by Ross Kemp
But there was no sign of the enemy and, within ten minutes, Frost’s group (‘Drake’) had located all the containers, gathered their weapons and equipment and formed up in the copse at the bottom of a shallow gorge, according to plan. On Frost’s signal, the fifty men began jogging the short distance back towards the coast in a silence broken only by the crunch of boots on snow.
The going was slightly harder as they came up the slope, especially for the radio engineer Cox, Lt Vernon and the rest of the sappers as they dragged their wheeled canvas trolleys and equipment for the Würzburg over the icy ground and through a maze of barbed wire. While the engineers laid up below a ridge waiting to be called forward, Lt Young and his men split off towards the Würzburg installation close to the cliff’s edge, while Frost and his men took up position around the house. Flanked by four men, Frost walked to the front door as calmly as a postman and blew on his whistle. Immediately, the sound of explosions, machine gunfire and shouting shattered the eerie calm. Bursting upstairs, Frost’s men silenced the only German inside the house, who had opened up on Young’s men from a first-floor window.
Leaving two of his men to secure the villa, Frost and the others raced the 200 yards over the frozen lawn to assist Young, only to discover that the Germans manning the Würzburg had been quickly overwhelmed. Those that hadn’t been killed were taken prisoner. Seized by terror when the assault began, one of them had fled and leapt over the 400-ft-high cliff. It was his good fortune that he landed on a ridge about ten feet below. After he was dragged back up, Private Newman set about interrogating him, but like the others he questioned, the man was virtually dumb with shock.
Sergeant Cox and the sappers arrived on the scene at the same time and immediately pulled their tools from the trolleys and set about dismantling the dish. The apparatus, they soon discovered, had been installed very securely, and the engineers were having difficulty in taking it apart. When they began to come under heavy fire, Cox admitted, ‘We proceeded to rip the rest of the stuff out by sheer force.’
The fire was emanating from the direction of Le Presbytère farm in the woods to the north where the main German garrison was stationed. It was only a matter of time before they were roused into action, but Frost’s men, in position and waiting for the counterattack, brought heavy fire to bear on the position. Two rounds rang on the metal dish a few inches from Cox’s hands, but the RAF Sergeant was uncowed and continued with his work.
Slowly the fire from Le Presbytère intensified and enemy vehicles were observed manoeuvring through the trees. Whether they were reinforcements or resident troops looking to move into a flanking position, Frost could not tell. Worried about the threat from mortar units, which would have caused carnage among his men, he snapped at the engineers to hurry up. Vernon and Cox had managed to remove the entire structure from its base as well as most of its component parts and they quickly loaded the final items into the trolleys. They had dismantled the entire structure in under twenty minutes. Leaving half his men behind to cover the withdrawal, the engineers and the rest headed towards the beach. They had just begun to descend the steep slope when they came under raking fire from the pillbox that Charteris’s group had been assigned to capture. A number of men went down in the hail of machine-gun fire, including Company Sergeant Major Strachan, who took three bullets to the stomach. Bleeding profusely, he was dragged to cover and administered morphine.
Frost was confused. The beach was meant to have been secured and all German defences neutralised. With his signallers unable to operate the faulty wireless sets, he was unable to contact Charteris, Timothy’s reserve group or his second-in-command, Captain John Ross. He couldn’t send out a runner because every time they moved, the gunners in the pillbox opened up on them.
They had been lying up for about ten minutes when a voice further down the slope shouted: ‘Come on down! Everything is all right, the boats are here.’ In all likelihood, this was a German trying to lure them into the open because almost immediately Captain Ross, who was close to the beach, yelled at them to stay where they were. Frost was not a man to panic, even in the direst emergency, but he was becoming concerned. ‘Obviously something was seriously wrong,’ he recalled. His anxiety increased when one of his men appeared at his shoulder to inform him that the Germans had retaken the villa, regrouped and were preparing to advance. Frost immediately took a group of men back up the slope and sent the Germans running for cover.
When he returned, he was surprised to discover that the pillbox had been silenced and the sappers were on the move again. They had been sliding so much in the icy conditions that they decided to abandon the trolleys and carry the bulky radar equipment down to the beach instead. Sergeant Major Strachan, barely conscious now, was being helped down with the rest of the party, barking incoherent orders at his men.
The three groups of the assault party, Drake, Nelson and Rodney, converged on the beach almost simultaneously, and Charteris was able to explain to Frost why the beach had not been secured. The young Lieutenant, as it turned out, had done well to lead his men back to the area in such good time. After a running battle with an enemy patrol near Bruneval village, he had followed the sound of the guns and arrived on the scene at the critical moment. Frost’s men and the sappers were pinned down and the beach was still in enemy hands. (In the darkness of the woods and the confusion of the running fight, a German soldier had attached himself to Charteris’s men in the mistaken belief they were his comrades. On being discovered in their midst, he was promptly dispatched.)
The two sections of Charteris’s four that had been dropped in the right place and arrived at the original assembly point as intended had waited for over an hour for the rest to arrive. Fearing the worst, Sergeant Sharp, the senior NCO, had decided to launch an attack. Under the original plan, Sharp’s men were to have provided the covering fire while Charteris attacked, and he realised the seriousness of the situation if the beach was not taken. The two sections had just begun moving out to their designated objectives when, to their relief, they heard an ear-splitting yell of ‘Cabar Feedh!’, the war-cry of the Seaforth Highlanders. That could mean only one thing: Charteris and the other half of the group had arrived and gone straight in on the attack. Supported by Timothy and the reserve group, Charteris and his men stormed the beach, quickly clearing out the guardroom and silencing the strongpoint. The offending pillbox on the cliff was put out of action and, in a matter of minutes, the enemy’s dogged resistance was overcome and the beach and cliff area were soon securely under British control – but it had come at a cost. Two men were killed and six lay wounded, half of them seriously.
It was past two o’clock in the morning when the assault party began to assemble on the small beach at the mouth of the Bruneval ravine. The raid might not have gone completely to plan, but the paratroopers had achieved what they had intended: to reach the objective, subdue the enemy and remove the radar equipment. The apparatus now lay in the sand alongside the six wounded, all of whom had now been treated with morphine. The white chalk cliffs towered above them, almost luminous in the bright moonlight. The odd crackle of gunfire broke the stillness as the covering troops took up defensive positions to hold the area for the evacuation. There was one problem: there was no sign of the Navy.
The signallers attempted to contact the ships but without success. They flashed signals from a lamp but still the sea offered nothing but darkness and silence, save for the gentle lapping of the waves on the beach. A thin mist sat over the water and it was impossible to see more than a few hundred yards. As a last resort, it had been agreed that Frost would fire red flares from a Very gun, one to the north and one to the south of the beach. He did this several times, but still nothing. Following the repeated disasters in training, Frost had always feared that the evacuation would be the most challenging element of the operation. ‘With a sinking heart,’ Frost noted, ‘I moved off the beach with my officers to rearrange our defences.’
The men had just taken up their positio
ns and were braced for the countermeasures of the German reinforcements when one of the men shouted to him: ‘Sir, the boats are here! God bless the ruddy Navy, sir!’ Indeed they were. As if to make up for their late arrival, the support landing craft, carrying the Royal Fusiliers and South Wales Borderers, emerged from the mist firing every gun in their possession at the cliffs. This had been their order, but with many of Frost’s men now back up above the beach, their heavy fire was no longer welcome. The entire raiding party yelled at the top of their voices for them to stop, and the guns quickly fell silent. Mercifully, no one was wounded.
The plan had envisaged six landing craft arriving in pairs, but reality had rudely punctured any hopes of an orderly evacuation. They were well behind the strict timings laid out in the schedule, the sea was running high and German reinforcements were certain to be pouring into the area. All six of the landing craft arrived at once. The six wounded men and the Würzburg equipment were the priority and, once they were safely loaded into the first landing craft, the rest of the troops waded out up to their chests to scramble aboard the other five. As they did so, the Germans appeared at the top of the cliff and started throwing grenades and firing mortar bombs onto the beach. It was a noisy and confused scene and there was no time to count heads. Frost watched the disorderly scramble with dismay, but there was no alternative now. The landing craft chugged out to the waiting Motor Gun Boats at a stately twelve knots, their maximum speed. Once the troops had climbed aboard the larger, faster vessels, the landing craft were hooked to the stern to be towed back to England.
The bodies of the two men killed in the raid had been left behind deliberately, but shortly after boarding Frost learned that six men, who had become lost, had arrived at the beach a minute after the last landing craft had pulled away. Frost hid his distress but knew there was nothing they could do for them now. There could be no turning back. He could only hope that the men would be treated well by their captors.
While the crews of the gun boats handed out blankets and generous tots of rum to the sodden paratroopers, they explained why their arrival had been delayed so long. The force had been lying offshore, as planned, waiting to launch the landing craft, when a German destroyer and two torpedo boats passed within a mile of them and the wireless operators had been unable to respond to the signallers’ promptings. It was most probably the light mist that saved them from being detected, but it had been a close shave. Had the German ships passed any closer or spotted Frost’s Very flares, the evacuation force would have been attacked and the paratroopers would have been stranded ashore.
Fifteen miles out from the French coast, a squadron of Spitfires arrived to escort them back home. German divebombers had been expected to stalk the flotilla from daybreak, but no attack materialised. Destroyers came out to join the escort and it was the afternoon by the time they steamed past the Isle of Wight and into Portsmouth. Once in the harbour, the destroyers saluted the raiding force, ‘Rule Britannia’ rang out from Tannoy speakers and the Spitfires swept down low in tribute before disappearing back to their bases.
In the early evening, the raiders boarded the troopship Prince Albert to be welcomed by Wing Commander Pickard and his crews. A throng of photographers and reporters were there in numbers to report on the success of the highly daring raid, the first significant operation by a new breed of soldier. ‘The limelight was strange after weeks of secrecy and stealth,’ said Frost. ‘All we really wanted was dry clothes, bed and oblivion; but before that there was some serious drinking to be done.’
The following day a Hurricane was sent over the Channel on a reconnaissance flight to Bruneval. A group of German officers was standing round the foundations where the Würzburg had been operating twelve hours earlier. The sight was too tempting for the pilot and, turning back, he swooped on the gathering and opened fire with his four wing-mounted cannons. Before climbing out of the dive, he had the pleasure of watching the grey-coated Germans diving into the shallow hole.
That night C Company returned to Tilshead and Frost was climbing into a hot bath, looking forward to a quiet evening and a good night’s sleep, when he was called to the telephone and instructed that he was to be in London for a meeting at nine o’clock. A staff car, he was told, was on its way to pick him up. Driving through the blacked-out streets of London, he was taken to a building on Birdcage Walk, between Buckingham Palace and Westminster, and led below to an underground bunker. Dressed in his Cameronians uniform, he was met by Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee; the replica of Bruneval stood on a table in the centre of the room.
Soon the room began to fill up with the most important figures in the British administration of the day: Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, Secretary of State For War Sir James Grigg, First Lord of the Admiralty ‘AV’ Alexander, First Sea Lord Sir Dudley Pound, Chief of the Imperial General Staff General Sir Alan Brooke and Chief of the Air Staff Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal. Frost felt increasingly anxious about the prospect of addressing the War Cabinet about details of the raid and he was relieved to see the more familiar face of Commodore Lord Mountbatten, the Combined Operations chief.
‘Suddenly the Prime Minister was there, siren-suited and with outsize cigar,’ recalled Frost. And Churchill approached him, saying: ‘Bravo, Frost, bravo, and now we must hear all about it.’ To the young Major’s relief, Mountbatten as Chief of Combined Operations laid out the details of the raid.
The six wounded men all made full recoveries, although the life of Company Sergeant Major Strachan hung in the balance for several days. Within a few months he was back in uniform and promoted to Regimental Sergeant Major. The six men left behind became prisoners of war. French Resistance chief Colonel Rémy survived the war but ‘Pol’(Roger Dumont) was exposed by the signal sent from England congratulating him for his work on Bruneval. He was shot by a German firing squad. Many of the paratroopers who took part in Bruneval were killed in subsequent operations.
Four weeks after Bruneval, Private Newman, the German-Jewish interpreter, was captured during the Combined Operations assault on the dockyard at St Nazaire, in what has since been dubbed the ‘greatest raid’. Fortunately his true identity was never revealed and after the war he settled in England for good. Pickard was not so lucky. Three times he was admitted to the Distinguished Service Order before meeting his death two years after Bruneval when he led the low-level Mosquito bombing raid on a prison at Amiens to free the hundreds of French Resistance men held there.
Major Frost and Lt Charteris were awarded the Military Cross, and Flight Sergeant Cox and two sergeants received the Military Medal for their roles in Bruneval. Company Sergeant Major Strachan was later awarded the Croix de Guerre, Lt Young was Mentioned in Dispatches and the scientist R. V. Jones was given a CBE. For Frost, Bruneval turned out to be little more than a light diversion and skirmish compared to the actions and operations in which he subsequently became involved. He saw heavy fighting in the bloody campaigns in Tunisia, Sicily and Italy, but it was for his leadership and gallantry at Arnhem, immortalised in the film A Bridge Too Far, that he was to be best remembered. Badly injured and captured at Arnhem, he saw out the war in a POW camp. He retired from the army as a Major General in 1968 and became a farmer in West Sussex.
‘So what did we get out of all this?’ This was the question that Churchill barked across the table at his Cabinet Ministers and Chiefs of Staff when Frost had joined them in their bunker. Radio technology is a complex subject and this is the wrong place to explain its finer details, but in brief, the capture of the Würzburg was a significant breakthrough for the British. As a result, Britain was able to improve its own radar network, and, in the words of R. V. Jones, the man leading the scientific fight against the Nazis, the Würzburg provided, ‘A first-hand knowledge of the state of German radar technology, in the form in which it was almost certainly being applied in our principal objective, the German nightfighter control system . . . it had provided us with the equivalent of a navigational “fix” in confirm
ing the “dead reckoning” in our intelligence voyage into the German defences.’
But these were not the only happy consequences of the Bruneval venture. Soon after the raid, the German authorities issued orders that all radar installations were to be protected by barbed wire – to the delight of the RAF’s Photographic Reconnaissance Unit. The smallest details in an image were often the key to revealing the true nature of an object or location being photographed. Barbed wire was too thin to be detected from the air, but its presence was revealed by the grass which grew longer and darker underneath it as well as from the debris that became caught in it. Subsequently, Jones and his colleagues were able to identify several more sites of interest to them.
The British scientists and military planners were not the only ones to appreciate the quality of the Bruneval raid. The official German report recorded that ‘the British displayed exemplary discipline when under fire. Although attacked by German soldiers they concentrated entirely on their primary task.’
The success of the raid boosted the status of Combined Operations and secured the future of British airborne troops. Bruneval is the first battle honour awarded to what today is known as the Parachute Regiment or, more often, ‘the Paras’. The War Office immediately expanded the fledgling force and, by the war’s end, thousands of paratroopers had served with great distinction and courage in all major theatres of the war. More often than not, they were the first troops in.