Chapter 11
Along the remote, sparsely populated expanse of Loch Fyne, Frost and his raiders could train without risk of being watched or spied upon. RAN Commander Cook was there, together with his Tormentor flotilla. Two dozen men from the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) were there, for they had been chosen to travel in the assault boats. Casualties were expected, and there was only so much medical care the paratroopers could perform for themselves.
Combined Operations had decreed that each assault boat should double as a medical station, ‘equipped with one or two stretchers, a medical satchel, thermos flasks of hot tea or soup and at least one medical orderly’. Of Frost’s men, four in each platoon were given basic medical training and issued with bandages and morphine, in case any life-saving care was required on the field of battle, and before the wounded could be got to the boats.
A force of men from the South Wales Borderers and the Royal Fusiliers – tough infantry regiments, each with two-and-a-half centuries of tradition to their names – were there, selected to act as fire teams on the assault boats. Each would carry four men armed with Bren light machineguns or Boys anti-tank rifles, a .55-calibre long-range weapon capable of penetrating light armour, which came complete with a bipod, but had the kick of a mule. As the assault boats approached the shore, the gunners were to rake the German positions with murderous fire, so as to doubly secure the beach. The boats were fitted with ‘armoured shields’ as added protection for those riding in them.
A group of about a dozen sappers were also at Loch Fyne. Hailing from the Royal Engineers (RE), they were a recent addition to Frost’s party. With their mottos Ubique (Everywhere) and Quo Fas et Gloria Ducunt (Where right and glory lead), the Royal Engineers had a two-hundred-year history of providing their specialist skills to whatever unit might need them. They had long been at the cutting edge of technological developments in the military, pioneering the use of mapping, telegraphy, observation balloons, tanks and aircraft in warfare.
The party of RE sappers was commanded by twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Dennis Vernon, who’d been educated at the Leys, a Cambridge boarding school, and after that Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Smart, bright, quick-thinking, Vernon had a lively interest in technology. He’d picked up the essentials of the groundbreaking field of radar pretty swiftly. While some of Vernon’s sappers were to act as an anti-tank party, laying mines on the road leading to the beach, most were to concentrate on dismantling the radar.
Like Preist, the scientist now slated to ride in an assault boat brandishing his radio receiver, Vernon and his men had been schooled by Schonland, using his replica paraboloid. Under his expert tuition they’d been treated to ‘a practical trial of “robbing” a mock up R.D.F. set’. They’d been warned about the dangers of electric shocks; how those working ‘in the proximity of H.T. wires should have rubber gloves and insulated-handle implements’. They’d been provided with the tools of their new trade: ‘for opening doors and windows ... for opening [the] set and removing parts . . .’ and for ‘wrecking set after work is done’.
Specialist burglary bags were furnished by SOE. The contents included: ‘2 jemmies, 2 axes insulating handles, 1 claw hammer, 1 Cold Chisel, 1 Hacksaw and spare blade, 1 Pr side-cutting pliers, 2 Prs rubber gloves, 1 Head torch, 2 Hand torches, 1 shifting spanner 6” handle . . .’ Vernon and his sappers had also trained with the foldable, two-wheeled trolleys, which were for ‘carrying away objects of interest’ – in other words, the purloined parts of the radar.
Once the paraboloid had been properly looted, the remains were to be blown sky high, so as to hide all evidence that its constituent parts had been spirited away. The aim was to make it look as if the raiders had simply sabotaged the Würzburg, in the hope that this would win the boffins extra time to work out how to defeat it. To that end, the explosives provided in each SOE wrecking bag included: ‘3 made-up charges, 8 short lengths of safety fuse, 2 Tin boxes of Tysules [incendiaries], 1 Box of fuses.’
The forces gathered at Loch Fyne practised rendezvousing with Tormentor’s assault boats and disembarking ‘under fire’. It proved surprisingly difficult, and particularly at night. Rarely did things go to plan. Sometimes, the boat crew failed to locate the right stretch of rocks. It was challenging finding dark figures on a dark Scottish shoreline. At other times, men were left behind. Radio communications from shore to ship proved patchy, and signalling with torches or Very lights – flare rounds – frustratingly hit and miss.
‘We found evacuation of the beaches ... extremely difficult,’ Frost remarked, ‘and if the weather was bad, sometimes dangerous ... For several nights there was not a single successful evacuation.’
It didn’t bode well, and especially as the rehearsals had been in relatively sheltered, friendly waters. Frost certainly didn’t relish the thought of ‘getting abandoned on the coast of France’, and all because the assault boats couldn’t find the right beach, or making radio contact had proved impossible.
Their ‘mother ship’ was anchored on a hidden expanse of the Loch, among a flotilla of assorted Combined Operations vessels. HMS Prinz Albert was a former Belgian passenger ferry that had plied the Ostend to Dover route from 1937 until the outbreak of hostilities. When the Germans had overrun Belgium, Prinz Albert had been requisitioned by the War Office. She was re-engineered to carry eight Assault Landing Craft (ALCs) – very similar to Eureka swamp boats in design, only being equipped with a ramp at the bows, for ease of landings.
Known as ‘Lucky Albert’ to those who crewed her, Prinz Albert was armed with guns and cannons and had yet to suffer a hit during the war, despite her deployment on several commando-style raids. She was relatively fast, with a top speed of 22 knots. Prinz Albert’s role was to piggy-back the Tormentor flotilla across the Channel, dropping the assault boats near the French coast under cover of darkness. After that, it was up to Commander Cook to steer them to the beach, to pick up the raiders and skedaddle with the loot.
With room to carry 340 troops, there was more than enough space for Frost and his men. Indeed, after the freezing mud and huts of Salisbury Plain, the vessel seemed like a veritable floating hotel. She was spotless, and there was ample food and drink. There were even real eggs in real shells, something the raiders hadn’t seen for months. This was a time when the milk ration in schools had been reduced to a third of a pint per pupil per day, and the adult butter ration was two ounces per week. Breakfasting on fresh eggs went some way to making up for the botched rehearsals and the frequent tumbles into the icy waters of the loch.
Frost had one other issue troubling him at Loch Fyne. Just prior to their departure for Scotland, the mysterious Peter Nagel had joined their number. Frost had studied the man carefully. Nagel was small, dapper and handsome, with brown hair and blue eyes. He’d been sent to Frost dressed in the uniform of the Pioneer Corps, the ‘King’s Own Loyal Enemy Aliens’. Dispatched from Combined Operations headquarters, Frost’s instructions were to enter Nagel on his Company strength as a ‘Private Newman’.
Though he spoke fluent English, Frost knew very well that Nagel was German. In the paperwork, General Browning described him as ‘a German fighting against Hitler’, stressing how his ‘knowledge of the German language and of the psychology of Germans’ should prove invaluable. Nagel was a man of the world and Frost noted his obvious toughness, intelligence and humour. Apparently, his father had fled the predations of the Nazis, after which he had travelled widely, including to London, Paris, Vienna, Budapest and New York.
Frost figured he could slip Nagel – Newman –into C Company, with none but him, CSM Strachan and his second-in-command, Lieutenant Ross, being any the wiser. But still he felt uneasy. That unease had stayed with him in Scotland. ‘There was a distinctly eerie feel’ to having a German join his party, Frost remarked, no matter what arguments were made to justify his presence.
In truth, Nagel had more reason that most to want to fight. Born in 1916 to well-to-do parents in Berlin, he was half-Jewish. At first the young Nagel had excelled at his fine Protestant school, the Hansa Vorschule, situated in north-west Berlin. But with Hitler’s rise to power had come the rise of anti-Semitism. Peter and his elder brother, Lothar, had often found themselves in fights. Even the school’s principal had told him, ‘People like you are not wanted in Germany.’
Eventually, Peter’s father, Morny Nagel, had found a way to fool the Nazis. The family had split up, making their separate ways to England. But by the time they got back together, Nagel’s mother had been detained in France and would spend the entire war there. His father, meanwhile, re-established the family fabric business in Leicester. Nagel, then in his late teens, joined him, working first on the factory floor to learn the trade from the bottom up. Then had come the war.
Nagel had signed up on 8 March 1940, as a private in the Pioneer Corps, but with his fluency in several languages he’d quickly come to the notice of SOE. At the SOE’s top-secret Special Training Stations dotted around Britain, he was taught to use every weapon imaginable and to communicate in Morse code, excelling in fieldcraft, hand-to-hand combat, but most of all explosives. He scored 92 per cent in one SOE demolitions test. He was judged as being ‘very keen all round, extremely reliable and very courageous ... will always find a way out.’ It was also noted that Nagel was an ‘inveterate and successful womaniser’ and ‘kicks hard against injustice’.
When Combined Operations had searched around for a German-speaking candidate with elite-forces training, Nagel had been the obvious choice. He was a perfect fit for Operation Biting, possessing not only the language skills but also the boldness and front to confuse the enemy by yelling orders in German, as the raid went ahead in near darkness. That was one of Nagel’s foremost roles. He was also to be Frost’s interpreter, interrogating any prisoners should they need to be questioned on the finer points of the paraboloid radar.
Frost was privy to little of Nagel’s background or training, not to mention the source of his motivation. Fortunately, he was about to have his mind put at rest about the German recruit, and in the most emphatic way. Several days into their Loch Fyne rehearsals, Frost was asked to get his men – his ‘horrible crew’ – off the ship. It was 12 February 1942, and the top brass were due for an inspection, the captain of the Prinz Albert asking Frost if ‘he wouldn’t awfully mind taking his men up into the hills for a few hours.’
It turned out that the visitor – a senior commander, with royal blood no less – was none other than Mountbatten, and his primary reason for visiting was to make an address to everyone, Frost and his raiders included. Frantic hooting from the Prinz Albert’s sirens alerted Frost that they were very much needed on the ship. They hurried down from the hills and slipped back aboard.
A gifted orator, Mountbatten made a short, stirring speech in which he pretty much gave the game away. Prior to this moment, none of the Prinz Albert’s crew had been any the wiser that they had paratroopers aboard. Now they certainly knew. Not a man among C Company, and the various attachments, was left in any doubt that they were training for a real mission. Mountbatten’s speech left little doubt that the Winston Churchill demo story had been just that: a fiction, to cover up the real nature of what they were here for.
Once Mountbatten was done, he and Frost had a private word. Both men were relatively young, Mountbatten especially so for the burden of responsibility and command that he carried. He asked Frost if he had any concerns. Two, Frost explained, in his typically direct fashion. First, the rehearsals at Loch Fyne had clarified the risks of C Company being left on the beach at Bruneval, for the pick-up had proven tricky. Second, he remained unhappy about the German on their strength – Private Newman; Peter Nagel.
Nagel was sent for. Mountbatten was fluent in German and he subjected him to volley after volley of questions. What did he do before the war? Where were his family now? What were they up to? Why did he want action? What compelled him to fight his fellow countrymen? To each, Nagel answered in a calm, matter-of-fact way. At the end, he and Mountbatten shook hands and Nagel was dismissed.
Mountbatten turned to Frost. ‘Take him along. You won’t regret it ... I judge him to be brave and intelligent. After all, he risks far more than you do . . .’
Nagel had also been thoroughly security vetted, Mountbatten pointed out. With that, the matter was closed. Nagel would vow: ‘If you had asked us, we would have gone on another hundred raids.’ In the days and weeks to come, he was to more than prove true to his word.
During their time on Loch Fyne, Frost encouraged every man, no matter his unit or rank – or nationality - to speak his mind. All were free to make suggestions and to propose modifications to the plan. Nothing was off limits, and for sure they had need of every bit of inspired thinking. Timing was critical. Frost commanded 119 raiders: 120, himself included. He was to thrust those few score men into the heart of one of the enemy’s most heavily defended and prized installations.
That enemy, meanwhile, would have every road and track at his command, with the capacity to bring overwhelming strength to bear in short order. Mortars; armoured cars; panzers; fighter aircraft – the German commanders had it all at their beck and call. Frost and his men were to remain on the ground only for as long as it took to spirit the paraboloid away. If they were delayed, the tide and the sea would turn against them. The assault craft could not be left stranded on the rocks, as had so often happened during training. If they were, the consequences would be hugely costly for all concerned.
Having got his sappers, plus his mysterious German recruit, Frost’s party was all but complete. All bar one, in fact. At the eleventh hour, a radar expert of sufficient expendability had been press-ganged into joining the Ladies from Hell. While Frost and his men were being put through their paces at Loch Fyne, that lone radar specialist had been learning to do something that he’d never once imagined, not even in his wildest dreams – to drop through a hole in a Whitley’s floor and to parachute to earth ...
* * *
From the start, the summons had been an odd one. Sergeant Charles William ‘Bill’ Cox was serving as a radar mechanic at one of the Chain Home stations situated on the North Devon coast. On Sunday 1 February 1942 he’d been ordered to catch the train to London, post-haste. He’d left that very afternoon from Bideford railway station, without the faintest clue what might lie in store.
He’d reported to the Air Ministry at Whitehall, still none the wiser. There he was teamed up with a Corporal Smith, like himself a radar mechanic but serving on an Isle of Wight Chain Home station. The two men were led before Air Commodore Tate, a Canadian First World War veteran who was serving in the RAF’s Technical Branch. Marched into his office, they stood to attention before the man’s desk.
Tate eyed Cox. ‘You are Sergeant Cox, radar mechanic?’
‘Yes, Sir.’
Having asked similar of Corporal Smith, Tate announced: ‘You two NCOs have volunteered for a dangerous job.’
‘Yes, Sir,’ Smith confirmed.
‘No, Sir,’ Cox countered, most firmly.
Tate glanced at him in astonishment. ‘You have not volunteered?’
‘No, Sir.’
Tate seemed confused. ‘There must be some mistake. I particularly asked for volunteers from amongst the comparatively few with exactly your qualifications ... But now you are here, Sergeant, will you volunteer?’
‘Well, Sir, what exactly would I be letting myself in for?’
‘That I cannot tell you. There is a war on and people get hurt in wars, but I promise you, you have a pretty fair chance of surviving.’
‘Very well, Sir,’ Cox conceded, ‘I volunteer.’
Having been promoted on the spot to Flight Sergeant Cox and Sergeant Smith, the two men were dispatched to Ringway Aerodrome, still none the wiser as to what they’d let themselves in for. They arrived, to see the letters ‘No. 4 PTS’ emblazoned on the hangars. It still didn’t mean a thing to them.
While they were being processed through the guardroom, Cox posed the obvious question: ‘What is this place?’
‘This,’ the figure on duty explained, ‘is No. 4 PTS’.
Cox sighed. ‘I know. I can see “No. 4 PTS” in big lettering on that hangar over there. But what is No. 4 PTS?’
‘No. 4 Parachute Training Squadron.’
Cox felt his heart ‘drop, then start pounding like a trip hammer’. What on earth had he got himself into? They carried a sealed letter from Air Commodore Tate. It read: ‘These two NCOs are as yet unacquainted with the duties on which it is proposed they should be employed, or the training that will be required to prepare them for carrying out such duties.’
Cox and Smith were led before Group Captain ‘Stiffey’ Harvey, who commanded Ringway. He glanced over the letter, before casting the two recruits an almost pitying look. ‘You don’t know why you’re here?’
They shook their heads.
Having given all the usual warnings about the utmost secrecy of what he was about to tell them, the Group Captain explained their mission in a nutshell – that they were to form the radar-dismantling party of Operation Biting, and all that would entail. ‘We cannot force you to jump,’ he added. ‘You did not originally know what you volunteered for, so if you refuse there is nothing we can do.’ They were advised to have a look around and a think about it.
Cox and Smith did just that.
Before the war, Cox, who hailed from Wisbech, the Fenland market town in Cambridgeshire, had never been to sea or ridden in an aeroplane. In fact, he’d never strayed more than a hundred miles from home. Not long married to Violet, and with an infant son and a five-month-old baby daughter, he’d been a cinema projectionist prior to signing up. Small and slight in stature, he wasn’t everyone’s idea of a hero, and with his young family he had every excuse to turn tail and run. Regardless, having had a nose around, both he and Smith decided they’d best get on with it.
They made two jumps from the ‘vile, loathed sausage’ – the tethered balloon, which Cox found ‘rather nerve-racking’. On the second, Sergeant Smith sprained his ankle. There was no way he could complete his six jumps in the time remaining, so from then on Cox was on his own. He made two jumps from a Whitley at 800 feet, followed by one as part of a stick. His final qualifying jump was to be at night, from the hated balloon. It was an ‘eerie experience, for everything was dark and quiet’, the hole in the floor looking like ‘the bottomless pit’. Cox managed it with no sprains or bruises. He’d earned his wings.
It was 15 February, and he would be leaving the next day to link up with the raiders. The earliest date the mission might go ahead was the 22nd, so just six days hence. Cox had an awful lot to cram into the remaining time. He made for Tilshead, a tiny village slap bang in the centre of Salisbury Plain. Just outside of it lay RAF Tilshead, an airbase in use by Combined Operations. Amidst the Lysanders and the Hotspur gliders scattered around the airstrip, Cox sought out Frost and his men. Once he’d got over the fact that he could barely understand a word of their thick, Scottish accents, his impressions were of a ‘grand bunch of fellows.’
Frost made the new arrival welcome as best he could, but everything seemed fraught and hurried. From Loch Fyne, Frost and his men had taken the train south, while the Prinz Albert steamed along the west coast of Scotland making for Southampton harbour. That was where the seaborne armada for Operation Biting would set sail from, as long as the mission got the final go-ahead. That all depended on the weather during the five days of the ‘moon window’ – 22-26 February – and the English Channel in February was hardly renowned for its calm or its clemency.
At Tilshead, Cox was introduced to Lieutenant Vernon and his sappers. Together, they would effectively form the radar-dismantling party. But their role was far more complex than simply being a gang of thieves. They were to take a Leica 35mm camera and notebooks with them, so they could sketch, annotate and photograph the paraboloid, before attempting to tear it apart. It was a belt-and-braces approach. If they damaged it beyond repair, or ran out of time, at least the boffins would have something to look at, to try to gauge how the thing worked.
Frost, meantime, put Cox on a crash course of ‘hardening-up’ training. By day he had fierce PT, route marches, navigation, unarmed combat instruction, weapons practice, plus learning the drill for crossing barbed wire. The first man had to lie over the wire, while the others proceeded to run over his prostrate form. Come nightfall, he was busy studying recce photos of the terrain, using a ‘special optical device that gave details in three dimensions’ – the stereoscope viewer.
Two models had been constructed in papier mâché at RAF Medmenham, and shipped from there to Tilshead. One showed the paraboloid with the distinctive Château Gosset behind it, and all the immediate defences. The other, built to a smaller scale, showed the wider terrain and approaches. Somehow, Medmenham’s Model Making Section – sited in Danesfield House’s rambling basement – had brought the targets miraculously to life.
In Danesfield’s cellars they’d interpreted the recce photos, translating them into a different language entirely – that of three dimensions; of slopes, hedges, hills, trees and bunkers. A team of former sculptors and artists had set to work with fretsaw, spatula and paint-brush, with tiny hammers and nails, slicing out the contours from hardboard, and nailing them into an approximation of the relief. Smoothed over with a special covering, a massively enlarged photograph of the terrain was wetted, made flexible and eased into place.
In that way, the towering cliffs of Cap d‘Antifer had been given precipitous form, the steep valley of Bruneval given its plunging drop to the sea. Next, the dun-hued tones of a winter landscape were added in paint, plus tiny models of buildings, fences and the paraboloid itself were lowered into place, using tweezers. Everything over three feet across was included, so that an observer could crouch down and glance across the ‘landscape’, as if he or she were actually there.
Lit via an approximation to ‘moonlight’, the models were photographed as if from a Whitley pilot’s eye-view, the cliffs, sea and surrounding landscape appearing as they might on the night of the assault. Wing Commander Pickard and his fellow pilots studied those images closely, committing to memory the contours and landmarks they would need to watch out for, and the means via which they would find the drop zone, a flat patch of open ground lying to the rear of the chateau. After hours of such study, it felt almost as if they had flown the mission already, the raid itself being but a repeat performance.
Having studied the models and spent a few days with Jock Company, Cox – the reluctant parachutist – found he rather liked the men’s ‘come-what-may, I’m okay’ attitude. This late in the day, Frost and his men had been issued with no special orders regarding the danger of Cox being captured. Perhaps none were necessary, after the warning regarding Preist: ‘SHOULD NOT FALL INTO THE ENEMY’S HANDS’. Perhaps it was a simple matter of, for ‘Preist’ read ‘Cox’.
In any case, any sensitivities over Operation Biting had been largely swept away, after the events of recent days. From Paris, Remy and his Confrérie Notre-Dame had radioed through a warning. One of the network’s key tasks had been to keep a close watch over the German battle-cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, plus the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. During the battle for Norway, the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had sunk the British aircraft carrier HMS Glorious, and damaged the cruiser HMS Renown. For months they had been bottled up in the French port of Brest, where they could do little further harm.
But the worry was they might slip out and cause havoc among the Atlantic convoys. Remy had sent through just such a warning: evidence from the shipyard workers suggested all three vessels were preparing to make a break for it. Unbelievably, they had done just that, and more to the point they had got away. On 12 February, in broad daylight, they had steamed at top speed east through the English Channel, and it wasn’t until they were past Dover that what became known as the ‘Channel Dash’ was finally rumbled.
How had it been possible? Under Hitler’s direct orders, they had slipped away in broad daylight, which no one on the Allied side had been expecting. The Führer’s gambit had worked, and he boasted that it proved how his habit of acting differently from what his enemies expected paid off. But more than that, the escape of the warships was due to the German military’s ability to evade Britain’s watchers. Somehow, all those giant Chain Home towers lining the southern coast had been blinded, to such an extent that they had missed the massive warships.
Hitler had demanded total radio silence for what had been codenamed Operation Cerberus, after the multi-headed dog from Greek mythology that guards the gates of the underworld. Fittingly, Cerberus had been a many-headed operation. Not expecting a daylight breakout, and hearing no radio chatter to suggest otherwise, the watchers had been lulled into a false sense of security. Just as soon as the warships began to move, the Germans had launched a complex electronic warfare (EW) plan, beginning with a Luftwaffe mission disguised as a bombing raid, but which actually deployed airborne decoys to confuse British radar.
Two Heinkel 111s, a fast medium-bomber, flew towards Plymouth, each carrying five Garmisch-Partenkirchen jammers, which together simulated a flight of fifty warplanes. To Britain’s radar operators, it appeared as if a major bombing raid was targeting the south coast port, drawing their attention that way. As the warships raced eastwards, so the EW measures shadowed their progress, jamming the Chain Home stations and shielding the vessels from view. It wasn’t until 1131 hours that a Dover radar station picked up the ships, by which time they were steaming through the Strait of Dover and almost in the clear.
British warplanes dashed after them, but all were repulsed or shot down. As the warships slunk into the thickening gloom of bad weather, there was no need for any further EW measures. A straight run to Norway, and friendly waters, beckoned. The Channel Dash proved a major propaganda victory for the Germans. Britain had been hoodwinked most comprehensively, and in her own back yard. After all, this was no Singapore or North Africa. This was the English Channel.
The shock value was enormous. It provoked uproar. The Times described the escape as ‘the most mortifying episode in our naval history, since the Dutch got inside the Thames in the seventeenth century.’ Across the Channel, in Paris, Remy was fuming. Why did he and his fellows in the network keep risking their lives, if their warnings were simply to be ignored? In London, Churchill seethed. ‘The Brest question’ had ‘settled itself by the escape of the enemy,’ he observed in disgust.
More to the point, the Channel Dash had proved just how sophisticated were the enemy’s technologies, demonstrating most powerfully their capacity to jam British radar. If that was the offensive capability of German radar, just imagine what technologies might underpin the electronic defences ringing occupied Europe, not to mention those of the Fatherland. The Channel Dash provided a huge impetus to Operation Biting. If nothing else, the British public were desperate for a morale boost. For a shot in the arm.
With the first day of the February moon window approaching, minds turned to the war of words that would result from the raid. De Casa Maury penned a memo entitled ‘Biting Publicity’, stressing the need to strike first and to strike hard. ‘These days are particularly dangerous as the enemy has a series of Axis successes to exploit . . . However successful Biting may be, the enemy could very quickly put out a story to the world that an airborne invasion of France had been attempted and repulsed . . .’
The answer was issuing a press communique ‘as early as possible after the operation, without waiting to know the actual results’. It needed to be ready for the noon broadcast of the BBC, and for publication in the evening papers, ‘so as to forestall any efforts made by the enemy’. It would have to be prepared well in advance, Biting requiring an aggressive PR offensive to scupper any enemy propaganda.
A press announcement was drawn up, outlining the bare bones of the operation and its success. Of course, this was a high-risk strategy. To strike first required a story going out before the full details were known. For Biting, timely information – not just timing per se – was going to prove vital. To that end, three press men were sworn to strictest secrecy, before being brought into the know. Lieutenant L. Puttnam was an official War Office reporter: he would fly in Wing Commander Pickard’s aircraft. Mr A Humphreys was a journalist with Reuters, and he was allocated to the Tormentor flotilla. Mr A. Edmonds, a cameraman with Gaumont-British, would shoot newsreel footage of the final rehearsals.
Edmonds was dispatched with his film cameras to join Frost and his men. At Lulworth, on the east Dorset coast, three stretches of remote beach had been cleared of anti-invasion barriers and mines: Redcliff Point, Bowleaze Cove and Arish Mell. It was no coincidence that the small pebbly coves and towering chalk cliffs were very reminiscent of the terrain around Bruneval. After their exhaustive preparations on Loch Fyne, the raiders hungered to strike back, but they were to be terribly frustrated in the dog days of February 1942.
Like Salisbury Plain, the Lulworth area was a long-standing military exercise ground, so the raiders could make their final dry runs without too much risk of being observed. Between 17 and 20 February there were daily rehearsals, as the assault craft tried to link up with the raiders in those steeply-shelving coves. Not one went to plan. At one stage, the assault craft made it into shore, but got trapped on a falling tide. The raiders leapt out and heaved and shoved in the freezing water, but the boats were stuck fast. ‘We got a bit browned off during those practices,’ Frost remarked drily.
On another day the raiders were scheduled to leap from the Whitleys, but the wind proved too fierce. Instead, the aircraft roared along the Dorset cliffs dropping only the containers, after which Frost and his men armed themselves, assaulted the imaginary radar station, before heading for the beach, laden down with a trolley loaded with boulders. But there the plan went awry. The assault craft landed in the wrong place and the raiders lost their way in a minefield, which had been laid to deter German invaders.
This time, Frost and his men were lucky to escape with their lives. That rehearsal ‘could not have been a more dismal failure’, Frost recalled. It was a sobering moment. They were just days away from zero hour, yet not a single practice had been successful. If anything, the dry runs both here and at Loch Fyne had gone to show how impossible it all might prove.
Frost wasn’t the only one who was worried. Wing Commander Norman declared the Lulworth rehearsals ‘fruitless’. There was one possible consolation. It was ‘a poor show, but it taught us a lot. 51 Squadron are trying hard and will, I’m sure, make a good try.’ Despite such attempts at reassurances, the men of C Company were beginning to lose heart. Those they relied upon most – the aircrew and the boat crews – just didn’t seem able to pull it off.
Meanwhile Cox – Biting’s eleventh-hour volunteer – had been granted leave in which to visit his young family. He travelled home to Wisbech, remaining blissfully unaware of the dramas and frustrations playing out on the Dorset coastline. His wife, Violet, asked no questions, although she knew he was attached to a parachute squadron and that something of the utmost secrecy was in the offing.
The day Cox reached his home town, 19 February 1942, the Allies suffered another cruel blow. In the largest ever attack against Australia, over 180 Japanese carrier-based warplanes struck the harbour at Darwin, sinking 11 ships and destroying 32 aircraft, while suffering negligible losses themselves. Defeat seemingly plagued the Allies on every front. But Cox had more parochial matters on his mind. He bade a lingering farewell to his family, knowing in his heart that ‘perhaps I should never see them again’.
Cox caught the train to London, heading for the Air Ministry – the place at which he had first been persuaded to ‘volunteer’. There he found Lieutenant Vernon, the commander of the sapper party, who had also just enjoyed a few days’ leave. Awaiting them were Donald Preist, the radar expert who longed to risk a dash ashore from the assault boats, and R. V. Jones, the scientist to the spies. There was much to discuss, apart from the technological aspects of the coming raid. A mysterious Frenchman joined them, dressed in full uniform. Cox and Vernon were briefed on how they should comport themselves if captured, and how they were to guard their secret radar knowledge.
They were allowed only to give name, rank and serial number. ‘Don’t be worried too much about physical torture’, Jones reassured them, ‘because I don’t think they’re using it’. But they were to be wary of trickery and deception. ‘We were told that the enemy occasionally put an apparently English person in the room,’ remarked Cox. ‘This man proceeded to get into conversation and very cleverly drew out the things they wished to know. A concealed microphone relayed the conversation.’
They were also warned of the ‘kindness treatment’. After days of solitary confinement in a dark damp cell, a new officer would appear as the prisoner’s apparent saviour, offering to get him moved to a far nicer room. ‘He will give you cigarettes, a decent meal, a warm fire and something to drink,’ Jones warned. ‘After a while you will feel such a glow and be so grateful to this very decent officer, that when he starts asking you questions you will hardly be able to resist telling him everything ... So for God’s sake ... be on your guard against any German officer who is kind to you.’
Cox joked that he could ‘stand a lot of that sort of thing’.
Cox and Vernon were also briefed on how to evade the enemy. Raid planners had decided that ‘even though the party was large, it might easily split up into twos or threes and attempt to escape that way.’ It might be possible to signal in a boat for a clandestine coastal rescue. The French Resistance networks were primed to help, and any farmer or local villager might come to their aid. They were to memorize various addresses, which acted as safehouses, and passwords were provided. Lastly, they were given maps of France printed on silk, tiny compasses and saw-blades, plus wads of French cash – escape aids, courtesy of SOE.
The chief worry for Jones was that Cox would be the only one of the raiders wearing an Air Force uniform – blue, in a sea of khaki. If he were captured, it was bound to provoke some difficult questions. Cox suggested a solution: he would claim to have been one of the Whitley’s dispatchers and to have got carried away in the rush, falling out of the aircraft pretty much by accident. Jones wondered whether that would wash with the enemy.
Jones had tried to get Cox re-assigned as an Army serviceman, with uniform and papers to suit, but the War Office had baulked. They argued that they couldn’t break the rules by willy-nilly shifting a man from one service to another. Jones felt a real sense of responsibility towards Cox – the young radar mechanic risking his life, arguably in the place of Jones himself. But either way, it was too late to do anything about it now. From London, Vernon and Cox caught the train to Tilshead.
Operation Biting was scheduled to be launched the following evening – 22 February 1942.