On 12 June, 1942, a lone RAF Beaufighter struck a blow against Nazi pride, and gave hope to the oppressed citizens of occupied France. These are the remarkable events of ‘Operation Squabble’, as it was named, and the story of the man who flew that lone aircraft – former president of the RAF Association’s Southgate and Wood Green Branch, Group Captain Ken Gatward.
In the spring of 1942, information began to reach London from sources within occupied-France of German parades taking place along the Champs-Élysées in Paris. This was seemingly done to emphasise German superiority, and remind the Parisians of their place.
Back in London, it was thought that something should be done to combat this arrogance and bolster French morale. Finally, it was decided that a Beaufighter of Coastal Command would take on the task – codenamed Operation Squabble.
The plan was to use cloud cover to penetrate France undetected, fly low-level over Paris, shoot up the parade, take some photos, and drop French Tricolour flags over the Arc de Triomphe before quickly disappearing. A secondary target was set as the Ministere de la Marine in the nearby Place de la Concorde, which had become HQ for the German navy – a suitable victim for the guns of a Coastal Command aircraft.
Having volunteered for the operation, Flight Lieutenant Ken Gatward and his navigator Sergeant George Fern were initially hindered by the weather, having to turn back on numerous occasions due to lack of cloud cover over France. On 12 June 1942, however, the pair were intent on completing their task. Having once again seen clear skies when they reached the French coast, Gatward and Fern decided to press ahead, hoping to avoid the Luftwaffe by flying fast and low; ‘hedge-hopping’, as it was known.
“We flew very low all the way across, and saw masses of horses in the fields”, said Gatward, in a 1945 recounting of the event. “The Beaufighter is pretty quiet, and we didn’t disturb the cattle and horses overmuch, but we took some photographs of them. Some of the horses were rearing up as we came over the fields, and one of them was white horse; you can almost see the whites of his eyes in our picture.”
As the Beaufighter pressed on, it flew over Rouen aerodrome – then a Luftwaffe airfield – but encountered no opposition. Racing over fields at treetop level, the pair made directly for Paris.
“I’d never been to Paris before, but it looked exactly as I imagined it would”, said Gatward. “We’d studied a lot of guide books and photographs before we set out. We could see the Eiffel Tower when we were 30 or 40 miles from Paris, which helped with our navigation because we were much too low to have a look at Paris from above. It was a very nice day – plenty of sun – and we could see quite easily where we were going.”
Taking their bearing from the Eiffel Tower, Gatward lined up the Beaufighter to come in directly over the Defence Monument before heading straight for the Arc de Triomphe:
“I said to Sergeant Fern, my observer: ‘are you ready for the first flag?’, and he said ‘Yes, I’m all ready, but the slipstream is nearly breaking my arm!’ He was pushing this furled flag down a flare shoot into the slipstream from the propellers, and at the right moment he let it go.”
Much prior work had gone in to how best to prepare and release the flags. By the day of the raid, both had been precisely weighted and folded so they would stream as soon as they were released.
“We couldn’t stop to see exactly where the first dropped”, Gatward said, “but Vichy says it fell right on the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, which is of course just where we wanted it to be.”
With no German parade visible, Gatward turned his attention to the secondary target:
“One of the things we wanted to look at particularly was the Ministry of Marine, because it was crammed with Huns, and we had something for them. We spotted that quite easily, and turned north towards the opera house and then out again.”
On their first circuit the people in the streets hadn’t paid much attention to the aircraft overhead, the noise of which perhaps mingled with the traffic. Within moments of ending the first circuit however, Ken Gatward turned in for his second run:
“This time we came in as low as we dared, in case they had any light Ack-Ack [anti-aircraft guns] on the rooftops. Actually, I was too busy watching out for rooftops and steeples to notice any Ack-Ack, but Sergeant Fern warned me that some strafe did pass close by us, but the aircraft was not hit.
“On this second circuit, we… [came] square up to the Ministry of Marine, and we were right in line at a range of about 500 yards before we let fly with our four cannons, and saw the sparks flying off the building. We hadn’t any time to see whether the shells burst inside, but a good deal went through the windows.
“We sprayed the place from base to apex and only cleared the roof by about five feet. Whilst I was doing this, Fern was shouting out encouragement and pushing out the second flag, which we hoped would fall slap across the front door.
“There were people running about the street to have a good look at us – and we noticed that one or two faces at the windows were actually peering down at us. We saw a number of German military cars stop in the street, with Huns standing around them, and others dodging around the street and the avenue. But we couldn’t let fly at them because there were too many civilians about.
“Most of the civilians were waving to us. Fern said he saw some German soldiers trying to take cover behind a lorry. One of them was very fat, and he was shaking his fist at us!”
Having achieved all they could – Fern snapping the required photographs after dropping the flags – the pair turned for the coast. All in all, Gatward and Fern had been over Paris for only five to six minutes. On the return journey they once again passed over Rouen aerodrome, and once again no enemy aircraft came up to meet them.Upon their return to England, Ken Gatward was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, with George Fern receiving the Distinguished Flying Medal.
Their actions were also widely celebrated in the media and, perhaps inevitably, the story became embellished with each retelling – with parading Nazis scattering in panic, and one hapless band member apparently diving through his own bass drum in his efforts to escape.
Both Gatward and Fern survived the war, and on 28 July 1949 both were publicly recognised for their gallantry during Operation Squabble at an RAF Association ceremony on Broomfield Park in London. Here, Monsieur Louis Roche of the French Embassy in London officially presented a Tricolour to then-Wing Commander Gatward in front of a crowd of 12,000 spectators.
“Everything was so dark at that time”, Monsieur Roche announced to the crowd, “that the feat of arms of Gatward and Fern was what everyone had been waiting for. It cheered up thousands of people who had been living in misery.”
The honour of handing over of the flag itself was given to an eyewitness of the event, Mrs Jane Luc, the English wife of the First Secretary of the French Embassy. RAF Association standard bearers from numerous branches also held prominent positions around the platform.
As president of the Southgate and Wood Green Branch, which had no premises of their own at the time, Gatward entrusted the Tricolour flag into the care of the Mayor for safe keeping. It has proudly hung in Southgate’s Christ Church ever since.To read more stories like this one, subscribe to Air Mail magazine by joining the RAF Association – the charity that supports the RAF family.
