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:
“It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
“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)
“An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.”
—Henri Bergson (1859–1941)