Night Raid

by Taylor Downing

  While Cox was waiting a new alarm was raised. The soldiers from Le Presbytère had moved forward and reoccupied the Villa Gosset, which was only about three hundred yards behind the men at the pillbox. Frost decided there was no alternative but to take a squad back and evict them. He only had a few Paras left with him and rounded up all the weapons he could find. Lieutenant Vernon joined the group, changing roles from an engineer to being a soldier.

  Frost led the men back across the plateau and charged towards the Villa Gosset, all guns blazing. Astonished, the German soldiers withdrew quickly and retreated to the Rectangle. Probably these were Luftwaffe soldiers without the combat experience of the Wehrmacht troops. In any case, few defenders hold firm when a group of determined paratroopers charge at them in a frenzy. With the German soldiers pulling back, Frost had at least averted this threat to his rear.

  Frost returned to the small group sheltering around the pillbox. As he did so, silence finally fell down in the valley. There was a lot of shouting from below and Major Frost gave the order that they should now move down the steep slope of the cliff. This was no easy matter when dragging trolleys laden with heavy electronic equipment. Cox, Corporal Jones and the other sappers manhandled the trolleys part way down the slope, but it was very icy and the trolleys slipped and were difficult to control. After a while they gave up and abandoned the trolleys and many of the heavy tools they still had with them, carrying the vital apparatus on their shoulders for the rest of the descent.

  Frost’s party also included the prisoner, Heller, from the Würzburg and the badly wounded Sergeant-Major Strachan. Somehow, Strachan managed to part walk, part slide down the slope with the aid of the other men. Frost deduced that the rapid use of morphine had a beneficial effect. But Strachan was slowly becoming delirious: when he reached the bottom of the cliff he started giving out orders rapidly but with little coherence. The others could barely understand what he was saying and took no notice. But he was a difficult man to ignore and kept demanding their attention.

  Lieutenant Timothy now joined the party coming down the cliff and he gave Strachan a cricket sweater he had brought with him in the aircraft, to help keep the wounded man warm.2 No doubt it was good for Strachan to keep talking; it kept his mind active and prevented him from falling into unconsciousness, even if to the others he was talking nonsense. But his condition was clearly deteriorating.

  As they reached the bottom of the slope they had to pass through a patch of trees and bushes, and when they emerged they were surprised to be challenged by a sentry. But it was a British voice that called out, ‘Halt, who goes there?’ They responded with the password ‘Biting’ and were allowed to carry on to the road, which was now open to the beach.

  Cox was surprised by the strange scene he now found in front of him. Everywhere there were signs of the aftermath of a major fire fight. There were two German soldiers with their hands up standing against a wall, guarded by a semi-circle of Paras. Charteris was going from dugout to dugout calling on any surviving Germans to come out with their hands up. A sapper with a mine detector moved about on the beach, making sure that the intelligence brought back by the French underground agents was correct and that the Achtung Minen signs really were for show only. More and more Paras were drifting on to the beach from the various sections that had been involved in the fire fight at the villa. After a short while the sapper with the mine detector called Cox and the others over to tell them the beach was clear. They went forward with their booty and sat down with it under the cliff.

  With all the drama of the last hour now over, Cox had time to reflect for almost the first time that night. Although the beach was a hive of activity, there was obviously something wrong. There was no sign of the Royal Navy. Where were the landing craft? He grew concerned and started to question what would happen if they did not turn up, wondering ‘if we should be killed or taken prisoners’.3

  Lieutenant Euan Charteris had no time to enjoy his moment of glory. Growing more agitated, he assigned a Bren gunner to take up position where the German machine gun had been, with its commanding view across the valley and the exit to the beach, telling the gunner to keep careful watch on the woods on the slope behind him in case the Germans who had fled in that direction tried to return.

  Charteris positioned other men in the German slit trenches to guard the approach to the beach. He was annoyed with the group standing around the prisoners. They looked far too casual, he thought, as though the show was over, they were still on an exercise and an army transport would be turning up any minute to take them back to camp. He ordered some of them to deploy into defensive positions, leaving only one man to search and guard the prisoners. Corporal Campbell turned up and said he had been sent by Sergeant Lumb, who was part of the Rodney party. Apparently, Lumb had been in the aircraft where the man had been caught in the static lines. Lumb had jumped before the incident occurred and he and his group of paratroopers had landed south of Bruneval, along with some of the radio equipment and two of the signallers. Making its second run after the man had been freed, the aircraft had dropped the remaining Paras at the correct DZ, but without the radios. Now Lumb had made it with the radios but was still somewhere in the woods behind Bruneval under heavy fire from the enemy based at the hotel.

  Cursing, Charteris told Campbell to go and get Lumb and the radio operators down to the beach and to report to Captain Ross as soon as possible. Charteris also spent a moment looking out to sea, hoping desperately to see the landing craft appear. He realised that the situation was getting serious. They were about an hour behind schedule.

  Having reached the foot of the cliff and quickly surveyed the scene to see that Charteris and Young were doing a good job in positioning the men, Frost met up with his second-in-command, Captain Ross, whom he had not seen since emplaning at Thruxton airfield. They had one overriding concern now, to contact the navy and bring in the landing craft. Ross had a radio operator in his party and Frost ordered him to start sending out the agreed signal immediately.

  After a few minutes he reported back that he was getting no return signal. Frost himself started signalling, using his torch with the blue light. Still he got no response. The sappers with the Eureka system started sending the signal from the beacon out to sea. But again there was no response. By now it was 0230 and the Germans had had more than two hours to mobilise a force to counter-attack the beach.

  A mile and a half out to sea and a little north of Bruneval, Commander Frederick Cook was equally puzzled. After the drama of the passing German warships, everything had gone quiet for the small flotilla. When no signal had been received from the beach, at 0145 flotilla commander William Everitt had used his radio to try to make contact with the paratroopers. But he had received no response. He assumed that either the battle for the beach was still raging or that something had gone wrong with the radio communications. In his landing craft, Preist grew more and more worried. The lookouts strained to pick up the agreed signal from the Para commanding officer’s blue torch or any other sign that the beach had been secured. The sea haze had by now reduced visibility to less than half a mile, and they were further than that from the beach.

  There was nothing Cook could do but wait. He could not risk sending the craft into the beach if it was not secure. But how much longer should he wait before withdrawing? The boats must be well away from the French coast by daylight.

  Back on the beach, Major Frost was beginning to despair. He reviewed the situation. The mission had achieved its objectives. The Paras had seized and dismantled the Würzburg radar and the key components were now on the beach waiting to be taken off. They had given the Germans a ‘good hammering’ and so far the enemy had not responded with overwhelming counter-measures. They had suffered a few casualties but had fared better than Frost had expected. The men of Rodney who had been providing the defensive perimeter had now mostly come in, although a few men were still defending the rear of the Para force. But there was no sign of the navy. It looked as thou
gh they were going to be left high and dry to fight it out until their ammunition ran out. Then they would have to surrender and spend the rest of the war in captivity. Frost found the thought of this ‘hard to bear’.

  Frost instructed Nagel to interrogate the three prisoners and find out where enemy reinforcements were likely to come from. But they were too frightened to provide any useful information. As a last measure, someone suggested that green flares should be fired from both ends of the beach. Frost agreed and the flares were fired. But still there was no response.

  Frost reluctantly gathered his officers around him, and decided with a sinking heart they must start to prepare a perimeter defence. Some men would have to go back up the cliff to fend off any counter-attack from Le Presbytère. Others would have to return to the village and take up positions to fight off an assault down the main road. They had found a small fishing boat and Frost ordered that the radar equipment should be loaded into it, along with the wounded, and that it should be sent off to sea. It would carry eight men with difficulty and might just make it across the Channel back to England. Frost stated in his report that he was feeling thoroughly ‘fed up’.4 If he was willing to admit this much to his superiors, he must in reality have been feeling a hell of a lot worse.

  The officers had just finished their meeting and were about to order the men into defensive positions when a shout echoed across the beach. Someone called to Frost, ‘Sir, the boats are coming in! The boats are here! God bless the ruddy navy, Sir!’ Frost looked up and saw a set of black shapes approaching, gliding across the sea towards the beach. The commander of the flotilla had ordered the landing craft to move into a position about three hundred yards off the beach, where they were to turn off their engines and wait. Fortunately, at this distance, one of the lookouts had seen the green flares through the haze and Everitt had ordered the landing craft to go in. A sense of ‘relief unbounded’ spread rapidly amongst the Paras as the men called out to each other, ‘The boats are here!’ ‘The Navy’s here!’5

  The plan had been for the landing craft to come in two at a time and for an orderly evacuation to take place in three waves, with the embarkation of the radar equipment and the wounded the first priority. Then officers were to oversee each member of their section as he embarked in the remaining landing craft. But just as the lookout saw the flares through the mist, the radio operator on one of the landing craft picked up the signal requesting all the boats to come into the beach as soon as possible. So all six landing craft came in at the same time, preparing to beach and drop their ramps. The consequence was a free-for-all.

  The chaos of the next few minutes was increased when a German machine-gunner up in the cliffs spotted the landing craft approaching and opened fire on them. The sailors in the tiny vessels saw tracer coming down towards them but fortunately none of the fire was accurate. The Bren gunners on the landing craft opened fire up into the cliffs with a furious burst when the boats were about fifty yards off the coast. Frost desperately tried to tell them to cease fire, as there were still Paras up on the cliff slopes. But the noise made by the gunners as the sound of up to twenty Bren guns echoed around the small bay made it difficult for Frost to make himself heard.

  Everyone knew they were running out of time. Naval officers yelled orders from megaphones. The Para officers were also trying to be heard above the din. Between them, with a great deal of shouting and calling, they managed to get the wounded, the prisoners and all the pieces of radar equipment on to a landing craft. Cox and the sappers had to wade out into the sea with the water up to their thighs carrying the equipment above their heads. They got to the landing craft, climbed in and were told to go forward and sit down.

  The craft was just about to pull away when the German machine-gunner opened up from the top of the cliff again. Most likely soldiers from Le Presbytère had now ventured forward towards the pillbox on the shoulder of the cliff. At once the Bren guns in the landing craft returned fire at the site of the machine gun. The sound of gunfire was deafening, but there was no further fire from the German machine-gunner.

  The first landing craft was now ready to pull off the beach, but had got stuck on the shingle. With everything running late, the tide had turned and was going out. This was what the naval commanders had most dreaded. For a moment it looked as if the fiasco of the rehearsals on the Dorset coast would be repeated. But there were too many men on this first landing craft, so some of them were told to get out and on to the next vessel. A naval lieutenant, D.J. Quick, jumped into the sea and managed to attach a line from the landing craft to another one that was not stuck, while a group of soldiers jumped overboard and, after much heaving and pushing, managed to free the landing craft. They clambered back in and the craft headed out to sea. Seeing that the wounded and the radar cargo were away, Frost gave the order for a general withdrawal.

  The same sequence was repeated on the other five landing craft. Men piled aboard. Naval officers shouted instructions. On one boat there were nearly sixty men at one point and several were told to get back on the beach and find another boat. In the plan, Hardy and Jellicoe were supposed to be the first sections to embark. But in the chaos on the beach men from every section threw themselves on to any boat they could reach. To add to the mêlée, German soldiers now appeared from hiding places on the cliff slopes and the woods and threw hand grenades down to the beach. But any German soldier who made the mistake of firing a weapon was met by a hail of gunfire from the Bren gunners on the landing craft.

  The officers tried vainly to control what was going on. But the desperation to get away among both the Paras and the sailors, combined with the ear-splitting noise and the gunfire and grenades coming out of the darkness on to the beach, prevented anyone from taking control. Frost admitted that the ‘checking out system’ for the Paras ‘had gone west’. He put this down more than anything to ‘the noise made by the barrage’ put up by the Bren gunners.6 Charteris had to wade out into the sea to get into a boat. He tried to count his men, but so many of them had made for other boats that he was unable to tell who was where. Sergeant Forsyth from Rodney section was another who had to physically push his landing craft off the shingle amid shouting and yelling from the sailors and while bullets from the top of the cliff ricocheted off the boat around him.7

  On Sergeant Gould’s boat another disaster now occurred. After the landing craft filled up with paratroopers, the sailors hastily hauled it off the shingle but as it headed out to sea the front ramps opened and water began to pour in. The boat took in between two and three feet of water before the sailors managed to close the ramps. Gould told the Paras on board to start baling out using their helmets. Frantic action prevented the boat from going down but then, to make matters worse, the engine broke down. Another landing craft came by and threw a line across, towing the stricken craft out to sea while the Paras were still madly throwing water over the side with their helmets. Sergeant Gould was relieved to be out of danger, but all the guns had been on the floor of the boat and were now flooded. They would be defenceless if they were attacked by German aircraft.8

  Frost was the last to embark on the final boat. He had to wade about five yards out until he was nearly fully immersed to climb on board. He told the boat crew to wait while he shouted to ensure that no one was still left on the beach. There was no reply so the boat reversed, hauling on its anchor chain until it freed itself from the shingle and moved off into the darkness. Frost was sure that no one had been left behind. It was 0315. The raid had lasted almost exactly three hours.

  Donald Preist was waiting on the landing craft in which the radar equipment had been loaded. He took a first look at the bits and pieces as soon as he could. According to plan, the landing craft headed out to sea and after a short while, out of sight from the shore, made a rendezvous with the MGBs, to which the Paras and the captured equipment were then to be transferred. But with the wind now up and quite a swell, it was not easy to transfer the radar gear. Preist boarded MGB 312 and reached down to t
ake the pieces of the radar one by one. But as the MGB rose in the choppy water, the landing craft descended.

  Fearing that he would drop the cargo into the sea, Preist began to panic. ‘I visualised with horror the consequences. After all the hard work, the preparations and the battle itself, we looked like dropping the stuff in the drink.’9 But after a few anxious minutes everything was loaded successfully, and Cox and the sappers clambered aboard. MGB 312 turned on its powerful engines, lined up in the direction of Portsmouth and sped off at twenty knots.

  Preist wanted to hear from Cox what he had seen and done at the Würzburg while it was all still fresh in his mind. But Cox began to go pale and started to feel dreadful. Perhaps it was a reaction to the fact that the danger was now largely over, and everything started to catch up with him. He turned to Preist and said, ‘Please sir, I’m feeling seasick. I want to be sick.’ Preist had visions of Cox being incapacitated for hours, exhausted, in a daze and unable to remember anything about the night’s events. He was merciless. ‘Sorry, old man,’ he said. ‘Come down below and tell me the story. Then you can be sick.’ He led Cox down to the cabin below decks. Cox gave a short but detailed and very clear report, telling him how impressively he thought the German radar had been engineered. Preist told him he agreed, but that for now he had better keep this ‘under his hat’. Having given Preist the information he needed, Cox went back up on deck and was violently and repeatedly sick. Eventually the captain of the MGB insisted Cox go below and use his own cabin. There, utterly exhausted, he quickly fell asleep.