a carterton great
Max Sparks
A Carterton Great is a series of
features about remarkable Carterton
figures. This first piece is about Max
Sparks, the last surviving pilot of a low-
level World War 2 bombing mission.
Max was a resident of Carterton
and originally from Carterton, New
Zealand! He died in 2013 at the age of
92. This is the story of his involvement
in the raid on Amiens Prison known as
Operation Jericho.
On Friday 18 February 1944, as the
time approached 11am, aircraft carrying
out a raid on Amiens Prison took
off from a Hertfordshire airfield – 19
Mosquito Mk.VI aircraft: 6 aircraft
of No. 487 (Royal New Zealand Air
Force) Squadron, 6 of No. 464 (Royal
Australian Air Force), 6 of No. 21 and
one Photographic Reconnaissance
Unit (PRU) aircraft. This was Operation
Jericho.
There is question as to what this
mission was in aid of. Did the French
Resistance ask MI6 for the raid in order
to release résistants imprisoned at
Amiens? Or was it all part of a plot to
convince the Germans that when the
invasion of France came it would be in
the Pas-de-Calais? In The Jail Busters
Michael Lyman describes it as “an
unashamedly heroic rescue story: of
résistants (and possibly British agents
also) incarcerated in the jail awaiting
certain death or deportation to a
concentration camp in the east (which
meant the same thing)”.
No matter what the reason for the
attack was, Max Sparks was the
second pilot to take off, as part of the
first wave of 6 aircraft (belonging to
the RNZAF) due to strike at 12 noon
– as the German guards inside took
their lunch. The job of this first wave
was to break down the eastern wall
of the target with their bombs – and
to bomb the northern wall and the
guard’s quarters. All this was to come
after flying at a very low level across
the channel in horrible weather.
Sparks’ goal was to strike the eastern
wall. He would have released his
bombs once his group leader, Charles
Pickard, had dropped his. Once this
had been done, there was no time to
assess what had happened; he and his
navigator Arthur Dunlop had to leave
for home. They were struck by German
flak on one of the wings and returned
to base in a written off aircraft. Pickard
and his navigator Bill Broadley were
not so lucky: their aircraft was shot
down by Focke-Wulf 190s, killing them
both.
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