Picture a field in occupied France. It is a little after midnight, and there is a full moon riding above the poplars. Three people stand in the wet grass, holding bicycle lamps, hearts going like drums. They are listening. And then they hear it: a single engine, far off, growing. Somewhere up there in the dark is a small British aeroplane, painted the colour of the night sky, coming to take one of them home.

That aeroplane was the Westland Lysander. And the story of how this odd, ungainly little machine became the secret ferry of the resistance is one of the most quietly heroic in aviation.

An ugly duckling with a gift

The Lysander was never meant to be glamorous. It first flew on 15 June 1936 and entered Royal Air Force service in June 1938 as an “army co-operation” aircraft, a flying pair of binoculars for the army, designed to spot for the guns, drop messages, and potter along above the front. Crews nicknamed it the “Lizzie,” with the affection you reserve for something a bit awkward but very dependable.

It had a single nine-cylinder Bristol Mercury radial engine up front, a high gull wing braced with struts, and fixed wheels tucked into streamlined spats. When the shooting started in earnest in 1940, the Lysander turned out to be desperately vulnerable to modern fighters, and the RAF lost a great many of them over France and Belgium. On paper, the Lizzie’s war should have ended there.

But the aircraft had one rare and precious talent. Thanks to automatic slats along the leading edge of the wing and big slotted flaps, it could fly astonishingly slowly, stalling at only around 65 mph, and it could put itself down and turn around in roughly 150 yards. A cow pasture would do. A Special Duties pilot named Hugh Verity, who would come to know the type better than almost anyone, described how gentle that slow flight could be.

The moon squadrons

In the summer of 1940, Britain had just set up the Special Operations Executive, Winston Churchill’s new agency for sabotage, espionage and helping resistance movements, the outfit he is said to have told to “set Europe ablaze.” SOE needed a way to slip agents into Nazi-occupied Europe and, just as importantly, to pull them out again. Parachutes were one answer. But some jobs needed a landing.

Enter two Royal Air Force Special Duties units, No. 138 and No. 161 Squadrons. No. 161 took on most of the Lysander work, and the aircraft was quietly transformed for its new life. A large fuel tank was slung under the belly for the long crossing. A fixed ladder was bolted to the port side so passengers could scramble in and out in seconds. And the whole machine was painted matte black, a decision Verity later remembered with a wry shake of the head.

Verity actually found the all-black scheme made the aircraft stand out against low cloud, and had his own repainted in dark colours on top. It is the kind of detail that reminds you these were real people, learning as they went, betting their lives on the answers.

A night in the life

Here is how it worked. For about a week on either side of the full moon, because moonlight was the only navigation aid they could count on, the pilots gathered at a cottage opposite the gates of RAF Tangmere on the south coast. Then, when a mission was on, they crossed the Channel alone. One pilot. One engine. No navigator, no radar, no lights.

Navigation was done the old way: a strip map folded in one hand, a compass, a watch, and the pilot’s own eyes hunting for rivers, coastlines and forests silvered by the moon. On the ground in France, the reception committee, often just two or three resistance members, laid out a tiny flare path in the shape of an inverted L using pocket torches, perhaps 150 yards long. As the Lysander approached, an agent flashed an agreed letter in Morse. The pilot flashed back. Only then did the other lamps come on.

Then came the part that took nerve on both sides. The Lizzie dropped out of the dark, bumped down across the grass, swung around into wind, and sat there with its engine running. Arriving agents climbed down the ladder; the ones going home scrambled up it. The whole exchange was meant to happen in under three minutes. Three minutes, in a field, behind enemy lines, with the enemy sometimes only a village away.

The people in the back seat

The pilots called their passengers “Joes,” men and women alike, and grew genuinely fond of them. These were people like Violette Szabo, carried by the moonlight squadrons, later captured and executed, and awarded the George Cross. Between them, the Special Duties squadrons delivered 101 agents into occupied Europe and brought 128 back out, each one a human being carried across the Channel in a cramped rear cockpit, trusting a stranger and a matte-black taxi.

It was dangerous, patient, unglamorous work, and the enemy was not always the biggest threat. Verity liked to say his worst adversaries were fog and mud, fields that swallowed wheels and cloud that swallowed the moon. Over four years the moon squadrons lost aircraft and lost pilots, and still they kept crossing, month after month, whenever the moon was full.

When you look at a Lysander in a museum today, and a handful survive, one lovingly restored in Special Duties black, it is easy to underestimate it. It is small and knock-kneed and strange. But that little aeroplane did something almost no other could: it flew into the dark, alone, and landed on faith and torchlight to carry ordinary, extraordinary people home. Not bad for an ugly duckling.

More on the Lysander and its secret war.

Sources: Wikipedia (Westland Lysander); Air & Space Forces Magazine, "The Moon Squadrons"; RAF Museum; Legasee veteran archive (Hugh Verity); Wikimedia Commons.