Sean Feast

The WW2 story of a Special Duties Operator with 101 Squadron
Carried on the Wind reveals the secret wartime world of the RAF’s Special Duties Operators, employed to ‘jam’ enemy night fighter transmissions.
At the centre of the story is Ted Manners, who flew as the ‘eighth man’ in an otherwise normal operational Lancaster bomber aircraft belonging to 101 Squadron. Using his specialist knowledge, equipment and training, his job was to thwart Luftwaffe communications between their ground controllers and the deadly night-fighter squadrons operating in the skies over Germany in 1944.
It is also the exciting and often tragic story of the remaining members of the Lancaster crew with whom Ted flew … all of them young men caught in the maelstrom of a tour of operations that included eight trips to Berlin as well as others to Nuremberg, Leipzig and Mailly-Le-Camp … also surviving a mid-air collision over Belgium.
It is an excellent insight into the wider activities of 101 Squadron, whose attrition rate at the time was so appalling, that in the course of their six-month period with the squadron Ted and his colleagues were the only crew to complete a tour of 30 operations … in the process winning two DFCs and a DFM between them.
A compelling read, full of accurate historical detail and a fitting tribute to the bravery of the crews of RAF Bomber Command, who suffered such devastating losses.