About the author
Taylor Downing is a television producer and historian. He was educated at Latymer Upper and Christ’s College Cambridge, where he took a Double First in History. He worked at the Imperial War Museum and for several years has run Flashback Television, an independent production company, where he has produced more than two hundred documentaries, including many award-winning historical films. His previous books include Spies in the Sky, Churchill’s War Lab and (with Sir Jeremy Isaacs) Cold War.
Also by Taylor Downing
The World at War
Spies in the Sky
Churchill’s War Lab
Cold War (with Jeremy Isaacs)
Battle Stations (with Andrew Johnston)
Olympia
Civil War (with Maggie Millman)
The Troubles (as Editor)
COPYRIGHT
Published by Hachette Digital
978-0-7481-3131-0
Copyright © Taylor Downing 2013
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
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Night Raid
Table of Contents
About the author
Also by Taylor Downing
COPYRIGHT
Behind Enemy Lines
1: Radar
2: Bawdsey Manor
3: Freya and Würzburg
4: Airborne
5: Early Warning
6: The First Raids
7: Scientific Intelligence
8: Photo Intelligence
9: Combined Operations
10: Underground Intelligence
11: Training
12: Volunteers for Danger
13: The Plan
14: The Defenders
15: The Drop
16: Attack
17: Fire Fight
18: The Ruddy Navy
19: Aftermath
20: Good News
21: The Scientific War
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Illustrations
Index
Behind Enemy Lines
It was the silence that amazed him most. No engines. No gunfire. Nothing stirred. He hadn’t expected this total, all-embracing silence. The incredible noise inside the aircraft had lasted for two hours and had almost shattered his ear drums. The men had sung songs with a tense, nervous gusto. Some had played cards, mostly pontoon. No one wanted to show the others that he felt scared. Then, as they approached the drop zone, came the shouting of the jump sergeant, straining to be heard above the roar of the Rolls-Royce Merlin engines. ‘Action stations… Hook up… Stand by…’ Every man checked that the static line of his parachute was firmly connected to the rail inside the aircraft. Then he checked his neighbour’s. After a few seconds of anxious waiting came the scream as the red light went green. ‘Number One Go-o!’
He was the fifth out. There was the rushing sound of the slipstream as he fell through the hole cut in the bottom of the aircraft into 500 feet of cold February night air. The anti-aircraft guns were still firing in the distance. He felt the abrupt pull of the parachute opening, the smooth descent, the force of the sudden landing, the silk parachute collapsing on top of him. He released his harness and with a lot of effort hauled it in and gathered up his chute.
For several minutes everything had been busy, frenzied. Somehow he had imagined that the sound of battle would be the next thing he heard. But there it was. The silence. And the darkness, except for the moon in a clear sky. His eyes took time to become accustomed to the dark, just as his ears did to the quiet. It was uncanny. Then, a dog barked in the distance.
It was Major John Frost’s first combat jump. Immediately he felt the elation of having survived the fall and the landing, with nothing broken. Not even any bruises.
The first thing he did was to address a call of nature. Then, in less than thirty seconds, Regimental Sergeant-Major Strachan appeared quickly from the darkness behind the trees. Of course, he had jumped sixth, thought Frost, immediately after him. Strachan would be the nearest to him on the ground. The sergeant was trained to check first that his commanding officer was all right.
They were now behind enemy lines in occupied France. This was no time to hang around and think about the night sky. Paratroopers were at their most vulnerable in the few minutes after they had landed. Suddenly, after the brief pause, everything started to happen at once, as though on a film set where the director had called ‘Action’. The rest of the stick of Paras appeared. Their eyes were getting used to the blackness now and they could see each other more easily. They had all landed within a few hundred yards of a line of trees by a gully, in exactly the right spot. Frost reflected that the RAF had done a brilliant job getting them right on to the DZ. It would be some time before he found out that one group crucial to the mission had been dropped miles away and had no idea where they were.
Strachan seemed to take the lead, to do what well-trained sergeant-majors do – rounding up the men and gathering in the canisters of equipment including their guns that had been dropped with them. Strachan checked that every Para had stowed his parachute, gathered his kit and retrieved his weapons. Many of the men had one of the brand new British sub-machine guns called a Sten gun, a knife and four Mills grenades. The officers and senior NCOs had a 4.5 mm automatic pistol.
There was thick snow on the ground. They had only been told about this at the last moment as they were getting on to the transport planes at Thruxton airfield. There was no snow in England. Frost had worried during the flight that they should have brought with them their white smocks, but it was too late. And now they were on the ground it didn’t seem to matter much. The snow muted their movement across the fields, but it didn’t hold them up. And the enemy would know they were there soon enough.
Once Strachan had got the Paras organised and into battle formation, Frost instructed them to follow him. They had only about six hundred yards to go to their objective. The men set off swiftly into the night, blackened figures moving stealthily across a white landscape. There were no unexpected obstructions. Frost realised how good their briefings had been. From the aerial photographs of their mission’s objective a detailed terrain model had been made of the entire location. Every man had studied this and knew in detail his own part in the operation, exactly what to expect and where to go. From intelligence gathered before the raid they even knew the name of the German sergeant in charge of their first objective.
Frost thought how remarkably well prepared they were. If only the rehearsals hadn’t gone so badly. They had never had a single successful ‘dress rehearsal’, as he called it. Not a single run-through of the mission had worked. Something had gone wrong every time. Sometimes the RAF had dropped the Paras in the wrong place. Sometimes the Royal Navy had come in to the wrong beach. Once, they had all ended up in a minefield. Some of the rehearsals had been a total shambles.
But now it was all going well. It took only ten minutes for the men to cross the fields and ascend the slope to the strange pre-war seaside villa perched on the top of the cliffs. Once there, Frost sent half of his men off to surround the large radar installation about a hundred yards from the villa that was the real objective of the raid. The boffins back in Lond
on needed to know how this apparatus worked. It seemed unlike anything that was known about in Britain. The Paras could see the strange bowl-like shape of its rotating antenna silhouetted in the moonlight. Everyone had been instructed not to open fire until Frost gave the signal. Surprise was the essence of any raid behind enemy lines. With luck, at this point, none of the German garrison would even know that a team of British paratroopers had landed and were now surrounding them.
Within a few minutes all the Paras were in position. Frost led his men up to the villa, which they believed acted as the local German headquarters. There had been much discussion in the practice runs beforehand as to how he would open the front door. One bright spark had suggested that he simply ring the door bell. As it was, when Frost reached the door it was wide open. He almost forgot to give the signal but at the last minute he blew a single, long blast of his whistle. This was the sign to the Paras scattered across the cliffs that night. Immediately firing broke out around the radar station a hundred yards away. The raid was on.
1
Radar
On 26 February 1935 two momentous events took place, one in Berlin, the other in a field in Northamptonshire. The consequences of these two events proved to be curiously interrelated. That morning, in Berlin, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler signed a secret document authorising the creation of a new German air force. Under the terms of the Versailles Treaty imposed on a defeated Germany after the First World War, the country was not allowed a military aviation force. Flying in Germany had continued with the state airline, Luft Hansa, and in thousands of private flying clubs up and down the land. But by signing this secret agreement, the Nazi leader was authorising the next stage of Germany’s military rearmament with the creation of the Luftwaffe, the third armed force to stand alongside the German army, the Wehrmacht, and its navy, the Kriegsmarine.
The Luftwaffe was to be commanded by the Great War air ace and senior Nazi Party leader, Herman Göring. Its creation was kept secret so as not to jolt the other European governments into bringing down sanctions on Hitler’s regime, which had only been in power for two years. However, the following month, in London, a White Paper announced a new policy of rearmament and the expansion of the RAF. Hitler judged that this was the time to make his plans public, and so he announced national conscription and declared the formation of the Luftwaffe. As Germany’s rearmament went up a gear, a new air race was about to begin.
On the same day that Hitler signed the secret decree, in a field at Weedon in Northamptonshire a bizarre experiment took place that attracted very little attention, even from the local farmers. Not far from the large transmitter at Daventry that sent out powerful radio waves for the BBC overseas service, known then as the Empire Service, two men erected a makeshift aerial from a pair of metal cables suspended between wooden poles. They then attached the aerial to a small cathode ray tube oscilloscope set up in the back of a Morris van.
Late that morning, two other men arrived from London in a smart Daimler to observe the experiment. On cue, an RAF Heyford biplane bomber flew overhead at 6000 feet on a roughly prepared course. At first, the men peering at the small screen in the back of the van saw nothing. But when the Heyford turned back to pass overhead again, the little green spot at the centre of the tiny screen began to move and swell into a vertical green line more than an inch in height. Slowly, as the aircraft could be heard disappearing in the distance, the line contracted.
The Heyford made three more passes, and during each one the green dot on the screen lit up and animated with the passing of the bomber. One of the men carried out a quick calculation and concluded that they had followed the movement of the Heyford to a distance of about eight miles. This was the first practical demonstration in Britain of how radio waves could be used to detect and to show the location of an aircraft in the sky, the system that was later called radar.* Robert Watson-Watt, who was to be called the ‘father’ of radar, turned to his colleague in the back of the van and supposedly uttered the historic words ‘Britain has become an island once more.’1 A new era had arrived.
Although this strange episode in a Northamptonshire field later came to be seen in Britain as the birth of modern radar, scientists had known since the discovery of radio waves that when such waves hit a metal object they would be reflected back, just as the ripples from a splash of water in a pond would reflect back when they hit the bank. The German physicist Heinrich Hertz had shown this in the 1880s. In 1904 a German engineer named Christian Hülsmeyer had laid on a demonstration near Cologne to show that radio waves could be used to locate the presence of a nearby ship in fog, mist or the dark, and by helping to avoid collisions could increase the safety of vessels at sea.
Hülsmeyer patented his invention, which he called a Telemobiloscope, and tried to interest the German navy in it. Admiral von Tirpitz wrote back to him curtly, ‘Not interested My people have better ideas.’ And when Hülsmeyer demonstrated his device to industry he got a similar negative response. The German electrical giant Telefunken told him, ‘We have no use for this discovery.’2
During the First World War, great advances were made in the understanding and use of radio waves, which could now be sent in more powerful clusters or pulses. Merle Tuve and Gregory Breit in the United States and Edward Victor Appleton in Britain continued this work in the post-war years. Appleton later won a Nobel Prize for his efforts. The huge growth of interest in radio was one of the cultural and technological phenomena of the 1920s, bringing into the business big companies like AT&T’s Western Electric in the USA, Telefunken in Germany and the Electrical and Musical Industries group (EMI) in Britain.
This led to the development and mass production of components like the cathode ray tube, which was transformed from an obscure laboratory tool into a device for widespread use. In 1934, experiments measuring the return of radio waves from nearby aircraft or ships took place separately in Washington, at Kiel harbour in Germany, in Leningrad and in primitive forms in Japan and Holland. With the technology racing forward in several places at once, Watson-Watt later acknowledged that there was a ‘wide open tool box of ideas from which the weapon of radar might be forged’.3 A recent historian has concluded more succinctly that it was ‘a classic case of simultaneous invention’.4
But the story of the development of radar in Britain was different. Not only did it combine brilliant invention with plucky improvisation, but it also developed rapidly because of a profound need. The necessary technology and ideas might have come together in many places at about the same time, but British scientists adopted and turned them into something of real practical value over a remarkably short period. And the need for something like radar did not exist in Britain out of a desire for commercial advantage. It came from the state itself, and from a pressing need to defend the nation’s borders.
On 10 November 1932, Stanley Baldwin expressed British government thinking when he proclaimed in the House of Commons, ‘I think it is well for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed.’ He concluded with the famous phrase, ‘Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.’ Baldwin was not only stating a fact – at that moment it was impossible to prevent a large bombing force from getting to its target – but he was also seeming to accept that there was no point in trying to defend the country from enemy bombers. Defeatism appeared to have become public policy.5
Over the following years the international situation deteriorated. In October 1933, the new German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, withdrew Germany from the League of Nations. Next year the international disarmament conference in Geneva broke down. Although no one in Britain wanted war, people with vision began to see that one day another war with Germany might be inevitable. This prompted many to become increasingly critical of the government’s defeatist attitude.
One of these critics was Frederick Lindemann, an Oxford professor and close friend of Winston Churchill. Lindemann was a distinguished scientist who r
an the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford and through his friendship with Churchill liked to regard himself as a man of public affairs. A dapper man who dressed very formally with wing collar and tie, bowler hat and umbrella, he always acted the part of the stiff and proper Oxford professor, and was universally known as ‘the Prof’. Lindemann liked to be blunt and provocative towards others but was always quick to take offence himself.
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