In 1943 Frank Griffiths crash landed in France, escaped to Switzerland then then made the long journey home – back through occupied territory…
The six years of war between 1939 and 1945 are full of stories of horror, cruelty and bloodshed. But there can also be found numerous tales of bravery, compassion and determination. One such story is that of Frank Griffiths, a British pilot who became lost in France and – after escaping to Switzerland – made the perilous decision to come home the long way round, back through occupied territory. Now his great grandson Adam Hart has chosen to recount his adventure in Operation Pimento: My Great Grandfather’s Escape. Ahead of his appearance at Chalke Festival, Adam spoke to us about Frank’s story, his own journey retracing his steps and why ordinary French civilians inspired him to write…
Could you tell us a little bit about your Great grandfather and his role in the Second World War?
Frank Griffiths was my great grandfather and he was born on the Wirral in 1912. He was a bit of a maverick, headstrong and didn’t really care what people thought of him. For example, when he left school, he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, so he decided to buy a 18 foot shrimping boat, which he lived on for six years. He sailed in the summer, spent his days fishing and then moored up in Liverpool and worked through the winter – it was a pretty hardy existence. Despite going to public school, he was pro trade-union, pro-closed shop, an atheist and a teetotaller. He decided in 1936 to join the RAF after he went on a commercial flight to the Isle of Man and realised he wanted to spend his days flying. He passed his training and, when the war came in 1939, he became a bomber pilot in Six-Two Squadron. He was posted to Malaya where, unfortunately for Frank, there was no war. He wrote of his guilt concerning missing the Battle of Britain and Dunkirk and he applied to be sent home but was turned down. He would have been about 25 at the time. However, he was sent home in 1940 due to an old back injury and spent months recovering. He then became a test pilot but in 1943, due to either boredom or guilt, applied to be posted, ending up in 138 Squadron – Special Duties. It was their job to supply war material to resistance groups in Europe. That was in April 1943, and by August 1943 when Operation Pimento occurred, he’d flown 16 missions.
How did you come to know about Frank?
He’s something of a family legend, with lots of tales of his daring-do from the Second World War. Frank himself, unusually, did talk about the war. Not in an emotional way, but he was fond of telling anecdotes. He also wrote a lot down and I’m so glad he did. Truthfully, I really didn’t know that much about him until I started researching in earnest and I found out a lot more about who he actually was. He’s always been a family legend but now he’s become my own personal hero as well.
What was Operation Pimento?
Operation Pimento was a very last minute Operation. It was laid on the day it was to occur – Saturday, August 14, 1943. Frank wrote about how that worried him from the start. His crew were just people who were available on the day – a scratch crew – which also made him nervous. The most important part of the Operation was to drop heavy explosives to a resistance group near Modan, in Southeast France in the Alps. In three weeks, the allies were planning to launch their massive invasion at Salerno in Italy and these resistance fighters were trying to blow up a railway tunnel between France and Italy, intending to slow down the inevitable German reinforcements.
How did Frank become trapped in France?
The first of many miracles was that he escaped with his life from the crash. They were brought down at night by small arms fire and, with so little altitude, there was basically no time or height to parachute. The plane crashed straight through a village and started a terrible fire, killing all the crew except Frank. The only reason Frank survived is that he was catapulted out of the cockpit. He somehow became tangled in these telephone wires, which basically broke his fall. He stumbled into the village where he met a 14 year old boy who took him home to his mother on his bicycle, where Frank received first aid. I met this woman’s granddaughter and great grandson, and they told me details which had never been part of the story I was told. Essentially the family heard gunfire outside, which was the Italians trying to flush out any survivors. They panicked and hid Frank, who they’d undressed because they wanted to get rid of his English uniform, in their chimney in his underpants. Afterwards the local resistance cell took Frank to a sort of restaurant/brothel where he hid for three days. All this time Italian soldiers were actually coming and drinking while he’s lying upstairs. Then he was taken to another safe house, where the woman told her neighbors that he was a distant relative who escaped from a local mental hospital. Finally he was driven near the Swiss border, where he had to stroll hand in hand with a 22 year old French woman, because the Italian soldiers wouldn’t bother you if they thought you were young lovers. In Switzerland he had a choice. He could remain in Switzerland, where there was quite a high chance he would stay for the rest of the war, or he could try to escape back to the UK through occupied territory. And Frank chose to try and escape. He embarked on a two month journey across France, over the Pyrenees, crossed Spain and eventually got to Gibraltar. And there’s so much more I could say about all of that.
What enticed you to retrace you’re Great Grandfather’s journey?
It’s a good question. I was doing a journalism masters at Cardiff University and an organisation called the Worshipful Livery Company of Wales, offered a travel journalism bursary. I applied with the intention of retracing Frank’s Escape and, to my surprise, won! I was 22, just out of uni, and thought it would be a fun trip and a bit of an adventure. I did the trip, which was a month, and met lots of descendants of the people who saved him and these meetings were so powerful and so incredible that as soon I got home I knew I had to write it all down. I’d been commissioned to write one 1000 word article but I spent the next couple of months tapping out 50,000 words. I just had to do it. I had to get it down on paper.
What inspired you to write?
I guess that’s what really made me want to write – the poignancy of these meetings with these people who were total strangers. Their ancestors were normal people, a shopkeeper, a farmer – ordinary civilians. They weren’t combatants. But for the French it’s so important to know they were on the right side, that they weren’t collaborators. So I think really it was those ordinary French people who actually inspired me to just sit down and write it. Frank is still the hero, and I’m so proud of him but those French civilians are really inspiring.
Operation Pimento: My Great Grandfather’s Escape is out now from Hodder & Stroughton.
Adam Hart will be speaking at Chalke History Festival on Saturday 28th of June. Tickets and further details can be found here.
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