intelligence officer's table alone, at some point Garrety hadn't noticed, and asked — quietly, by the look of it, and evidently without result — whether anyone yet had a name for any of the résistants seen going out through the eastern breach. Nobody did, not that night, not for weeks, and Voss came back and sat down across from Garrety and picked his tea back up as though he had only been to the window to check the weather. Garrety didn't ask. He had decided, walking out to S-Sugar that morning, that he wouldn't, and the decision held. Broadley's name went up on the board with Pickard's that night, the way names went up, chalked in a clerk's careful hand between two dozen others who had come home. Garrety looked at it once, from the doorway, on his way out into a night gone suddenly, unfairly clear and cold, stars showing where twelve hours before there had been nothing but snow, and thought about a man who had spent an entire war being famous for a film about a Wellington bomber called F for Freddie, and had died, in the end, in a wooden aeroplane of exactly the same name, having just made the single quietest, most disciplined decision of the entire operation — the decision not to drop another bomb. He did not have a neat thought to close the day with. He had flown a machine built by furniture-makers, over a road built by Romans, to blow a hole in a wall built by the Republic of France for the Reich's convenience, and some men were free tonight who would not otherwise have been, and some men were dead who would not otherwise have been, and both of those things were true in the same square mile of snow at the same minute, and no amount of arithmetic in the debrief hut was going to resolve them into a single, satisfying number. Voss came out and stood beside him without speaking, and together they looked at the line of Mosquitoes on the dispersal pans, their black-green shapes gone soft and blue in the frost, S-Sugar third from the end with her wasp still chalked on the cowling, patient, ordinary, already being readied by torchlight for whatever the next morning would ask of her. "Same time tomorrow?" Voss said eventually, which was not a question either of them expected an answer to. "Same time tomorrow," Garrety said, and they walked back toward the huts together, past the frost, past the smell of dope and glycol and birch that would outlast, Garrety was fairly sure, every man currently breathing it in.