THE LACKEY 3A DROP SITE

On the night of 27/28 April 1944, the aircraft Worry Bird of the 801st Provisional Bomb Group was heading for a clandestine supply ground known as LACKEY 3A, near Lyon.
This site had been created only weeks earlier by Captain Jules Édouard Lesage—code-name Cosmo—and his Canadian wireless operator Lieutenant Alcide Beauregard, known in the field as Cyrano.

Inserted by Lysander aircraft on 8 February 1944, the pair were part of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), tasked with organising LACKEY, a new circuit in the Rhône–Saône region to coordinate railway sabotage and air-drop operations.
Operational reports later noted that the LACKEY grounds, including 3A, were “poorly chosen—on hillsides or in valleys,” and one crew would pay a tragic price for that difficult terrain.

BEAUREGARD, ALCIDE “CYRANO”

Born in Sainte-Christine, Québec, in 1916, Beauregard was a truck driver who enlisted in the Canadian Army in 1939 and transferred to the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals.
Fluent in French and skilled in radio, he was promoted to Lieutenant and attached to the SOE F Section in London.
Codenamed BURGLAR, he maintained London contact for the LACKEY network, sending and receiving over a hundred messages during five months of perilous work.
His radio traffic kept the Resistance linked to Allied command, but constant transmission from one address in Lyon exposed him to German radio-detection teams.

CAPTURE AND TRIBUTE

Beauregard was arrested in Lyon on 8 June 1944 at 23 rue Desparmet, with young Louis Cézard, who helped him destroy his codes before capture.
After interrogation, he was held in cell 50 of Montluc Prison, then executed on 20 August 1944 at the Fort de la Côte-Lorette, Saint-Genis-Laval, with some 120 other prisoners.
Posthumously Mentioned in Despatches, he is commemorated on the Bayeux Memorial and at Valençay among the 104 fallen agents of SOE F Section.

In May 2023, French President Emmanuel Macron named him at Montluc as one of “those foreigners among the French who chose freedom with their hearts and their blood.”