6
The day after Mountbatten’s inspection, Prins Albert sailed round the Scottish west coast to Gourock and disembarked the paratroopers. They boarded a train back to southern England where on 15 February, in icy weather, they resumed training for the attack. A new face joined the company – an airman named Charles Cox. Reg Jones and his colleagues agreed that it was essential to dispatch to Bruneval an expert familiar with radar. It would be quite an undertaking for a mechanic – a fitter, in air force terminology – who was untrained for battle, coolly to address the Würzburg set, probably under German fire, and facing drastic time pressure. Derek Garrard, one of Jones’s assistants, immediately volunteered for the role, but his participation was vetoed by Sir Charles Portal, chief of air staff: Garrard knew too much to be allowed to risk capture. Jones heaved a private sigh of relief, because the same constraint applied to himself: he would otherwise have felt obliged to raise his own hand to accompany Biting.
An uneasy compromise was decided upon: a TRE specialist – the sunny, bespectacled Donald Priest – would sail with Fred Cook’s evacuation flotilla, tasked to meet the paratroopers and granted a temporary commission as an RAF flight-lieutenant. If Frost’s men held a secure perimeter Priest, an enthusiast for living dangerously especially in fast cars, would land, climb the cliff and inspect the Würzburg himself. This scenario was wildly implausible, but in any event Priest could make a rapid examination of the radar equipment when it was loaded aboard the landing-craft, to check the raiders had secured what they were being sent for.
But somebody technically literate must drop with C Company, follow up its assault, then address the Bruneval installation with a tool kit. On 30 January Sgt. Charles Cox was at his usual duty post, as one of the crew of an RAF Chain Home Low radar station at Hartland Point on the North Devon coast. In peacetime, the twenty-eight-year-old had been a cinema projectionist and radio ham, living in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire. His mother had been on the stage, playing roles unspecified, and his father was a postman. He himself was a lively, bright young man, already married with a small baby. He was a little baffled suddenly to be handed a railway warrant to London and told to report to an office in the Air Ministry. Next morning, 1 February, he found himself, along with a second airman radar specialist named Corporal Smith, standing at attention before the desk of Canadian-born Air Commodore Victor Tait, the RAF’s director of radar. Much later, the technician was asked if he had volunteered for Biting. He responded: ‘Sort of.’ The conversation which took place at the Air Ministry explains his equivocal choice of words.
Tait, an exotic character who had spent most of the 1930s creating a pocket air force for Egypt’s King Farouk, said to the two men gravely: ‘You’ve volunteered for a dangerous job.’ Cox hastened to correct this misstatement, saying that he had never volunteered for anything. Tait, perhaps disingenuously, claimed to have been told that Cox and Smith had been identified as among the very few qualified personnel for a certain task, and to have put their hands up for it. Whether or not they were in reality press-ganged, the air commodore said: ‘Now you’re here, will you volunteer?’ Cox answered: ‘Exactly what would I be letting myself in for, sir?’
‘I’m not at liberty to tell you … I honestly think the job offers a reasonable chance of survival. It’s of great importance to the Royal Air Force. And if you’re half the chaps I think you are, you’ll jump at it.’
Both men volunteered. This version of the story is Cox’s, but it is the only one we have, and there seems no reason to doubt it, save that in his written narrative he made no mention of Corporal Smith. The two were among a relatively small number of skilled radar mechanics who were physically fit enough to qualify as parachutists and drop into France. Cox had hitherto neither taken to the sky in a plane nor put to sea in a ship. Indeed, the young man’s life had been remarkably humdrum. From that morning, however, the things which befell him in the ensuing month would more than make up for any earlier lack of incident. Before Cox and Smith left the Air Ministry they were given a step in rank, in the former’s case to flight-sergeant, and two days later issued with new railway warrants, this time to Manchester. Thus did they discover that they would be expected to jump into enemy territory.
Once in the north, they fulfilled instructions to report to the adjutant of No.1 Parachute Training School at Ringway. Smith wrenched a muscle on his second balloon jump, and so could not continue with the course right away. Cox, meanwhile, completed without accident an abbreviated version, and indeed found the experience exhilarating. A few days later, with wings sewn onto his tunic, he was dispatched onwards to Tilshead, now alone. He received a civil welcome from C Company, though he struggled to understand some of its Jocks through their heavy accents.
He was introduced to Dennis Vernon, who commanded the Royal Engineers section that he would accompany into action. The lieutenant, some months younger than himself, came from Cambridge, where he had attended the Leys School, then the university’s Emmanuel College. Vernon was plainly clever, and also notably cool under pressure. His superiors had chosen well when they dispatched him to join Biting. Air Commodore Tait was obliged to inform Cox that his RAF comrade Smith had now fallen ill, and was unfit to complete the Ringway course. The little flight-sergeant said he was sure Vernon could do anything in France that his mate in blue would have been asked to accomplish. It was anyway too late to jump-qualify then train another RAF technician.
Vernon was commissioned to photograph the Würzburg from all angles with a flashlight Leica camera. A senior radar specialist, Col. Basil Schonland, visited Tilshead to brief Cox’s engineer comrades on the technology. A mobile gun-laying radar was driven into the camp and parked by their quarters, so that they could practise disassembling it. All this was a revelation to the sappers, but they needed to understand the exact purpose of Biting, in case Cox and Vernon became casualties during the raid.
The ‘Demounting party’, as the planners somewhat clumsily christened Vernon’s team, was instructed to secure the central portion of the Würzburg aerial, protruding from the centre of the bowl or ‘great mussel’, as the Germans knew it. They were told that most of the essential electronic equipment was located in a metal cabinet mounted right behind the pedestal supporting the aerial dish. Beyond discovering how Würzburg worked, Reg Jones added laconically that it seemed desirable ‘to find out whether there was anything to be learned from the enemy’ which might improve British radar construction. The planners budgeted for the engineers to have thirty minutes’ access to the enemy installation, before a withdrawal to the beach became essential. This was optimistic. In such a relatively lengthy time span, once the defenders were alerted and shooting started, Germans from the surrounding area would have time to concentrate in force against Frost’s 120 thieves. This made it all the more important that the attackers should be dropped with absolute precision, within quick reach of the Bruneval radar site.
In the days that followed the 15 February jump at Syrencot, C Company rehearsed, or attempted to do so, with Prins Albert’s landing-craft, now back at their base on the Hamble. The navy identified three beaches between Weymouth and Swanage that were suitable for realistic exercises, but Royal Engineers had to remove anti-invasion mines and obstacles before they could be used. The need to travel by road each day to the coast in a convoy of five lorries wasted precious hours of the short winter days, and the subsequent trials were less than successful. On 17 February, yet another surge of bad weather forced cancellation of a scheduled full-scale rehearsal with the navy. The frozen ground also made it impossibly rash to stage another parachute jump, in which a crop of injuries would be inevitable. Frost’s men instead practised their roles in the ground attack: only a week remained before the first date when moon and tide made Biting feasible.
Cox and Vernon were suddenly granted two days’ alleged compassionate leave in London. In truth, Reg Jones wanted to meet them. Single-mindedly focused upon every operation that pertained to his work and to the war effort, he considered Bruneval his baby. Cox managed to fit in a hasty rail journey home to Wisbech ‘for one precious night’ with his wife Violet. We can speculate that Charlie may have confided to her some hints of the almost unimaginably dramatic experience that lay ahead for him. Then he and Vernon met by appointment in a waiting room at the Air Ministry. They were shown into an office where three men sat behind a table, two of them obviously English and wearing civilian clothes; the third French, clad in battledress. ‘The Englishman in the middle’ – Jones – ‘powerfully built, sure of himself … did the talking, while the third man spoke occasionally when what you would call the technical side of matters was under discussion’ – this last was most likely Derek Garrard.
Cox’s account of the interview at the Air Ministry bears rehearsal at length. ‘Both the Englishmen,’ he wrote, ‘evidently knew more about radar than we did. Without raising his voice or saying anything dramatic, [Jones] made us feel that our job was something really worth doing, and that we were lucky to find ourselves doing it.’ The scientist’s blend of confidence and natural authority, which had already carried him close to the heart of the war effort before he was thirty, imbued the flight-sergeant with conviction, even though the theme of their conversation was hair-raising. Jones had applied to the War Office to grant Cox temporary military status and uniform, for the duration of the operation. In 1942, however, inter-service collaboration was at a low ebb. Jones wrote much later: ‘It seems incredible, even at this distance of time, but the War Office adamantly refused to co-operate.’
Thus, when Cox met Jones, the scientist said that it seemed only fair to emphasize the special danger he would face, as the uniquely blue-clad member of the raiding force. The airman responded: ‘I’ve been thinking about that, sir.’ He proposed, if captured, to tell the Germans he had been dispatcher in one of the dropping aircraft, and had made an impulsive decision to jump with his charges. Jones replied frankly that he thought it unlikely such a thin cover story would wash. Instead, he told Cox he should say, ‘if caught on the job, that we were simply a demolition squad out to do mischief to a valuable bit of enemy equipment. We would both come in for special questioning, since I was the only airman in the parachuting party, and Vernon was the only engineer officer.’
Jones warned that the Germans often planted an ‘English’ stool pigeon in a new prisoner’s cell. He said: ‘Don’t be worried too much about physical torture, because I don’t think they are using it. What you have to be tremendously careful about is being thrown into solitary confinement in a cold, damp cell, with nothing but bread and water for a few days. Then a new German officer will come round on a tour of inspection, and will himself protest about the way you are being treated. He will take you out of your cell and explain that he will try to make amends for your bad treatment, giving you cigarettes, a decent meal, a warm fire and something to drink. After a while you will feel such a glow and so grateful to this very decent officer that when he starts asking you questions you will hardly be able to resist telling him anything he wants to know. So for God’s sake, Cox, be on your guard against any German officer who is kind to you.’ Reg Jones delighted in the airman’s response. He stiffened smartly to attention before the scientist’s desk and said: ‘I can stand a lot of kindness, sir!’
Cox went on to recount: ‘We were given advice on how to escape capture if things went badly wrong with the raid. With the French people in the locality we would be among friends. Granted half a chance, any of the farmers or villagers would hide us and risk their lives … just as they were doing for all our boys shot down over France. It might well be, the big man said, that even if things went wrong, we would be smuggled, Dennis and me, fairly quickly back to England, either by boat or in a small pick-up aircraft. But in case we were completely on our own over there, we were given French money, maps printed on fine silk and collar studs with miniature compasses hidden in the bases. We had to memorize three addresses, two in France and one in Switzerland. If we got to any of the three, we had a code password. The people in the houses would do the rest. We would simply be packages in their care.’
Much of the above was absurdly optimistic, of course. In early 1942 most French people were understandably wary of lending active assistance to evaders or escapers, which made all the more impressive the courage of those who did so. But Jones’s business, that morning at the Air Ministry, was to fill these two bright, thoroughly decent but green young men with the confidence that would be indispensable to fulfil their roles in an extraordinarily hazardous mission. Cox was not an eager warrior such as were most of C Company, impatient to grapple the enemy. He was a very ordinary chap, more than happy to do his duty, but somewhat awe-struck by this melodrama in which he found himself plucked from among the war’s extras to play a starring role. If he and Vernon failed, Biting failed. Jones and Priest patiently explained to the airman and the engineer exactly what components of the Würzburg were most coveted. Then, accompanied by earnest expressions of good luck, the two visitors were ushered to a staff car outside the Air Ministry which bore them to Waterloo Station, where they boarded a train for Salisbury, to be once again met and driven back to their spartan quarters at Tilshead. Cox said: ‘We were beginning to feel quite important people, but we were soon cut down to size.’