Operation
After their training had been completed, on 17 November the sappers were transported to an RAF airfield at Skitten in Scotland, with the operation scheduled to commence two days later. On the evening of 19 November, Group Captain Cooper, with the aid of a Norwegian meteorologist and regular reports from the SOE agents stationed near the landing zone, decided that although the weather was not perfect, it would be best to launch the operation that night; Cooper believed that if it were delayed, the weather might deteriorate on subsequent days and prevent the operation from being conducted entirely. The first aircraft–glider combination took off from the airfield at 17:50, with the second following at 18:10; after circling the airfield several times the two combinations headed out across the North Sea towards their objective.
Read more about this topic: Operation Freshman
Famous quotes containing the word operation:
“Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.”
—Francis Bacon (1560–1626)
“You may read any quantity of books, and you may almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don’t have, at the back of your minds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“It requires a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding. The only idea of wit, or rather that inferior variety of the electric talent which prevails occasionally in the North, and which, under the name of “Wut,” is so infinitely distressing to people of good taste, is laughing immoderately at stated intervals.”
—Sydney Smith (1771–1845)