Night Raid

by Taylor Downing

  In addition to the popularity of the radio news at home, the BBC had built up an immense reputation throughout Europe and overseas for providing people with an accurate account of what was happening in the war. BBC News became known as ‘the voice of freedom’. And in contrast to the constant barrage of overt propaganda sent out from Berlin or Rome, the BBC was indeed the voice of objectivity and accuracy. By 1942, the BBC was broadcasting out of Bush House in Aldwych in twenty-six different languages.10 In most of occupied Europe it was illegal to listen to BBC broadcasts from London and the punishments for being caught were severe. At some stages of the war the occupying German military authorities threatened men and women with execution if caught doing so. But people continued to listen in large numbers, regarding the broadcasts as their only link with what was really happening in the outside world.

  The BBC also provided a beacon of hope and a reminder that not all of Europe lived under the Nazi yoke. Many operatives in the French underground first heard of the success of the Bruneval raid on radio bulletins over the weekend. Men like Chaveau and Dumont were delighted to hear they had contributed to such a successful and daring venture. Gilbert Renault, Rémy, had been brought out of occupied France by an RAF Lysander which had picked him and a colleague up from a field in the countryside north of Rouen on the very night of the raid. He was now planning the next stage of the underground war with intelligence chiefs in London. Rémy read the news of the raid in the headlines of a London newspaper. ‘Such words make wonderful reading to an intelligence agent,’ he wrote later.11

  Like the BBC, the press were subject to censorship from a Chief Press Censor working within the Ministry of Information who had final control over what could be printed.12 But again the press needed no encouragement in picking up the official communiqué issued by the military authorities on 28 February. The Sunday papers on 1 March were full of news of the raid, and most of the front pages were given over to it. The papers described Major Frost and his men as heroes, and Britain needed its heroes at this point of the war.

  The Sunday Times’ headline was ‘Full Story of a Paratroop Raid’ and the paper spoke of the ‘brilliant success of Friday night’s combined raid by British paratroops, infantry and naval forces on an important German radiolocation post on the French coast’. The report continued, ‘Overcoming strong enemy opposition, the paratroops destroyed the apparatus, inflicting heavy casualties and capturing prisoners, some of whom they brought back with them.’ It then told how ‘Having completed their task, they overcame the beach defences from the rear and, under cover of fire from light naval forces, embarked safely. Not a single plane or ship was lost and our casualties were “very light”.’13

  The other Sunday papers, too, splashed the story over their front pages. The Observer lauded the role of the paratroopers, all of whom the paper noted were ‘volunteers who after being accepted by the Selection Board, are given an intensive course of athletic training’. The paper went on, ‘The men were selected for their exceptional physique and also for their courage and determination.’14

  By Monday 2 March, the full report by Alan Humphreys for Reuters had been syndicated to the press, providing a lot more colour that gave the story new momentum. Again, the front pages were full of the Bruneval raid. The Guardian quoted Captain John Ross, who said that although the Germans fought well, ‘when it came to fighting at close quarters they gave in’. Major Frost was quoted as congratulating the RAF, who ‘put us down ten yards from where we wanted to be… within two minutes of leaving the plane the troops were armed, organised and ready to fight’. He went on to say that the ‘real hero’ was the youngest officer ‘commanding a section which was dropped away from the bulk of the troops’ and had to find his way back into the action to ‘lead the battle for the beach’.

  Lieutenant Peter Young was quoted as saying that when the German sentry at the radiolocation post opened fire on them, the Paras ‘rubbed him out’. After that they hunted down the other defenders ‘with hand grenades, automatic weapons, revolvers and knives. Most were killed but some ran away.’15 Accompanying these vivid stories were photographs taken by the official War Office photographer of the men in training and returning to Portsmouth on the MGBs.

  One of the stories fed to the press in the days following the raid was that Stanley Morgan and Cyril Tooze, two of the infantrymen who came in, guns blazing, on the ALCs, were professional footballers. They had been groundsmen at Arsenal before the war and were now playing for Brighton and Hove Albion. When they came on to the pitch before the match against Millwall on the Saturday a week after the raid, the press made much of the fact that these Bruneval heroes were now playing a different kind of sport. According to the Daily Sketch, the Brighton team were enhanced by two of the ‘intrepid band who smashed the Nazi radio location post at Bruneval’. The reporter quoted a Brighton official as saying, ‘The other lads will get the shock of their lives when they know. We never see the pair until shortly before kick-off and never know what they do between matches.’16 It was an early example of feeding the press with stories to keep an incident in the mind of newspaper readers.

  Suddenly, everyone knew about the paratroopers. The news of the daring night raid did immense good for the reputation of this elite new arm of the fighting services. Sergeant Macleod Forsyth from Rodney section remembered a paratrooper friend from another unit telling him after the raid that every time he went into a pub, people wanted to buy him a drink as soon as they saw the airborne wings on his shoulder. ‘But I wasn’t on that raid,’ Forsyth’s friend would protest. But everyone said, ‘Never mind mate, you’re a paratrooper and that’s all that matters.’17 When Private Tom Hill arrived home on leave after Bruneval everyone in the village knew all about the raid and a reporter from the local paper came out and wrote an article about their local hero.18

  Forsyth remembered the raid as a great morale booster, because ‘we were losing everywhere and now the papers said “we can do it”’. At that time, he recalled, everyone in Britain thought the Germans were so clever: ‘they can do this and that but they weren’t so clever and we caught them with their trousers down around their ankles’.19

  The guiding force behind the sophisticated orchestration of news about the Bruneval raid was none other than Lord Louis Mountbatten. Taking a very modern view of how an army or a navy should fight, Mountbatten was keen to embrace the media, and to seize every opportunity to promote the work of the armed services. During the early months of 1942, he devoted a lot of his own personal time to the media portrayal of his then most famous exploit. In the summer of 1941 Mountbatten had told his friend Noel Coward the story of the sinking off Crete of HMS Kelly, of which Mountbatten was captain. Captivated by Mountbatten’s account of the event and of the speech he had made to the survivors, the playwright and theatrical star decided to write and produce a film about the subject in which he would himself play the role of the captain. The Admiralty were at first opposed to the project, as they did not like the idea of a popular film that centred on the sinking of one of their warships. However, Mountbatten personally introduced Coward to Sir Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord, and to Brendan Bracken, the Minister of Information. Under pressure from this joint charm offensive, the authorities came around. Two Cities, one of the big British film production companies of the 1940s, decided to make the movie.

  Mountbatten remained closely involved in the production of the film, going through draft scripts and discussing the plot with Coward. He was even consulted in the casting of some of the minor parts. Despite his hectic schedule he found time to make frequent visits to Denham Studios, where the production was based, and arranged for the King and Queen to make an extremely rare visit to the studios.20

  Released in late 1942 and entitled In Which We Serve, the film was an immense hit with the cinema-going public and rapidly became one of British cinema’s great wartime classics.21 For nearly a year, it was the highest grossing film at the British cinema box office and Noel Coward won an
honorary Oscar for it. Although in the movie the ship was renamed HMS Torrin and was only loosely based on the Kelly, most people realised where the story came from. And the film did Mountbatten’s career no harm.

  Mountbatten was equally keen to promote the work of his Combined Operations unit, and was happy to employ the press and the media to do so. Not only had he been in favour of placing Alan Humphreys on the Prinz Albert when more conservative commanders had doubted the wisdom of having a civilian on board, but he had also encouraged the photographing and filming of the many exercises and rehearsals that had taken place during the weeks leading up to the raid. These photographs now provided a perfect accompaniment to the yards of newsprint that were produced about the raid. In addition, Mountbatten authorised a film cameraman to record the training and the return of the paratroopers to Portsmouth harbour.

  Eddie Edmonds was an experienced cameraman who had worked for Gaumont British News, one of the five main newsreel companies, since before the First World War. In addition to his wartime experience in filming the London Blitz, in 1941 he had filmed the commando raid on the Lofoten Islands. Like Reuters correspondent Alan Humphreys, he was known and trusted by the military and so in February 1942 they invited him, on terms of the strictest secrecy, to film with C Company and the naval teams training for Bruneval. He was ‘embedded’ with the navy for more than two weeks, making a film record of the preparatory exercises and of the return of the Paras from Bruneval.22

  The cinema newsreel was a form of news that before the war had usually combined bouncy silliness and trivia with brief headlines of one or two major news stories. The newsreels came out twice a week and were shown in cinemas across the country as part of the programme that preceded the main film. Since it always took a few days for the news footage of an event to be dispatched to a film laboratory and developed, processed, then cut into a short story and distributed to the cinemas, the newsreels never contained the latest news in a way we are familiar with today, in the era of digital twenty-four-hour news. But during wartime, when up to 22 million people visited one of the 4500 cinemas in Britain every week, the newsreels provided a rare opportunity for audiences to see moving film of the events that were shaping their lives.

  In reality, the newsreels were more a part of the entertainment industry than they were of the news business. They were tabloid in tone and as much about celebrity as about politics or the war, once being described by the American comedian, Oscar Levant, as ‘a series of catastrophes ending in a fashion show’.23 But during the war, the Ministry of Information strictly controlled the content of the newsreels, like that of the press and the BBC. After months of bad news, the Ministry was keen to get the good news of Bruneval across to a mass cinema audience.

  Edmonds with his film camera had been invited up to Inveraray to film the paratroopers as they practised boarding landing craft from HMS Prinz Albert on the banks of Loch Fyne. It was no accident that he had been present on 12 February when Mountbatten arrived to meet and talk to the paratroopers and the sailors. Mountbatten was always very happy to be filmed for the newsreels.

  Edmonds had filmed him inspecting the troops on the foredeck of the Prinz Albert, although he had not filmed the speech in which the admiral had let the cat out of the bag that the men were likely to be training for a military mission rather than for a demonstration to politicians. Newsreel cameramen rarely filmed speeches. They were too long, as anything more than a brief soundbite would slow up the fast-paced newsreel, and they used up too much precious film stock. In any case, a newsreel cameraman like Edmonds rarely travelled with cumbersome sound recording equipment that would have needed an additional team to operate. All his footage was mute, without sound.

  Over the next two weeks, Edmonds filmed the various exercises on the Dorset coast. He filmed the infantrymen cleaning and loading their Bren guns before going in with the landing craft. And, most importantly, he filmed the jubilant scenes on Saturday 28 February, when the Paras arrived back at Portsmouth on the MGBs and re-boarded the Prinz Albert.

  Edmonds’ film was pooled for syndication to the five major newsreel companies: British Paramount News, Pathé News, Movietone News, Universal News and his own company, Gaumont British News. All five companies edited the footage into a major up-beat story, three placing it as the lead story in their issues on Thursday 5 March.24 Gaumont British News devoted nearly half of its ten-minute newsreel to the story of the Bruneval raid,25 a sign of how important the event was thought to be. By then, everyone in the cinema audience would have heard about the raid and would probably have seen some of the photos in the press. These, though, would be the first moving pictures they had seen.

  The newsreel began, as always, with a split-screen title sequence, a musical fanfare and a newsreader announcing, ‘This is the Gaumont British News presenting the truth to the free peoples of the world.’ Then came a title that read ‘Britain’s Paratroops Raid France’. In the rather hyped-up style common to the newsreels, the commentator read the following words to Edmonds’ edited film of the Paras and the navy in training:

  Perfect training and rehearsal down to the last detail were the secrets of the great success of the British paratroop raid near Le Havre which destroyed the radiolocation station at Bruneval. The actual raid of course took place at night making photography impossible, so the record brought back by the Gaumont British cameraman who went with the invading troops across the Channel is limited to events before and after the actual assault.

  Mountbatten and the War Office were keen to emphasise that Britain’s force of paratroopers was a new elite. So the commentary went on, with magnificent hyperbole, over shots of the Paras training:

  This is the type of man who volunteered for the most hazardous work of the war, parachute troops – more physically perfect than any other body of men on earth. Quick, resourceful and courageous and super efficient in the use of arms, the perfect partner in a rough house.

  Over shots of Captain Peate of the Prinz Albert, Commander Cook and Major Bromley-Martin on deck rather self-consciously looking at maps, the commentary continued: ‘Now last-minute details are discussed by the officers in charge of operations.’ No newsreel can avoid a bit of light relief, and Edmonds had filmed the mascot of the Prinz Albert, a dog, running about on deck with a lifebelt dangling around its neck: ‘On this trip even the ship’s mascot dog wears a lifebelt.’

  After explaining the success of the mission and using the film that Edmonds had shot of the Paras returning to the Prinz Albert at Portsmouth, the newsreel built up to its climax, delighted to explain that these men had just raided occupied France: ‘This is the real thing. These men who are coming aboard have just returned from enemy territory. They have surprised the German garrison and overcome it.’ There is much cheering on the soundtrack at this point. But over shots of Sergeant-Major Strachan being brought aboard the Prinz Albert on a Robertson stretcher, the commentary continues: ‘Casualties were light but not all came through unhurt.’

  With the shots of Wing Commander Pickard talking to the Paras, the newsreel got the RAF into the show as well: ‘On board the parent ship the wing commander who led the troop carrying aircraft had a chat with the troops. He had returned to his aerodrome and came back with the navy to see the finish.’

  The newsreel finally reached its climax, providing its own bullish take on what the success of the raid meant: ‘It does your heart good to hear that somewhere we’re hitting out, not just being hit. None of us ever believed that we are in danger of losing the war but we are in deadly danger of doing too little to win it.’ This was the nearest Gaumont British News dared go towards criticising the country’s political and military leadership.

  Despite the bombast, and the silliness of showing the ship’s mascot dog (which no doubt provoked a loud ‘Aaaah’ from the pet-loving audience), the newsreel encapsulated several key messages about the raid. It talked about the training, efficiency and daring, about the strength and capability of the new force of parat
roopers, and about the success of hitting the enemy with a surprise blow. It celebrated the co-operation of the Royal Navy and RAF in the raid and the combined ability of the military to hit back at the enemy. If Mountbatten ever saw the newsreel he would have been delighted at how strongly these messages came across. But he would also no doubt have been greatly disappointed that the film of him on the Prinz Albert in Loch Fyne had ended up on the cutting-room floor. Sadly, he did not play the starring role in this newsreel version of the raid.

  Promoting the success of the raid at home was one thing. But showing off Britain’s ability to strike and surprise the enemy was also an important objective of overseas news, especially for Britain’s allies in the US and the Soviet Union. Again, the news story of the Bruneval raid was fed to the foreign press, and in the United States it was picked up with particular enthusiasm. The USA was developing its own parachute forces in what would become two separate elite airborne divisions, but neither had yet been deployed in combat. American and Canadian readers relished the news from Bruneval and after the news coverage had been absorbed, photo magazines devoted whole features to the story of the development of Para forces. Two weeks after the raid, on 14 March, the Toronto Star Weekly devoted several pages to photos and descriptions of how the British paratroopers had won a splendid victory at Bruneval. Edmonds’ footage was again used in April 1942 in the War Pictorial News, an official newsreel produced by the Cairo branch of the Ministry of Information for circulation throughout the Middle East.26 In addition to screenings to Allied troops in the Middle East, the newsreel was translated into Arabic and French and shown as widely as possible to local audiences.