Following a medal sale that stirred memories of some of the most daring missions flown out of Norfolk during the Second World War, Steve Snelling salutes a master airman who was the RAF's original 'smart' bomber.
His baby-faced appearance earned him the nickname 'Daisy'. At the same time, his bravery and skill on a succession of low-level, high-precision bombing raids earned him a hatful of honours and a reputation second to none.
Hailed as a master navigator par excellence, Ted Sismore, who died at the age of 90 two years ago, was instrumental in turning Bomber Command's missions impossible into spectacular successes.
From silencing a Nazi rally to planning the astonishing Amiens jailbreak raid and carrying out a series of pinpoint attacks on Gestapo headquarters in enemy-occupied Denmark his extraordinary exploits read like a roll-call of the RAF's greatest headline-grabbing sorties.
Recognised as the brains behind some of the RAF's most breathtaking feats of arms, Ted's medals last week sold for thousands of pounds above their catalogue value at auction.
His 11-medal group, led by the Distinguished Service Order and Distinguished Flying Cross with two Bars, went under the hammer at Spink's London auction rooms.
The medals had been listed at a value of £40,000-£50,000, but the bidding reached £72,000 by the time the hammer came down.
During the war, Mr Sismore's career included postings to Sculthorpe, Swanton Morley and Bylaugh Hall.
When he finally retired in 1976, he was an air commodore, following a career spanning nearly 40 years of war and peace.
Before the auction, Spink's medal consultant Mark Quayle said: 'Visually, alone, it is a spectacular group. To see that many awards for gallantry in a single group is rare enough, but the story behind them is even more extraordinary.
'The particular raids in which Ted Sismore excelled were highly specialised and hazardous low-level missions against specific targets, often a single building in a large city.
'They called them Mosquito daylight spectaculars for a good reason: they depended for their success on minutely-detailed planning, incredible flying skills and unerringly accurate navigation.'
That was where Ted Sismore came in. Robert Lyman, whose new book on the Amiens raid, Jail Busters, is due out next week, describes him as 'the brains' behind some of the RAF's most breathtaking feats of arms. 'His mottos,' he says, 'were: boldness and audacity.'
By the time he arrived at Marham to begin operations on the twin-engine Mosquito, a war-winning aircraft nicknamed the 'Wooden Wonder', Sismore was already a 21-year-old veteran of 30 missions in the out-dated Blenheims.
More importantly, he possessed a talent for survival that was more than matched by a genius for navigation.
Over the course of the next two-and-a-half years, which was studded with Norfolk postings to Sculthorpe, Swanton Morley and Bylaugh Hall, his knack of leading formations precisely to their high-profile targets would ensure him near legendary status.
As Norwich-based aviation historian Martin Bowman put it, 'to have pulled off those kinds of missions once would have been remarkable, but to do it time after time was exceptional. What he achieved was absolutely incredible.'
Designed to deliver lightning strikes with deadly accuracy, the kind of missions in which Sismore became expert usually involved flights deep into enemy territory carried out at wave-top and then tree-top level to avoid detection.
His remarkable run of success that would see him rise from pilot officer to squadron leader began within weeks of joining 105 Squadron at Marham in a raid on Berlin that would prove the cheekiest of all the so-called Mosquito 'spectaculars'.
Deliberately timed to disrupt a broadcast by Reichsmarshal Herman Goering to mark the 10th anniversary of the Nazis' seizure of power, the attack carried out on January 30, 1943 was described by one senior airman as the mission that 'set the world laughing'.
But it was no joke for men like Ted Sismore. His first reaction was a simple question: 'Shall we have enough fuel?'As it was, everything went like clockwork. Roaring low across Germany, the Norfolk-based Mossies took advantage of a break in the clouds to pick out the city's radio station at precisely the moment when Goering was scheduled to speak.
The sudden sound of explosions interrupting the announcer's voice followed by cancellation of the broadcast told of the raid's startling success. The raid, which had taken the German defences completely by surprise, set the pattern for many more low-level sorties. Sismore's contribution was recognised by the first of three awards of the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Within five months, he had capped that honour with a Distinguished Service Order for a Marham-mounted mission against the Jena glassworks, which represented the RAF's deepest-ever daylight low-level penetration of Germany.
Once again Sismore provided the expert navigation required for a hair-raising operation that resulted in a series of hair's-breadth escapes from disaster that began the moment they crossed the Dutch coast.
'In a few minutes we came to the Zuider Zee, to find a fleet of small fishing boats ahead, some 200 altogether, and I think the fishermen were rather surprised as the formation opened out a little and passed low between their masts…'
The clear weather that greeted their landfall over enemy-occupied Europe, however, gave way to thick mist over Germany that resulted in the fatal collision of two of the aircraft.
With visibility down to less than a thousand yards, they remained dead-on course to see the factory's tell-tale chimneys and ring of barrage balloons.
Their troubles, however, were only just beginning. Dodging the balloons and guns mounted on towers to bomb at chimney height, Sismore heard a 'frightening bang' which was followed by smoke and fumes filling the cockpit.
Flak had struck the port engine, severed the inter-com and peppered the fuselage, wounding his pilot in the hand and leg. Somehow Sismore managed to bandage his injuries as they evaded the enemy's defences.
Then he managed to pick out sufficient landmarks to plot their low-level escape across Germany and Holland.
Only when they had reached the sea was Sismore able to assess the damage.
'I… found that a piece of the port airscrew had been forced through the side of the fuselage and had smashed a lot of the equipment, luckily a fraction of a second after the bombs had left the racks.'
Not long after, Sismore was rested from operations. Posted first to Sculthorpe and then to 2 Group HQ at Bylaugh Hall, he was eventually appointed navigation leader to 21 (City of Norwich) Squadron where his growing reputation was further enhanced by his role in helping plan the astounding Amiens jailbreak raid.
According to the raid's latest historian, Sismore's involvement was critical to its success. Everything, says Robert Lyman, was planned 'in meticulous detail' with Sismore taking charge not only of routing the aircraft, but the plan of attack, from the strength of the bombs to the walls to be breached.
Despite the loss of one Mosquito, the mission was accomplished brilliantly, allowing some 250 resistance workers to escape from the Gestapo-run prison.
Sismore had originally been slated to fly on the raid in a Mosquito piloted by 2 Group commander Air Vice-Marshal Basil Embry. But when Embry was barred from flying on account of the risks, he flatly refused to let his leading navigator go either, famously telling him: 'If I don't go, you don't go!'
Another ground posting to Swanton Morley followed before Sismore resumed flying.
The three Danish raids that climaxed a brilliant record of high drama and even higher endeavour opened with an attack on the Gestapo HQ housed inside buildings on the Aarhus university campus.
As would be the case on all of the missions, carried out in daylight and at roof-top height, Sismore was the lead navigator charged with routing the bombers safely through areas bristling with anti-aircraft defences.
Attempts by the Danish resistance to blow-up the heavily-defended Gestapo buildings crammed with 'a dangerous accumulation of intelligence' had failed, but the assault by 25 Mosquitos flying in three waves was a coup beyond even Sismore's imagination.
In the space of 11 minutes on October 31, 1944, the two buildings were reduced to smouldering ruins and their store of incriminating files destroyed for the loss of one aircraft forced to crash-land in neutral Sweden.
Heartened by the success requests were made for similar strikes against the secret police headquarters in Copenhagen and on the island of Odense.
The two raids were carried out a little under a month apart in the spring of 1945 and resulted in the timely obliteration of both targets.
Once again, Sismore's role was critical, the recommendation for his third DFC adjudging the success of both operations as being 'largely due to the extremely high standard of navigation'.
The report, however, told only part of the story. Operation Carthage, the raid on the Gestapo HQ housed in Copenhagen's Shell House building, was fiendishly difficult and, alone of the Danish sorties, was marred by tragedy.
Flown from Fersfield near Diss, the mission involved a 350-mile North Sea crossing at a height of no more than 50 feet in stormy conditions.
Eventually, after an hour and 40 minutes of 'acute anxiety and discomfort', Sismore had made the scheduled landfall. Eventually they were over their target in Copenhagen, and Sismore had the bomb doors open and his pilot pressed the release.
In those moments, between 100 and 200 Gestapo workers died and yet only eight of the 30 or so resistance workers known to be held captive on the sixth floor were killed or fatally injured. But what began as another stunning exhibition of precision bombing misfired when the fourth Mosquito crashed in flames next to a school crowded with children. Distracted by the smoke, some of other aircraft released their bombs, resulting in the deaths of 96 pupils and teachers and injuries to more than a hundred more.
Added to the losses on the ground were nine aircrew from four Mosquitos and an escorting Mustang which failed to return to Norfolk.
Sismore's war was almost over. The Odense raid carried out a few weeks later was his last operational sortie before the German surrender.
Peace, however, did not spell the end of his aerial exploits. Two years later, he navigated Sqd Ldr 'Mickey' Martin, a former Dambuster pilot, on a record-breaking flight from London to Cape Town that earned them the Royal Aero Club's Britannia Trophy.
More honours followed. In 1956, Sismore, by then having trained as a pilot, was awarded an Air Force Cross to add to his wartime distinctions for his role in helping develop jet night fighter tactics at the height of the Cold War.
After a spell in charge of the nation's Royal Observer Corps, he eventually retired as an air commodore in 1976 after a career spanning almost 40 years of war and peace that will forever be most closely associated with the low-level 'spectaculars' flown out of Norfolk that represented the 'finest hour' for a man called Daisy.
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