Book review: Operation Pimento by Adam Hart

Molly Stubbs 

Before Frank Cromwell Griffiths became a test pilot at RAF Christchurch in 1940, before he was on the cutting edge of technology that ultimately won the allies the war, his life seemed to prepare him with all the ingenuity, intelligence, and impulsiveness necessary for an airman. 

An upbringing in Denbighshire’s nature promoted basic survival techniques, while an education at both ends of the spectrum and a six-year stint on a boat around Liverpool gave him the communication skills to unite boffins and bombardiers. 

Combined with a sense of adventure and a love for flying, his RAF instructors in 1936 noted how ‘above average’ he performed, even if he was, as they politely put it, ‘overconfident’. He wouldn’t be needed for peacetime duty, but after November 1939, the British military couldn’t exactly be picky.   

Ironically, the onset of World War II gave Frank Griffiths the chance to live out his dreams. But it wasn’t until 1943 when he finally took to the skies over the continent. 

Part of the top-secret RAF Tempsford squads, set up by the Special Operations Executive, Frank and the crew of his Halifax, O for Orange, dropped weapons and supplies to European resistance fighters as well as delivering British spies to their objectives.  

But on one fateful night, 15th August 1943, an opportune bullet courtesy of Italian soldiers stationed in Meythet, France took out one of O for Orange’s port-side engines. The plane went down, and with it the lives of six of its seven crew members and five civilians on the ground. 

Tragedy 

For Frank, hanging from telephone wires still strapped to his seat, the sole survivor, this tragedy was just the beginning of a three-month escape from occupied France that would see him through Switzerland and Spain in his gruelling journey back to wife and newborn daughter. 

In Operation Pimento: My Great-Grandfather’s Great Escape, debut author Adam Hart, Frank’s great-grandson, combines biography, history book, espionage epic, daring escape plot, travel memoir, and love letter to a family member who passed before he was born, but shaped our world in immeasurable ways.

Armed with a sleeping bag and some snickers bars, twenty-two-year-old Hart retraces this period of his great-grandfather’s life … literally. 

Beginning at the memorial in Meythet, minutes away from where a Madam and the Maquis (French resistance) nursed Frank back to health, travelling across the alps into Figueres, sleeping in a flowerbed outside a Spanish train station, and finally heading into Gibraltar where Frank caught the flight back to Wiltshire, Hart meets the descendants of resistance fighters and allied heroes who ensured his family line would continue, while bringing Frank’s story to life from myriad documents, diaries and anecdotes.

Tension

Frank’s own diary became a ‘bible’ to Hart when writing Operation Pimento, and the airman’s personal thoughts and recollections from many years after the war’s end are quoted throughout the book. However, much of the dialogue, as Hart admits in his introduction, has been created in service of reader immersion. 

This mix of non-fiction with sprinklings of fictional elements gives the ‘characters’ bodies and hearts and souls far more effectively than their plaques on French street corners and Wikipedia articles ever could. But it’s not just the people who receive such treatment. 

That there was a recorded full moon that August night transmutes into the Halifax’s ‘moon shadow racing below them’ with ‘Lake Annecy, its water twinkling in the starlight.’ That Frank received rudimentary medical care in the days after the crash results in him, on ‘another beautiful summer’s day in the Haute-Savoie’, settling down ‘Beside the riverbed, underneath a Victoria plum tree’. 

Such descriptions are lavish, inviting, entrancing but never excessive, and at many points provide much-needed levity. Like those fictionalised conversations between Frank and his saviours, they take the reader back in time to a world that, thanks to Hart’s skill, we never need to work too hard to imagine. 

Additionally, in these mirrored times, 1943 and 2022, the writer’s command of tension is on full display. Chapters break off at the opportune (read: most frustrating) moments to leave us hankering to find out how the Welsh airman gets out of the latest hair-raising situation he’s found himself in. And then, just as we’ve settled into Hart’s charming travelogue, back we go to his great-grandfather’s escape. 

Fine line

Books about war, perhaps all history books, tread a very fine line between presenting factual information, positing new ways of thinking about a certain person or battle, and being an enjoyable reading experience. 

Perhaps you’re the kind of person who prefers reading about troop movements and the logistics of war, how many months the Italian campaign stretched on, facts, figures, and statistics that keenly illustrate the level of decimation the world endured during that half-decade. 

If that’s the case, Operation Pimento may not be for you. The catastrophic effects of World War II are shown through one man’s experiences, an intensely focused but vitally human retelling of a single, very specific chapter in World War II history. 

Having said all that, though, the level of research Hart has undertaken, the documents he’s compiled and the emotional journey he too has undergone result in immense accuracy and detail, mixed with a healthy heaping of empathy.

When we learn that two of the six O for Orange crew members who passed that night had no idea their wives were pregnant back home, when Frank writes of prisoners subsisting on cabbage soup, lines of resistors led to torture dens in the basements of hotels, the cross-continent effort to get downed British and American airmen back to their homes, the conclusion is unavoidable; that it cannot be allowed to happen again. 

But for Hart, who initially set out to write a 1200-word article on the story passed down through his family from Frank, the conclusion is entirely more personal. Even though his great-grandfather passed before he was born, even though he’ll never meet the people who assisted the pilot during the war, keeping them alive through books like this means we’ll never truly be without them. 

Operation Pimento: My Great-Grandfather’s Great Escape is published by Hodder & Stoughton and was released on 5th June 2025. It is available to buy from all good bookshops.