Night Raid

by Taylor Downing

  The camp was still under construction when Frost arrived. Ugly brick huts were provided as living quarters, and Frost was disappointed to find he was to be adjutant to a new battalion that had not yet been formed. As adjutant, Frost was in charge of the day-to-day administration of the battalion, which involved checking the new volunteers. He was shocked by the quality of the new recruits. Many were misfits of one sort or another and some even had criminal records. It was clear that many had been ‘volunteered’ by their commanding officers simply to get rid of them. Many such men were sent back to their previous units within days.

  Another volunteer who arrived at Hardwick at this time was Lieutenant John Timothy. Having grown up in Tunbridge Wells in Kent, where he been a keen rugby player and cricketer at school, he had joined Marks and Spencer just before the war as a management trainee. On the day after war was declared he had eagerly queued with hundreds of others outside a recruiting office, only to be turned away as there were too many volunteers. In early 1940 he badgered the recruiting sergeant so much that he was eventually allowed to join up, although because there was a six-month waiting list for his preferred service, the Royal Navy, he decided to join the army instead. At first he went into the Grenadier Guards and later was commissioned into the Royal West Kent Regiment.

  Because nothing much was going on, he too put his name forward when the call went out for volunteers for the paratroopers. When asked why he had volunteered he replied, ‘Well, as the war wasn’t coming to me, I thought I’d better go and meet it.’10 He was selected and told to report to Chesterfield station, where the soldier who met him had himself only arrived the day before. On the following day, Timothy led the reception committee that welcomed the next batch of recruits. Everything in the Parachute Brigade was new and everyone was learning together.

  Slowly, a form of order and organisation settled on the business of forging a new fighting force. The men did endless hours of work in the gym to get them up to a high standard of fitness. As the first novices departed for the training school at Ringway, more men arrived to take their places. And when they returned a few weeks later proudly wearing the shiny white wings with a parachute in the middle, they spoke of the excitement of parachuting and infected the rest of the unit with their enthusiasm.

  Everyone realised how fit you had to be to survive the knocks of a parachute jump, but John Frost worried that, with so much paperwork to handle, he was unable to keep up with the level of physical fitness required. When his turn came to transfer to Ringway for parachute training he had a fit of nerves. Writing later, he remembered ascending for his first jump in a crazily swinging basket to a balloon 600 feet above Tatton Park with the battalion’s commanding officer: ‘We smiled at each other the learner parachutist’s smile, which has no joy or humour in it. We fiddled anxiously with our harness and occasionally threw a quick agonized glance at the ground below, but in the main we stared upwards, praying hard.’11

  When it came to the jump, the first sensation Frost remembered was the breath drawing from his lungs, until he heard a crackling sound from above and the sudden pull on his harness told him that his parachute had opened successfully. The rest of the descent was ‘heavenly’. After a very gentle landing, Frost decided to make his second compulsory jump from the balloon straight away. Cocky and confident, he chatted away to his fellow jumpers as he ascended to 600 feet once again. As he leapt out of the balloon for a second time he remembered hearing someone call out, ‘Keep your legs together,’ but he found himself caught in a slight wind and he landed with all the weight of his body on his left leg, causing his knee to be savagely wrenched. After a few seconds he got up and managed to hobble away. But the next day he had a huge swelling in his left knee and he was taken to hospital in Manchester. Frost was convinced that this was an ignominious end to his parachuting career. But after an operation on his knee he began to make a gradual recovery and, amused to find that nearly all the other officers in the ward around him were injured parachutists, determined to get fully fit before completing his parachute course.

  Private Tom Hill was one of the early members of Frost’s new battalion. A friend of his had seen the notice calling for volunteers and said he had put his name down. Hill said, ‘Oh, if you’re going, I’ll apply as well.’ His friend replied, ‘Don’t worry, I’ve put your name down too.’ He was happy to have been ‘volunteered’ and looked forward to some action. Having been selected, he remembered the fitness training, which included constant runs carrying a full pack – seven miles in an hour one day, then twelve miles in two hours a week later. He was told that landing after a normal parachute jump was like jumping from a twelve-foot wall, so you had to keep your feet together and brace yourself well. When he ascended to the balloon for his first jump he felt his stomach knot up as he swung from the basket, looking down the hole to the ground 600 feet below, a terrible feeling. But he went ahead with the jump anyway. The second time he remembered as being even worse. It took several jumps before he began to get less tense and relax. But he never really enjoyed the jumping.12

  Macleod Forsyth used the training at Hardwick to get really fit. One of nine children of a Scottish miner who had joined the army in 1933 to try to find a better life than mining, he had gone into the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders but thought the training of the pre-war British Army was very amateurish – more like the Boy Scouts than a professional army. And he had little time for the officers, who he thought ‘didn’t have a clue’ about how to lead a group of men. He spent much of the early part of the war on guard duty in Orkney, so when in 1941 the call went out for volunteers for special duties, Forsyth decided he ‘wanted a bit of action’. Having applied, he was one of three men from his famous Scottish regiment to be selected at this time for the Parachute Brigade.

  As a paratrooper he then realised ‘what training really was’. After general fitness training, the men practised their landing by falling out of the back of army trucks travelling at 25 mph. They had to roll on the ground and then get quickly back on their feet. When it came to jumping, Forsyth like everyone else was terrified at first but was elated at having completed his first jump. He later remembered that ‘in those days, damn few had ever jumped and you thought “My God, I’ve done it” and felt so good.’ Anyone who refused to jump in training was allowed to leave – after qualifying as a paratrooper you were no longer allowed to refuse to jump, as that would be classed as ‘cowardice in the face of the enemy’. But Forsyth only recalled one lad who refused and was returned to his unit.

  Forsyth remembered the hard physical work, day after day, and ‘being on the gallop from when you got up to when you went to bed’. He was so hungry that he was delighted at the Ringway canteen to discover you could go back for seconds. One evening he ate three dinners. Finally, on qualifying as a paratrooper, Forsyth remembered the immense pride of having his wings sown on and the feeling that ‘we were the best.’13

  One final but vital administrative change was needed before the hundreds of men training at Hardwick and on the course at Ringway could be classed as a military body fully prepared for action. At the end of October 1941, the commander-in-chief of Home Forces, General Sir Alan Brooke, decided to create an Airborne Division to consist of both the Parachute Brigades and the soon to be formed Air-Landing or Glider Brigade. This new headquarters would co-ordinate the expansion of the airborne forces. The man appointed to command this new division would become one of the most legendary figures in the story of British airborne troops.

  Major-General Frederick Browning, universally known since joining the army as ‘Boy’ Browning because of his youthful looks, was another highly unusual figure. He was an old Etonian and a graduate of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. In the First World War he had fought in the Grenadier Guards, winning a Distinguished Service Medal for gallantry at the Battle of Cambrai in 1917. After the war he turned to athletics and winter sports and competed in the British bobsleigh team in the 1928 Winter Olympics at St Moritz in
Switzerland. In 1931 he read the novel The Loving Spirit by Daphne du Maurier and was so captivated by the author’s descriptions of the Cornish coast that he took his own boat to Cornwall to explore the area. The following year he met du Maurier and after a whirlwind romance married her. He was commanding the 24 Guards Brigade, one of the elite units within the British Army, guarding London from an attack from the south, when he was appointed to head this new airborne fighting force. Unlike many senior army commanders he had already shown an interest in the use of airborne forces by working out in his spare time how to equip and man an airborne unit and how to deploy it in offensive actions.14

  Browning was ambitious and determined to make a success of his newly formed division. The only precedent for organising a new type of fighting unit within the British Army was the establishment of the brand new Tank Corps in the First World War, but Browning was a good organiser and he immediately set himself to develop tactics for the use of airborne troops. He selected a new headquarters at Syrencote House near Netheravon on the edge of Salisbury Plain.

  Realising the importance of building up a strong esprit de corps within the airborne unit, he encouraged this by introducing new variations of clothing for the men who would jump from aircraft or land in gliders behind enemy lines. The old British Army helmet that had been in use since the First World War was no good for parachute forces, as the lip sticking out at the base of the helmet could be dangerous when jumping. A new helmet, made of canvas with rubber padding, was designed that fitted the head more tightly. It became standard paratrooper headgear until the late 1950s. A number of smocks were issued to be worn over conventional battledress. Copied from the German Fallschirmjäger, these were designed to prevent the paratrooper’s uniform from getting entangled in the parachute harness. The paratroopers were issued with new lightweight trousers, easier to jump in than the heavy serge trousers worn by the rest of the British Army. All this helped to make the airborne soldiers stand out from other army units and to create a sense of pride in being in the division. Browning was a stickler for discipline and for smart dress. He wanted everyone not only to feel they were the best within the army but also to feel pride in the achievements of their fellow paratroopers. His men were going to be a special type of fighting force and he had great ambitions for them.

  So, despite all its early problems, the Airborne now at last had a clear organisation, a proper structure and a dynamic commander. And the new airborne troops soon began to establish their own spirit, their own values and an immense pride in being among the toughest and bravest men in the British Army. All that was needed was a badge and an emblem. Browning decided to look back to ancient Greek mythology and the story of Bellerophon, who had ridden the flying horse Pegasus to attack the fire-eaters. The airborne troops adopted the Pegasus image as an emblem and wore it as a flash on their shoulders.

  But there were still doubts about what the unit could achieve. Its first mission against the aqueduct in southern Italy had been a humiliating failure. What the new force urgently needed to prove its worth was a new mission and a triumphant success.

  7

  Scientific Intelligence

  Late on a wintry afternoon in November 1939, a young scientist in Air Ministry Intelligence by the name of Reginald Victor Jones was working in his office when a colleague, Frederick Winterbotham, came in and dumped a small parcel on his desk. ‘Here’s a present for you,’ said Winterbotham. Jones asked where the parcel had come from and Winterbotham, who was a senior figure in the Secret Intelligence Service (also known as MI6), told him that it had come from the naval attaché in Oslo. Norway was still neutral at the time.

  Apparently, the attaché had received a personal note telling him that if the British wanted to know about secret scientific and technical developments taking place inside Germany, the BBC should be asked to make a particular change in the opening words of their German-language evening news broadcast. The attaché passed the message back to London and the BBC made the change, giving a sign to the mysterious figure that there was interest in hearing what he had to say. Within a couple of days a parcel had been left on the window ledge of the British embassy in Oslo. Jones opened the package now on his desk and found seven pages of typed text, along with a small sealed box. Fearing that there might be some sort of bomb or booby trap enclosed, Jones slowly and carefully opened the box. Inside was a sealed glass tube, rather like an electronic valve.1

  When the letter was translated, Jones was amazed by what he read. It contained a list of various scientific research projects that were under way in Germany. As well as a description of work going on at an aviation research establishment at Rechlin, the German equivalent to Farnborough, which the British knew about already, it referred to strange-sounding rocket research taking place at a site on the Baltic coast known as Peenemünde, of which the British knew nothing. It included details of two new types of torpedoes that were being developed by the Kriegsmarine, one guided by radio and one with a magnetic fuse. And it reported that the twin-engined Junkers Ju 88 was to be used by the Luftwaffe as a dive bomber alongside the Stuka.

  Astonishingly, it also revealed that RAF bombers on a raid on Wilhelmshaven in September had been picked up at a range of 75 miles by a radar station with an output of 20 kilowatts. Although it didn’t give the wavelength of the radar signal, the letter suggested that this could be worked out and the radar should be jammed. More revealingly still, the letter claimed that there was another radar station using paraboloid aerials operating on a wavelength of about 53 cm. There was further information about a set of radio beams called Y-Gerät that were in some way to aid aircraft navigation. The letter was signed simply ‘A German scientist who wishes you well’.

  When British scientists examined the strange glass tube they found it to be a form of proximity fuse for anti-aircraft shells, designed to trigger an explosion when close to a metal object. The British, too, were developing such a device but this one was more sophisticated than anything being worked on in Britain. It took some time for the young British scientist to absorb all this information. But to Jones it seemed that Christmas had come early that year.

  However, the reaction of his colleagues was quite different. The letter became known as the Oslo Report and it was circulated within military intelligence. Senior intelligence officers quickly decided that the report was a hoax, intended to divert British Intelligence into useless byways to waste time. The Deputy Director of Intelligence at the Admiralty, John Buckingham, was convinced that the whole document was a ‘plant’, because no single scientist could possibly have known about the range of work that was going on across Germany. When Jones argued that the report confirmed German research that was already known about, Buckingham replied that this was standard practice. By informing the other side of something they already knew, the intention was to convince the victim that the rest of the information, which was false, was in fact true. Buckingham said it was only because Jones was an innocent in intelligence that he would fall for such a trick.

  Other scientists agreed. Since Robert Watson-Watt’s spying holiday in East Prussia, it had been accepted in British scientific circles that the Germans did not have radar. The descriptions in the Oslo Report were assumed to be wrong, to leave a false trail for the British to pursue. It was decided to ignore the report and copies of it were destroyed so as not to mislead future intelligence officers. Amazed at this conclusion, Jones decided to keep his copy, mystified only by who could have written the document.2

  Dr Reginald Victor Jones was just twenty-eight years old when the Oslo Report was dumped on his desk. But he was mature and experienced beyond his years. He was a scientist through and through, certain that there was a scientific explanation for everything and that it was the duty of research scientists like himself to find it. But despite his serious aspirations, he had a wicked sense of humour and delighted in setting up practical jokes to trick his friends. His speciality was in telephone hoaxes. He would call a colleague and prete
nd to be a telephone engineer who had to fix a fault on their line, asking him to take up various improbable poses like standing on one leg and waving the receiver in the air, or putting the receiver in a bucket of water while waving his free arm. All the while other friends would be in hiding, watching the hapless victim. Jones tricked some of the finest brains in Oxford into performing this form of foolery in front of their colleagues.

  Brought up in south London, Jones had taken a First at Oxford in physics in 1932. He did his Ph.D. research at the Clarendon Laboratory where Professor Frederick Lindemann, the director of the laboratory and Churchill’s close friend and adviser, picked him out. But, Lindemann was sceptical about radio detection finding and believed that the future lay with the use of infra-red rays, so Jones’s research was concentrated in this field for some time. Jones visited Bawdsey Manor and could see the advantages of radar, but continued to believe that infra-red could be used to detect approaching aircraft at close range when radar was less effective.