The Raid on Mailly-Le-Camp

While the mystery of his Uncle’s death was a cold case for many years for Brian Lissette, the people of Chaintreux, in France, have never forgotten the sacrifice, and regard the crash site as sacred.

The Weekend Sun is following the story of retired policeman Brian Lissette's most rewarding investigative work, a personal cold case stretching back more than 70 years.

Last week, fifty years after a group of NZRAF airmen took part in a daring raid in France, the nephew of Warrant Officer Leslie Harry Lissette started to unravel what happened on the night of May 3, 1944.

EM F-Fox of 207 squadron trundles down the runway at Spilsby towards the dark in the west. The Lancaster's four Rolls Royce Merlins roar under the strain of a full payload of high explosives, and the crescendo rattles windows in nearby towns and villages and chinaware shakes. With metres to spare, Warrant Officer Leslie Harry Lissette coaxes the Lancaster off the runway and into the moonlight of a Lincolnshire night sky.

The procession starts. For half an hour the bombers roar down runways at nineteen airfields across the region, at the rate of one a minute, into the night. It was an aerial armada.

And the chat in F-Fox would have gone something like this.

'Pilot from navigator.”

'Go ahead”.

'Target ETA zero-zero-eighteen. Course and airspeed good.”

'Roger nav.”

The bombers cruised smoothly across the channel and the coast of France before banking in an eastward turn towards the target.

The weather was perfect – clear sky and moonlight – and the bombers cast eerie shadows on the fields and copses below.

The target was regarded as a ‘soft' target. A German Panzer depot and military barracks at Mailly-le-Camp, south of Rheims in Northern France and about 500 kilometres from Spilsby.

The bombing run begins. 'Steady Skipper … steady … left a touch … left Skipper. That's it … steady.” And then a shout of, 'Bombs gone!!” A four ton bomb, a ‘cookie', and a cluster of five hundred pounders, dropping in a wickedly destructive formation, into the maelstrom below.

They got the job done.

Lissette would then have reached down, pulled a lever, 'Bomb doors closed”, and opened the throttles for home. 'Let's get the hell out of here.”

But the night was not done with the airmen.

After the initial marking run, the bombers had been instructed to circle the marking flares to await further instructions from the Main Force Controller. However, the radio frequency was somehow shared with a broadcast of American forces band music. It was a long half hour before the Deputy Main Force Controller was able to take over.

But the scene had been irrevocably set, leading to the bloodshed, the utter disaster that would unfold over Mailly-le-Camp, as the tunes like ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas' drowned out vital instructions to the pilots.

The raiders were left exposed and circling around the target. As the Luftwaffe night fighters got a whiff of what was happening, they pounced.

Forty two Lancasters were lost and 258 aircrew killed, 12 per cent of the force deployed, an unacceptable high rate of loss. Amongst them was Warrant Officer Leslie Harry Lissette. A mother lost a son. Florence Anne Dudfield, whose photo sat on the mantelpiece in the Lissette family home, lost a lover. And a young Brian Lissette lost an uncle.

The story stirred the policeman in Brian Lissette.

'I'd been researching the family tree. I had fifty five pages of research dating back to the 1700s. But it was the events of that night which hooked me.”

They're recorded in ‘Battle Under the Moon' by Squadron Leader Jack Currie DFC. 'EM F-Fox was hit in the starboard wing by cannon shells from a night-fighter over the target. A second attack caused a fire in the bomb bay.”

While the rest of the squadron scuttled back across the channel, F-Fox was on fire and limping home with an engine down.

But out of a crisis, out of the flak, raking cannon fire, explosions, and flames, heroes were to emerge. Brian Lissette was, as yet, unaware just how far that would take him almost 70 years later.

Next week: How an unlikely lad from a small New Zealand town became a war hero to a small French commune.

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