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Glyn Loosmore
enlisted in the Royal Armoured Corps in
July 1942 for training as a radio operator. Once qualified, he volunteered
for “special operations of a hazardous nature” and went to Milton Hall,
near Peterborough, to train as a radio operator with one of the SOE teams
to be dropped into occupied France on or shortly after the Normandy
invasion Loosmore was assigned to the team codenamed Andy that was dropped in the wrong place and too low, as a result of which both officers were injured on landing and had to be evacuated. Loosmore was instructed to join Team Ivor whose radio operator had been killed when his parachute failed to open. This was not a matter of a few miles' walk but a journey across central France by taxi, provided by the Resistance. Ivor contacted the main Resistance group in the Morvan département led by the previous commanding officer of the 1st Régiment d'Infanterie, disbanded when Germany occupied the Vichy Zone in late 1942. By persuading other Resistance groups in the Morvan to unite under a French Colonel Bertrand, a force of 1,700 was assembled but only half of them armed. |
Loosmore was kept hard at work on his
radio calling for airdrops of arms and ammunition. But only one supply of
small arms was received and these were unsuited to the task of harassing
the large number of German troops moving through the Morvan en route for
Germany Ivor dispersed to other duties on recall to England. Loosmore sailed for the Far East in November and was dropped into Burma to join already deployed units of Force 136 in March 1945. Although the war in Europe was all but over by then, the Japanese were still fighting stubbornly. In Burma, the former Jedburgh team members were employed to supply the local anti-Japanese guerrilla forces with arms and direct their operations along lines required by General Sir William Slim's 14th Army advancing from the north. Loosmore worked with the Mongoose team commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Ronald Critchley, in the Karen tribal area, where some 7,000 local levies were raised. Attacks on the Japanese were mounted but Mongoose was driven into the hills by retaliatory attacks and the burning of Karen villages. Glyn Loosmore was awarded the Military Medal and the Croix de Guerre for his work with Team Ivor in France and mentioned in dispatches for his time with Mongoose in Burma. |
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