Night Raid

by Taylor Downing

  The paratroopers were taken to three blacked-out Nissen huts around the perimeter of the airfield. Inside, they found their parachutes, neatly packed and in lines of ten, laid out for each of the twelve aircraft that would fly that night. The men were offered sandwiches and cups of tea. Chatting nervously, they checked each other’s parachute straps, told jokes and tried to keep cheerful. Some blacked their faces so they would not stand out at night. A reporter later noted that ‘even their teeth’ had been blacked up.4 They only wanted one thing now, to get on with it.

  Major Frost and Sergeant-Major Strachan went from hut to hut to talk with their men and give out any final instructions. They wished them luck and generally gave off a sense of optimism and confidence. It was just what men about to go into combat needed. They had been given their detailed briefings and knew the landscape they were to operate in, but only now were they informed that the location of Operation Biting was the cliffs of northern France. As the target was just on the other side of the Channel, it would be a relatively short flight to the drop zone.

  Frost was outside one of the huts when Group Captain Norman appeared. He had come down to Thruxton to wish Frost and his men good luck. But Norman had also just received the latest weather report from an RAF aircraft over the coast at Bruneval. He told Frost that conditions were excellent. The sea was calm, visibility was good, at least three to four miles, the cloud was thick at a little under 2000 feet, so it would be easy to see the ground from the aircraft and identify the DZs. Norman finished by telling Frost, ‘The latest news is that there is snow on the other side and I’m afraid the flak seems to be lively.’5 Then he wished him good luck, turned and departed for Portsmouth, where he would sit out the night following the news of the raid in Admiral James’s command post.

  Frost’s heart dropped. He thought about all the RAF aircraft that were supposedly carrying out their diversionary raids but had in effect awoken a hornet’s nest along the French coast. Maybe every anti-aircraft gunner in northern France would be alerted and waiting for the squadron of Whitleys when they finally made it over there later that night. He was also irritated to hear of the snow. There was no snow in southern England and he had expected none in France. He fretted about the fact they had left their white smocks back at Tilshead. Maybe they would be highly visible in dark gear crossing the expanse of white and an easy target for the local defenders. But it was too late to do anything about that now. Frost went around the men for one final visit to tell them the latest news. He tried to be encouraging and not to show the qualms he was now feeling about the mission ahead.

  In the middle of the evening, soon after 2130, in the darkness, the Paras of C Company finally marched from their Nissen huts out on to the tarmac of the apron to the waiting aircraft. The company piper, Piper Ewing, piped them out, playing the regimental marches of each of the Scottish units from which the men had been drawn. There was nothing like the sound of bagpipes to send men into battle. As on so many occasions in the years before when Scottish troops had prepared for combat, the bagpipes had the effect of steeling the men and instilling them with a fighting spirit. Added to this was the relaxed bravado of the RAF crews who met the men at their aircraft. Flying over occupied Europe at night was routine for them. Their business-as-usual attitude helped to provide extra courage.

  All that is, except Wing Commander Charles Pickard. This evening the dashing pilot and famous film veteran felt less than sure about the whole mission. Before getting into his plane, he took Frost aside and expressed his fears to him, saying that carrying all these paratroopers into action made him ‘feel like a bloody murderer’.6 It was an extraordinary thing for an experienced pilot to say to the leader of the men he was flying into action. In many ways it was quite unforgivable. Fortunately, it had little effect on Frost, who was too busy thinking about his men and the problems ahead to be seriously upset.

  There was one final task before the men climbed up into the aircraft. The Elsan lavatories had been removed from each plane to reduce weight. Anticipating the consequence, the orders stated that ‘troops should relieve themselves last thing before emplaning.’7 After all the tea they had nervously drunk in the last few hours this was a wise move. Had anyone been watching, they would have seen in the darkness dozens of men laden with parachute packs on their backs, drawn up alongside each Whitley bomber pausing to undo themselves and taking a final piss on to the Hampshire soil. Relieved, they then climbed into their aircraft, so heavily loaded up that each man had to shove the one in front into the fuselage. The last man had to be hauled in by his colleagues.

  By 2200 all the men had emplaned. The first of the engines were started up, filling the quietness of the night with the roar of the Rolls-Royce Merlins. For most of the men it was the sound they had been praying to hear for four days. At 2215 the first of the Whitleys began to taxi out to the end of the runway. A few moments later it was airborne and the mission had at long last begun.

  The paratroopers had precise positions for the take-off and most of the flight. With a load of ten men, along with the canisters of weapons and other equipment in the bomb bays, each of the Whitleys would be fully loaded. There were no seats in the aircraft and the men had all been weighed in their kit. Frost, for instance, weighed in at 93 kg fully laden. Everyone had been allocated positions to balance the aircraft, most of them lying out and spread across the ribs of the fuselage.

  Even though the Whitleys would not be flying at a high altitude, it would be freezing cold in the unheated body of the aeroplane. So the Paras were given kapok sleeping bags and a pair of silk gloves to help them keep warm. This was RAF kit and seemed strange to the tough fighting men of the elite Para force. But the men were told that they had to take up their exact pre-assigned positions. The orders made it alarmingly clear by stating that ‘with troops aboard the pilot will be unable to control the aircraft unless “TAKE-OFF POSITION” is correctly taken up. The alternative is a crash.’8 No one wanted to risk that and the big, tough paratroopers obediently crawled into their correct positions.

  At roughly sixty-second intervals, each of the remaining eleven Whitley bombers took off. By just after 2230 the last of the bombers was airborne. They flew along the English coast past the RAF fighter station at Tangmere to the rendezvous for their coastal departure point over Selsey Bill. The first aircraft to take off circled over this easily identifiable landmark until all the remaining aircraft in the squadron had arrived. There were no stragglers, so at 2315, precisely on schedule, they headed out across the Channel at 125 mph flying on a direct route for Fécamp, a fishing port on the French coast a few miles north-east of the drop zone. They flew low, just below a thin layer of cloud.9

  Paratroopers on board aircraft heading for their drop zone experienced a range of emotions. They knew that within a couple of hours they might be fighting for their lives behind enemy lines. Or they might be stranded or isolated, having been dropped in the wrong place. The intelligence itself might prove to be wrong and a reception committee of heavily armed enemy troops might be waiting for them. Worse still, they might be shot down before they even arrived at the drop zone, sending the whole aircraft plummeting in flames. Or their parachute could fail to open and they would plunge to a certain death on the ground below.

  This uncertainty was something that all paratroopers faced, whether commanding officers or humble privates. It was unique to parachute forces. The jump out of an aircraft behind enemy lines was something that brought them together in a sort of equality that ground troops never experienced. Several of the men in C Company would go through this many times before the war’s end and the veterans would help the newcomers with the inevitable tension that everyone felt. But the night raid at Bruneval was the first time that any of the men had been through this experience. They were all new to the emotions in what seemed to everyone like a long haul as the Whitleys droned on across the Channel, heading for France.

  Everyone had a different way of coping with the tension. Some men sang
songs to keep their spirits up and to help them feel they were all members of a ‘band of brothers’ facing the same fate. Others played cards. A few read books or magazines they had brought with them. One or two even managed to doze off, or at least to shut their eyes for a couple of hours of rest and relaxation. Most thought that anyone who could still their nerves, sit quietly and go to sleep on the flight before a combat jump was super-cool. In fact this was not the case. People respond differently to tension and for some it was easier to be calm, collected and self-possessed than it was to take part in communal singing or games. There was not a single man who deep down did not feel fear of what lay ahead. Even if, wanting to appear cool to their mates, they pretended to be unconcerned, it would have been extraordinary not to be anxious. Paratroopers would often say later, ‘if you weren’t afraid you weren’t human’.

  On Frost’s aircraft the ten men were cheerful. They sang songs and played cards, mostly pontoon. Frost wrote in his report, ‘Spirits were high; indeed, I can describe them as terrific.’10 He later told a reporter that on every aircraft it was as though the men were ‘having a concert party’.11 In one of the aircraft, a group played cards for money. Corporal Stewart, the company gambler, already had a full wallet from previous winnings. He won again and, with his wallet bulging even more, he pointed out that if anything happened to him, whoever was nearby would ‘find himself in luck’s way’.12

  Lieutenant Charteris discovered that the man next to him in his aircraft was one day older than he was and they would both be celebrating their twenty-first birthday in a few days’ time. They swore they would get through the mission and celebrate together. Again, the men in this aircraft were in high spirits, singing and joking. The only tension that the young officer observed was that the men kept asking him what the time was and how long there was to go. He never gave a precise answer.13 Clearly, the four-day delay and resulting emotional roller-coaster had not seriously upset the men. They were fully primed and ready for action.

  A few hours before and several miles south, on the cliff tops at Bruneval, the nine men on the night shift of the Würzburg had left their billets at Le Presbytère and walked across the field to the radar station. At exactly 1900 hours they had begun to arrive for duty, relieving the day shift. Theirs was the long night shift that would last until 0800 the following morning. Throughout the night, at least two men would be on duty at the radar at any one time. The others would be on lookout duty, or be resting in a dugout next to the site. The small lookout post was a short distance away and contained a machine gun, binoculars and a telephone. Every night the radar men knew that the defence of key German strongpoints in France depended on their vigilance.

  As the evening progressed, the radar operators had a busy shift. In the middle of the evening an alert came through from the Freya radar operators of British bombers approaching the port of Le Havre. This was one of the diversionary raids mounted that evening. Accordingly, the power supply was turned on in the nearby dugout and the Würzburg started up. This was a slow business: it always took a few minutes for the equipment to become usable and the cathode ray tube at the centre of the machine needed at least two minutes to warm up. The operators then calibrated their apparatus. This had to be done each time the equipment was started up and was carried out by picking up a return signal from a point at a known distance and direction. The team at Bruneval used an echo point on the cliffs at Étretat about six miles away. They then started to take readings of the height and direction of the bombers, which were about twenty-five miles out to sea, and phoned the readings through to their control headquarters near Le Havre every couple of minutes. After a while the aircraft flew out of range and the Würzburg was turned off.

  The whole process was repeated a little later when another group of bombers were spotted off the coast. Instead of getting a little sleep in the dugout, the team remained on alert throughout the evening. But none of them on duty that night had any idea of what was coming their way next.

  By contrast, a few hundred yards away, in the old seaside villa Stella Maris down below the cliffs, the night was passing slowly. The sound of anti-aircraft fire against the far-off bombers could barely be heard. And the task of the soldiers here was to guard the beach from possible enemy raiders. They were not concerned with distant air raids. At 2120 the guard changed and those who had been on alert in a dugout looking out to sea came inside and a fresh shift went out to keep watch. The men who had been on duty were relieved to be indoors out of the cold. They kicked off their boots, took off their greatcoats and lay down to rest, as they were allowed to do. Within minutes, most of them were dozing, although the telephone orderly, Corporal Georg Schmidt, remained awake to answer any calls that came in from company or battalion headquarters. For these soldiers it looked like being another long, cold, quiet night.

  After a little less than two hours’ flying time the Whitleys approached the French coast. The order was shouted down from the cockpit to the men, ‘Prepare for action,’ and the hole in the base of the aircraft was opened. Immediately the fuselage was filled with freezing night air from outside. The parachute force now gathered themselves for action. Each man connected the static line of his parachute to the cable that ran along the fuselage. Every man checked that the line of the man next to him was fully secured. The men nearest the hole could look out and see the calm sea below.

  As predicted, when they approached the French coast the anti-aircraft gunners opened up. Frost looked out and saw the tracers of the anti-aircraft fire coming up towards them, mostly orange with a little red. He thought it looked like ‘a pleasant firework show’. But there was nothing pleasant about the heavy fire aimed towards the squadron of bombers. Lieutenant Charteris thought the flak sounded as if ‘a man was hammering on a piece of tin below us’.14 The lucky ones were those inside the aircraft who could not see out. Sergeant Macleod Forsyth was at the back of his Whitley but remembered that the face of the corporal who was sitting at the hole waiting to jump turned a ghastly white. He thought the man was going to be sick. When Forsyth later had a chance to ask him why he had turned so pale, the corporal said, ‘So would you if you had seen that tracer coming up at you.’15

  The pilots started to take evasive action. The risk was that this would throw the aircraft off course and the navigators would get lost, with the consequence that the pilots would drop their cargo in the wrong place. Two and a half years later, this was exactly what would happen on the night before D-Day. On that occasion, the pilots broke formation and rushed to give the signal to jump, in order to get the men out as soon as possible. As a consequence, paratroopers were scattered across tens of miles of countryside, many of them miles from their objectives.

  The Whitley bombers flew in a line south-west along the French coast about half a mile out to sea at between 1000 and 1500 feet. The pilots and navigators could clearly see the French cliffs and were able to take a bearing from the Cap d’Antifer lighthouse, the only one along this stretch of coastline. Then, as planned, just before Le Havre the Whitleys turned to port and flew inland for five hundred yards or so. They then turned again to port and flew north-east on a reverse parallel line to that which they had just travelled.

  On the ground below, the Würzburg operators grew more alarmed. It looked as though the British aircraft were heading straight for them. There seemed no alternative. They were the target for that night. They were going to be bombed. The sirens rang out and the men in the nearby garrison at Le Presbytère rushed to their dugouts.

  As the bombers made their final turn to port the red warning light came on inside the aircraft. The men on board knew that they were only seconds away from the order to jump. Some of them could see the familiar sites of the valleys and woods near the drop zone. The planes were now flying low, at about 400 feet. As the navigator and the pilot spotted the deep valley containing the Bruneval road they pressed the green light. This was the signal for the paratroopers to jump. They should all be out by the time the aircraft h
ad passed the line of trees on the other side of the road.

  This was the moment the men had trained so hard for. They had to get out of the aircraft through the hole in the base of the fuselage as quickly as possible without smashing their faces on the side of the hole, the ‘Whitley kiss’. As the first men jumped into the cold night air their adrenalin kicked in. The mission was on. There was no turning back now.

  16

  Attack

  Lieutenant Charteris, ‘Junior’, leading the Nelson detachment, jumped from the very first aircraft, which was piloted by Wing Commander Pickard. They were scheduled to jump at precisely 0015. Charteris remembered sitting by the hole and waiting to jump, looking out and seeing every house and every tree passing below. He felt it was unreal, as though he were acting in a play. As soon as the light went green he jumped. It was a lovely drop and he came down ‘like a feather’ in about ten seconds to make a perfect landing in a field. There was no wind and it was easy to cut away the rigging lines of his parachute. He saw the other nine of his stick landing nearby.