The day my mother saw paratroopers drown in the Tay... and my epic fight for the truth
A top secret D-Day training mission. A total news blackout. And a dogged journalist’s determination to honour the victims – and their vital witness
EIGHT months pregnant and standing on the shoreline of the Tay in her summer coat and hat, my mother watched the waves crash in blustery winds and witnessed a tragedy unfold.
It was sunny that Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1943, yet the wind gusted to 30mph at Wormit Bay in North Fife.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon when she heard the drone of two converted twin-engined Whitley bombers approach the south side of the Tay Bridge.
She watched in disbelief as 18 fully laden paratroopers, their parachutes open above them, tumbled from the sky and into water up to 30ft deep.
As a Royal Navy wife, my mother knew that, for many of the soldiers, their last moments in this world would be the dreadful, numbing realisation that they had no control in such violent winds. The only outcome as they dropped from 800ft was certain death in a watery grave.
In time, a Polish officer arrived. Mum asked him about the men and he said: ‘They are all OK.’
She knew it could not be true and thought he had spotted she was heavily pregnant and was trying to lessen the impact of what she had seen.
In fact, he was reporting correctly that ten Polish airborne soldiers from one of the two aircraft had landed in the shallows and struggled ashore.
The operation had been a training exercise... but was that the whole story? Until the end of her days, Mum never believed so.
My mother, Anna Mulford, passed away in a side ward of Dundee Royal Infirmary in 1994. As I held her hand that day, kissed her forehead and thanked her for everything she had done for me, I realised that, in this life at least, I would not be able to answer the question she had asked so often.
For my brother, born at the end of August that year, the photo of my mother in her maternity smock taken on the day of the disaster at Wormit – where the whole family would decamp each Sunday from Dundee in the summer – was a treasured possession.
It travelled with my father, Chief Petty Officer Mark Mulford, aboard the battleship HMS King George V on convoy escort duty from which he fully expected not to return.
In the family, my mother’s resolute unwillingness to accept anything other than the whole truth was legendary. Perhaps that is what inspired me as an investigative journalist.
WHEN I started training as a reporter on the Dundee Courier, my mother implored me to ask the senior reporters who had been on the paper in 1943 what had really happened to those soldiers who fell from the sky.
They said they had never heard of anything of the sort. If it had happened, they would have known – even if the Official Censor had imposed a news blackout.
I tried many times over the years to find the truth – but got nowhere. But still the questions my mother had asked troubled me.
Eight years ago, through an appeal in the Courier, I traced James Lindsay from Carmyllie in Angus, who had been a young boy in his family holiday cottage in Fife overlooking the scene.
He remembered not just the gold strands on his bedroom wallpaper being illuminated by searchlights, but also walking the beach at Balmerino with his father the next morning and finding sodden parachutes, helmets and equipment strewn along the shore.
Mr Lindsay recalled the authorities coming round, insisting on a complete lockdown on talk about what happened.
Then an elderly ex-RAF man got in touch, saying he had been one of the airmen on the rescue launches which had picked up bodies as the Tay gave up her dead over the next month.
My mum’s instincts that the Polish officer had pulled his punches had been correct all along – yet the full picture of what happened eluded me still.
Investigative journalism depends largely on seeking out the crucial fact and connecting it with the rest of what you have. It is the search for the nugget which unlocks so many doors – but it can be tricky to find.
I asked a friend to visit the National Archives at Kew and to search the logs of the RAF Air-Sea Rescue launches at Tayport and Montrose for July and August 1943. That came back blank.
The civilian RNLI lifeboat from Broughty Ferry would certainly have been requested to launch. The RNLI told me their records during the war were heavily censored and they could not help.
At this point, I was still concentrating on the men who drowned being Polish. I visited cemeteries in Perth, Edinburgh and Largo in Fife.
I even checked the records of Dundee Crematorium for Polish deaths. Nothing added up. I was still missing a crucial detail – the date of the tragedy. Instinctively, I knew it had to be a Sunday. Every Sunday from Easter to autumn the extended Mulford family piled into a steam train at Dundee Tay Bridge Station and crossed the span to Wormit.
My mother told me often of learning on her own mother’s knee of the famous disaster of December 1879 – when the original bridge collapsed, taking a train and its passengers to their deaths.
Yet here I was, more than 130 years later, trying to solve another mystery in the same area.
Determination and resolve morphed into blind obsession. I found I had a new, unwelcome definition of the phrase ‘a long shot’. I tried everything. Then I was told of some 400 Polish airmen buried at Newark Cemetery in Nottinghamshire. The volunteers of the Friends of Newark Cemetery group checked gravestones and offered to ask all their Polish contacts.
On my birthday on June 18 last year, I was enjoying a Saturday night in Peebles when my mobile buzzed. From Newark, my appeals for information had reached Derek Crowe at Strathclyde University.
He found a passing reference to the incident in the memoirs of a Polish general. He also found the date I had been searching for – June 13 – and the fact that the second
aircraft contained nine men from the 8th (Midlands) Battalion of the Parachute Regiment.
With my heart beating faster, I checked. June 13, 1943 was a Sunday. The men my mother saw that day were not all Poles – some were Britons.
I headed for Kew, where I found the battalion’s war diary. It was still stamped SECRET and had only just been released after decades locked away. The entries for June 13 gave the minimum detail, but it was enough to prove that my mother was right.
Of the nine Paras on board, seven drowned; while one had refused to jump and was court-martialled.
The ninth, Regimental Sergeant Major Alan Parsons, landed on a narrow sandbank and made it ashore with help from a local man.
Operation Bluebell had started on Salisbury Plain in Southern England, with 130 soldiers in ten obsolete Whitley bombers repurposed to carry paratroopers.
Their drop zone was a tiny site at Tentsmuir, on the west side of St Andrews Bay. But the weather was to play a deadly card. With the wind from the south-west, Tentsmuir was reachable. The pilots had been told to keep the water of St Andrews Bay on their right as a guide.
Dropping their troops over Wormit did also mean the water was on the right – but it was the River Tay and the wind would likely carry the troops out over the river.
Even the weather reports for the day are stamped SECRET.
I got hold of them and asked a friendly weatherman to evaluate phrases such as ‘deep area of low pressure’ and ‘turbulent air with very gusty conditions’. The reply was stark: ‘It was the perfect storm.’
AT 15:55, the order to jump over Wormit was given to the soldiers jammed in the fuselage of the two Whitleys. The 30mph gusts were more than twice the jump maximum.
As a veteran military parachute instructor whose students have included Special Forces from the SAS and SBS put it starkly: ‘They would have emerged going like a train – but in a sideways direction with basic parachutes you could not control.’
Why they jumped there, ten miles off course, remains a mystery. Did the aircrew mistake the stretch of water? Were they ordered to abandon a second approach and get on with the exercise? We may never know. The ten Polish troops survived only because they were nearer the shore. The British, with their plane further out, were not so lucky.
The discovery begged two vital questions. Why the total secrecy and why the go-ahead in suicidal conditions?
The answer was chilling: This was a top-secret proving trial to see whether paratroopers could be landed in a tight space.
Perhaps the final clue lies in the presence at Tentsmuir of Lord Alanbrooke, the Chief of the General Staff of the Army, and many of his top brass colleagues. I now know they were planning the D-Day invasion of June 1944 and assessing whether an airborne element would work.
Alanbrooke was known to be uncompromising. The exercise was to go ahead. No discussion. Full stop. He was not known as ‘Colonel Shrapnel’ for nothing.
If an exercise proved worthwhile militarily, then the attitude of the time was: ‘Shame about the dead, but small price to pay really to prove the point.’ There was a war on, you know. In total, seven men drowned; while an eighth, also a member of the 8th Battalion and on another plane, was killed at Tentsmuir when he was struck during the jump by an ammunition box. Many others were injured.
The cover-up was deemed vital to prevent the Nazis getting any intelligence which might allow them to work out any details regarding D-Day.
Even the tiniest piece of information is useful to an enemy. Who was watching? Wind speed? Height of jump? Why near water? How many rescue boats might reveal how many men were missing. And so on.
Of the many calls I received during my decades-long investigation, one stands out for the most poignant of reasons.
A man from Broughty Ferry checked the date and told me that he and his pals in the school holidays had found a parachute in the sand well out from shore. They could not free it without cutting the lines.
He took its panels home and his mother made silk blouses for his sisters.
He is haunted by the thought of the tragic reason why they probably could not free the canopy. Sadly, I had to tell him that two bodies were never found.
MY Mum spent her final years in St Serf’s Care Home in Newport, two miles from Wormit Bay. Going out for Sunday tea was often preceded by a walk along that same beach.
Standing there on the 75th anniversary of the tragedy brought back so many happy childhood memories.
Now they are mixed with the sadness of the needless loss of these brave men.
The 8th Battalion was part of 7,000 airborne servicemen who parachuted into Hitler’s ‘Fortress Europe’ on D-Day and wreaked havoc deep behind enemy lines.
In time, my ashes will be scattered at Wormit Bay. It means that much.
And if mum and I meet in a better place, I will tell her I finally solved the mystery of the tragedy on the Tay.
She understood the need for wartime secrecy. I doubt, however, if she would have accepted the reckless, brutal sacrifice of lives to test a theory.