5
1 C COMPANY
And so to those who were to do the business, the young soldiers who – ignorant of their objective until the final days of training – were to steal Hitler’s radar; to form the point of the needle which Britain was to thrust into an exposed finger of Nazi-occupied Europe. The men of C Company 2nd Parachute Battalion were overwhelmingly Scots, most former civilians, enlisted ‘for the duration’. There were three Flemings, a Burns, a Finnie, a Campbell and a Craw, together with many Macs – McCausland, McIntyre, McKenzie, McLennan. Pte. Tom Laughland was a Glaswegian who served with the Argylls as a physical training instructor before in 1941 volunteering with his mate Cpl. Tom Hill to become paratroopers. One platoon included a commercial artist, Glasgow shipyard and factory workers, together with a furniture upholsterer. Many of them were physically smallish men, a legacy of the slums from which their families came, but they were also iron hard. Among the officers was a twenty-two-year-old English lieutenant who, in ‘civvy street’, was a Fleet Street cub reporter.
One of the few experienced NCOs, who would become a stalwart of Biting, was thirty-five-year-old Aberdonian bachelor Gerry Strachan of the Black Watch, a veteran of almost two decades of service. Strachan, now the company’s sergeant-major, looked, and was, a tough proposition with his thrusting chin and steely grin, a former coach of the regimental boxing team. At Hardwick Hall, men who slackened pace on marches grew accustomed to hearing his whiplash tones, demanding contemptuously: ‘Are ye tired, laddy?’ John Frost described Strachan as ‘a man who knew just exactly how a company should be run’. The CSM repeatedly proved himself a fine warrior in a fight.
By the end of the war, Britain’s forces accepted the services of any man and most women possessed of arms and legs. Earlier in the conflict, however, many eager and patriotic volunteers found themselves rejected because weapons were lacking to arm them, and personnel to train them. Lt. John ‘Tim’ Timothy, born in 1914, worked as a shoe salesman for Lilley & Skinner, then became a management trainee at Marks & Spencer, while enthusiastically playing sports in his leisure hours. He was rejected for military service in 1939 and again the following year, because of an old rugby injury. He was told that with his ‘B’ medical grading, he would be lucky to be accepted for the Service Corps.
Then recruiters appeared at a pub which he frequented in Eltham, and he secured the A1 health rating he coveted. He wanted to join the RAF or Royal Navy, but both had long waiting lists. Instead he briefly served with the Grenadiers before attending Sandhurst and securing a commission. In September 1941 he volunteered for the new ‘Special Air Service’ battalion, only to be rejected yet again, because of varicose veins. This desperately eager young officer appealed through a medical specialist, who passed him fit. Thus, now, he found himself a platoon commander in C Company, playing rugby for the Parachute Brigade.
Lt. Peter Young was a skinny seventeen-year-old apprenticed to a Fleet Street newspaper when, in 1939, he joined an East Surreys Territorial Army unit near his home in the London suburbs, and thereafter advanced to a commission, and entry to the Airborne, before he was twenty. Young, now just twenty-two, owed his Christian name to Peter Pan, in which his mother, an actress known as Carmen Wood, had once starred. His father had been a fighter pilot, killed in a post-World War I air crash.
Lt. Euan Charteris was the twenty-year-old offspring of a notorious figure of the earlier world war. His father, Brigadier John Charteris, had been Field-Marshal Earl Haig’s chief of intelligence on the 1914–18 Western Front, highly influential and disastrously wrong. His son, who would make a critical contribution to Operation Biting, was youngest of three brothers. Brash and ebullient, at Wellington College he was a star of rugby and other sports, captain of his house, a sergeant-major in the Officers’ Training Corps and pillar of the debating society. Charteris seconded a 1938 motion that ‘a woman’s place is by the fireside’; on another evening attacked democracy in favour of aristocracy in a speech described as ‘a magnificent display of pure bombast’. He once blacked up to impersonate Mahatma Gandhi – a performance unlikely to win applause if reprised in the following century – and won an annual school prize for a best essay on the Duke of Wellington.
In 1937 he was a member of a Schools’ Exploring Society expedition to Newfoundland. In the autumn of 1939 he went up to Christ’s College Cambridge as an exhibitioner, but soon left to join the King’s Own Scottish Borderers – he had been raised in Dumfriesshire. Charteris was full of energy, bumptiousness and ambition – he hoped eventually to enter politics. He was superbly fit, sometimes impatient of lesser young bloods – Wellington College remarked sardonically on his ‘powerful, if rugged, intelligence’. He became celebrated in C Company for an adolescent appetite – at every meal, he ate for two. Such young men often distinguish themselves at the sharp end of war; and equally often perish.
The formidably big, burly John Frost had been serving as adjutant of 2 Para until, just weeks before the assault on Bruneval, he was appointed to the command of C Company, with promotion to major. This was apparently because though not an authentic Scot, Frost wore the tartan of a Scottish regiment. It was deemed sensible that such a band of warriors should be led by one of their own kind. Also, perhaps, higher powers saw in Frost a forceful officer, well-suited to lead the most significant wartime operation thus far by Britain’s paratroops. He was born in Poona in 1912, son of an Indian Army general, educated partly at Wellington a few years before Charteris. He then passed through Sandhurst before being commissioned into the Cameronians. Seeking adventure, he applied for secondment to the Iraq Levies, an imperial buccaneer unit, with which he spent two years guarding RAF bases, while also acting as master of the Royal Exodus Hounds, which pursued jackals when its mounts were not required on the polo pitch.
Frost wrote later that he never forgot the arrival at his remote desert camp of the September 1939 signal announcing succinctly: ‘War has broken out with Germany only’. The first person he told was a captain who exulted: ‘Marvellous, marvellous! I was terrified that old Chamberbottom would settle up once again!’ Frost recalled: ‘My own first thought was that it might perhaps mean promotion.’ Ever the man of action, and still a bachelor, he began agitating to escape from Iraq and return home to his regiment, an outcome he achieved only in the autumn of 1940. He sailed home bearing a parting present from followers of the Royal Exodus – a copper hunting horn which thereafter he carried into action through four years and many battles.
Frost spent the later months of 1941 defending Norfolk with a Cameronian territorial battalion against an increasingly unlikely German invasion, but mostly shooting duck with a hospitable landowner. He was unhappily conscious that after two years of war he, an ardent professional soldier, had yet to see action. He shared the unease that was widespread throughout the country about the general ethos of Britain’s soldiers, after so many humiliating defeats in Norway, France and around the Mediterranean littoral. Those were days when, amid shrunken respect for the army, officers sometimes found themselves refused salutes by other ranks, and by members of the other services.
Then a circular letter reached his unit from the War Office, soliciting volunteers for ‘special air service’ battalions, and especially captains qualified to command companies: ‘I had not very much idea of what special air service was, but presumed it would be something in the Commando line, and just what the doctor ordered.’ He was less confident about the airborne aspect, though: ‘My knowledge of parachutes and parachuting consisted solely of what the Germans had achieved by this method of moving into action. The press had rather scoffed at the effectiveness of the new arm.’
He had never taken seriously the threat of Germans airlanding behind the British front – ‘most of us felt that the Home Guard would be more than a match for them’. He supposed the spirits of enemies who descended from the skies would be severely dampened by the number killed in jump failures. His colonel agreed, telling him scornfully: ‘I can’t imagine any sensible person choosing you to be a parachutist. You ought to keep your feet firmly on the ground.’ The soldier persisted with his application, nonetheless, and was eventually summoned to an interview at the War Office.
A few mornings later, he stood among a throng of fellow captains and majors, addressed by a brigadier who told them: ‘Gentlemen, from amongst you we are going to select the company commanders, second-in-commands and adjutants of the 1st Parachute Brigade. We have a tremendous task ahead of us and very little time.’ During the ensuing week back with his old battalion, Frost reflected gloomily on his poor showing at the subsequent interviews, and thus slender prospects of acceptance. His medical record was impaired by partial deafness, caused by a fall while riding in an amateur horse race. At the War Office, he thought he had been rash to respond to a question about discipline by saying that too much of it cramped initiative.
Here, however, he had hit the right spot. Brigadier Richard ‘Windy’ Gale, 1st Parachute Brigade’s appointed chieftain, quizzed all his aspiring officers: what do you do if, immediately after landing by parachute in action, you are faced by an enemy tank? Too often, said Gale, a nervous subaltern answered: call his superior. The brigadier instead sought men such as Frost, willing to grapple challenges on their own: ‘It was action that was wanted.’ The young officer, passionately committed to the army, shared in its 1941 sense of professional shame, and was bent upon playing a personal part in restoring its lustre.
He was astonished and delighted when, ten days after his visit to the War Office, he received orders to report to 1st Parachute Brigade’s Hardwick Hall camp near Chesterfield in Derbyshire. In October 1941 he found himself in grim, muddy, dispiriting parkland, set between mining works and slag heaps. He and his fellow new arrivals were to officer the 2nd Battalion, following in the bootsteps of 1 Para, which had been created almost a year earlier. Their uncertainty about what they had let themselves in for was intensified when drafts of rankers began to arrive. Some of these men, far from being aspiring heroes, were hopeless cases of whom cynical unit commanding officers had sought to rid themselves: ‘A good few were hardened criminals.’ They were short of experienced NCOs, backbone of every military organization.
As an officer of a doughty Caledonian regiment, Frost was pleased to find the men of the Scottish company were in better shape than others. Yet he acknowledged they were ‘a wild crew’. Volunteers for special operations, whether commandos, SOE, SAS or parachutists, were seldom the sort of people to make docile household pets. More than a few of Frost’s Scottish soldiers were instinctively violent products of the roughest, harshest of upbringings and early lives. But they were men who wanted to fight, and Britain in those days badly needed such eager warriors.
He observed about the experience of watching his first parachute demonstration: ‘What struck me so forcibly was how completely dependent we were on the skill of the pilots.’ Ignorant of all things pertaining to the RAF save the beauty of Spitfires in flight, he had taken for granted the ability of aircrew to find their way to an appointed point, by day or night. Experiences during the next three years cured him of this delusion. Again and again, airborne operations would be compromised or fail because men were dropped in the wrong places. If the green light mounted above the exit of every troop-carrying aircraft was illuminated late – even by a matter of seconds – men overshot their landing zones often by miles. Conversely, the drop signal was frequently given too early – an episode of this kind in bad weather over Scotland caused an entire stick of heavily-laden jumpers to be precipitated into the Clyde, never to be seen again. In 1943, scores of men on their way to fight in Sicily splashed fatally into the Mediterranean. More will be seen of this problem later in our own tale.
At night at Hardwick, the old professional army’s prohibition on talking ‘shop’ in the mess was discarded: officers debated keenly and fiercely the proper employment of parachute troops. Their role in Germany’s 1940 sweep across Europe had been wildly exaggerated by rumour, which especially seized the mind of Britain’s prime minister. The May 1941 invasion of Crete was spearheaded by fallschirmjäger who achieved their objectives only at the cost of prohibitive casualties. From Russia, BBC bulletins reported incidents of lightly-armed Luftwaffe airborne attackers being ‘mopped up’. Colossus, British paratroopers’ inaugural venture in Italy, had been a failure as an operation of war, even if it showed that the British Army was not entirely inactive. The one unquestioned success of airborne operations was the Germans’ May 1940 coup de main, the gliderborne descent on the Belgian fortress of Eben Emael.
Even in those very early days in the history of parachute warfare, it was obvious that its selling point was the capability to spring surprises – suddenly to deploy fighting men where the enemy least expected them; to create a new battlefield of the sponsor’s choice, far behind any supposed front line. It was equally apparent, however, that for paratroopers to prevail against ground defenders they must secure their objectives quickly. If they became engaged in a protracted clash, lack of heavy weapons, vehicles and ammunition replenishment must prove a handicap, probably fatal. When Frost’s aunt’s chauffeur heard that young Johnny had signed up to serve as a parachutist, the old man observed disgustedly and by no means foolishly, ‘Why, that’s the surest way of becoming a prisoner that’s ever been invented!’
In those days, embryo paratroopers did not undertake rigorously structured month-long courses such as would be standard for later trainees. Instead, men were dispatched severally from their units to the school at Ringway. John Frost arrived there with his colonel, Edwin Flavell, aiming to complete their two balloon jumps and five aircraft descents in record time. Neither had either fulfilled a proper programme of ground training – ‘parachute rolls’ on landing, for instance – nor worked to get themselves fully fit. On the first morning they were winched to six hundred feet above Tatton Park in a gently swaying balloon cage: ‘We smiled at each other the learner parachutist’s smile, which has no joy or humour in it. One merely uncovers one’s teeth for a second or two, then hides them again quickly lest they should start chattering.’
Most people find unnerving the silence of the sky beneath a huge gasbag, contrasted with the deafening engine roar that suffuses a transport aircraft and its passengers. There is a cold-bloodedness about the requirement to leap from a balloon into the blue vacancy which chills even the doughtiest novices until they have braved the experience. Frost wrote: ‘The first sensation of falling drew the breath from my lungs till a cracking sound from above and a sudden pull on my harness told me that the parachute was open, and the rest of it was heavenly.’ On the ground, the jubilant, gleeful adjutant and colonel congratulated each other: many private soldiers proclaimed exultantly: ‘Gor, it’s better than sex!’ but some young officers, in those relatively virginal times especially for the middle classes, lacked experience from which to make a comparison.
Flavell and Frost insisted on embarking immediately upon their second jump. The former landed safely, but the latter made the classic error of hitting the ground with his legs slightly parted, which proved as painful for himself as it does for most Airborne trainees. He spent that night in a local hospital, after being operated on to remove fluid from his knee. He returned limping to Hardwick Hall, obliged to delay completion of the course until he regained fitness.
On 14 January 1942, before the chiefs of staff had signed off their authorization for Biting, Browning’s staff dispatched an order to the Parachute Brigade, requiring 2 Para’s C Company to be detached to Tilshead, in ‘army country’ on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, for ‘experimental training for a raid’. They should expect to be administratively independent for six weeks. Arrangements for cash to pay the men were being made with Lloyd’s Bank in Amesbury. The ORs – other ranks – would mess separately from the glider pilot trainees with whom they would share a camp. Officers and men alike were to be briefed that their task was to rehearse a demonstration airborne attack on an enemy facility, for an audience of the War Cabinet, which would take place probably on the Isle of Wight.
First, though, Frost the company’s commander needed to complete his interrupted parachute course. He surrendered his men to the custody of Major Philip Teichman, who fervently hoped his own elevation would prove permanent. Frost then hastened back across the Pennines to Ringway. The first intimation that he might be destined for something important was the discovery that the RAF had been told to make his qualifying jumps a priority, and he was scheduled to perform two on the first morning. To his frustration, however, winter fog closed in, and persisted. Next day, only late in the afternoon did the weather clear sufficiently to make a jump from a Whitley possible, which he completed in safety, then persuaded a passing motorist to drive him the few miles back to Ringway from the landing zone at Tatton Park, just in time to make another descent before the light failed. He achieved a further jump the following evening, and on the next day completed the course in perfect weather. He was richer by four shillings a day in pay: other ranks received half that amount – essentially danger money. A WAAF batwoman sewed the cherished winged badge on the arm of his tunic before he set forth for Tilshead, to resume command of his company.
2 TILSHEAD AND INVERARAY
In January 1942 Frost had yet to see action, but in the years that followed he was to prove himself an outstanding fighting leader – cool, tough, brave, quick-thinking. Only after the war was done did he marry and have children. Not in the least cerebral, he never seemed destined for the highest ranks, and indeed did not attain them. But he was ideally suited to lead such an operation as that to which he was now pledged, though still unknowing about its nature. In character Frost had more than a little in common with his American counterpart Dick Winters, of Easy Company 101st Airborne Division, later famous as the ‘band of brothers’.
It seems nonetheless surprising that this unknown and untested major, rather than an officer with battle experience, was now to be entrusted with command of a raid upon which depended a significant fragment of Britain’s battered national prestige. The most credible explanation is that the senior officers who made the choice had not reflected much on the issues at stake – the personal burden that Frost would have to shoulder through his hours on the ground in France. Only the prime minister, together with R.V. Jones and his ‘boffin’ colleagues, knew enough fully to grasp this. It is noteworthy that Gen. Sir Alan Brooke, head of the British Army, made no mention of Biting in his voluminous contemporary diaries, either before or after the event, though he knew it was taking place, and indeed signed off authorization. For the CIGS, preoccupied with grand strategy and – like most senior soldiers – sceptical about ‘sideshows’, a company-strength raid on the coast of Normandy seemed below his threshold of attention. Nevertheless he might have done well to consider the embarrassment – the crowing from Radio Berlin – that would accompany its failure.
On his arrival at Tilshead on 22 January, Frost displaced C Company’s acting commander, to Philip Teichman’s disappointment. The latter had been arranging accommodation and training facilities for the main body of paratroopers, who arrived two days later, after a journey delayed by snow. Teichman told his successor that while everything was secret, it appeared the unit was merely to stage a demonstration for the politicians: no ‘party’ – characteristic British military vernacular for an operation of war – was in the offing. Something serious might follow, Teichman had been led to believe, only if the initial exercise proved successful.
The camp at Tilshead was one among hundreds of desolate wartime clusters of hutments, set behind concertina wire on a low, barren hill above the village with views across miles of unlovely training grounds and army facilities. The day after C Company arrived from Hardwick, its men were paraded for inspection by Browning, their divisional commander, whom few of them had yet seen. Frost felt disconsolate as he mustered his hundred-odd scruffy, muddy, travel-soiled soldiers for scrutiny by the spotless ‘Boy’. The general, who almost alone among those present knew what Frost’s men were to train to do, took the inspection seriously. After talking at length and one by one to many of the paratroopers, he concluded that their enthusiasm and high spirits did much to compensate for their appearance. Finally Browning said to Frost: ‘I think you’ve got a good lot of men, but I have never seen such a dirty company in all my life!’ On the general’s return to his headquarters amid the Georgian splendours of nearby Syrencot House, he gave orders immediately to issue C Company with new clothing.
Frost was not consulted about a reorganization of his command, which was abruptly imposed by Divisional HQ. Combined Ops had produced the overall tri-service scheme, but Browning’s staff devised the tactical plan for the drop and ground attack. The major was dismayed, and indeed enduringly angered, by what he was told to do. Like all British Army infantry companies, his own was organized in platoons and sections, with an HQ that included runners to carry messages. Browning’s officers instead decreed the force should be divided into disparate groups which would drop at different times, with varied assignments. He himself would lose his headquarters team: ‘I didn’t like this at all … I should have four bodies, all different in size and firepower, which would be difficult to control if things went wrong. Previous military experience had shown me that manoeuvres or operations which went strictly according to plan were very rare indeed.’ In those days wirelesses played almost no part in actions below battalion level, while voice radios were both scarce and unreliable. The major was told that he would be getting a lot of sets, and indeed duly received these; on The Night, however, they failed comprehensively.
Orders for the paratroopers’ stay at Tilshead were conveyed to Frost by Browning’s appointed liaison officer, a somewhat pompous, mustachioed Grenadier of thirty-nine named Major Peter Bromley-Martin. The latter’s explanation of their mission – to stage a mock raid on an ‘enemy’ outpost on the Isle of Wight – did not impress C Company, nor indeed Frost and his officers. Beset by rain, icy winds and mud, they hated their temporary quarters, and likewise the glider pilots already stationed there. They disliked Bromley-Martin and other Airborne Division staff whom they met, together with everything they heard about the silly apparent purpose of their training – to impress a clutch of politicians. They wanted to go back to 2nd Battalion, and to Hardwick Hall.
Frost drove over to Syrencot House to remonstrate, only to find Browning absent. Instead he argued with the division’s senior staff officer, Lt. Col. Arthur Walsh, but returned to camp having got nowhere. The company commander and Browning’s people never achieved much rapport – it seems noteworthy that the general’s later report on Biting pays no personal tribute to the man who led it, though some lesser participants are mentioned favourably. Next day Bromley-Martin returned to Tilshead to see Frost. For the company commander’s ears alone, he confided the true nature of the operation for which he and his men were to train – a raid on a German radar installation in France. Then he put the major in his place. His job, this newly-minted paratroop officer was informed crisply, was to do what he was told; to execute the plan he would be given. If he continued to baulk about accepting this, ‘someone else would be found who did’.
The company commander’s enthusiasm was not much increased by their conversation. Bromley-Martin concluded, with Grenadier affectation: ‘I must say I find the whole thing fascinating.’ He, however, was not being invited to jump into Occupied France. Frost, who was, did not share this view. His dislike and distrust of the liaison officer persisted. If Bromley-Martin was responsible for planning Biting, as appeared to be the case, the Cameronian was thoroughly unhappy about it. In particular, he was infuriated – and remained so during and after the assault – that he, as its commander in the field, was to have no say in its organization.
Yet the planners had a case. As well as Frost’s anxiety about dispersal of his little force, each of the RAF’s aircraft could carry only a single ‘stick’ of ten men. Thus it would anyway have been hard to maintain the usual infantry company organization, even had the divisional staff not decreed otherwise. Moreover Frost, as a mere novice major who had never seen action, could scarcely be surprised that his superiors were unwilling to concede him a free hand in executing an operation of such complexity, involving all three services and commanding the keen interest of the prime minister. The ex-master of the Exodus Hounds would exercise tactical leadership on the ground which, heaven knows, represented responsibility enough. He would not, however, be granted licence to organize the ‘party’ nor to invite the guests. Bromley-Martin told him: ‘You’ll be taking your company over to France before February is out. Now it’s up to you to see that everything works properly and that your Jocks are so fit they’re jumping out of their skins, or you won’t have a hope of bringing them out alive.’
Inevitably, Frost acceded. As his company commenced training, he reorganized the men in groups, each of which was given the codename of a naval celebrity, in deference to the amphibious nature of their task – Drake, Rodney, Nelson, Jellicoe and Hardy: ‘This was to be a combined operation par excellence, and we hoped the Senior Service would appreciate the gesture.’ Frost was impressed by twenty-year-old Lt. John Ross, a Black Watch officer from Dundee whose severity made him admirably unflappable. Somebody would have to be in charge if the major ‘bought it’, as might easily happen in France. He appointed Ross his second-in-command, promoting him to acting unpaid captain.
Browning decreed that, within reason, C Company were to have whatever arms and matériel they requested. Frost, accustomed to the army’s parsimony with resources, especially in those lean times, was astonished to find himself supplied with every kind of equipment and weapon, including some he had never heard of. C Company was given its own transport and a prodigious issue of ammunition for training. Some staff officers, not in the secret, baulked at fulfilling extravagant Airborne Division requisitions for stores and clothing – for instance forty-two pistols, thirty wrist-watches, thirty wrist-compasses, fifty torches, six Hawkins anti-tank grenades, six morphia syrettes apiece for each officer, escape kits, together with 120 white oversuits to be worn if Bruneval proved snowbound on The Night. Much of this equipment did not reach Tilshead until the last stages of the company’s preparations.
New faces joined its ranks – an officer and eight sappers from the recently-created parachute squadron of Royal Engineers, equipped with mine-detectors and other tools of their trade. An additional forty-odd men, almost all from 2 Para’s B Company, were dispatched from Hardwick to Wiltshire as reinforcements, prospective reserves and substitutes: in all arduous training and especially airborne exercises, casualties and drop-outs were inevitable.
GHQ Home Forces breached the elaborate security precautions, by referring in circulated documents to the real purpose of Biting, provoking the fury of Browning when he got to hear of it. Several of the weapons and much of the equipment to be employed were very new, still in the experimental stage, especially the 9mm Sten sub-machine carbines which thirty of the raiding force were to carry. Stens were light, handy and could make a formidable racket, important virtues in a butcher-and-bolt raid such as this, but they were also prone to jam or self-trigger, and inaccurate beyond the shortest ranges. Components of early versions were created at the Liverpool factory which in peacetime produced Meccano children’s construction kits. Rumour had it that some of these cheap-and-cheerful weapons, of which most parts were mere stampings, were assembled in garages with five man-hours’ labour, at a cost of just £2 apiece. The planners were untroubled by the little guns’ limitations. In darkness neither side’s small arms were likely to hit much. Four million Stens were ultimately made, and supplied to Resistance groups in occupied territories around the world – they cost one-sixth the price of American tommy guns.
C Company was to exercise on Golden Ball Hill, a stretch of high downland north-east of Alton Priors, near Devizes, which descended steeply onto flatland that would pass muster as the sea. This, they were told, represented a plateau onto which they would land – in Wiltshire, from trucks rather than aircraft – assemble, and march to their objective, followed by a descent to the evacuation beach such as they would encounter on their demonstration for the War Cabinet. Some individuals were given fragments of information about their personal roles – Euan Charteris, for instance, knew that he and his section would be responsible for storming a fortified house at the foot of the hill – though not that this lay on the coast of Normandy. A company of field engineers moved hedges (yes), planted token trees and marked out roads, wire entanglements and other landmarks. The scale of resources committed to Biting was becoming remarkable, but a cynic might observe that most of Britain’s Home Forces, at that period, had little else useful to do.
Given the shortage of time before the operation, it might have been better to utilize a training area on Salisbury Plain, close to Tilshead, rather than expend hours each evening winding through the Wiltshire lanes to reach and later return from Alton Priors. Though the latter location was hilly, sure enough, its topography otherwise bore only a limited relationship to that on which C Company must fight in France. Browning afterwards made the point that distances marked out at Alton proved to have been very different from those at Bruneval, and this mattered in enabling the disparate elements of C Company to master routes and timings in darkness.
They began to practise night attacks on the hill above Alton Priors, though the weather – extreme cold and heavy snowfalls – severely restricted activity. The enthusiasm of both officers and men was impressive, indeed moving, and seemed to go far to compensate for their lack of experience. Each night they returned exhausted and filthy to Tilshead, where they astonished the resident glider pilots and their cooks by the quantities of food they consumed.
Yet training schedules were repeatedly interrupted by the wintry conditions, and a company parachute drop had to be cancelled. There were wearisome delays before some kit could be issued, and much time-wasting in achieving telephone contact with higher headquarters, including the War Office to which frequent appeals were needed, to secure authorizations denied by service bureaucracies that were not privy to the Biting secret. The force lacked access to ready money to pay local bills for essentials ‘extremely small in relation to the cost of the operation’. Meanwhile Frost knew he was working his men hard: whenever they were stood down he arranged transport to Salisbury or Devizes for some serious pub crawls. One night some of his men returned to camp heralded by a raucous din from a local British Legion band’s instruments which they had liberated. Thereafter, observed Frost drily, ‘the guardroom door yawned more widely’, as did the threat of being left behind when they staged their big drop. Browning chafed that, mostly thanks to the weather, thus far ‘very little satisfactory ground training’ for the mission had taken place. But the wheels were now turning relentlessly, towards the dates set for a landing in France.
Even as the paratroopers prepared, elsewhere hundreds of other men – soldiers, sailors and airmen – were being mobilized to participate in Biting. Lt. Cdr. Fred Cook was summoned from HMS Tormentor to a conference in London with some of Combined Ops’ senior naval officers – John ‘Jock’ Hughes-Hallett, David Luce and Peter Norton. There, he was admitted to the secret of the Bruneval plan, in which his landing-craft would play a critical part. Halfway through the subsequent discussion, Luce interrupted Hughes-Hallett – known to his critics as Hughes-Hitler, in deference to his imperious manner – to say: ‘Sir, shouldn’t we tell Cook he is to be naval CO of the operation?’ The Australian officer returned to Portsmouth somewhat awed by the responsibility that was being thrust upon him and his half-trained flotilla.
So much emphasis was being placed on secrecy that Cook was appalled, listening to one of ‘Lord Haw-Haw’s’ regular evening propaganda broadcasts from Berlin, to hear Goebbels’ mouthpiece boast: ‘Tormentor, we know where you are at the mouth of the Hamble river. You are going to be bombed next Friday night!’ Cook said: ‘And by Jove we were.’ The Luftwaffe killed only a few cows, but for some days afterwards a shower of German magnetic mines laid in the estuary prevented the landing-craft from putting out. Then, one morning, these little vessels were hoisted aboard the ‘mother ship’ HMS Prins Albert, which sailed north to Gourock, west of Glasgow, where a rendezvous had been fixed with Frost’s paratroopers, for the next round of rehearsals.
With so many cooks stirring the Biting broth, senior officers introduced added ingredients. It was decided the landing-craft should be armed, to provide supporting fire if Frost’s men were being pressed by the Germans as they quit the beach. Each ALC was to be equipped with four Bren light machine-guns and 500 rounds apiece; they would also carry Boyes anti-tank rifles, though back in 1940 these had been exposed as useless weapons, allegedly to engage enemy small craft which sought to intervene against the evacuation. The six ALCs would be accompanied by two LSCs – landing support craft fitted with 20mm Oerlikon cannon. Gerald Templer, the fiery local army chief of staff in Hampshire, fought for a detachment of his troops to man the weapons in the ALCs, to emphasize his disdain for commandos and their kin. He wished to show that line infantrymen could well undertake the raiding role. Browning resisted – wanting his own men in the boats – but was overruled. Instead forty men of the Royal Fusiliers and Monmouth Regiment were assigned to man the Brens and Boyes afloat, and boarded Prins Albert before it sailed for Scotland.
On 9 February, with their attached engineers and thirty-odd members of B Company who were, effectively, reserves for the raid, Frost and his men boarded a train to Scotland for four days of training with the navy. In the interests of security, they removed all Airborne insignia before heading northwards. On arrival at the ship, the soldiers enthused: their quarters and rations afloat proved a great improvement on those at Tilshead. When they began to exercise on and offshore, despite freezing conditions there was almost a holiday mood among the exuberant adventurers. All this seemed a bit of a lark.
‘Even the subalterns had enough to eat,’ wrote Frost, ‘and there was no shortage of the civilized things in life. We were lucky with the weather, and all of us greatly enjoyed splashing about in the landing-craft, even if it meant long hours and frequent wetting in the icy waters of Loch Fyne.’ Their activities were exhaustively recorded by an army photographer named Lt. Puttman, who was to accompany both C Company’s training and subsequent return from France: propaganda was intended to be a significant element in the raid’s purposes, assuming its success.
The worst aspect of their days and nights around Inveraray, however, were that the coastal exercises laid bare the limitations of the landing-craft and their officers. Amateur seamen and navigators all, they experienced chronic difficulty in locating a rendezvous in darkness; distinguishing light signals; retrieving Frost’s men from appointed beaches. The major nursed a dry, understated reflection: ‘The possibility of being left stranded on the coast of France after we had done our job was unpleasant.’
One night aboard Prins Albert, Frost and his men were told that next day, they should disappear ashore, because Commodore Mountbatten was on his way to inspect the ship. In the event, even as the company tramped the surrounding hills it was recalled by frantic hooting on the ferry’s siren. Dickie wanted to see ‘his’ soldiers, as well as the sailors. Back on board, they were mustered with the naval personnel, to be addressed by the star of Combined Ops, who worked his usual cheerleading magic. He spoke with a blithe, unconsidered indiscretion which drove a coach and horses through security. Only Frost, among the paratroopers, was thus far privy to the secret of their mission, and the planners had intended to keep it that way until the last moment. Now, though, the commodore harangued them about the importance of the raid on enemy territory which they were about to undertake. He amazed and excited every man who still supposed they were merely training for an amphibious exercise, although even Mountbatten was not careless enough to disclose the objective. The major wrote: ‘We were left in no doubt by his Lordship that cooperation [between the three services] had to be the thing.’
The commodore asked Frost privately if he had any concerns, to which the major responded: yes, he had. A certain Private Peter Walker – obviously a German – had suddenly been attached to the company as an interpreter. Frost did not like him, did not want him: ‘So many things could go wrong with our little party, and we had been taught to fear the enemy’s Intelligence. With all the talk in England then and previously about the Fifth Column, I could not help thinking that the enemy probably knew all about us, and what we were training for. There was a distinctly eerie feel to having a Hun on the strength.’ ‘Walker’ himself was equally uncomfortable, to know himself to be the object of such mistrust.
Mountbatten immediately sent for this mysterious private soldier, and quizzed him in fluent German. The slightly-built ‘Hun’s’ real name was Peter Nagel. He was born in Berlin in 1916, youngest of three children. At school he excelled at history and sport, but one day the principal told this Jewish teenager icily: ‘People like you are not wanted in Germany.’ The Nagel family reacted prudently: they fled. The boy and his mother lived for a while in Paris, then in 1936 moved to Britain, where Peter worked at Morna Fabrics, a business his father established in Leicester, having achieved a feat unusual in those days – transferring his savings out of Nazi Germany through a phoney business deal with Wolsey, a British textile firm. Morna achieved increasing success.
In March 1940 young Peter enlisted in the Pioneer Corps, where his language skills attracted the attention of the secret world. Despite some shamelessly antisemitic criticisms that he encountered, an August 1941 report from SOE’s Special School reported Nagel to be ‘well-educated, extremely intelligent, and if not for his youthful appearance and inexperience … might be a good leader … very keen all round, extremely reliable and very courageous’. An instructor asserted in January 1942 that the cocky, streetwise Nagel was ‘by conviction a European, ideologically an anarchist … an inveterate and successful womanizer’. He was posted to No. 2 Commando, now 1 Para, from which he was seconded to C Company, wearing identity discs that declared him to be Peter Walker,* Religion C of E. Mountbatten, after completing his catechism, turned to Frost: ‘I judge him to be brave and intelligent. After all, he risks far more than you do.’ The major withdrew his objections. He later concluded that Mountbatten had been right. Walker was a remarkable man, who would prove invaluable to Biting.
It deserves notice that, through those middle days of February 1942 when Frost and his men were training, their country suffered yet another round of defeats. Though the paratroopers’ enthusiasm for their task remained undiminished, they prepared for battle amid what seemed a national culture of failure. On 12 February, the German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, together with the cruiser Prinz Eugen, sailed east from Brest to Wilhelmshaven at first undetected by the Royal Navy or RAF, then undamaged by repeated air attacks, though belatedly mined. The ‘Channel Dash’ prompted blazing headlines in the press, and was billed as a humiliation, of a kind unknown to England since the Spanish Armada in 1588. Four days later, on the 16th, the surrender of Singapore was announced, largest imperial capitulation in history, to a much smaller Japanese army. Churchill was devastated. He was desperate for good news. If great successes were not attainable, small ones must for a season suffice. Biting might be one such.
* Some earlier books, including that of John Frost, refer to Peter Nagel as ‘Newman’, but Nicolas Bucourt highlights the fact that on post-raid memorial documents signed by participants, there is no Peter Newman, always Peter Walker. I accept the latter version.