Night Raid

by Taylor Downing

  Back in the valley leading down to the beach, the fire fight had reached stalemate. The German soldiers in their well dug in defensive positions were spraying the area where the British paratroopers were thought to be with machine-gun fire. The Paras were returning the fire from at least three positions, but there were too few of them to carry the day.

  It was at around this time, at 0115, up on the cliff plateau, that Frost and his men found themselves under ever-increasing fire from the German troops in the copse four hundred yards to their north. Cox and Vernon had barely been allowed ten of the thirty minutes allocated to them to take apart the Würzburg. But Frost could not hold on any longer. The Germans had rallied too quickly and the Paras were impatient to move. And he had already sent Young and his section down to assist Ross’s men. On hearing the order to withdraw, Cox gathered up everything he and Vernon had pulled out of the Würzburg cabin. Together they placed it on the trolleys, barely aware of what they were taking with them and what they were leaving behind. They started to haul the cumbersome trolleys along the plateau to the edge of the cliff. It was no easy task but everyone gave a hand. Behind him, Cox heard an explosion as the engineers blew up what was left of the Würzburg.

  When they reached the top of the steep descent to the beach they found the pillbox that they knew as the Redoubt. Fortunately, it was not manned. The Germans had been taken by surprise to the extent that they had not had time to fortify all their positions. As the Paras moved around the pillbox Frost heard a voice coming up from the valley below that seemed to say, ‘The boats are here. It’s all right. Come on down.’ With a great sense of relief, he led his men forward over the crest to start their descent down the steep 370-foot slope. Just at that moment the machine gunner that had been pinning the men down at the bottom of the valley spotted the British paratroopers clearly silhouetted as they came over the top of the cliff. The gunner instantly opened fire. Sergeant-Major Strachan, who was about five yards behind Frost, dropped in a hail of gunfire. He had stopped seven bullets, three in his stomach.

  Frost immediately went back to help him. He could barely believe that this heavyweight brute of a man was lying there in agony in front of him. He pulled him into some cover behind the pillbox. Remembering that some of the men had morphine on them, he called one of them over to give Strachan an injection. It gave some rapid relief, but it was clear that Strachan was in a bad way and might not survive for long without serious medical attention.

  Just as he was considering this, Frost heard another shout from the valley below. This time he recognised it as Ross, who he knew was down in the valley somewhere leading the assault on the beach defences. Ross shouted up, ‘Don’t come down. The beach has not yet been taken.’ Having reached this point, however, Frost had no alternative. He told Cox, Vernon and the other sappers to dump the radar equipment near the pillbox and ordered everyone to lie down and take cover. Another hail of gunfire came up from the machine gun below. One of the bullets grazed Cox’s boot, but fortunately he was not hurt. They would have to remain on the shoulder of the cliff. They were stuck up there, for now.

  Lieutenant Euan Charteris and the other nineteen men from Nelson who had been dropped into the wrong valley had travelled about three-quarters of a mile when he saw through the trees the Cap d’Antifer lighthouse in the distance. It was a great relief to the young officer, as he knew now that he was heading in the right direction. It turned out that he had been dropped about two and a half miles south of the intended DZ. He was now moving up a track in a valley and thought that if he continued he would probably come out into the village of Bruneval before long. Aware that there was a platoon of men stationed at the Hotel Beau-Minet in the centre of the village, he nevertheless knew how critical his part of the operation was and how much every delayed minute cost the mission, so he decided to continue regardless. He spread his men out in the wood at either side of the road and carried on at a jog, hoping that if they circuited the village silently they would manage to reach the beach and carry out the assault they were there to lead.

  The soldiers based at the Hotel Beau-Minet were utterly confused by what was happening around them. They knew that British parachutists were in the area but they had no idea how many, where they were or what they were trying to do. They heard firing from the cliff top, and then the sound of battle coming up from the beach about five hundred yards away. But they had received no clear orders as to what they should do. So the sergeant sent out small patrols to reconnoitre and bring back information as to what was going on. It so happened that one of the patrols went south in the direction of Charteris and his men, who were advancing towards them.

  Moving quickly through the woods on either side of the steep little valleys it was dark and confusing, and the German patrol became split. One man separated from the rest saw the familiar sight of soldiers moving through the woods and fell in behind them, trailing them for some minutes. It’s not clear who spotted whom first, but the British Paras realised that the man at the rear of their squad was not one of their own when he suddenly called out to them in German. At pretty much the same time the German realised his dreadful mistake and screamed out. Charteris, near the rear of the group, turned and pulled out his revolver to shoot the man at about five yards, almost point blank. But in the flurry and speed of the incident he forgot to release one of the safety catches of his pistol and the weapon did not fire. The terrified German soldier fired his rifle but was too distraught to take proper aim and missed.3

  Sergeant Gibbon, who was at the front of the group with his Sten gun, span around in a flash. Private Tom Hill, at the rear next to the man with whom he had been advancing through the woods, was amazed to find he was a German. He saw the sergeant move and threw himself to the ground.4 Gibbon fired his Sten gun over Hill at the German, who dropped instantly.

  The scare was over, but the men had been shaken and Charteris, even more determined now to catch up with the others, ordered his men to continue. It later became part of the mythology of Bruneval that the Paras had used their knives to kill the German in complete silence. But this was not what happened, and the sound of the shooting had given away the presence of Charteris and his section moving up towards the village.

  In no time the Paras reached the road heading west into Bruneval and down the valley to the beach. Charteris told his Bren gun team to cover him while he and a group of men crossed the road and advanced through some scrubby land to the north. After a while, all twenty men went forward towards the village. By now the NCOs were calling out orders to the men as they advanced through woods and shrubs and were making quite a bit of noise. Charteris wrote in his report, ‘I was sure, however, that speed was more important than silence,’ and he told his men to carry on. It was now that they came under fire from the soldiers based at the hotel. One man, Private Sutherland, was badly wounded in the shoulder and the arm.

  The situation now became even more confusing for Charteris. Under fire he took cover in the scrub, while most of the men disappeared into the woods. At least four got separated from the rest. Charteris sent a corporal to try to find the missing men, but he returned having been unable to do so.

  At around this time he made contact with men from the Rodney group, who were acting as the reserve to prevent German reinforcements from coming up the main road. Having laid their two mines, they were already involved in skirmishes and had suffered casualties, with two more men wounded. Since the radios had gone missing in the drop, the commander of Rodney, Lieutenant John Timothy, was using runners to keep in touch with Frost. Timothy was able to tell Charteris that the operation at the radar station had been a complete success and that Frost had started to move off the plateau but that the beach had still not been captured. This news no doubt spurred Charteris on. It had been his task, after all, to take the beach.

  Charteris and the few men he could muster moved off, again running, in the direction of the road to the beach. They came under sporadic fire but in the darkness they were able to k
eep moving forward. There were now men spread across the cliffs and hillsides and the valleys surrounding Bruneval firing at each other. Some groups were in positions they were familiar with and could just about see their enemy. Others were lost or waiting to move, unsure who was where and what they should do next. The German commanders, miles away in their headquarters, were still trying to make sense of the many reports of firing they were receiving, still struggling to assess the strength of the force they were up against and what its objective was. Meanwhile, Frost was stuck on the shoulder of the cliff, unable to move off without coming under fire from a machine-gun position on the valley opposite, and unable to communicate with most of the men in his company. The fog of war had truly descended on Bruneval.

  Frost had another problem to worry about. Somewhere out to sea, hopefully not far away, were the landing craft of the Royal Navy, waiting for the order that the beach was secure and that they should come in to take the men away. But the signallers around Frost could not make contact. The new model 38 radios did not appear to function correctly. Frost himself repeatedly flashed from the cliff top a blue signal from a bright torch. But he received no response. This was beginning to cause some alarm.

  In fact, the tiny flotilla of landing craft was on station about a mile and a half away. The men in the vessels could see flashes and tracer rounds on the coast where the cliffs came down into the valley. They were also aware of the occasional flare going up ashore. But they too could make no contact with Major Frost or the Paras. They had no idea whether the raid was a success or if the British troops were being massacred on the cliffs. It was now approaching 0200, nearly two hours since the first Paras had jumped.

  It was at this point that Charteris and the men who had kept up with him finally approached the villa Stella Maris where the German defenders were keeping the rest of the Para force at bay. The men with Charteris were exhausted. They had been moving quickly through woods and valleys for about ninety minutes, knowing that the enemy were in the trees and buildings around them. Some of them had been carrying heavy equipment and ammunition supplies. Charteris let his men rest up for a moment. He took one man’s rifle and gave him his revolver instead.

  But he and some of his group had now reached their objective, the Stella Maris, the base for the German beach defence. He wrote afterwards, ‘I had thought for a month how best to attack this house. I had examined all the photographs and worked out all possible plans but when I came to do so the reality was quite different from the expectation.’5

  The men from the various sections were all mixed up but Charteris got together a group of men and they crawled down the slope of the cliff towards the Stella Maris. When they were within range they threw two volleys of grenades at the villa, while Sergeant Tasker and his squad kept up a constant covering fire towards the German positions. As the grenades were going off Charteris and a few men made a dash for it into the road that ran up to the villa. This was their most vulnerable moment. If the German defenders had rallied quickly and lobbed a couple of grenades down into the road they would be dead men. But the Germans too were tiring. It had been a long and confusing fire fight for them. The defenders kept their heads down while the British grenades exploded.

  Screaming and shouting, Charteris and his men charged towards the villa itself. Some of the men with him were Seaforth Highlanders, an old regiment with a proud military tradition. As they charged, Sergeant David Grieve, who was right behind Charteris, screamed the regimental war cry, ‘Caber Feidh’.6 As the others joined in, the cry echoed across the valley warming the hearts of every Scotsman nearby. It almost certainly had the opposite effect on the enemy in their defensive positions.

  Charteris was first to reach the villa and threw some more grenades into the building. He charged around the corner to a terrace overlooking the sea. There was no one there. He could not find the front door, so he went around to the back of the building where he saw an open door and charged in. The room was dark but beyond it was a door leading to a lit passage. He yelled out loudly ‘Hände hoch’, ‘Komm hier’, and various other German phrases he had learnt for the occasion. He threw another grenade and, with Sergeant Grieve behind him, again went forward.

  Inside the villa, Corporal Schmidt the telephone orderly was still dutifully taking and sending messages. At the moment that Charteris approached, Schmidt happened to be on the phone once again to Major Paschke at his headquarters in Bordeaux-St-Clair. Grenades were going off in the building around him and the major was getting more and more angry, asking time and again what all the noise was. Finally there was a few seconds’ pause and the orderly managed to get it out that the noise was from British grenades. With some disbelief that British soldiers were so near, Paschke told the man he must withdraw and abruptly put the phone down.

  At that moment Charteris and Sergeant Grieve charged into the telephone room firing their Sten guns. As they came in they were clearly lit up and silhouetted by the passageway. The orderly could see them but for a moment they could not see him. Schmidt had the opportunity to open fire and would almost certainly have killed both men. But he could not bring himself to fire into a man’s body at just a few yards’ range. Obeying Charteris’s randomly shouted instructions, he threw his hands into the air, came forward out of the shadows and surrendered.

  Adrenalin pumping hard, Charteris in turn could easily have fired a couple of rounds into the German standing in front of him. Instead he grabbed the corporal’s weapons and screamed loudly at him, ‘Where are the rest of you?’ When he repeated this in a form of German, Schmidt pointed to another door and said, ‘Zwei.’

  Leaving the German prisoner with the sergeant, Charteris charged through the door screaming loudly. But he could not find the two other Germans and soon worked his way up to the roof. From there he spotted the entrance to the trenches that formed the principal German defensive positions. He threw another grenade, but it failed to go off. By now the German machine gun not far away had stopped firing. Charteris paused to draw breath. He was now by himself on the perimeter of the German defences.

  Within seconds Captain Ross appeared from the road below. He and his men had pressed forward into the German defensive positions. Private Tom Hill took part in this assault and rolled a grenade into one end of the defensive dugouts. As a German soldier appeared hurriedly from the other end, Hill fired at him and he ran away.7 All the other defenders now disappeared and Beach Fort was finally in British hands.

  Charteris’s action in storming the Stella Maris had been the turning point of the night’s action. The Germans had at last ceased firing and appeared to have fled up into the woods above the road. More and more Paras now arrived on the scene. When Lieutenant Young, who with his section had been sent down from the cliff by Frost, also appeared at the villa, Ross dispatched him to check out the beach defences to see if there was any further resistance to overcome. But all the Germans appeared to have left. However, as he moved cautiously into one of the pillboxes, Young found a German who had been slightly wounded and had crawled into the pillbox for cover. The young soldier was only too keen to give himself up to the British Para officer, and Young had no alternative but to accept the man’s surrender. His name was Fusilier Tewes.

  One of those wounded in the skirmish at Beach Fort was Corporal Stewart, the company gambler. He had been hit in the head. After the fighting was over, lying on the ground with blood oozing from under his helmet, he turned to the man nearest to him, Lance-Corporal Freeman, and said mournfully, ‘I’ve had it. Here’s my wallet.’ And he handed it over, packed with weeks’ worth of takings at cards.

  Freeman took the wallet enthusiastically, before turning to examine Stewart. In the bright moonlight he could see him clearly and realised that he had been only grazed. ‘You’ve only got a scalp wound,’ he said. Stewart cheered up immediately and retorted, ‘Gie us my bluidy wallet back, then!’8

  It was now 0225 and the beach was at last under British control. But the south-westerly wind in th
e Channel was getting stronger. And as the wind got up, so the sea haze worsened, with visibility decreasing minute by minute. Time was running out for the navy to get the men off the beach.

  18

  The Ruddy Navy

  Flight Sergeant Charles Cox lay on the ground at the top of the cliff by the pillbox, next to the valuable pieces of radar equipment on the trolleys. He listened to the battle raging below, even hearing what he described as ‘Scottish war cries’. But he could do nothing but wait. He thought he was lying there for about thirty minutes. Meanwhile, behind Cox and the others, German troops around the Rectangle were still firing in their direction. Cox wrote later that he ‘did not feel unduly worried’.1 If this was true, he was probably the only man who was not worried at this point.