Glyn Loosmore RIP

Kyt · Dec 4, 2007

Radio operator who worked with SOE teams in France and Burma and won the Military Medal and Croix de Guerre

Glyn Loosmore obituary - Times Online

Glyn Loosmore's change of career from the Midland Bank eventually to become a district commissioner in Tanganyika was largely the result of his wartime experiences with the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in German-occupied France and later against the Japanese in Burma.

He enlisted in the Royal Armoured Corps in July 1942 for training as a radio operator. Once qualified, he volunteered for “special operations of a hazardous nature” and went to Milton Hall, near Peterborough, to train as a radio operator with one of the SOE teams to be dropped into occupied France on or shortly after the Normandy invasion.

Codenamed Jedburghs, the majority of these three-man teams were used to establish contact with the French Resistance and call by radio for airdrops of arms and explosives for such groups to undertake sabotage helpful to the Allies' campaign to liberate France.

Loosmore was assigned to the team codenamed Andy that was dropped in the wrong place and too low, as a result of which both officers were injured on landing and had to be evacuated. Loosmore was instructed to join Team Ivor whose radio operator had been killed when his parachute failed to open. This was not a matter of a few miles' walk but a journey across central France by taxi, provided by the Resistance.

Ivor contacted the main Resistance group in the Morvan département led by the previous commanding officer of the 1st Régiment d'Infanterie, disbanded when Germany occupied the Vichy Zone in late 1942. By persuading other Resistance groups in the Morvan to unite under a French Colonel Bertrand, a force of 1,700 was assembled but only half of them armed.

Loosmore was kept hard at work on his radio calling for airdrops of arms and ammunition. But only one supply of small arms was received and these were unsuited to the task of harassing the large number of German troops moving through the Morvan en route for Germany.

Ivor dispersed to other duties on recall to England. Loosmore sailed for the Far East in November and was dropped into Burma to join already deployed units of Force 136 in March 1945. Although the war in Europe was all but over by then, the Japanese were still fighting stubbornly.

In Burma, the former Jedburgh team members were employed to supply the local anti-Japanese guerrilla forces with arms and direct their operations along lines required by General Sir William Slim's 14th Army advancing from the north. Loosmore worked with the Mongoose team commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Ronald Critchley, in the Karen tribal area, where some 7,000 local levies were raised. Attacks on the Japanese were mounted but Mongoose was driven into the hills by retaliatory attacks and the burning of Karen villages.

Loosmore was awarded the Military Medal and the Croix de Guerre for his work with Team Ivor in France and mentioned in dispatches for his time with Mongoose in Burma. On demob in 1947 he returned to his job with the Midland Bank but left to attend the University of Wales, graduating with a first in 1951. He joined the Colonial Administrative Service, and served in Northern Rhodesia until, opposed to the imposition of the Central African Federation, he transferred to Tanganyika and became district commissioner, Shinyanga. He retired in 1963 to take up a lectureship in English at the University of Leicester.

He is survived by his wife, Elizabeth, née Goldsworthy, and a son and daughter.

Glyn Loosmore, MM, wartime member of the SOE, was born on March 3, 1923. He died on November 29, 2007, aged 84
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