by Ross Kemp
The training, which took place mainly on Salisbury Plain, was intensive and exhausting. Neither time nor the weather was on their side. All the equipment they had been promised soon began to arrive by the crate-load at Tilshead, providing further evidence for the men that they were about to be sent on a major operation. The item of equipment arousing the greatest amount of interest was the recently invented Sten submachine gun, a fully automatic rifle/pistol hybrid that made their bolt-action Lee Enfield .303 rifles look distinctly old-fashioned.
In the second week of February, the raiding party took the train to the west coast of Scotland to carry out training exercises with the Navy. They were quartered near Inveraray, aboard the Prince Albert, the parent ship of their landing craft which, all going to plan, would provide their means of escape from France after the attack. The freezing cold waters of Loch Fyne might not have been the most popular of training areas for the men, but the exercises did at least focus the minds on the challenges they faced. Embarking 120 men, with equipment, casualties and prisoners, in the dark and under fire, was, they soon realised, by no means a straightforward procedure. ‘The possibility of being left stranded on the coast of France after we had done our job was unpleasant,’ Frost recalled. ‘And in the end we went on the raid without having had one really successful evacuation.’ The high point of the training in Scotland was a visit from Combined Ops chief Lord Mountbatten who, without giving away details of the raid, made a stirring address to all ranks, naval and military.
Back at Tilshead, they carried out a practice drop with the Whitley bombers detailed to take them in on the night. It was the first time that No. 51 Squadron had ever dropped parachute troops but, unlike every other element of the training, the exercise passed off successfully. The cold ground was rock solid and there were a few sprains and bruises, but no serious injuries.
The raiding party consisted of 120 all ranks, divided into three groups with the code names Drake, Hardy, Jellicoe, Nelson and Rodney, who were each given separate tasks to carry out on the night. Major-General Browning chose the names as a salute to the Royal Navy, whose men and vessels would, if all went to plan, evacuate the raiders and their top-secret prize and return them safely to Portsmouth. BITING was to be a combined operation in the purest sense. The RAF was to deliver the Army to the target by air, the Army would execute their tasks on the ground, and the Navy would transport them from France by sea.
For security reasons, it was not possible for Jones or any other leading scientist in possession of highly confidential information to join the raiding force. Were they to fall into enemy hands, they would be subjected to the Gestapo’s most extreme forms of interrogation to extract their invaluable store of secrets. And yet, it was important that an engineer with more than basic knowledge of radio technology joined the sappers tasked with dismantling the Würzburg. Were they unable to remove the apparatus, the engineer would at least be able to photograph it and scrutinise its parts at the scene. Any information whatsoever was to be welcomed by Jones and his colleagues down at the Telecommunications Research Establishment at Worth Matravers, near Swanage, on the Dorset coast.
A request for volunteers to take part in a ‘special mission’ was put out in the appropriate circles. One of the first to put his name forward was RAF Flight Sergeant Charles Cox, a former cinema projectionist who had never been in an aircraft, let alone jumped out of one. Nor had he ever been on a ship – and his wife had given birth just a few weeks earlier. It was only when he arrived at Adastral House on Kingsway, the London home of the Air Ministry, that Cox, an expert radio mechanic, was made to understand quite how ‘special’ the mission was going to be. Without revealing the precise objective of the mission, Cox was left in no doubt about the hazards involved – an impression reinforced when he was dispatched to Ringway, the parachute centre near Manchester, to learn how to jump. But Cox was not just bright and patriotic, he was brave too, and he took to the training with the same degree of commitment as the dedicated paratroopers.
All the key figures involved in the raid were men of the highest standing or greatest promise. Major Frost, who had been commissioned in the Cameronians, a Scottish infantry regiment, was a tough, resourceful leader, destined for fame in the grim battle at Arnhem. His men were mainly Commandos drawn from Scottish regiments. The Company Sergeant Major, Strachan, of the Black Watch, was almost a stereotype of his rank: a no-nonsense, highly efficient, experienced man, who had the huge respect of men and officers alike. If you wanted something done, you went to Strachan. During the training, a young German Jew, Peter Nagel, who had fled Germany before the war, was added to the party. He was to act as interpreter and his name was changed to Private Newman.
The air element was commanded by Pickard, whose fearless exploits had already earned him a Distinguished Flying Cross. Frost needed only a short meeting with the dashing, handsome airman and his men to know his troops were in good hands. ‘They belonged to a crack bomber squadron . . . We were left in no doubt as to their efficiency, and we felt that if anybody was going to put us down in the right place, they were the people to do it.’
The naval force assigned to take the raiders back to England was under the command of Commander F. N. Cook of the Royal Australian Navy. He was one of 400 (out of 1,250 men) who survived when the battleship HMS Royal Oak was sunk by a torpedo from a German U-boat while at anchor in Scapa Flow. His force, escorted by two destroyers, consisted of half a dozen Motor Gun Boats, the same number of assault landing craft, and two support landing craft, manned by thirty-two officers and men of the Royal Fusiliers and the South Wales Borderers. They were to provide covering fire while the raiding party was embarked.
The last week of the training was spent rehearsing the evacuation in the landing craft, but there was little improvement on their poor performances in Scotland. Much of each day was spent in the back of troop trucks, slowly winding through Dorset lanes to get to the stretch of coast where the exercises took place. When they finally arrived, foul weather prevented them from taking to the water. It was highly frustrating and Frost, not a man to flap in a crisis, was starting to get worried. The last rehearsal ‘could not have been a more dismal failure’, he wrote. The equipment containers landed in the wrong place, the landing craft went to the wrong beach and the paratroopers ended up ten miles from the target site . . . in a minefield.
The raid was scheduled to take place forty-eight hours later, on the night of Sunday 23 February, but the Navy were insisting that a further rehearsal should be carried out. Fortunately, the weather that had been causing so many problems forced a postponement to the following night, and a final rehearsal was performed near Southampton. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a great improvement on the shambles that had gone before.
By the eve of the raid, Frost’s men knew every last detail of the German position at and near to the villa. They knew every strongpoint, pillbox, light machine gun position, every roll of barbed wire; they knew the location and exact strength of the local billets and barracks and the weapons at their disposal. They even knew the names of some of the troops. For this remarkable intelligence, they had the French Resistance to thank, and three men in particular.
The man in overall command of reconnaissance and intelligence gathering was Gilbert Renault, known to the British Intelligence Services as ‘Colonel Rémy’, one of the most famous secret agents of the war. After a short stay in England following the collapse of France, Rémy returned to his homeland to recruit and train underground intelligence operatives. It was to one of his best men, Roger Dumont (codename ‘Pol’), that he entrusted the task of reconnoitring the Bruneval site. Assisted by Charles Chauvenau, aka ‘Charlemagne’, a garage mechanic from Le Havre, Pol quickly began gathering remarkably detailed information about the objective. By chatting to one of the guards near the villa, they made the crucial discovery that, in spite of the warning signs along the cliff, the beach below was not mined. The RAF’s photographic unit, meanwhile, continued to provide first-
class images of the coast from which a very detailed model of the objective was constructed.
A considerable number of German troops were stationed in the area immediately around Bruneval, comfortably outnumbering Frost’s force. At the large, modern villa, guarding the Würzburg apparatus to the front, was a garrison of between 30 and 40 men. Most of these were thought to be from the signalling corps and a few of them were likely to be in the house when the paratroopers arrived. Many others would be operating or guarding the Würzburg dish or the Freya installation 750 yards to the north. The major threat was likely to come from the 100-strong garrison, stationed at Le Presbytère, a complex of farm buildings 200 yards to the north of the villa, set within a rectangle of woodland, housing coastal defence troops and off-duty signallers. There were also three or four dozen troops billeted in Bruneval village, less than half a mile from the beach along the main lane. These were believed to be the personnel who manned the defensive positions on the top of the cliffs and down at the beach. The operational orders, shown to Frost, refer to eleven light machine gun positions around the villa, cliff and beach, as well as a pillbox halfway up the steep slope leading from the shore to the villa. They also refer to enemy infantry reinforcements based six miles away, and a reconnaissance battalion fifteen miles away.
Diversion raids by Bomber Command started on the night of February 17/18. Flying to targets in the Paris area, the bombing force were ordered to cross the French coast at low level between Le Havre, ten miles to the south, and the Somme estuary, eighty miles to the north, in order to get the enemy in the Bruneval area accustomed to the approach of low-flying aircraft by night.
The plan was to split C Company into three groups and drop them in a ten-minute period between 0015 and 0025, roughly half a mile to the east of the villa. ‘Drake’, the first and largest section, led by Frost, was to be the first to jump. After forming up, they were to head towards the cliff and capture the Würzburg. Their primary task was to enable Flight Sergeant Cox and the sappers, under Captain Denis Vernon, to dismantle the radar dish. The aim was to bring back the entire apparatus, but what couldn’t be removed was to be photographed. There were fifty men in Drake, split into two groups. One under Lieutenant Peter Young, who had played a key role in Operation ARCHERY in Norway two months earlier, had orders to assault and hold the Würzburg while Cox went to work. The other, under Frost, was to clear out and secure the villa. Among the orders issued to Frost were the following instructions: ‘No prisoners will be taken other than officers and technical personnel . . . It is imperative that the scientist (Cox) should run no risk of capture.’
The second group (known as ‘Nelson’), under the command of Lieutenant Euen Charteris, was to capture the beach and hold it. The third (‘Rodney’), under Lieutenant Timothy, was to act as reserve and/or fight off German counterattacks at the radar position or the beach.
Every man of Frost’s party was to be in position by the time he blew his whistle to signal for the battle to begin. Speed and precise timing were to be essential. The raiders were not to remain on French soil for a minute longer than necessary. It would not be long before the enemy arrived at the scene in significant numbers, some armed with weapons considerably more powerful than Sten guns and Mills bombs. Good timing and a swift execution of the raid’s objectives were essential for the evacuation as well. The Navy, strict timekeepers, would be waiting off shore. Whether it was the right shore was another matter.
It was 2230 when the first of the twelve Whitleys roared down the runway at Thruxton and climbed into the clear night sky above Hampshire and banked southeastwards towards the Channel. Pickard was at the controls and, behind him, Frost sat uncomfortably on the ribbed aluminium floor of the draughty fuselage, squeezed in amongst his men. To keep out the intense cold, some sat with blankets over their legs, others climbed into sleeping bags.
The noise of the bombers’ huge engines and the heavy vibrations made talking impossible, but playing cards and singing helped break the tedium and distract minds from the challenges ahead. When the paratroopers had run through their favourite tunes, Flight Sergeant Cox added to the entertainment with a solo rendition of ‘The Rose of Tralee’. The men had drunk so many mugs of tea during the countdown to takeoff that, an hour into the flight, many of them, including Frost, were desperate to piss. Unfortunately, the lavatories had been removed from all the aircraft in order to free up space and they had to squirm where they sat.
The twelve bombers formed up over Selsey Bill, south of Chichester, and left England behind them. As they approached France, a diversion bombing raid was taking place at Le Havre a few miles to the south. Two bombers attacked an aerodrome and marshalling yard. The paratroopers, their faces blackened with tar, had been in the air for almost two hours when the hole cover in each Whitley was removed and a freezing blast of air surged through the fuselage. Below, the flat surface of the Channel glistened in the moonlight and, as the aircraft levelled out at about 550 feet, they could see the snow-draped coast of France. Moments later, the long beams of coastal searchlights began to scour the heavens and the AA gunners opened up. The shells burst around the slow-moving bombers, three of which were hit but suffered only minor damage. The pilots threw the lumbering bombers around the sky to dodge the stream of shells and tracer streaking towards them. Two aircraft, carrying Lt Charteris and half his men from the ‘Nelson’ group, were forced to take evasive action and veered away from the approach path they had plotted. All twelve aircraft headed a few miles inland before turning back towards the coast to drop their human cargo.
The cry of ‘Action stations!’ told the men that the time of reckoning had arrived. Pickard throttled back to fly as slowly as possible without stalling, but the Whitley was still travelling at just over 100 miles an hour. Frost, who was the first to jump, sat with his legs at the edge of the hole. The red warning light gave way to green. Frost took a deep breath and dropped out. He felt his legs pulled out horizontally by the slipstream and for a brief moment he was lying parallel with the ground. Dropping in sticks of ten, the other 120 men followed in rapid succession, with the aim of landing in as small an area as possible. A second or two after jumping, each paratrooper felt the jerk from the line pulling out the parachute from the bag on his back. Almost instantly, the plummeting fall towards earth was checked as the canopy of the parachute burst into its full twenty-eight-foot diameter above his head and he began to float towards the earth. It felt gentle, but they all knew from the shock of the landings in their practice jumps that they were falling much faster than they thought.
The landscape, illuminated by the bright moon, looked exactly as it had been represented by the model they had been shown. One by one, the 120 men hit the ground with a thud, rolled over and immediately cast off his parachute harness. Falling at speed, it is very difficult for a parachutist to calculate exactly when he is going to touch down, and the shock of a landing has been compared with that of jumping blindfold from a height of about six to eight feet. On this occasion the jolt was softened only a little by the carpet of snow that lay over the area.
The Commandos of No. 11 SAS Battalion, who were dropped in to blow up an Italian aqueduct in February 1941, can claim the honour of carrying out the first ever paratrooper operation by British forces. Technically, the Bruneval raid was the second, but it was a far bigger and infinitely more important and hazardous enterprise. It was also the first carried out by the 1st Airborne Division, the country’s first dedicated force of paratroopers, created on Churchill’s insistence. It was half an hour after midnight on 28 February 1942 when the boots of the first British paratroopers thumped onto Nazi-occupied French soil.
The 120 men of C Company, 2 Para had under an hour to prove their worth to Britain’s war effort. The best-case scenario envisaged by the Combined Operations planners was a successful removal of the radar dish, a light casualty toll, an orderly evacuation and safe passage back to the UK. The worst case? Slaughter on the beaches or capture and ‘interrogatio
n’ by the Gestapo.
It was an unpromising start to the raid. The two aircraft that had diverted to avoid the flak barrage dropped their ‘sticks’ over two miles south of the intended dropping zone. As soon as he hit the ground, Lt Charteris realised that he and the twenty other men from the Nelson group had landed in the wrong place. They had been handed the crucial task of capturing the beach and holding it so that the landing craft could come ashore. Without Nelson, Lt Timothy’s reserve of thirty men was not strong enough to hold their other positions and simultaneously attack the German pillbox and all the machine-gun positions covering the beach.
Aware that catastrophe loomed without them, Charteris quickly assembled his men, and using the distant beacon of the lighthouse at Cap d’Antifer north of the villa to guide him, they set off in single file at a fast trot. Within minutes, they had stumbled into the enemy and the first bursts of a short but brutal firefight cut through the still night air.
The intended dropping zone was a large area of open ground 600 yards east of the villa to the north of the Bruneval ravine, through which the road trailed from the village to the embarkation beach. Several inches of snow lay on the ground and, under the bright moon, 100 British paratroopers were clearly visible as they quickly gathered up the nylon canopies. The only sounds were the rustle of parachutes and the humming engines of the bombers as they disappeared back across the Channel. The tension that every man must have been feeling at this moment was suspended by a brief, comic scene when several dozen of them, including Frost, unzipped their trousers and relieved themselves of several pints of processed tea. ‘It was not good drill,’ the Major conceded, ‘for now was the time when a stick of parachutists are most vulnerable and one’s first concern should be to make for the weapon containers.’
