Night Raid

by Taylor Downing

  A debate began within the scientific intelligence community as to how these devices worked. Was the second Giant Würzburg merely a back-up to the first? Or did the two machines work in tandem in some way? Jones speculated that one machine was there to track an Allied bomber, while the other followed the intercepting German fighter and directed it precisely to the bomber. If this was the case, the Würzburg must operate on an extraordinary level of accuracy for the two machines to line up together. Jones realised that this required a level of precision engineering and manufacturing that was way beyond anything British scientists had designed so far.

  Others disagreed, saying it was not possible that two machines could be linked. British bomber crews were increasingly reporting terrifyingly accurate anti-aircraft fire when they approached the western borders of Germany and said this was directed at them by searchlights. Could the Giant Würzburgs be some form of gun-laying system that controlled both searchlights and anti-aircraft fire? The discussions and the disagreements continued. But it was clear that there were many unanswered questions about the Würzburg, how it operated and what its real function was.

  Jones noticed that although the Würzburg photographed so brilliantly at Bruneval was on the top of a 300-foot cliff, there was a descent through the cliffs nearby to the beach below. It occurred to him that a raiding party might be able to land on the beach, climb the cliffs and capture the equipment. If they were able to bring it back to England it might be possible to examine it and answer many of the questions that were bothering the scientific community. Moreover, once they understood how the device worked it might be possible to devise ways to jam it or distort it as had been done with other systems, like the navigational beams used by the Germans to guide bombers to their targets. But Jones realised that to send a raiding party would be a highly dangerous exercise and put many lives at risk. So he hesitated to put a proposal forward.

  A few days later, in mid December 1941, Jones was talking with W.B. Lewis, deputy superintendent of TRE and A.P. Rowe’s assistant. He too had seen the intriguing photographs of the installation at Bruneval and his team had joined the debate as to how the Würzburg worked. The idea of a raid came up and Lewis immediately said that if Jones proposed it, TRE would support the idea.5 Both men knew that Churchill strongly favoured such missions, relatively small-scale actions designed to create maximum disturbance for the enemy.

  Jones was a member of the Air Staff, effectively the governing body of the Air Ministry, and so he raised it here. With TRE’s active backing, the idea of a raid to capture the radar equipment was taken up. The Air Staff passed on a request to Combined Operations headquarters, where it landed on the desk of its ambitious new commander, Lord Louis Mountbatten, who was eagerly looking for opportunities to show off the skills of his newly trained forces. He realised what a great coup and a tremendous boost to morale a successful raid would be, not only at home but also in showing the Allies and the rest of the world that British forces could hit back at the enemy. All the pieces were falling into place.

  9

  Combined Operations

  As he surveyed his new command at Combined Operations headquarters in late December 1941, Admiral Louis Mountbatten was more conscious than most that the war was going disastrously for the Allies. Britain had received a boost when, on 7 December, two days after Tony Hill had taken the spectacular oblique photograph at Bruneval, America joined the war following the Japanese attack on the US Navy’s Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. When Churchill heard the news late that evening on the radio at Chequers, he was elated. For eighteen months he had tried to persuade the United States to commit to the war effort. He spoke on the transatlantic telephone to President Roosevelt, who told him, ‘We’re all in the same boat now.’ With America in the war, Churchill was sure that victory would follow… eventually. He went to bed that night and ‘slept the sleep of the saved and thankful’.1

  But in the days and weeks following the entry of the United States into the war, the situation became dire indeed. Only four hours after the air strike at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese army in China launched its assault upon the British colony of Hong Kong. On that same day Japanese troops began landing in Thailand and Malaya. Admiral Sir Tom Philips sailed from Singapore with two Royal Navy battleships, HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, to challenge the Japanese invasion fleet in the Gulf of Siam. But, sailing without air cover, they were spotted, and both ships were attacked and sunk by the Japanese air force. With the American fleet heavily mauled at Pearl Harbor and the last two Allied capital ships in the area now gone, Japan was supreme in the Pacific. If there had been any doubt beforehand, this victory for Japanese air power showed that the era of the battleship was finally over.

  Japanese forces swept south into the Malayan peninsula and launched an invasion of the Philippines. On 24 December, US Marines on Wake Island surrendered to a Japanese invasion force. The following day, after a brief siege, the British garrison at Hong Kong surrendered. It had been a dreadful month of disaster and humiliation in the Pacific.

  On the Russian front, the Soviets had lost more men and resources in the first six months after Hitler’s invasion in June 1941 than any army had ever lost in history. Well over a million men had been taken captive. But the winter frosts and thick snow slowed the German advance and the Soviets succeeded in stopping the German army within just twenty-five miles of the capital, Moscow. Fresh winter troops from Siberia launched a counter-attack against the German forces, who were not prepared for winter fighting in the bitter cold. But the good news from Moscow was balanced by the horrors facing the men and women of the second city of Leningrad, under siege from the German army whose Panzers surrounded the city. Under constant artillery bombardment and cut off from supplies, the civilians began a bitter ordeal of endurance and starvation. On Christmas Day alone, more than four thousand Leningrad residents died of starvation. Their suffering was to continue for another two years.

  In the Mediterranean, Italian divers disabled two British battleships, HMS Valiant and HMS Queen Elizabeth, in Alexandria harbour. The Royal Navy had four battleships put out of action in ten days. Adding in the American losses at Pearl Harbor, the Allies had lost an incredible total of twelve battleships in two weeks. In North Africa, Hitler had sent his favourite general, Erwin Rommel, with a Panzer corps to assist his retreating Italian allies. A see-saw war then developed, and after Rommel’s early victories, the Eighth Army under General Auchinleck turned the tide. As Rommel retreated, British forces advanced once again into Libya, captured Benghazi and pushed on towards Tripoli. But the British advance ran out of steam and on 21 January Rommel launched a counter-attack. Within a little more than a week he had recaptured Benghazi and pushed further east until he was stopped on the Gazala Line, not far from Tobruk and the Egyptian border.

  As a trading, maritime nation Britain depended upon supplies arriving by sea, especially ammunition, vehicles and war material coming by convoy from North America across the Atlantic. But U-boats roamed the choppy Atlantic waters and caused carnage when they spotted a convoy in mid-ocean. Churchill called it the ‘Battle of the Atlantic’, and knew that winning this conflict was essential for Britain’s survival. But here too, the war was going badly. The U-boats had a field day after America’s entry into the war. Ranging up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States they sank unprotected vessels along the coast with impunity. The U-boat crews enjoyed the easiest hunting of the war and spoke of it as the ‘happy times’.

  Moreover, before Pearl Harbor, the Royal Navy had been making progress in hunting down the U-boats by intercepting German Enigma messages. Every time a U-boat reported back giving its precise location, the coded message was picked up and deciphered at Bletchley Park. But in early 1942, the Kriegsmarine, growing suspicious, added a fourth rotor blade to their Enigma machine. This meant that the code permutations were increased by a factor of twenty-six. The codebreakers at Bletchley Park were left completely in the dark. It took nearly a year t
o recover from the blow and to compute a new system for breaking the codes. In the meantime, the U-boats were sinking nearly a hundred ships each month. Not only were thousands of merchant seamen tragically losing their lives, but hundreds of thousands of tons of much-needed rations and war supplies were ending up at the bottom of the sea. Britain faced ultimate defeat if the country were starved of the necessities of fuel and foodstuffs and of the supplies needed for keeping up the war effort.

  It was in the context of the grim ongoing news of these disasters at sea and retreats on all fronts that Lord Mountbatten began to reorganise Combined Operations. He inherited from Sir Roger Keyes an office on loan from Scotland Yard in Richmond Terrace off Whitehall with a tiny staff, including typists and messengers, of only twenty-three people. But Churchill had great ambitions for the new command. He wanted it not only to plan small raids along the coast of occupied Europe, but also to begin planning for the full-scale invasion of Europe that would inevitably come, now the Americans were in the war, in a year or two. With his characteristic bulldog spirit, Churchill told Mountbatten, ‘I want you to turn the south coast of England from a bastion of defence into a springboard of attack.’2

  Within six months, Combined Operations’ staff had grown to over four hundred. The generations-old jealousies between the three services that had held up the development of a true combined spirit under the prickly Keyes were soon dispersed under Mountbatten. Genuinely committed to finding new ways of carrying offensive operations into Europe, he found himself surrounded by men who were not only a lot older but who had decades more military experience. About this strange new world he wrote that he was often ‘taking the Chair at meetings at which I always seem to be the youngest person in the room’.3

  Mountbatten reorganised the headquarters staff, splitting it into two. The first section, Administration, was to be largely run by naval officers. The second, Operations, was itself split into Planning, Intelligence, Training and Communications. It was charged with finding targets for small-scale raids, co-ordinating the intelligence work of several different agencies, finding the right equipment and training units in the new techniques needed. Most of this was done in Scotland.

  There was some overlap between the work of Combined Operations and that of the Special Operations Executive, which Churchill had created to liaise with European underground movements to carry out acts of sabotage and create havoc in occupied territories. This had caused friction under Keyes. Mountbatten met with Hugh Dalton, the head of SOE, and they agreed to work together rather than to squabble. All raids of under thirty men were to be carried out by SOE, larger incursions by Combined Operations.4

  Mountbatten started a recruitment drive, but only wanted officers who had a genuine commitment to working with the other services. He toured the Royal Navy’s officer cadet schools and encouraged the next generation of naval officers to put down ‘Combined Ops’ on their preference forms for where to be allocated on graduation. By contrast, Mountbatten was heavily criticised in private for bringing in some of his old cronies to support him. The man he recruited to head the Intelligence section, the Marquis of Casa Maury, was a rich, glamorous racing driver who had been part of Mountbatten’s ‘set’ before the war. But he also brought in many brilliant minds who applied new thinking to the challenges ahead. They included scientists such as the maverick boffin Geoffrey Pyke, whose vivid imagination was to come up with some of the most remarkable ideas of the war. One of these was for a giant, impregnable aircraft carrier to be constructed out of reinforced ice in the middle of the Atlantic. Pyke constantly railed against the Whitehall and military machine, which seemed to believe ‘nothing should ever be done for the first time’.

  Mountbatten then recruited as scientific advisers physicist J.D. Bernal and Professor Solly Zuckerman, who had carried out important research on the impact of bombing. Zuckerman’s first task was to estimate the number of nights in a month that would be ideal for small raids on the French coast. He scrutinised the meteorological records to find the number of nights at which wind speeds were less than Force 5, and combined this with a study of when the moon was full and the tides were right. He came back to Mountbatten to report proudly, ‘it turns out that there will never be a night suitable for a small raid.’5 Despite this useless conclusion, Zuckerman went on to carry out invaluable work for Combined Operations, including a later study that established to everyone’s surprise that most injuries to soldiers taking part in raids came not from rifle or machine-gun fire but from mortar shells. Zuckerman went on to a distinguished career and in the 1960s became Chief Scientific Adviser to the British government.

  By the end of 1941, the headquarters at Richmond Terrace had become a lively place where all sorts of remarkable and adventurous ideas were debated and pursued. Mountbatten called it ‘The only lunatic asylum in the world run by its own inmates.’6

  The initial thinking was that Combined Operations should attempt to mount commando raids on a rather bigger scale than the tiny pinpricks launched along the French coast so far. On the night of 23 November 1941, just four weeks after Mountbatten had taken over command, one of the old types of raid took place when a group of eighty-eight officers and men from 9 Commando landed at Houlgate, near Deauville, on the French coast. The raid was on a small scale but the radios failed and the operation showed that the commando forces had not yet learnt how to keep communications open between the men on land and the ships out at sea. This would prove to be a continuing problem in the months ahead.

  A far bigger commando raid, and one much more in line with Mountbatten’s ambitions for his forces, took place at the end of December on the western coast of Norway. The country was a vital link in Germany’s supply chain of Swedish iron ore, which was carried via the port of Narvik onto shipping that took it south to Germany. Mountbatten’s objective was to get the Germans to strengthen their forces in Norway as a way of reducing the pressure on Russia. On the morning of 27 December, a commando force of 51 officers and 525 men supported by a small flotilla of cruisers landed at the port of Vaagsö. An air raid by RAF Hampden bombers was timed to divert the Germans from the raid. German shipping gathered in the fjords around Vaagsö before making the dash south into the Baltic. The commando raid achieved complete surprise, overwhelmed the small German garrison, captured many PoWs and blew up much of the port’s infrastructure. The raiders departed just a few hours after they had arrived.

  Although there were losses among the raiding party, the mission was a total success in that it encouraged the Germans to substantially reinforce the Norwegian coast. Knowing how important it was to maintain the supply of iron ore for his war machine, Hitler announced that the Kriegsmarine must defend the long coastline of Norway as a matter of priority, and early in 1942 three extra divisions of ground troops were sent to reinforce the garrison. Hitler declared that ‘Norway is the zone of destiny in this war’ and continued to send troops to guard his supply routes that could instead have been playing a role on the Russian front or in North Africa. By 1944, the garrison in Norway was to stand at 372,000 men. The Vaagsö raid helped to distract German forces from other fronts and to divert them into spending months and years defending thousands of miles of ice and fjords. And it had been the first genuinely combined operation organised by Mountbatten’s new and growing staff.

  In the days following the Vaagsö raid, Mountbatten set up a team to search for objectives in France. His planning staff included two key players. Captain John Hughes-Hallett of the Royal Navy was a distinguished sailor who had fought in the Norwegian campaign and was at this point Mountbatten’s chief of staff. He was keen to encourage raids on the French coast to probe the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy’s defences. David Luce was a young commander from a naval family and would rise to be First Sea Lord in the 1960s. In late December these members of Mountbatten’s staff started to consider whether to commit soldiers for a combined forces raid on the Würzburg radar installation at Bruneval.

  In addition to a
chieving the specific object of capturing vital radar equipment for the scientists to examine, Mountbatten knew that a successful raid would act as a great fillip to the nation. So, from the first assessment of the concept of the Bruneval raid, the value of a successful raid in boosting morale was part of everyone’s thinking. But there were several questions for the planners to answer before a full-scale plan could be put forward. Was a sea landing possible? Not only was the coast at Bruneval well defended with minefields, machine-gun posts and gun emplacements, but once ashore a raiding party would have to advance up the steep ascent in the valley between the cliffs. If the enemy defenders were unable to repel the commandos on the beaches, then they would certainly be waiting for them as they advanced up the cliff. Even if the landing was successful, the Germans would be fully warned and likely to rigorously defend the radar installation on the cliff top.