Their job completed, the pilots turned for home and headed back across the Channel. The first aircraft landed back at Thruxton at 0140 and the remainder over the next fifty minutes. Although three of the Whitleys had been hit by flak, none of the damage was serious and no one had been injured. For Pickard and his men, their night’s work was done.
Once they had organised themselves on the ground, the Rodney team took up their position behind the main assault party, to defend the rear of Frost’s men from any significant counter-attack from La Poterie or any of the other German troops known to be in the area. But the men who were missing from the first batch of the third aircraft included two of the radio operators with their invaluable 38 radio sets.
Major Frost was not surprised that he and his men were now coming under fire from the Rectangle. That had been anticipated. But he was alarmed at how quickly the German troops seemed to have got themselves into position and opened fire. Frost ordered the men he had left at the Villa Gosset to withdraw from what was too clear a target and to join the rest of them around the Würzburg. It was while the men were leaving the villa that, in an early salvo fired from the Rectangle, Private McIntyre buckled and went down. He was the first British soldier killed in the raid. Frost ordered Lieutenant Naumoff, who was in charge of the Drake party, to deploy to the right of his men and to return fire into the Rectangle. Suddenly, the area around the Würzburg had become none too healthy.
Vernon continued to take photos and Cox began the well-drilled process of dismantling the gear. Sapper Stan Halliwell leapt up on to the concrete wall with a hacksaw and prepared to cut the radio cable. He paused for a moment, wondering if the power supply had been turned off. If not, he knew he was in for ‘a shocking experience’. But there was no problem and his hacksaw sliced through the cable in seconds.5
Then Cox went around to the back of the big metal cabin and severed the cable connecting it to the aerial. They managed to break in to the cabin, which contained several smaller units in closed boxes: the transmitter, the oscillator, the amplifier, the cathode ray tubes and the pulse generator. This was the heart of the machine and the key zone that the engineers had been told to search for. It had been switched off but was still warm from earlier use that evening. Cox and Corporal Jones, another sapper, began trying to unscrew the panels with the various screwdrivers and spanners they had with them. It would have been difficult work in any circumstances but in the dark and under fire it was a real struggle, and it seemed desperately slow going. Cox wrote later that ‘bullets were flying much too close to be pleasant’, but working behind the cabin and the aerial they at least had some protection. He remembered calmly in his report that ‘Two bullets hit the apparatus, but most of the machine gun fire went high.’6
As Cox and Jones continued to try to unscrew the key units, Vernon carried on taking photos with his flashlight. Each flash seemed to attract more fire from the German soldiers in the Rectangle. And all the time their fire seemed to get more accurate. Every time Vernon used his flashbulb the paratroopers kneeling or lying around the Würzburg cursed and swore at him. Their loud protests made the task of the dismantling squad even more difficult.
Despite the return fire from Naumoff and the Drake party, the German soldiers in the Rectangle were becoming more organised and more determined. A few had moved out from behind the trees and taken up positions in the open space between Theuville and the villa. Oberleutnant Huhn was still at his headquarters at La Poterie trying to piece together the disparate fragments of information that were coming in, attempting to understand what was happening and how many of the enemy had landed in his area. But more German troops were heading for the fire fight that was taking place on the cliff plateau.
If Huhn was having difficulty making sense of what was going on around Bruneval, Frost had his own problems. By now, he knew that Charteris and his Nelson party had been dropped in the wrong place and had not yet taken control of the beach. He didn’t know where they were or how long it would take them to arrive, or if they would arrive at all. This was disastrous for the raiding party on the cliff top as they had no route along which to withdraw with their precious cargo. Some of the radio operators were missing and in any case the new radios were not working properly. As a consequence Frost had no clear communications with parts of his company. He cursed the fact that he and his party had been organised into an assault group for the attack and he now had no sort of company organisation around him through which to receive information and issue orders. Men who would otherwise be runners, and his company sergeant-major, Strachan, were dispersed and totally occupied with their own tasks. Meanwhile, as the Germans kept up their fire against the main operation at the Würzburg, Vernon, Cox and Jones were still bravely attempting to dismantle the apparatus.
Cox and Vernon were aware that they had hit a problem. Although a sapper had removed many of the labels, which showed that most of the equipment was made by Telefunken, they were unable to unscrew the boxes containing the main components. They took a decision to try to smash their way into the boxes. Using jemmies, hammers and axes they started to attack the solidly constructed units with brute force. They realised they might damage some of the equipment in so doing but at this point it was a risk that seemed reasonable to take. With Corporal Jones providing leverage on a large crowbar, part of the frame came away with a tearing sound. It turned out not to be just the casing of the cabin but the switching unit that allowed both the transmitter and the receiver to use the single aerial. It was a vital part of the Würzburg’s design.
Vernon took one last photograph and the flashbulb lit up what would have seemed a very strange scene. A group of heavily armed Paras with blackened faces, in full kit, were kneeling or lying holding Sten guns alongside a team of what looked like burglars with jemmies and a crowbar standing around a small cabinet and a large radar bowl on the top of a cliff in northern France.
Frost now had to make a decision. The German fire was becoming ever more determined and more accurate. But his exit route to the beach was still not open. It looked as if the men on the cliffs would have to fight their way down. While he was still weighing this up, a paratrooper alerted him to the fact that in the distance three vehicles appeared to be approaching Le Presbytère. Were these reinforcements, or were they armoured vehicles that had arrived far sooner than expected? The co-ordination of the German response seemed to be far better than the planners had anticipated. The Paras could probably withstand the small-arms fire and the machine guns for a bit longer, but if reinforcements with mortars or artillery pieces were now arriving they would become easy targets. The men around the Würzburg were getting impatient with the process of dismantling the gear. Vernon and Cox grew increasingly heavy-handed, smashing at boxes and pulling out whatever bits of electronic gear they could.
Frost made up his mind. He ordered the engineers to stop work and the men to pull out and head towards the beach. The Paras had rehearsed this many times and each man knew what he had to do. But what they didn’t know was what they would find 300 feet below them on the road.
17
Fire Fight
Captain Ross, C Company’s second-in-command, was part of the Nelson group that had jumped in the first wave that night. But unlike the twenty men of that group who had been dropped in the wrong place, Ross and his men jumped on target into the correct DZ. They soon realised that the rest of Nelson were not with them. They waited for a few minutes at the forming-up position to see if Charteris and the others would arrive, but when they didn’t show Ross decided he had to carry on regardless.
The original plan to attack the beach defenders called for one section to assault the machine-gun position and the casemates on the north side of the beach road. These were the German positions that lay between the beach and Frost’s party on the cliff plateau. On the other slope, Charteris was to lead the main assault on the Stella Maris and the network of defences just above it called Beach Fort. Ross and his section was to provide covering fire
and prevent any troops stationed at the Hotel Beau-Minet from coming up to give support to the German positions on the beach. This plan had now to be seriously reassessed. Ross had only half of the men he should have had to carry out the assault. So he split them into three groups. Sergeant Tasker was to take a group to attack the casemates on the northern cliff. Sergeant Sharp was told to move down that slope towards the wire on the beach. Ross himself, with a small group, would try to clear the enemy from the defensive positions above the Stella Maris.
Early that evening everything had seemed very quiet and normal at the Stella Maris, despite the sound of the distant air raids. The raids had become so frequent that they ceased to bother the men guarding this small stretch of beach. The section that had changed shifts at 2120 had come in and settled down for some rest. There were nine men with a sergeant in charge. Then, soon after 0015, Corporal Schmidt had been startled by the ringing telephone. It was the company headquarters at La Poterie calling to say that there were reports that enemy parachutists had been dropped in the area.
The telephone orderly woke the sergeant in charge, who was told to man his defences around the villa in case British paratroopers came his way. He ordered his men to wake up and prepare for action. He grew annoyed at how long it took some of them to get ready. For many, no doubt, it felt like yet another exercise dreamed up by their officers to test their response in the middle of the night. Even if it was not an exercise, it would no doubt prove to be a false alarm. As the men grudgingly got themselves organised, the sergeant distributed hand grenades. The machine gun positioned at the front of the villa overlooking the beach was removed and taken to be installed in the defences above, overlooking the road and the steep slope running up the cliff opposite.
By 0030 the men at the Stella Maris were in position and waiting to see what would happen next. Only Corporal Schmidt, the telephone orderly, had been left behind to keep in touch with company and battalion headquarters in order to relay any further messages that came through.
Initially, things went well for Ross and his men. Tasker’s squad started to move on the casemates and Sharp and his team moved down towards the wire across the entry point to the beach. But then, in the bright moonlight, the sergeant from the Stella Maris, on full alert, spotted Sharp and his men moving across the hill on the far side of the road. He could not see who they were but was immediately suspicious. He fired a white Very light into the sky above where he saw movement, which lit up the whole area. If they were German troops they would fire a different-coloured flare in response. But no response came. So the sergeant fired his automatic pistol across the valley towards the moving figures. In the moonlight he could see men scattering across the ground opposite. A new fire fight now began down in the valley by the sea. This would be a much tougher and longer fight than the one that had taken place on the top of the cliff.
The sergeant had spotted Ross’s men as they moved down the gully towards the beach road. They immediately returned the fire and directed their weapons towards the old villa, the outline of which they could clearly see across the valley. However, the sergeant at the beach post ordered the rest of his men into the defensive positions above the villa at Beach Fort where he had already positioned his machine gun. This gun now opened fire on the Paras on the slope opposite, forcing them to lie low. But then Tasker’s men, higher up the side of the cliff and overlooking Beach Fort, opened fire on the German troops, spraying the whole area with bullets from their Sten guns. Now it was the turn of the German defenders to get their heads down.
Before long Sharp’s men joined in the firing. The Germans were surprised at the intensity of the fire that was now coming at them and had no idea how many British paratroopers they were up against. But they were well dug in. Their defensive positions, identified in the aerial photographs, had only been completed about two weeks before. The Germans now threw their grenades as well. A full-scale battle erupted along the road to the beach. But neither side showed any sign of giving way.
From the cliffs above, Frost could hear the sound of a fierce fire fight taking place in the valley. The commander of the raid was continuing to regret the failure of the radio communications and began increasingly to feel that he simply did not know enough about what was going on, who was where, and who was firing on whom. He gave the order for Lieutenant Young and the Jellicoe section to move down from the cliff plateau to give support to Ross and his men. They started to slowly descend the cliff towards the gully. Frost made contact with Lieutenant Timothy and instructed him to keep watch on Le Presbytère, but to send men up the valley towards the beach to help in the assault on the German positions up there.
Inside the Stella Maris there was intense activity. Men were rushing in from the positions above to collect ammunition, grenades and more Very flares to light up the area. With the sound of battle echoing up the valley, the phone kept ringing and the telephone orderly was kept busy. Before long the battalion commander from Bordeaux-St-Clair, Major Paschke, came on the phone. He asked what was going on and Corporal Schmidt explained they were in a fight with British paratroopers. Paschke sounded as though he didn’t believe what he was being told and asked to speak to the sergeant. The orderly went outside to try to call him to the phone, but immediately came under fire from the other side of the valley. Major Paschke never got to speak to the sergeant. The fire fight continued to rage across the valley by the entrance to the beach.
The Royal Navy was of course to provide the third element of the raid that night, the evacuation from the beach. But they were having their own problems that night. HMS Prinz Albert had left Portsmouth in the afternoon of the day before and sailed without incident to a point about fifteen miles north of Bruneval. Accompanying her were the six fast-moving MGBs. Weather conditions were near perfect, with no wind, a calm sea and a bright moon with only a very slight haze. At precisely 2152 she offloaded the six Assault Landing Craft and two further Support Landing Craft. They were to wait off the beach until requested to come in and embark the whole paratrooper force. On board each of the ALCs were the men from the South Wales Borderers and the Royal Fusiliers, armed with Bren guns to fire up at the cliff defences if there was still fighting going on when they arrived at the beach. In one of the landing craft was the Noah party, with Donald Preist, the TRE radar specialist.
The small flotilla moved away and assembled off the coast at 0025 to wait for the signal from the paratroopers to come ashore. Not far away, the lighthouse at Cap d’Antifer suddenly turned its light on and gave a couple of flashes as it rotated. It was a form of reassurance for the men in the landing craft, suggesting that nothing unusual was happening. The ships’ navigators were delighted to take a bearing from the lighthouse and confirm their precise location. It seemed a stroke of good luck. But not for long.
The ALCs were about a mile and a half offshore when suddenly the lookouts sounded the alert. The lighthouse beam had been turned on to assist a line of larger ships that came into view moving rapidly down the coast from north to south about a mile further out to sea. The men on board knew they had to be enemy ships. They identified two German single-funnel destroyers and two E-boats, fast, deadly, torpedo-carrying motor boats. Had someone given their position away? Commander Cook told the vessels to cut their engines and to maintain silence. The men on board the landing craft could do nothing but hold their breath and pray.1 They would be easy targets for the German ships. The British sailors now cursed the clear light of the moon brightening up the sea. The MGB crews prepared for action but knew that they would be totally outgunned by the German vessels. Sergeant Eric Gould waiting on his landing craft was ‘scared to death’ at the sight of the enemy ships and overheard one of the sailors say, ‘God, I hope they don’t see us or they’ll blow us out of the water.’2
The German vessels sailed on by, but then they slowed up. Had they spotted the ALCs and their escorts? The German ships seemed to be altering course. Then, to the immense relief of the crews watching from the landing craft
and the MGBs, the German vessels moved on towards Le Havre. It seemed that they had been waiting for clearance to enter the harbour.
As the German vessels disappeared towards Le Havre, the British sailors gave an immense sigh of relief. Because they had been between the German vessels and the land the British vessels had been disguised and had not been spotted, even though it was such a clear night. It would have been the end of the whole operation if the German destroyers and E-boats had got in among the evacuation fleet. But the incident underlined the huge risks that were being taken by having such a tiny flotilla of small British vessels off the coast of occupied France in waters that the Kriegsmarine regarded as its own. As the men recovered their composure, some of the sailors detected a freshening wind blowing up from the south-west. If it strengthened it could blow everything off course.
Night Raid Page 23
