Frost’s men held on amid bitter house-to-house fighting. Clinging on to the northern end of the bridge, they were isolated and surrounded, while once again their radios failed to work and provide a clear picture of what was happening elsewhere. With supplies of food and ammunition running out, with virtually no water and with the wounded stacked so closely together in basements that the medical orderlies could barely get around them, the SS commander invited Frost to surrender. ‘Tell them to go to hell,’ was his response.10 But on the third morning, Frost was himself severely wounded. It was the end of the battle for him. In a truce later that day, he and the hundreds of other wounded were taken prisoner and removed to a hospital. The remainder of 2 Para fought on for another twenty-four hours until the German forces overran them.
John Timothy, by now a major in command of his own company, also took part in the Arnhem operation in a separate battalion. He soon found himself and his men fighting for their lives against far stronger enemy forces, equipped with heavyweight Tiger tanks which they could hear rumbling forward during the night. His company fought a brave rearguard action to enable the rest of the battalion to fight their way through to the road bridge. With his company reduced to only six men, he led an assault against an enemy strongpoint, managing to overcome it. For this he won his third MC in fifteen months. But he too was eventually captured and taken off to a PoW camp, Offlag VIIB in the east. There, he was taken for interrogation and found that his name was known to the Germans, still listed on a card index as a lieutenant, as the leader of Rodney at Bruneval. Conditions were Spartan, with meat served only once a week. With the Russians approaching, Timothy and his fellow prisoners were evacuated westwards. He managed to escape and eventually linked up with advancing American troops.11
Sergeant-Major Gerry Strachan was another Bruneval veteran to fight at Arnhem. Having been captured, he too spent the rest of the war in a PoW camp, Stalag XIII.
Frost, who took some time to recover from his wounds, spent a cold, hungry and utterly miserable winter in captivity until American troops liberated his prison camp in March 1945. General Browning had questioned before the operation whether taking the bridge at Arnhem was not a ‘bridge too far’ in Monty’s ambitious plan, and it was this phrase that provided the title for the classic British war film made in the 1970s about the Arnhem story.12 The part of Frost was played by Anthony Hopkins. Frost was a consultant on the film and, then in his sixties, found it strange to watch re-enactments of the battle being staged before his eyes with Hopkins playing his part. In the end, however, he quite liked the film, and no doubt the fame it brought him.13
Many of the Germans captured over the years had told the British Paras that they had no conception of what the fighting was like on the Eastern Front, so vast were the numbers involved and so bitter the battles. Hitler’s ambition to conquer the Soviet Union in just six months following his invasion in June 1941 had nearly succeeded. As his armies rolled forward taking hundreds of thousands of prisoners, Hitler spoke of his ‘crusade’ against communism. He called the Soviet state a ‘rotten structure’ that when kicked in would soon come ‘crashing down’. But in December 1941 the advancing German armies ground to a halt within sight of the Kremlin towers in Moscow. As the winter blizzards swept in, the Soviets launched a counter-attack with fresh troops from Siberia. The German army for the first time went into retreat. When the fighting season started again in the spring of 1942, Hitler launched a giant offensive to the south of the country. Its joint objectives were to capture the rich arable lands, the coal reserves and oil fields of the Caucasus, and to reach the Volga river and capture the model Soviet industrial city named after the country’s leader, Stalingrad. Demands for manpower on the Eastern Front slowly began to consume the Wehrmacht and reinforcements were sent east until the Axis forces in Russia grew to 217 divisions by the summer of 1942.
One of the divisions transferred to the Eastern Front from France in May 1942 was the 336th Infantry Division, the unit that had defended the French coast north of Le Havre. The 685th Infantry Regiment, complete with its 1st Battalion under Major Paschke, was sent from the comfortable surroundings of the gentle Normandy countryside to the harsh and brutal world of the Russian front. Whether or not this was some sort of punishment perpetrated on the entire division for its failings at Bruneval is not recorded. It’s difficult to see that blame could fairly be directed at a unit that had to confront a surprise night raid by British paratroopers, but it is entirely possible that the Nazi leadership would take no pity on a division that had failed to distinguish itself and had given the enemy a huge propaganda triumph.
Whatever was the case, on 14 May the 336th was transferred to Brittany and from there to Belgorod, 350 miles south of Moscow, where it joined the German Sixth Army commanded by General von Paulus. In the major offensive that summer, the division was involved in heavy fighting around the town of Rossosh in the Don basin in July and was so badly mauled that it was withdrawn from the front to recuperate for the autumn in Hungary. During this time the 685th was reformed as a Grenadier regiment and with the 336th returned to fight in Russia again at the end of the year.
The 685th Regiment found themselves fighting for their lives in Russia. By 1944, still as part of the 336th Division, they were fighting in the Ukraine and withdrew south to the Crimea and its capital, Sebastopol. The Red Army then advanced into the Crimean peninsula with thirty divisions and nearly half a million men. Hitler ordered his troops, based in the well-defended city, to hold the Crimea at any price. On 5 May the Soviets unleashed a huge bombardment, and after intense fighting day and night the German citadel capitulated after only five days. The German forces were annihilated, the Wehrmacht losing a hundred thousand men killed or captured. Some twenty-two divisions ceased to exist, among them the 336th.
The few men from the 685th Regiment who escaped were reformed into a new division, the 294th, before that unit was itself entirely wiped out in fighting in the southern Ukraine in August 1944. Very few of the men who had been based at the Hotel Beau-Minet or in La Poterie or elsewhere along that stretch of the French coast survived.14 Fusilier Tewes, who had surrendered in the dugout on the beach at Bruneval, and telephone orderly Corporal Georg Schmidt, who had been taken prisoner in the Stella Maris, turned out to be the lucky ones. They were still alive in a PoW camp in England.
As a postscript to the annihilation of the German forces that had once guarded Bruneval, the German general in command at the time, Johann Joachim Stever, the ex-Panzer general, had been replaced as commander of the 336th Division in March 1942, a month after the Para raid. He had retired temporarily on grounds of ill health. But he recovered and like so many of his colleagues, he found himself by the summer of 1944 serving on the Eastern Front. Despite the severity of the fighting, he survived the long retreat across eastern Europe and returned to Berlin. Stever was no Nazi, and his lack of ideological commitment might have been one of the reasons for his demotion after the Blitzkrieg assault on France in 1940. However, as far as the Soviets were concerned, his position as a major-general in the Wehrmacht made him a war criminal. Soon after the end of the war, in May 1945, he was arrested by Soviet troops in Berlin. He disappeared and was never heard of again. Officially posted as ‘missing’ ever since, he was almost certainly shot in the back of the head, the favourite form of execution of the Soviet secret police, soon after being captured.
Of the British soldiers who had been at Bruneval and survived the war, Sergeant-Major Gerry Strachan, was liberated from his PoW camp and came back to Britain where he married his wartime girlfriend, Ivy, a corporal in the Auxiliary Territorial Service. He returned to his pre-war regiment, the Black Watch, and served in India during the final days of the Raj. However, he never fully recovered from the stomach wounds he suffered at Bruneval and, aged only forty-one, he died in 1948.
Flight Sergeant Charles Cox went back to Wisbech in Cambridgeshire where he opened a radio and television maintenance shop. He became a local figure w
ell known for being able to repair almost all types of electrical equipment. But few locals knew of his role in dismantling the Würzberg on the cliff top, under fire, in 1942.15
John Timothy with his Military Cross and two bars could have stayed on in the army, but decided to go back to his former life at Marks and Spencer and spent the rest of his days rising through the ranks of the retail giant. He travelled the country with M&S and was manager of their Wakefield store for seven years.16 John Ross, captured in Sicily, had spent much of the war active in the escape committees of the various PoW camps in which he was incarcerated. For this he was awarded an MBE. He returned to Dundee and became a successful solicitor after the war.17
Only ‘Johnny’ Frost stayed on in the army, becoming a legendary figure among British paratroopers. He rose to the rank of lieutenant-general and commander of the 52nd (Lowland) Division. Having retired in 1968 to take up farming in West Sussex, he led many annual reunions of veterans at both Bruneval and Arnhem, where every year Dutch children lay flowers on the graves of the British dead in the Commonwealth War Graves cemetery. Two roads in the vicinity of Bruneval have been named rue John Frost and in 1977, after A Bridge Too Far was released, the new road bridge across the Lower Rhine at Arnhem was renamed the John Frostbrug, the John Frost Bridge.18
2 Para remained one of the most famous units within the British Army. The battalion served in Palestine in 1946, took part in the seaborne landings at Port Said, Egypt, in the Suez Crisis of 1956, and was posted to what was then called the Persian Gulf in the early 1960s. The battalion was in the Far East for much of the next few years but was sent to Northern Ireland for the first of sixteen tours of duty in 1970. In August 1979, the unit suffered the worst single loss of life in Northern Ireland when the Provisional IRA killed sixteen men in a double ambush at Warrenpoint.
In the Falklands, 2 Para fought with great distinction, capturing many hundreds of Argentine prisoners during the battle for Goose Green and overwhelming a nest of machine-gun positions on Darwin Hill in the famous action on 28 May 1982. The battalion commander, Lieutenant-Colonel ‘H’ Jones, was killed leading this attack, for which he was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. 2 Para completed two tours of duty in Iraq in 2005 and 2007. The battalion formed the nucleus of the 16th Air Assault Brigade that fought in Afghanistan in 2008 and 2010. Heroes still emerge in 2 Para and soldiers carry on earning distinguished medals. The battalion continues to win further battle honours, although the first honour proudly listed in 2 Para’s history will always, of course, be that of Bruneval.
The success of the raid at Bruneval in capturing enemy radar technology made a major contribution to winning the scientific war that was a key part of the Allied victory in the Second World War. In his volume in the Oxford History of England, A.J.P. Taylor wrote that it was Tizard, Watson-Watt and their associates that had ‘laid the foundations for victory’ with the development of radar.19 After 1945, radar became one of the most important technologies of the second half of the twentieth century. It was used to assist civil aviation and helped keep the skies a safe place for travel despite the huge growth in numbers of aircraft over the decades. It is used in naval shipping of every sort, from small fishing trawlers to giant super-tankers, for navigation and safety. It plays an important part in weather forecasting and has been developed for a host of additional purposes never imagined by the early pioneers at Orford Ness and Bawdsey Manor, at Gema or Telefunken.
After the war R.V. Jones left the world of intelligence and returned to academia. He was appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy at Aberdeen University, where he remained until his retirement in 1981. He did much important work on improving the sensitivity of scientific instruments, but his pivotal role in wartime scientific intelligence only emerged in the late 1970s after the stories of the extensive codebreaking operations at Bletchley Park were revealed. In 1994 he was made a Companion of Honour.20
In late 1945 a series of redundant army trailers full of mobile radar equipment were deposited in a muddy field in Cheshire and handed over to the care of Manchester University. Here an ex-TRE engineer, Bernard Lovell, began to develop an entirely new and dynamic use for radar. The equipment that had been used by anti-aircraft guns to detect enemy planes was now used to pick up radar echoes from the ionised trails of meteors, shooting stars, from the outer atmosphere of the earth. Slowly, and with better equipment, Lovell began employing the technology to study the moon and the planets. This was called radar astronomy, and the place where it started was Jodrell Bank.
By the mid 1950s, the transmitting element of conventional radar apparatus had been abandoned and, using the receiver alone, Jodrell Bank became the world centre of an entirely new science devoted to the study of radio waves from sources far away in the universe, called radio astronomy. Funding crises threatened the work at Jodrell Bank many times – on one occasion Lovell himself was threatened with imprisonment for supposed financial mismanagement. But the politics of the Cold War came to his rescue, and when he picked up signals from the missile that launched the Russian Sputnik in October 1957 Jodrell Bank instantly became world famous. With the Americans showing massive interest in his work, the future was secure.
Before long the huge, sensitive 250-foot receivers at Jodrell Bank were picking up signals from objects unimagined when the facility was established – from radio galaxies, quasars, pulsars and masers to the residual radiation from the primeval state of the universe. The techniques first developed on the Suffolk coast were now used to penetrate the mysteries of the universe and track objects billions of light years away from our planet.21
In 1942, Robert Watson-Watt, who is often called ‘the father of radar’, was knighted. After the war the British government eventually awarded him a token £52,000 for his contribution to the invention of radar. By the 1950s, he was spending most of his time in North America as a consulting engineer. Despite the award, Watson-Watt, like other wartime inventors, felt more appreciated in the United States.22
In 1957 Watson-Watt was visiting the west coast. Late for a speaking engagement, he put his foot down on the largely empty freeway. What he did not know was that just ahead at the side of the road was a policeman with a brand new radar gun. The policeman recorded the speed of the vehicle, mounted his motor bike, chased down Watson-Watt and told him he had been caught speeding. Watson-Watt asked the cop how he could prove what speed he had been travelling at, and the policeman showed him the radar gun.
Cursing, Watson-Watt is supposed to have said, ‘If I’d have known it would be used for purposes like this I would never have invented radar.’23
Acknowledgements
There are many people who helped with this book. As usual, I will start by thanking my colleagues at Flashback Television with whom I had the pleasure of making several television documentaries on radar, on airborne forces and on special operations. Particularly, I should like to thank Colin Barratt, Paul Nelson, Andrew Johnston, Hereward Pelling and Ian Bremner. I’m also grateful to Ann and Niels Toettcher, the current owners of Bawdsey Manor, for allowing me to explore their superb historic house. In addition, I would like to congratulate the Bawdsey Radar Trust who are doing excellent work in preserving and presenting the Bawdsey story. A ‘radar tour’, from Orford Ness to Bawdsey Manor, to Worth Matravers is a fascinating journey to make. Also, I’m grateful to my friend Trevor Kirkin for reading and commenting on the opening chapters.
Sadly, most of the men who took part in the Bruneval raid, and those who were in the frontline of the scientific war, are no longer with us. But the records they left behind are marvellously rich. There are extensive reports and detailed summaries of the raid written at the time. British airborne troops had only been in action once before Bruneval, in southern Italy in February 1941 and that was a disaster. So the men on the Bruneval raid were like guinea pigs. The Airborne Division and the army as a whole wanted to scrutinise how the Paras would perform in combat, what problems they would face and how they would try to solve t
hem. The key weapon they used was new; the communication systems they carried in packs on their backs were being tried out for the first time; the medical aids they would carry, even the canisters used for dropping their supplies, were all new and the senior officers wanted to know how they performed. Much was written in the weeks after the raid by those trying to learn the lessons of Bruneval. And today it is wonderful to read these accounts with all the vivid detail they reveal.
Like many of those who took part in the Second World War, when the Paras who had fought at Bruneval (and in all their other combats that followed) returned home after the victory in 1945 they wanted to forget about the war and to put it all behind them. There were new priorities to address and the challenges of settling down to peace-time life to face up to. But as they grew older and passed into retirement, many veterans wrote memoirs or were interviewed at length about their wartime experiences. Many of the men were extremely frank in these interviews. I have interviewed several wartime veterans over many years who will begin a story by confiding, ‘Of course, I’ve never told my family this but…’ That used to puzzle me until I realised that it is often a lot easier to tell something to a sympathetic stranger than to reveal it to loved ones, especially if the story has a dark side, something men would like to forget or that they still feel bad about. And many veterans felt a lot better for opening up about something they had not talked about for fifty or sixty years. They had got something that worried them off their chest. I used to call it ‘interview therapy’. So many of the oral histories I have been able to refer to for this book are both open and honest. But as with all memories, the historian must be critical when reading or hearing them. Furthermore, they need a context in which to be understood and that comes from the original documents written at the time. It is the combination of original documents and later recorded memories or written memoirs that provides the raw material on which this book is based.
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