Night Raid

by Taylor Downing

  The RAF awarded a second DSO to Wing Commander Pickard for ‘demonstrating his outstanding powers of leadership and organisation’. Although commander of the squadron of Whitleys, he had of course dropped the stick of Paras from his own plane in the wrong place and was, apparently, a little embarrassed to receive this distinction. But the RAF also gave the Military Medal to Flight Sergeant Charles Cox, who had ‘volunteered’ for the mission and who bravely succeeded in leading the dismantling of the Würzburg while under fire. Regimental Sergeant-Major Gerry Strachan, who was in hospital in intensive care, was awarded the French decoration, the Croix de Guerre. Intelligence scientist R.V. Jones was made a Companion of the British Empire for having suggested the raid in the first place.

  In military terms, the huge success of the Bruneval raid had two major consequences. First, it put British airborne forces decisively on the map. Many had doubted the wisdom of diverting sparse resources into the Airborne Division. Despite the huge success of German paratrooper forces in May 1940, the failure of the first British Para raid in the south of Italy in early 1941 had shown up the risks of these operations and had tended to encourage the doubters. Bruneval was the first, striking success for British Paras. It would later be the first ‘battle honour’ of the Parachute Regiment.1 The raid had shown the need for top rate intelligence and the virtue of good, careful planning. With two soldiers dead and six captured, a loss rate of 6.5 per cent was deemed acceptable for such a bold operation carried out behind enemy lines. General Browning was at last able to provide clear evidence of the Paras’ value. The future of British airborne forces was now secure and it was never seriously challenged again. And, unknown in London, the Germans, too, had pointed out the courage and the daring of the Paras the first time they had come up against them.

  Second, the raid was a triumph for the planning and the organisation of Combined Operations. Accordingly, one of the first to benefit from the success of the raid was the man who had helped to conceive the raid in the first place, the head of Combined Operations, Lord Louis Mountbatten. On 4 March, two days after the meeting with Frost in the underground war rooms, Churchill summoned Mountbatten to lunch at Downing Street. He approved strongly of Mountbatten’s conduct at Combined Operations and told him so. What’s more, the Prime Minister told Mountbatten that, rather than ‘Adviser’, he was now to be ‘Chief’ of Combined Operations and promoted to the rank of vice-admiral. In line with the principle of ‘combined’ forces, he was also to be appointed a lieutenant-general in the army and an air marshal in the RAF. This was indeed a remarkable promotion and no one other than the King held senior ranks in all three services. Mountbatten was delighted and wrote proudly to a friend that he was now ‘the youngest Vice Admiral since Nelson’.2

  It was a dazzling leap up the ladder, and a real sign of the Prime Minister’s confidence in him. In addition, Mountbatten was to join the Chiefs of Staff Committee, even though he was so much younger than the other chiefs who met daily to direct Britain’s war effort. For the men of Combined Operations this was a huge boost. John Hughes-Hallett later spoke of his ‘exhilaration, almost exultation’ at the elevation of his boss. ‘At one stride our organisation had penetrated the very citadel of Power. We were now to work for a man with access to all the secrets.’3

  Mountbatten enthusiastically wore the uniform of a vice-admiral in public. In a rare display of modesty, he failed to acquire the uniforms of a lieutenant-general and an air marshal, protesting that he did not have enough clothing coupons to purchase such outfits. But this marked a turning point for Mountbatten, the King’s cousin. He would remain in the senior echelons of the military and political establishment. In 1944 he was appointed Supreme Commander of South East Asia Command and after the war he was made Viceroy of India where he oversaw the process of British withdrawal from the Raj and the creation of the independent states of India and Pakistan.4

  Despite all the brouhaha, Bruneval was still only a small-scale raid. One month later a far bigger combined operation took place at St Nazaire. This large port on the western coast of France had the only dry dock on the whole Atlantic coast capable of repairing warships as large as the Tirpitz. The Bismarck had been heading there for repairs when it was sunk the year before. Churchill was terrified of a ship this size breaking out into the Atlantic to disrupt the sea lanes. Enormous resources were at the time being devoted to try to monitor and attack the Tirpitz, which was holed up in the fjords of northern Norway. To discourage it from trying to break out into the Atlantic, a commando raid was mounted supported by the Royal Navy.

  But St Nazaire was a well-defended fortress with batteries of anti-aircraft weapons and naval guns. So the plan was to sail a line of vessels across the sand banks in the estuary of the Loire, taking advantage of an exceptionally high spring tide in order to get right inside the harbour. The ships would include an old First World War destroyer, HMS Campbeltown, packed with delayed-action explosives, which was to ram the gates of the dry dock. Commandos on board would land and head off to destroy a variety of other targets within the port. Other naval vessels, consisting of twenty Motor Torpedo Boats (MTBs) and MGBs, would arrive bringing in further commandos, each squad including demolition parties that once landed would cause further havoc around the port. The damage done, they would then withdraw on the MTBs and MGBs.

  In the early hours of 28 March, the operation began with an RAF bombing raid on the harbour by Whitleys and Wellingtons, planned to distract the enemy at the critical moment. But cloud cover prevented most of the bombers from finding their targets and the local German commander became suspicious that something was up. Initially he suspected another parachute landing. The convoy of British vessels sailed into St Nazaire harbour with the Campbeltown flying the German naval ensign, but the ships were soon picked up by German searchlights and despite Campbeltown’s subterfuge came under intense fire. The vessel sailed on despite being hit and managed to ram the gates of the dry dock. The commandos on board disembarked and began to plant their explosives around the harbour. However, most of the vessels that were to take the commandos away were sunk and several hundred men were left stranded ashore. They fought on outside St Nazaire until they ran out of ammunition, when they had no alternative but to surrender.

  By morning all was quiet in the harbour. A group of German officers and engineers came in to assess the damage. They were on board the Campbeltown when the explosives went off. In all, 360 men were killed in the huge explosion. The dry dock was damaged so badly it was put out of action for the rest of the war. Mission accomplished.

  The success of the raid came at a high price. Of the 622 men from the Royal Navy and the commandos who took part, only 228 returned to England. One hundred and sixty-nine men were killed and 215 became prisoners of war. A total of eighty-nine decorations were awarded to members of the raiding party, including five Victoria Crosses, two of them posthumously. St Nazaire has gone down in the history of the commandos as one of their most heroic actions, as indeed it was. However, with a loss rate of more than 60 per cent, it was of a completely different order to Bruneval. It once again showed that daring and courage could not only inflict severe damage on the enemy, but that these raids had the consequence of drawing many enemy troops into France to reinforce the long coastline that faced Britain.

  Only one man who had been on the Bruneval raid also took part in the St Nazaire mission. That was the German Peter Nagel, who had acted as translator for the Paras at Bruneval and did the same at St Nazaire. He was one of the many men captured at St Nazaire, but his disguise as Private Newman was so complete that the Germans never suspected he was of German origin. He survived captivity, returned to England and lived to a fine old age.

  In October 1942, the Parachute Brigade was sent from Britain to North Africa. John Frost, who had been sent on a speaking tour to tell military audiences about the Bruneval raid, was promoted and became commander of the 2nd Battalion, which came to be known colloquially as 2 Para. Following the Allied landin
gs in Morocco and Algiers in Operation Torch, Allied troops drove eastwards from north-west Africa. Meanwhile, Montgomery was advancing westwards from Egypt after his great victory at El Alamein. The idea was for the two forces to join up in Tunisia and to destroy Axis power in North Africa.

  In Algiers, Frost and his men were told to wait for orders. It was clear that the British high command still did not really know how to use its airborne resources. And there was no one in the Allied headquarters with any experience of working with airborne troops. Eventually a plan was hastily drawn up for the 2nd Battalion to drop behind enemy lines near an airfield, then to march to a second airfield and destroy that, and then to meet up with advancing ground troops just outside Tunis for a triumphant entry into the capital.

  Frost and his men jumped this time from American C-47 Dakota aircraft, which were far superior to the Whitleys. The men could sit in two lines and jump from a side door rather than having to lie across the fuselage and jump through a hole in the floor. Each Dakota took twenty Paras instead of half that number in the obsolete British bombers.

  After several last-minute changes to the plan, Frost and the battalion landed at Depienne, south of Tunis, and set off for the airfield they were to capture at Oudna. When they reached it they were surprised to find it had already been evacuated. As their task had been to destroy aircraft and stores at Oudna, they were left without a mission. But there began a long and confused combat around the airfield and the surrounding rocky countryside. The whole operation had been ill thought through, and was woefully supported by an Allied headquarters that rapidly seemed to forget about the Para battalion stuck behind enemy lines – partly because the drop unfortunately coincided with a major new offensive by the Germans to the north that naturally focused the attention of the Allied commanders.

  Effectively abandoned, almost out of ammunition, with many casualties that had to be left behind, Frost ordered his men to withdraw to what they thought was the Allied front line. Once again their radios failed to work properly, and in any case the batteries ran out after a day or so. A keen huntsman, Frost blew his hunting horn to direct the men. They moved at night when it was freezing cold, and in the daytime were harassed by enemy ground troops and strafed from the air by the Luftwaffe. The battalion marched for sixty miles across difficult countryside for five days and nights, constantly being harried by enemy forces with Panzers and armoured cars. Sheer guts pulled the survivors through. But 260 men were lost in the futile mission, killed, wounded or captured.5 Philip Teichman, who had led C Company briefly before Frost, was among the dead, while several of the men who had taken part in the night raid on Bruneval were either killed or captured. Lieutenant Euan ‘Junior’ Charteris, the hero of Bruneval, led an advance party to try to find a way back to Allied lines and was killed while doing so. He had celebrated his twenty-first birthday but never reached his twenty-second.

  When Frost and just half of the battalion found their way back to Allied lines, he was furious. Everything had been so well planned at Bruneval, but it was the opposite with Oudna. The mission had been put together at the last minute and lacked clear intelligence as to where the enemy were and in what numbers they were deployed. The battalion had been given no support and was left to fend for itself, with ammunition and supplies of every sort running out. Frost later called it ‘perhaps the most disgracefully mounted operation of the war’.6

  The battalion received reinforcements and remained in North Africa for several months of heavy fighting as ground infantry. In one of these actions at Tamera in March 1943, Lieutenant John Timothy captured a German machine-gun nest and two brand new MG 34 guns almost single handed. For this and other actions he was awarded the MC. The battalion took more than three thousand prisoners during the campaign, many of whom saying when they came in how terrified they were when they realised they were up against British Paras. Indeed, the Germans in Tunisia nicknamed the Paras from their crimson berets Die Röte Teufeln, ‘the Red Devils’. It was a name that stuck.

  When the invasion of Sicily took place in July 1943, airborne troops were used to seize key points behind enemy lines in advance of the forces that were landed on the beaches. The objective of the 1st Parachute Brigade was to capture and hold Primosole Bridge, the gateway to Catania. The 2nd Battalion led by Frost was to hold the high ground a mile to the south of the bridge. The drop, like that at Bruneval, was carried out at night. But this time it proved to be a disaster. The transport aircraft passed over the Allied fleet just after a Luftwaffe attack and were fired at by anxious gunners in the Allied naval ships. They were thrown off course by further anti-aircraft fire over the drop zone. More than half dropped their human cargos miles from the DZ, some men being told to jump up to thirty miles away on the slopes of Mount Etna. A dozen pilots could not identify the DZ at all and returned with the Paras still on board.

  For the glider-borne troops the situation was even more tragic. Some gliders were released so far out to sea that they crashed into the water and hundreds of paratroopers drowned. John Ross, the second-in-command at Bruneval, was one of those dropped in the wrong spot and was captured. He spent the rest of his war in a PoW camp.

  Frost found himself moving off with only a hundred men, less than a fifth of his intended strength. The paltry forces captured the bridge from Italian troops during the night, but were not strong enough to hold out against a fierce counter-attack by German parachute forces on the following day and the bridge was recaptured by the enemy. During the next night the ground troops who had landed further south joined up with the surviving Paras, but it took four days of bitter fighting and heavy losses before the bridge was recaptured and the advance on Catania could continue.

  The whole airborne operation in Sicily had been a fiasco, for both the British and American paratroopers. Frost later described it as a ‘humiliating disaster for airborne forces and almost enough to destroy even the most ardent believer’s faith’.7 However, although nothing much had gone to plan, the paratroopers had proved themselves once again to be tough and determined fighters and had shown their ability to cause chaos behind enemy lines, even when dropped miles from their intended DZ. The final verdict was, therefore, to continue with airborne operations. 2 Para was sent back to North Africa to recover and to be brought back up to strength. Frost was meanwhile delighted to welcome back to the battalion Sergeant-Major Strachan, who had apparently recovered from his bad stomach injury at Bruneval.

  After spending some months fighting in Italy, during which Lieutenant John Timothy won a second MC, 2 Para was withdrawn to Britain at the end of 1943. A second division had been added to the 1st Airborne Division and General Browning was now in charge of an Airborne Corps. Despite the disasters in Sicily, it was clear that airborne troops were to be given a major role in the invasion of Europe when it came. But Frost and his men had to wait at home and follow the news of the invasion on the radio as other airborne units jumped on the night before D-Day. Their tasks were to secure the flanks of the landing beaches in order to prevent the Germans from mounting a rapid counter-attack while the invaders were still at their most vulnerable clambering ashore to establish a beachhead. On D-Day itself there were again problems with men being dropped in the wrong place, but American paratroopers performed well on the Cherbourg peninsula, and British Paras and glider-borne troops did a magnificent job at Pegasus Bridge and in capturing a large coastal gun battery at Merville.

  Frost and 2 Para were held on standby as several operations following D-Day were planned but then abandoned. The situation on the ground was changing so rapidly that ops became redundant before they could be carried out. Their next and most famous action of all came in September 1944 in the operation known as Market Garden. This was a daring plan dreamed up by Montgomery to try to finish the war by Christmas. Three airborne divisions, two American and one British, were to be dropped to capture three key bridges across canals in Holland approaching the Lower Rhine. Ground troops led by XXX Corps were then to smash through in a
sixty-mile corridor and link up with the Paras, cross the Rhine, cut off the Ruhr industrial district and advance into northern Germany in a lightning blow. Frost and 2 Para were given one of the toughest jobs of all, to capture and hold the furthest road bridge at Arnhem.

  A great deal has been written about the heroic but ultimately futile battle for the bridge at Arnhem.8 The airborne commanders were worried that the DZs were in the wrong place and were too far from their objectives. And once again there were not enough aircraft to carry all the men needed in a single day. At the eleventh hour, aerial intelligence had spotted enemy armoured troops resting and refitting in the surrounding woods, but this vital piece of information was ignored.9 So when Frost and his men finally reached the bridge, there were too few of them to defend their enclave from what proved to be an elite SS Panzer corps. The Paras were supposed to hold out for forty-eight hours, until the ground troops could fight their way through to relieve them. But problems with the advance of XXX Corps meant they never got through. The lightly armed Paras were completely outnumbered by the SS troops, who had plentiful supplies and were supported by heavy armour.