大象传媒

Wartime memories of my childhood in Bedford Part Four 鈥� Sabotage work of Major C. V. Clarke; 鈥極peration Josephine鈥� raid on Pessac Power Station in 1942.

Part four of an oral history interview with Mr. John Vandepeer Clarke conducted by Ann Hagen on behalf of Bedford Museum.

鈥淔urther to the altimeter switch charge, another thing that was devised by my father was the charge for attacking enemy occupied power installations and one extremely successful operation which was known as Operation Josephine, that was the code name for it, that was carried out in 1942 I believe. This consisted of saboteurs taking explosive charges, rather like miniature limpet mines; they were attached on a plate on the back of the saboteur, four charges which could then be taken into a power station, if you could evade the guard and plant them on transformers to go off, again after a given time. They weren鈥檛 using aniseed balls by this time, they had invented other means of time delay. But this was an extremely effective attack. It took place at a power station at a place called Pessac. [This operation is described in a book by M.R.D. Foot about the work of the SOE in France.]

The saboteurs who were carrying out this very successful raid were dropped in Southern France and after quite a long period of reconnoitring they attacked this power station at a place called Pessac which is just south of Bordeaux. And close by, controlled by this power station supply, were U boat pens for German submarine operations out in the Atlantic. This was an extremely successful attack and the transformers were destroyed and the U boat pens were put out of action for several months as a result. My father told me of the training of the saboteurs in this country which had taken place in 1941 when he was in charge of this secret station, Station 17 at Brickendonbury.

He felt it very important that these foreign enthusiastic volunteers should get some actual hands on experience of trying to carry out an attack. So my father made out a pass on War Office paper saying The holder of this pass, Major C. V. Clarke, has authority to inspect Luton Power Station. So armed with this pass, which I鈥檓 sure from judging the signature which looked remarkably like my father鈥檚, he took his team from Hertford to Luton one dark night. They used scaling ladders to get over the walls of Luton Power Station, which of course was guarded like all big installations. They successfully got inside, they planted dummy charges on all the transformers, they then got back over the wall successfully without anybody noticing. They, having cleared off to a nearby street and waited for my father who then walked up to the front door of the power station which of course was under guard and asked for the Officer of the guard and produced his pass and he said, 鈥業 want to do a routine inspection.鈥� So he went round with a very big torch and he came up to the first transformer and he flashed his torch and he said, 鈥榃hat鈥檚 that?鈥� And this young Subaltern who was in charge of the guard, 鈥業鈥檓 not quite sure what this is Sir.鈥� 鈥業t looks to me like an explosive charge. Let鈥檚 have a look round.鈥� And in the end the poor Subaltern in charge of the guard was knocked kneed with what he鈥檇 let happen. So my father, who was a kindly man said, 鈥楢lright old man, you say nothing about this and I鈥檒l say nothing about it. But you鈥檝e learnt your lesson.鈥� With that he had his team back to retrieve the appliances and off they went. But this was very valuable training, slightly unorthodox but it鈥檚 one of those things that happened in war time. One of the more wilder outfits in the Army during the war!

My father also at that time was responsible, with another officer, for training the team of Czechs who carried out the assination of Heydrich, the Nazi administrator of Czechoslovakia. They were despatched with a great range of various weapons to take with them on this attack which took place in (June) 1942 in which Heydrich died from the injuries he sustained in the attack. Dreadful aftermath of course with not only the death of all the saboteurs but also the blowing up of the Czechoslovak village of Lidice and a great deal of misery as a result.

The final thing in this sort of compendium of my father鈥檚 inventions was again produced at MD1 Whitchurch was a rather extraordinary conversion of a Churchill tank into a bridge, a mobile bridge. This consisted of a Churchill tank with two inclined ramps placed on top, one on the other, hinged and set up at an angle and with a small ramp at the back. It鈥檚 easier to look at the illustrations to understand what was happening but briefly one section of the ramp had rockets attached to it which propelled half the ramp at an alarming speed and at a height of about 60 feet in the air over an obstacle so that you could use the bridge to scale a 12 foot high sea wall or to cross a 30 foot river or canal. The photographs show some of the experimental work that was carried out in this country before it was intended to put it to use both in terms of going over walls and secondly over rivers.

My father went out and trained Canadians in the 21st Army Group in the spring of 1945 by which time all the trials had taken place, to use in the latter stages of the war in Holland. The particular use where they felt it could be used was on canals. He trained the Canadians up to a high degree and they were all ready to go to use the bridges across canals, because within 30 seconds or so of the bridge being launched tanks could follow up and cross the bridge and get across what otherwise would be an unfordable obstacle. To my father鈥檚 private disgust and disappointment, it was ready and planned to carry out an operation at the end of April 1945 when the Germans put their hands up in the Low Countries and the operation was therefore called off.鈥�

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