Night Raid

by Taylor Downing

  Frost and his men were alarmed by the fact that on several practice night-time evacuations, the sailors commanding the ALCs were unable to find the beach where the paratroopers were waiting. Embarking at night was clearly not going to be as simple as they had imagined. Frost agreed with the flotilla commander to synchronise their radio communication throughout each planned evacuation. This seemed to improve the co-ordination between the Paras and the sailors. But Frost and his men were still troubled by the number of practice runs that went hopelessly wrong. Frost did not relish the thought of being abandoned on the coast of France after their raid because the navy could not find the right beach – although at this point he could not share this fear with his men, most of whom still thought they were preparing for a demonstration to senior politicians.

  After a few more days practising night rendezvous along Loch Fyne, still without much success, the Prinz Albert headed south out of the loch. The parachutists were dropped off at Gourock from where they took the train back to Salisbury. It was now mid February, and the company next had to organise a practice jump outside divisional headquarters at Syrencote House. This was the first drop 51 Squadron had carried out and it took some time to organise the packing up of men and equipment at Thruxton airfield. The jump did not finally take place until late in the afternoon. The ground was rock hard but apart from a few bruises and strains there were no serious casualties. General Browning seemed pleased with the display.

  The final stage of training for the raid took place along the south Dorset coast on army exercise grounds around Lulworth Cove, where the cliffs were similar to those the men would find on the other side of the Channel. The naval staff had mysteriously changed the system of radio communication that Frost had set up with the flotilla commander in Scotland. This did not help co-ordination between the navy and the army. They had four practice attempts at linking up with the landing craft, which had now sailed south from Scotland. Not one resulted in a successful evacuation.

  Bad weather played its part in this dismal performance. On one run the landing craft successfully beached on the shore and the men clambered in, but the tide was going out and the landing craft could not get free to move off the beach. The men got out and pushed and shoved the landing craft, getting soaked in the freezing sea. But no amount of manhandling would free the landing craft, which were left like beached whales lying on the shingle as the tide went out.

  Almost every day the paratroopers drove south from Tilshead to the coast, carried out another failed attempt and then drove back again in the dark, often soaking wet, freezing cold and miserable, to their camp on Salisbury Plain. As if all this was not exhausting and dispiriting enough, the last evening practice proved to be the most chaotic of all. The weather was too bad to allow the men to jump by parachute. So near to the actual raid it was thought too dangerous; if some of the trained men became casualties they would have to be removed from active operations. So their trucks dropped them on a flat stretch of land not far from the sea. The Whitley bombers of 51 Squadron were scheduled to drop the containers of weapons and supplies, and a specially designed folding trolley to carry away the German apparatus, over their positions. After attacking an imaginary objective near the cliffs, the raiding party were then to form up on the beach and call in the landing craft by radio and with the use of a radio beacon. Then they would depart from the beach.

  However, everything that could go wrong did. The Whitleys dropped the containers in the wrong place. The landing craft went to the wrong beach. And to cap it all, the paratroopers found themselves caught up in a minefield that had been laid along part of the beach against German invaders, several miles from where they were supposed to be. They were lucky to get out without any casualties.

  The dates for the raid itself had been set well in advance. The planners had chosen nights when the moon was nearly full to provide maximum light and when the tides were rising, ideal for a pre-dawn evacuation from the beaches. The first of these dates was fast approaching, but Commander Cook insisted that there should be one further attempt to evacuate the Para company successfully as all previous attempts had failed. Again, the exercise was delayed due to bad weather and was finally scheduled for Sunday 22 February – only two nights before the first possible opportunity for the raid itself.

  This time the exercise took place in the Solent, not far from HMS Tormentor on Southampton Water. That night the weather was at last perfectly clear. The communications worked and the paratroopers linked up with the landing craft. But due to an error in their calculations, the navy had got the tides wrong and the landing craft had to beach about sixty yards out. There was nothing for it. Frost ordered his men to wade out into the sea to the vessels. They decided that as this was only an exercise they should not risk ruining their weapons with sea water, so they left them on the beach. They waded out into the dark, forbidding and frozen sea until the water was three feet deep, but they still had not reached the landing craft. As they went further out the sea got even deeper and began to lap over their thighs. Some of the men almost froze with cold and cramp. And when they reached the landing craft, the vessels were once again caught on the tide and would not budge. The men had to wade back ashore and the exercise was abandoned.

  This, the last possible practice run before the raid itself, had been a fiasco like the others. Frost, and no doubt several of his men, worried that they had not had a single successful dress rehearsal for the raid. He worried even more about being stranded on the French coast and taken prisoner by the enemy.

  At the heart of Operation Biting was the need to dismantle and carefully remove the key parts of the radar installation in order to take them away for examination back in Britain. To do this, the raiding party would need specialist skills beyond what could be expected of regular paratroopers. Finding the right men for this part of the operation would therefore be essential for its success.

  12

  Volunteers for Danger

  Since the original idea for the raid on the Würzburg radar installation at Bruneval had come from Air Ministry scientist R.V. Jones, his assistant, Derek Garrard, volunteered to go on the operation in order to provide the technical advice that would be needed in dismantling the radar to bring it back. And once Garrard had volunteered, Jones felt he had no choice but to volunteer himself. He was still young, aged thirty, and could be trained to join the mission. But he was somewhat relieved when Air Chief Marshal Portal vetoed his involvement, not on the grounds that he could not be spared, but on the basis that if he was captured, as all those dropped in the first Para operation a year before had been, he was a security risk. He knew far too much about Britain’s war science and under torture might reveal a great deal of immense value to the enemy.

  Portal furthermore forbade anyone on Jones’s staff to take part in the operation. So the planners had to find someone else who understood the working of radar systems but was less knowledgeable about the latest developments in British science.

  RAF Flight Sergeant Charles Cox was stationed at the Chain Low radar station on the remote, rugged coast of north Devon at Hartland Point. Hartland is a tiny, picture-postcard Devonshire village on the edge of a wild stretch of coast where strips of granite head out into the sea like lines of ploughed fields. For centuries it had been one of the most out-of-the-way spots in England. Emphasising its remoteness, the old sign as you entered the village read ‘Welcome to Hartland – Farthest from Railways’, and it was indeed the furthest point from the network of railway lines that at the time linked almost every part of England. For centuries Hartland had been best known for its tradition of ‘wrecking’, whereby sets of smugglers moved lights on the shore inland to lure passing vessels in storms onto the rocks. Groups of locals would then go down to the wrecks and help themselves to the proceeds.

  Cox was not a local but had grown up near Wisbech in the Fenlands of East Anglia. His father was a postman and his mother an actress. Before the war he had been a cinema projectionist and a radio ham, ne
ver happier than when tinkering with valves and bits of radio equipment. He had joined the RAF in 1940 and his interests naturally took him towards the technical side of aviation and into the brand new and fast developing world of radar. He was enjoying his stint at the recently constructed Chain Low station at Hartland. Something of a cushy number, it was a quiet spot without many distractions and gave him plenty of time to learn about the technology he was operating. As an experienced radar operator and mechanic, he was a highly valued member of his team and was known as someone who could repair the equipment when it went wrong or was damaged by the winds that tore across the north Devon coastline. He had acquired a reputation as one of the best radar mechanics in the RAF. Although in the air force, he had never flown in an aircraft, nor had he ever been to sea. And he had never travelled abroad.

  At the end of January 1942, Cox was surprised when his commanding officer gave him a railway voucher for the train from Bideford to London and told him to report to the Air Ministry immediately. When he arrived at Air headquarters on 1 February he reported to Air Commodore Victor Tait, at which point a rather surreal conversation took place.1 Tait said to the young flight sergeant that he was pleased he had volunteered for ‘a dangerous job’.

  Cox, puzzled, said that this was the first he had heard about it and that he had not volunteered for anything. ‘There must be some mistake,’ replied the equally puzzled Tait. ‘I asked for volunteers from the comparatively few with exactly your qualifications.’ There was a pause. Then Tait continued, ‘But now you’re here, Sergeant, will you volunteer?’

  ‘Exactly what would I be letting myself in for, sir?’ asked Cox.

  ‘I’m not at liberty to tell you,’ replied the air commodore. ‘However, I can tell you that although the job is dangerous it offers a reasonable chance of survival. It’s of great importance to the Royal Air Force. And if you’re half the chap I think you are, you’ll jump at it.’

  Cox did not take long to decide. His wife had given birth only a few weeks before. He had no wish to risk his life and leave his wife and baby without a husband and a father. But he was a patriot and devoted to the RAF. Although the task sounded daunting, he felt he could do with a challenge. After only the briefest hesitation he replied, ‘I volunteer, sir.’

  Delighted, Tait then told him that he would be required to help in the capture of a radiolocation post in enemy territory. Before Cox had time to reconsider, he was ordered to proceed to the travel office where he was given another railway voucher, this time to Manchester, and a chit with instructions to report at once to Ringway aerodrome.

  As Cox’s adventure continued, he probably felt as if he were in some kind of dream. He later described arriving at Ringway and not really knowing what was going on. It was unlike any airfield he had visited before. He noticed that busloads of soldiers kept arriving and flying off in old bomber aircraft, but not coming back. He noted that they all had ‘queer pots of helmets on’ that he had never seen before. They looked rather like the Boys’ Brigade, he thought. He wondered what the letters CLS on the main gate stood for. Eventually someone explained to him that this was a parachute training school, and that he and another RAF flight sergeant by the name of Smith had ‘volunteered’ for a mission to parachute into occupied France in order to bring back some German radar apparatus. Both men had to make their statutory six jumps before they could qualify to join the mission. So the two RAF technicians began an intensive course of parachute training. Cox made two jumps from a balloon at a height of 500 feet in the space of an hour on his first training day. The young father found the whole experience ‘rather nerve-racking’.

  There then followed four days of bad weather during which all jumping was cancelled. After this, Cox made his first ‘singles jump’ from a Whitley at about 800 feet. A ‘singles jump’ involved the Whitley circling the airfield and dropping trainees one at a time when it passed a given point on the circuit. Flight Sergeant Smith, who had already torn a muscle in his leg in the balloon drops, now ‘fell ill’ and withdrew from the operation. Cox never saw him again and realised that without a reserve it was now down to him to continue with the training and qualify as a parachutist in order for the mission to succeed. He began to feel the pressure.

  Cox made two more jumps, this time jumping in twos. But he still had to complete his sixth jump to qualify and as the operation was going to take place at night, he was told he would have to make a night jump, even though this was not part of the usual training programme. The night jump would be from a balloon again.

  Up he went with his flight instructor in the balloon to 500 feet. ‘It was a sort of eerie experience for everything was dark and quiet,’ he wrote in his report. He felt much more scared than during a daylight jump, remembering that ‘The hole in the bottom of the basket seemed suddenly to me to look like a bottomless pit.’ With great courage, and with the instructions drummed into him that he must keep his legs and feet pressed closely together, he jumped into the darkness. He could see nothing until what looked like a line of trees suddenly appeared out of the black below him and he panicked that he was going to crash right into them. In fact they were further away than he thought and he missed them and made a perfect rolling landing. As he gathered up his chute, and with his adrenalin still pumping, he felt better than he had ever felt in his life before.

  With six successful jumps behind him, on 15 February Cox was sent down to Tilshead to join C Company who were part way through their training for the mission. Frost and Ross welcomed him and put him on another intensive training programme, this time consisting of heavy physical exercises, including route marches with full kit and cross-country runs, a combat course that featured weapons training and knife fighting, the scaling of barbed wire (which entailed one paratrooper lying across the wire while others ran over him) and night patrols. For the first time, Cox got to know the paratroopers he was training with. They struck him as a tough bunch who had a positive ‘Come what may, I’m OK’ attitude. He began to enjoy their company and to admire them for their aggressive fighting skills. He particularly liked his fellow sergeants in C Company, and was able to join them in their own mess. He only had one problem. With their thick Scottish accents, he could barely understand half of what they said to him!

  Soon after Cox arrived at Tilshead, Sergeant-Major Strachan introduced him to the small group of Royal Engineers who had been seconded to join the mission. The Royal Engineers were in many ways the most modern and forward-looking section of the British Army. They had a long history of providing support for every type of military operation and their motto was Ubique – ‘Everywhere’.

  From the beginning, the Engineers, or sappers as they were called, had been closely associated with new forms of technology often adopted only very reluctantly by a deeply conservative army high command. In the eighteenth century, they had carried out an extensive mapping operation in Scotland and Ireland and had laid the foundations for the Ordnance Survey. In the Crimean War they had been the first to use telegraphy in military communications. In the latter decades of the nineteenth century they had pioneered the use of balloons for aerial reconnaissance in the army. In the early twentieth century they had experimented with different types of aircraft after the advent of powered flight, giving birth in 1912 to the Royal Flying Corps. They had been involved with developing tank warfare in the First World War. And in the inter-war years they were the only branch of the British Army committed to exploring new technologies and how they might relate to developments on the battlefield. For Operation Biting, a group of Royal Engineers who were part of the Airborne Division Air Troop were assigned to provide technical support. Ten sappers joined C Company under the command of twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Dennis Vernon.

  Vernon was a Londoner by birth but had spent most of his life in Cambridge, first at the Leys School and then at Emmanuel College where he read economics. He was a bright young officer with an interest in new ideas and new technology, and a lively enquiring mind. He and Cox
immediately got on well together. Vernon admired Cox for his knowledge of technical equipment. And Cox respected Vernon for his ability to pick up the essentials of radar and pass it on in a meaningful way to his men. The unit purloined a mobile radar that was in use by local anti-aircraft gunners and brought it to Tilshead. Cox was asked to explain to the engineers the principles of radar and how it worked. The improvised lecture went well and the men, who had barely heard of radar before, were drawn into what seemed like the fantasy world of detection by radio beams. Vernon then organised a course for the men on recognising electrical equipment and how to take it apart without electrocuting yourself.

  A more senior radar expert then arrived. Like many scientists in the war, Brigadier Basil Schonland, a South African expert on lightning, had built up an expertise in an entirely new field, in his case radar. His task was to show the engineers how to dismantle a mobile radar set, and the men practised taking it apart and putting it back together over and over again in order to familiarise themselves with it. The planners had to reckon with the possibility that Cox and Vernon might be disabled or killed during the operation and the remaining engineers therefore had to be capable of operating successfully without them. In addition, a further back-up plan was required.