page_title: Royal Air Force Special Duties Service
section_title: Summation
hierarchical_section_title: Royal Air Force Special Duties Service / Summation
caption_attribution_description: English: Formation of Douglas Dakota Mark IIIs of No. 267 Squadron RAF based at Bari, Italy, flying along the Balkan coast.
context_page_description: The Royal Air Force Special Duties Service was a secret air service created to provide air transport to support the resistance movement in Axis controlled territories. The service helped develop and support the resistance by bringing in agents, wireless operators and supplies. Parachute drop was the primary method by which the Special Duties units delivered supplies and most of the agents to the occupied countries. They also developed an air taxi service to pick up agents, political leaders and special communications from occupied Europe and bring them to England. On the outward flight the air taxi service also delivered agents and high value packages to France. Special Duties flights flew to target fields in Vichy France, Occupied France, Belgium, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Greece. By the end of the war Special Duties units were also operating in the Far East. The air units were controlled by the Royal Air Force, and worked closely with the SOE and the SIS.
context_section_description: The SD pilots and aircrew received little recognition for the work they did, and certainly not at the time they were doing it. But the men that made up the special duties air units were a breed apart. As pilots they tended to be self-sufficient, able to problem solve and act on their own. Though excellent pilots and natural navigators, Hugh Verity offered that many would not have been as well suited to  regular RAF officer duties. The pilots had to possess a certain intangible quality. The life of the special operations airman was that of the lone wolf.
  By the end of 1941 138 Squadron had moved 37 agents to France while picking up 5.    55% of their missions failed due to either bad weather or failure to make contact with the reception operator.   Over the course of 1942 the two SD squadrons, 138 Squadron and 161 Squadron, had ferried to France 23 tons of supplies and 155 agents, while picking up 19.  1943 saw the SD squadrons fly 625 sorties, deliver 589 tons of supplies and carry 102 agents to France while taking out 223. By the time the SD squadrons disbanded they had flown over 13,500 sorties and brought in over 10,000 tons of supplies, 60% of these supplies delivered after the invasion at Normandy. They had parachuted in 1,800 agents and brought another 324 in by Lysander or Hudson. They had also picked up 593 politicos, French resistance agents, family members, and the odd evading RAF or USAAF airman, and brought them back to England.  As for the SOE itself, the organisation was dissolved six months after the end of the war, 15 January 1946.
  An example of the effort given by the special duties units is the pick-up operation undertaken the night of 26/27 January 1943. René Massigli was a valued French political leader attempting to reach Charles de Gaulle in England. He had been held up by poor weather since November. It was for this reason that 161 Squadron commander Charles Pickard took up the mission himself. Taking one agent out with him in foul wintry weather, he traveled over a cloud covered France guided largely by dead reckoning and reached the target field area. Pickard was a doggedly determined aviator. Unable to see the reception committee's light, he continued to circle for two hours as his fuel level approached critical for his return flight. Finally a small break in the cloud gave him a glimpse of the signal light. He dropped through the cloud and quickly set down. Gauging his chances, Pickard gambled on a return flight to the nearest British airfield, RAF Predannack. As he made his way back he cleared France and most of the Channel, but as he approached the airfield at 3,000 feet his luck and his fuel ran out. Without power, he brought the Hudson in on a dead-stick landing, delivering his charges safely.
  In three weeks Pickard would fly the pick-up operation that would earn him his third DSO. A year after that he lost his life leading the Amien's prison raid. Learning of his death, Massigli offered this tribute to Pickard and the special duties units he was a part of:
  "As one of the many Frenchman whom the RAF pilots helped to escape from France in the recent years of affliction, may I be allowed to pay to Group Captain Pickard my tribute of admiration, gratitude and regret?
  The time has not yet come when it will be possible to reveal to the full what British airmen did in helping Resisting France. So much courage was demanded of them, so much ability and endurance when, on a moonlit night, they had to discover, somewhere in the French countryside, the field or glade that was ‘Target for tonight’. Among these admirable men, Group Captain Pickard was one of the greatest. Yesterday, as I was reading the thrilling story of the flight to Amiens, where he had a rendezvous with death, I was vividly reminded of the steady bravery, of the indomitable energy, of the boundless devotion to duty of the pilot who, although petrol was running low, tried with so much dogged obstinacy on a certain night of January 1943, to discover the field where he was briefed to drop a Frenchman and pick up another. That night the
caption: RAF SD Dakotas over the Adriatic
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