12
1 CELEBRATIONS
John Frost reached his quarters at Tilshead more than twenty-four hours after his MGB came alongside Prins Albert in Portsmouth. He and his men spent the next day resting and sorting kit. Browning told Frost: ‘You have put Airborne Forces on the map. From now on we should we able to get all sorts of things that have been withheld up to now.’ Fine words. Yet Frost, who never thought much of Browning as an airborne forces commander, carried to the grave a belief that the divisional commander had undervalued Bruneval and C Company’s achievement. That evening he was about to sink into a welcoming bath when there was a hammering on the door and an officer’s voice bellowed through it: ‘You have to get up to London right away because the Prime Minister wants to know the details!’ The exhausted major dragged himself into service dress and climbed into a staff car for the two-hour journey to the capital, reaching the guarded and sandbagged entrance to the underground Cabinet War Rooms at 9 p.m. He was led by a Royal Marine messenger down into the depths beneath official London, past steel doors, along shadowy corridors punctuated by harshly lit offices and scurrying personnel of both sexes, all ranks and services, to find the prime minister in the Cabinet meeting room surrounded by ministers and service ‘brass’, including Brooke, Pound, Portal, Browning and Mountbatten, this last claiming proud fatherhood of success. In front of Churchill, who was clad in a siren suit and puffing at his invariable cigar, stood C Company’s planning model of Bruneval, a duplicate which had been carried across Whitehall from Combined Ops in Richmond Terrace. ‘Bravo, Frost, bravo,’ said the prime minister, the British parachute force’s foremost sponsor. ‘And now we must hear all about it.’ The major stepped forward to tell his story. Mountbatten, however, was having none of that. He himself seized possession of the narrative, and addressed the group.
To explain the assemblage of so many great men that night, to hear reports of a tiny operation, it is necessary to recall that for weeks past, they had been receiving almost unbroken ill tidings from across the world. Since Frost and his company dropped into Bruneval, the Japanese had landed in three places on Java, which they swiftly overran, and the heavy cruiser Exeter was sunk off Batavia. It is no wonder the prime minister was eager that his closest colleagues should share in this flush of success, achieved agreeably close to home. Churchill suddenly gestured imperiously, to halt Mountbatten’s oration in mid-flow. He had noticed foreign secretary Anthony Eden and secretary for air Archibald Sinclair murmuring to each other in a corner, and addressed them as if they were errant schoolboys: ‘Come over here, you two, and listen to this, for then you might learn something for once in your lives.’ Eden and Sinclair shuffled sheepishly forward. When Mountbatten resumed the tale, Churchill again interrupted, to ask who was responsible for the raid’s excellent intelligence brief. ‘Wing-Commander Casa Maury,’ said CO’s chief complacently, glancing at his Cuban friend’s angular features, ‘who is standing beside me.’ The prime minister gave the marquis what Frost described as a ‘beatific smile’, then demanded a cut to the chase: ‘What did we get out of this?’
The chief of air staff launched a technical exposition which the prime minister once more cut short: ‘Now stop all that nonsense, Portal, and put it into language that ordinary normal mortals can understand.’ The hapless air marshal did his best to comply, perhaps wishing that he had caused to be present Reg Jones, the man with an inalienable claim to be garlanded as begetter of Biting. At the conclusion of Portal’s account, the prime minister stood reflectively contemplating the model. He moved a finger up the cliff, then said – now obviously thinking of German intruders upon Britain’s policies – ‘This is the way they will come, if they come. Up and over the cliffs. Just where we least expect them. Now, about the raids. There must be more of them. Let there be no doubt about that.’ Then the great man bustled out.
Mountbatten and Browning advanced together on Portal, saying in unison, apparently jesting but of course in earnest: ‘More aircraft, more aircraft, more aircraft.’ The chief of air staff presented his unraised hands in mock surrender, smiled and backed away. The warlords filed out, followed by the lesser mortals. A staff car bore C Company’s commander away to his club, where at last he was able to take his deferred bath. He decided that he had enjoyed his hour of rubbing shoulders with the great, and would not mind more of it.
Frost and Euan Charteris received Military Crosses for their night’s work – the latter’s medal obviously acknowledging the significance of his intervention in the defile – while Cox got a Military Medal and CSM Strachan, who miraculously survived his wounds, a Croix de Guerre with Palm. Peter Young and Corporal Sid Jones were mentioned in despatches, while Dennis Vernon was merely commended by Browning in his report. Sgt. David Grieve, who led the downhill charge on Stella Maris, and Sgt. Greg McKenzie, temporary owner of a Luftwaffe wristwatch, both also received the Military Medal.
To paraphrase Alice in Wonderland, amid success it was thought appropriate to assert that everybody had won, and thus that everybody must have prizes. Lt. Cdr. Fred Cook and two of his officers were given the Distinguished Service Cross for ‘daring, skill and seamanship’: nobody saw merit in asking harsh questions about the navy’s almost fatally tardy arrival at the beach, and Frost never declared resentment towards Cook and his subordinates. Wing-Cdr. Charles Pickard was awarded a bar to his DSO, in recognition for his leadership of 51 Squadron on an innovative and highly sensitive mission. A cynic might suggest that it would have been more fitting to give a medal to one of the pilots who landed his paratroopers in the right place. Pickard, however, was an avowed and indeed authentic RAF hero, who featured prominently in the post-Biting newspaper publicity. The air marshals were anxious to see their service receive its share of laurels for the success of the operation, without discrimination about the contributions of individual pilots.
John Ross’s absence from the list of those named for decorations may hint that senior officers were unimpressed that his Nelsons failed for so long to clear the way to the beach, until Charteris appeared. If so, such a judgement was ungenerous: for reasons that were no soldier’s fault, Ross was short of firepower to cross an expanse of open hillside swept by an enemy machine-gun, and to suppress an entrenched and wired German position. Later in the war, he would be decorated for a superb battlefield performance as a company commander. The allocation of ‘gongs’ for the troops who executed Biting was meagre, especially in comparison with the deluge of awards made later in the year for St Nazaire and Dieppe, much larger operations but also far more costly. Frost should rightfully have received a DSO, if any man deserved it for that night’s work. He wrote ruefully: ‘Our ration of gallantry awards … compared unfavourable with those given to the other Services involved, and later to all those taking part in other raids.’
Treatment of the service personnel was less mean-spirited, however, than that which was meted out to Reg Jones. ‘Pug’ Ismay wrote to the Cabinet Office: ‘The Prime Minister wishes Dr Jones to be put forward for a high honour in the next Lists. He mentioned a CB [Companionship of the Bath].’ Churchill restated this proposal in a letter to Sir Archibald Sinclair, Secretary for Air, on 3 April: ‘Dr Jones’s claims in my mind are not based upon the Bruneval raid but upon the magnificent prescience and comprehension by which in 1940 he did far more to save us from disaster’ – by identifying the Luftwaffe’s navigational beams – ‘than many who are glittering with trinkets. The Bruneval raid merely emphasized and confirmed his earlier services. I propose to recommend him for a CB.’
Yet this ‘high honour’ failed to materialize, being downgraded by the bureaucracy to a CBE. Lord Cherwell later told Jones that when the proposal came before the Whitehall Honours Committee, the egregious Sir Horace Wilson, head of the civil service and a notorious pre-war appeaser, threatened to resign if such a lofty distinction was conferred upon a recipient graded as a mere scientific officer. The young scientist belatedly received the Companionship of the Bath in 1946, after making many further important contributions to Britain’s ‘boffin war’.
On the morning of 1 March, Charles Cox fulfilled orders to report to the Air Ministry, where he was met with suitable congratulations and granted two weeks’ leave. A WAAF secretary sent a telegram in his name to his home at Wisbech: ‘HOME TONIGHT KILL FATTED CALF’. It was almost midnight when he reached the little house to find four generations of his relations, as well as his wife Violet, gathered around the fire in the lounge. ‘“Hello, family”, I said. “I’ve been in France, that’s where I’ve been, and it’s in the London newspapers tonight. How about that?”’ Although later in the war Cox served in North Africa and Italy, for the rest of his life nothing happened to him as exciting or important as Biting, and we might speculate that this decent, charmingly innocent man did not regret his humdrum fate.
On the afternoon of 2 March, Reg Jones and a colleague drove in the former’s old Wolseley to the Royal Patriotic Schools in Wandsworth, the PoW holding centre in south-west London where Heller, the Luftwaffe radar-operator from Bruneval, was being detained. They spent some hours sitting on the floor of a secluded room with him, reassembling the captured components in accordance with his directions. Heller said that, in his last letter to his wife, he had told her his post was so isolated the English might well make a raid and capture it. Now, he said gloomily, he was wondering if she was a fifth columnist.
Jones wrote in his report: ‘Unfortunately, [Heller] is not very competent’ – the man proved to have spent a significant portion of his service career in detention for assorted offences. After the war, Luftwaffe signals chief General Wolfgang Martini explained to Jones that his branch was granted only a low priority in the allocation of personnel, and thus had been obliged to accept such unsatisfactory recruits as the Bruneval prisoner. Nonetheless, the scientist reported in March 1942, ‘from his description we have been able to gather the salient principles of the method of operation’.
This was, the Luftwaffe man explained to his interrogators, that a Würzburg operator was warned by telephone or broadcast from his paired Freya crew to monitor a given bearing for aircraft which had been detected at long range: ‘A tram-driver’s handle rotates the cabin and bowl … The prisoner related with joy the fact that the Flak batteries in Le Havre fired blindly at an object reported by him to be high in the sky, but which he subsequently saw from his window to be a ship … Nevertheless the station claimed to have participated in the destruction of sixty-four aircraft and two ships, and appropriate silhouettes had been painted in white inside the bowl … The apparatus conforms closely to expectations, being simple in principle, and thoroughly, indeed beautifully, made … Without exception the valves are extremely robustly made and reach a very high standard in every respect.’ In design, as distinct from engineering, however, ‘in some respects, the set lagged British RDF’.
Examination of the captured Würzburg equipment by army radar officers and scientists of the Telecommunications Research Establishment at Worth Matravers confirmed that Cox, Vernon and his sappers had pillaged almost all the set’s key elements. Col. Schonland reported after a conference on 2 March that ‘the equipment brought home is of great value, and the sappers could hardly have done more with a much longer time’. The aerial, cut from the ‘giant mussel’ as the Germans called the set’s bowl, was in the words of Reg Jones’s report to the Air Ministry ‘the simplest possible type’. The transmitter and intermediate frequency amplifier, including a small cathode ray tube, had been captured complete. Only the indicating instruments were lacking, because these had been located in the operator’s cabin, which Cox’s party did not have time to explore. Nonetheless the capture of the set’s operator who, in Jones’s words, ‘has volunteered all possible information … largely compensated for the absence of the indicating instruments’.
Jones concluded his own report by addressing the vital question for the directors of the war effort, and explicitly the RAF’s bomber offensive: what would be the most effective response to the German technology and its tactical employment? ‘It appears at first sight that almost any technical counter-measure would be successful; it is certain that the device of dropping suitable reflectors, such as sheets of tinfoil, would be highly successful against operators of the calibre of the prisoner.’ Here was the origin of the notion of using so-called ‘Window’, dropped from a diversionary force of British aircraft to simulate a major bomber attack, or merely to swamp enemy screens. It was not employed, however, until the August 1943 Battle of Hamburg because of fears that the Luftwaffe, once enlightened, might adopt the same primitive methodology to blind British radar, though in truth the Germans had long understood the potential of ‘Window’.
Reg Jones and the airmen progressively grasped the ‘big picture’ of German electronic defences against the RAF bomber offensive. The Luftwaffe’s General Josef Kammhuber had created around the perimeter of Festung Europa a forward defence of the Reich, based upon a chain of invisible electronic ‘boxes’ – the Germans codenamed them himmelbetten, ‘four-poster beds’ – each some eighteen miles wide, stretching from northern Denmark down the coasts of Holland, Belgium, France. Each box was linked to one Freya and two Würzburg radars, together with a control room fitted with a so-called Seeberg plotting table. As a bomber approached a box, one Würzburg locked onto a British aircraft and plotted its progress, while a second – such as was not installed at Bruneval – tracked an airborne German night-fighter. The controller then directed the hunter by radio-telephone towards convergence with his quarry in the darkness or, at some locations, instead provided ranging data for anti-aircraft batteries or a master searchlight. Each himmelbett could theoretically handle six fighter interceptions an hour.
The system worked. In the winter of 1941–42 it was refined through the progressive introduction of more powerful and accurate ‘Giant Würzburgs’ with twenty-five-foot-diameter perforated dishes around their aerials. At that time, when RAF Bomber Command’s powers and numbers were still limited, this German defensive network represented a strong shield, and was responsible for the loss of many aircraft. Perhaps the most important technological outcome of the Bruneval raid, and of its consequent British identification of the main principles of the Kammhuber Line, was that it revealed to the RAF that a Freya-Würzburg combination could track and pursue only one aircraft at a time. Thus, Bomber Command responded by adopting so-called ‘streaming’ tactics – directing all aircraft of a night’s attacking force through the narrowest possible corridor in the sky in the shortest possible time, to swamp the Germans’ monitoring resources.
Streaming, first employed in May 1942, enjoyed significant success, though it could not save the bomber force from enduring terrible losses. Every aircraft on every sortie was obliged to pass hours forging through the darkness above the continent, offering the defenders repeated opportunities to shoot it down, despite the increasingly formidable array of radar jamming technology deployed by the RAF. Moreover, in the last eighteen months of the war German night-fighters achieved many of their successes by roaming the skies unguided by ground controllers. At a phase of the struggle when the night sky over Europe would often be crowded with hundreds of potential targets, these ‘Wild Boars’ located a bomber through visual sighting or their own short-range aircraft-mounted radar. The pinpointing of a British aircraft frequently signalled its doom. Wild Boar tactics were relatively crude, but inherently impervious to electronic counter-measures. A bomber crew’s eyesight became its best weapon in preserving their lives. Nonetheless, in 1942 all that lay a distance in the future: given that the entire strategic air war represented a deadly tennis match between measure and counter-measure, with the balance shifting every few months or even weeks, capture of the Würzburg endowed the British with an important short-term advantage.
There were further consequences of Bruneval. First, the Germans felt compelled to expend resources on strengthening the defences of every radar installation within reach of raiders. These were encircled with dense barbed-wire entanglements, readily visible to PRU pilots and on the images which their cameras brought home. Therefore, Jones and his colleagues could soon be confident of all Freya-Würzburg locations. At Bruneval, a replacement Würzburg set was re-sited within a single wired compound shared with the two Freya arrays. In April the Gosset château – the Manoir de la Falaise or ‘Lone House’ – was blown up by the Todt Organization, to remove a conspicuous landmark from the Normandy coast. On the debit side, the British were alarmed to recognize that their own Telecommunications Research Establishment, home to the nation’s most closely-guarded electronic secrets, was as vulnerable to enemy raiders in its coastal location outside Swanage as had been Bruneval to C Company. Thus, the TRE was transferred to a new inland base, at Malvern in Worcestershire, where its successor organization remains to this day.
Although John Frost and his men were saluted for their success, the army bureaucracy was remorseless in complaints about the perceived shortcomings of C Company’s fulfilment of its responsibilities. The major wrote wearily: ‘We got into trouble over equipment lost during the operation. We were on a peacetime system of accounting, and it was difficult for some to understand that almost inevitably things go missing in the confusion and flurry of action against a live enemy which includes a hasty evacuation by sea in the dark.’ C Company had abandoned or lost in Normandy most of its useless wirelesses, together with the engineers’ trolleys and other equipment, three Brens, two Stens and eleven rifles, for all of which they were persecuted through weeks of increasingly satirical paper exchanges with uniformed functionaries who had never heard a shot fired in anger. Frost was accused of losing eighteen pairs of binoculars that his men had not even taken to France. The glider pilots’ quartermaster at Tilshead was unwilling to accept that C Company had been in action, even when reading a newspaper that blazoned an account of the raid.
Moreover, Heller, the captured Luftwaffe technician, became in the security of captivity sufficiently truculent to complain about Sgt. McKenzie’s confiscation of his wristwatch. Amazingly the War Office decided to demonstrate that Britain faithfully obeyed the rules of PoW custodianship. Staff contacted C Company and insisted the watch should be returned. Now it was McKenzie’s turn to be the aggrieved party, because he asserted that he had spent five shillings on having the German ‘ticker’ repaired, which nobody offered to refund him.
Six of the seven paratroopers left behind at Bruneval survived the war as prisoners. Following the death of Scott and surrender of McCallum, Willoughby and Thomas on the beach, the Germans, who had found the signaller nearby, breathing his last, drafted the prisoners to carry his body up to the hamlet. Sutherland was discovered in the morning by Paul Delamare, owner of the farm where he had taken refuge, to whom he now introduced himself simply as ‘Tommy! Anglo!’ Soon in agony from his wounds, Sutherland asked Delamare to fetch Germans to whom he could surrender. The farmer duly called soldiers, saying ‘Tommy! Blessé! Ici!’ Both the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht treated the four paratroopers with surprising goodwill and even joviality. The divisional commander, Gen. Stever, quizzed them in English. The men relaxed on finding that they were not to be shot, and Madame Vennier the Beau-Minet’s owner reported: ‘They laughed – seemed excited by their adventure.’
Meanwhile Cornell and Embury walked for several days, receiving a mixed reception from local people and shivering through nights in the woods, before finding Resisters courageous enough to hide them, then to help them attempt to escape. A family named Lechevallier gave them notable assistance before Maurice Lajoye and his partner Madame Regnier, later his wife, guided them first by train to Paris – where, in a notable display of bravado, they were taken to see some of the great tourist sites – and then towards the Vichy Unoccupied Zone. At the last leap, on 9 March 1942 crossing the bridge at Bléré, Indre-et-Loire, a hundred yards short of relative safety, they were arrested and made PoWs. Their heroic guides were dispatched for the remainder of the war respectively to Buchenwald and Ravensbrück concentration camps, from which they returned broken in health.
The only French people to profit from the Bruneval raid were young farm boys who found and secreted a parachute discarded by C Company, from which they fashioned silk shirts, re-dyed in blue, that became the envy of the neighbourhood.
2 THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE
On 1 August 1942 a decree was promulgated from the War Office that Britain’s airborne infantry should thenceforward assume membership of a new Parachute Regiment, of which Bruneval was later declared to have been the first battle honour. Soon afterwards these soldiers were ordered to forsake their former unit headgear and adopt maroon berets. The ‘paras’ became, as they remain to this day, one of the most celebrated elite elements of the British Army.
More than a few of those who participated in Biting died on later Airborne battlefields, notably including Tunisia, Sicily and Arnhem. Frost’s 2 Para, of which he assumed battalion command in November 1942, fought through the North-West Africa campaign in which Sgt. David Grieve MM perished, aged twenty-eight, among sixteen officers and 250 other ranks who became casualties.
Another of the dead was Euan Charteris, killed on 3 December, aged twenty-one, after being dispatched on a mission to British lines from the encircled battalion, of which he was then intelligence officer. He was one of three brothers, all of whom served in the wartime army. It is unlikely that they were then aware of the controversial reputation of their father, because only after the Second World War was Brigadier John Charteris’s key role as Field-Marshal Earl Haig’s 1914–18 intelligence chief subjected to critical scrutiny by historians, himself exposed as a prime mover in some of Haig’s bloodiest blunders. In all probability, the Charteris boys knew their father only as a much-decorated soldier, whom they should aspire to live up to. Assured it is that Euan was a remarkably courageous young man and imaginative leader, whose role in Biting was critical. John Frost felt his loss keenly, especially because he believed the Tunisian deployment to have been a waste of expensively-trained airborne soldiers, there squandered as cannon fodder. Meanwhile Sgt. Johnny Boyd, hit in the foot at Bruneval, was killed especially cruelly, not by Germans but instead by Greek communists in Athens in January 1945, when the war’s ending was within sight.
Other prominent contributors to Biting also fell: Tony Hill, the photo-reconnaissance pilot who captured the first identifiable images of the Bruneval Würzburg, was fatally injured during a sortie over the Le Creusot works, dying in a French hospital on 12 November 1942. Reg Jones wrote: ‘I felt his loss more than any other in the whole war.’ Air Commodore Sir Nigel Norman, who directed the RAF element of Biting, was killed as a passenger in an aircraft take-off crash in May 1943, aged forty-two. Sgt. John Pohe, the 51 Squadron Maori who dropped Dave Grieve south of Bruneval, was later shot down and became a PoW. He participated in the March 1944 Great Escape from Stalag Luft III, and would be one of fifty recaptured prisoners executed in cold blood by the Germans, as deterrent examples to others.
Gen. Charles de Gaulle said to an intimate, André Gillois, after France’s liberation: ‘Between ourselves, the Resistance is a bluff which has succeeded.’ On 8 April 1942 a memo from the War Office’s director of military intelligence to Sir Stewart Menzies, chief of MI6, observed: ‘The report from “Rémy” on the enemy deployments [at Bruneval] was a remarkable document and contained information of the highest value, such as we seldom obtain.’ Rémy himself, exultant on learning of the success of the raid while he was in London, dispatched a personal signal of congratulations to Pol – Roger Dumont – the agent who had travelled to Bruneval and probed its defences. Rémy’s message, drafted in his room at the Waldorf Hotel after a sybaritic lunch at the famous Écu de France restaurant, read: ‘TO PACO FOR POL CONGRATULATIONS SUCCESS BRUNEVAL WHICH HAS RESULTED DESTRUCTION IMPORTANT GERMAN INSTALLATION WHILE TAKING AND KILLING NUMEROUS BOCHE.’
This signal was decrypted by the Germans a few weeks later – Gaullist BCRA codes were notoriously vulnerable – and proved to be Pol’s death warrant. Its sentiments were richly justified, but the message should never have been sent. It precipitated Roger Dumont’s arrest, and eventual execution by firing squad at Mont-Valérien on 13 May 1943. He wrote to his family an hour before his death: ‘All that I have done I have done as a Frenchman. I regret nothing.’ Elsewhere, Rémy’s mother and three of his sisters suffered a long imprisonment in Fresnes, while three other sisters were deported to the female concentration camp of Ravensbrück. They were liberated at the end of the war, but Rémy’s brother Philippe, also deported, was killed in Lübeck Harbour days before the British Army arrived there in April 1945.
Charles Pickard once recalled the lines famous among his kind, from Kipling’s 1919 poem entitled ‘R.A.F. (Aged Eighteen)’: Laughing through clouds, his milk-teeth still unshed/Cities and men he smote from overhead./His deaths delivered, he returned to play/Childlike, with childish things now put away. Following Bruneval, Pick and the other aircrew of 51 Squadron returned to bomber operations from their base at Dishforth in Yorkshire, where they played a favourite after-dinner game in the officers’ mess. The CO was hoisted upside down to plant soot-smeared footprints on the walls and ceiling as his pilots roared with alcoholic laughter. Pickard was obliged to explain the joke and the footprints when George VI visited the squadron a few weeks later. The king also witnessed a demonstration parachute drop by men of 3 Para, and Johnny Frost was presented to him.
Pick met his own almost inevitable death on 18 February 1944, when leading a sortie which garnered both fame and controversy, dubbed after the event as Operation Jericho. Nineteen twin-engined RAF Mosquito light bombers, escorted by Typhoon fighters, sought to liberate French Resistance prisoners held in Amiens prison. The attack required extraordinary aiming precision, to demolish the wall without killing the captives. In the event, of 832 prisoners in the jail 102 would be fatal victims of the bombs, a further seventy-four were wounded, while 258 escaped, of whom seventy-four were political prisoners or members of the Resistance. Pickard, who was designated as airborne controller, was ‘bounced’ by a German FW 190 fighter, from which cannon fire tore off the tail of his Mosquito. F-Freddie plunged into the ground ten miles north of Amiens, immolating Pickard, together with his devoted comrade and navigator Alan Broadley. Pick’s widow Dorothy returned to Africa after the war and eventually died in Rhodesia in 1999. Their son Nick became a successful musician with his own sound studio, dying in 2009.
Jericho almost certainly cost more lives than it saved. Nobody, including the French Resistance and SOE, ever admitted to requesting such a rescue mission, a hare-brained conception comparable with Gen. George Patton’s March 1945 dispatch of a US armoured column to liberate his own son-in-law from Hammelburg PoW camp, which likewise precipitated a bloodbath. Moreover, of those who escaped from Amiens two-thirds were soon recaptured by the Germans. The RAF did not initiate Jericho, so presumably the proposal came from an unidentified element of the secret world, which afterwards found it prudent to keep silent. It was tragic that Pickard, after surviving so much, should have been permitted as a group-captain to assume airborne command of such an operation. Like so many wartime stars, however, he had come to know no other life. He invited such a death, almost exactly two years after Bruneval.
Others lived, to share in victory. CSM Strachan remained on a hospital danger list for weeks, but eventually regained sufficient of his health to return to 2 Para in August 1943 as its regimental sergeant-major, the triumph of an iron Scottish will over a grievously damaged body. He later dropped into Arnhem, was again hit, and spent the last months of the war as a PoW before rejoining his old regiment, the Black Watch. Strachan’s Bruneval wounds continued to trouble him, though, and were responsible for his sudden death following surgery in 1948, aged forty-two, leaving a widow, Ivy, an army cook whom he had married five years earlier, and two small children.
Lt. John Timothy finished the war as a major with three Military Crosses, thus becoming one of the most decorated officers in airborne forces. His wartime adventures after Bruneval would fill a considerable volume. On leaving the army he returned to Marks & Spencer, for whom he had worked until 1940: for seven years he managed its Wakefield branch. He retired in 1973, never married, and died in 2011.
Charles Cox richly deserved not only the Military Medal which he was awarded for Biting, but his good fortune in living happily ever after. When the war ended he started a little electrical shop and survived until 1997. He was salt of the earth.
Peter ‘Walker’, or rather Nagel, the interpreter who served Frost so well at Bruneval, performed the same role on the St Nazaire raid, but was less lucky. He was captured by the Germans and spent the rest of the war as a PoW, though he preserved an identity as an infantryman named Walker. Nagel died in 1983, aged sixty-seven.
Bren-gunner Charlie Branwhite was reunited with his three children only in 1946, four years after the death of their mother, his wife Helen. Pte. Eric Freeman became one of Nottingham’s senior magistrates. Pte. Frank Embury, one of those left behind, who endured more than three years as a PoW, returned to his home town of Stoke-on-Trent, married and became a father of twins; found work first in a local abattoir, then in a pottery factory, before dying in 1987. His son says that he seldom spoke about his wartime odyssey, or perhaps nightmare.
The adventures of Tom Hill’s mate Tom Laughland, a Glaswegian corporal who served in Charteris’s Nelson section, had scarcely begun at Bruneval. He fought until captured in North Africa; escaped in Italy to rejoin 2 Para, dropped into Arnhem, where he was again captured at the bridge. After the war he completed a bricklaying apprenticeship, travelled widely before retiring to Scotland. In 2012 he celebrated forty years of marriage, finally dying aged ninety-three.
John Ross received a DSO following a December 1942 North African battle in which the company of 2 Para that he commanded was reduced to five men. He also later received an MBE, for his fine conduct in the German PoW camp where he spent almost two years, after being captured in Sicily. He became a post-war solicitor in Dundee and a deputy lord-lieutenant of Tayside, living until 1993.
Dennis Vernon finished the war as a major with a Military Cross, after surviving much action with airborne forces in North Africa and Italy. On being demobbed, he resumed his career as a civil engineer, ‘prospering without any fuss or bother, in peace as in war’, according to George Millar when they met.
Peter Naoumoff was captured in North Africa, and remained a PoW in Germany until he was liberated almost three years later. Returned to civilian life, he worked extensively abroad and died in 1986, aged sixty-five.
Lt. Cdr. Fred Cook returned to his native land in 1943, to direct the Australian Navy’s embryo amphibious training centre. Mountbatten became a godfather to his son, born after the war, and Cook continued to serve until he retired as a captain in 1960. The naval commander of Biting died in 1985.
Charles Chauveau, the motor dealer who had accompanied Roger Dumont to reconnoitre Bruneval, escaped German vengeance and sustained his role in Resistance until the liberation. By a sad irony, however, his garage business in Le Havre was destroyed in a 1 April 1942 RAF bombing raid. He died in 1963.
Rémy – Gilbert Renault – somehow survived two further missions in France as a secret agent. His wife Édith and baby son Michel escaped with him to England by sea after the earlier of these, in June 1942. He finally quit his field role in January 1943, thereafter staying in exile until France’s liberation. Renault proved able to overcome the strictures, indeed fierce criticisms, of some former Resistance comrades, notably Pierre Brossolette, to become a nationally recognized hero. Later, however, he went spectacularly politically astray. He revived his old monarchist enthusiasm, and broke with de Gaulle over the latter’s unwillingness to pardon Marshal Pétain, in the cause of national reconciliation. Renault died in 1984, aged eighty, having made himself a highly controversial, contrarian figure. Historian Sébastien Albertelli has written that Rémy was ‘the principal creator of his own legend through his prolific [post-war] literary output’. Yet there was substance in that legend, to which the triumph of Operation Biting made a substantial contribution.
Reg Jones was appointed in 1946 to the chair of natural philosophy at Aberdeen University, a role in which he specialized in improving the precision of scientific instruments. He briefly returned to intelligence under the 1951–55 Churchill government, but was unable to work comfortably with the peacetime secret services, most of whose senior personnel were conspicuously less gifted than himself. Jones’s daughter Susan earned fame in her own right when she was three times crowned Miss Scotland in national beauty pageants, while also gaining a degree in mathematics at Aberdeen.
Publication of R.V. Jones’s 1978 memoir Most Secret War made him belatedly a national figure. In 1994 he became a Companion of Honour, though he was never honoured by Oxford or Cambridge universities. The CIA created a special intelligence award in his name, of which in 1993 he was the first recipient. James Woolsey, the agency director responsible, said in expressing his own admiration for Jones: ‘He did not have any trouble speaking truth to power. He didn’t know any other way. This may be one of the reasons he was formally unrecognized [in his own country] for so long.’ Jones died in 1997, aged eighty-six.
As for Johnny Frost, C Company’s commander survived not only the bitter fighting in North Africa but also the bloody Sicilian campaign, in which the Parachute Regiment suffered terribly. Thereafter, at Arnhem Frost secured immortality, holding positions at the north end of the bridge through three days and nights before he and his men were obliged to surrender by losses, his own wounds and the exhaustion of their ammunition. After seven months in captivity, he returned home, having been one of a tiny handful of men who participated in all four of 1st Airborne Division’s major operational drops. In 1947 he married Jean Lyle, whom he had first met during the war, and encountered again in Palestine where she was shot and wounded by a terrorist of the Stern Gang while working for the Women’s Voluntary Service, and Frost was serving with his unit. The couple had two children, Hugo and Caroline, and after leaving the army as a major-general in 1962 he took to farming. He was urged to stand as a Conservative candidate for Parliament, but his wife sternly and surely wisely vetoed the idea. Instead, well into middle age he rode a 400cc Suzuki motorbike, and avidly consumed books of military history.
Frost died in 1993, aged eighty-one. Although one of Britain’s most famous wartime soldiers, he once confided how grateful he was never to have been considered for a VC, because he witnessed the lifelong unhappiness, and even guilt, that such a distinction could confer upon the Cross’s recipients. Few men better deserved their happy and fulfilled later lives than did Frost. He was no Wellington nor even Montgomery, but instead the best sort of British professional soldier – brave, effective, inspirational, absolutely committed to the fulfilment of any mission to which he pledged himself.
One of the last surviving Bruneval airborne veterans, Corporal Tom Hill who had dropped with Euan Charteris, died in March 2014.
Operation Biting, second jump into action – after the Tragino aqueduct – by Britain’s embryo airborne forces, as well as being only the second significant raid mounted under the auspices of the Combined Operations Command, might be described as a series of small miracles, such as are seldom granted to those committed to any act of war. The first was that Rémy’s agents were able to visit Upper Normandy; secure accurate intelligence about the defences around the Würzburg site; then return to Paris and report this to London, without being captured or their purpose divined by the Germans.
Gliders would have been far better suited to landing a concentrated force to execute Biting, but given their operational unreadiness in February 1942, it is remarkable that eight and a half of the twelve ‘sticks’ that comprised Frost’s company were dropped by parachute in darkness in the right place. The Whitley pilots were assisted by their objective’s proximity to the coast, so that in moonlight it was relatively easy to identify landmarks. Consider the consequences had Frost, Cox and Vernon been dropped where Charteris, Reid, Grieve and their men found themselves, as chance might easily have decreed: the assault would have been doomed. There was also no wind to blow the jumpers off course, once their canopies deployed. Largely thanks to the snow cushion, no paratroopers suffered jump injuries. Donald Peveler, one of Pickard’s flight commanders, wrote later that such an operation properly demanded visual beacons to mark the landing zone.
Most important of all, though many Germans witnessed C Company descending from the sky over Normandy, their superiors were amazingly slow to do anything effective about it. The winter weather contributed significantly to the difficulties of moving reinforcements to Bruneval, but so did infirmity of command. Whereas Mountbatten received bouquets, across the Channel his cousin Captain Prince Alexander-Ferdinand von Preussen, commanding the Luftwaffe’s 23 Flugmelde responsible for the radar sites, was formally reprimanded by his superiors for unauthorized absence from his post of duty on the night of 27/28 February. In a photograph of him taken next day in Étretat with three British prisoners the prince, back from Paris, appears relaxed and cheerful, but on 7 March he was dismissed from his command. He survived the war, dying in 1985, though youthful hopes went unfulfilled that his own early support for Hitler might induce the latter to make him a new kaiser.
Among humbler defenders of Bruneval, the Luftwaffe’s Ruben, Meiser, Deckert and Ermoneit received Iron Crosses, second class. The army’s investigator, a general, produced an extraordinary whitewash report on the British raid, asserting that everybody on the German side had fulfilled their duties as expected: ‘The troops did everything in their powers to prevent the enemy from executing their mission … I expressed my complete satisfaction that the division totally fulfilled its responsibilities.’ Col. von Eisenhart-Rothe, the 685th’s regimental commander, was soon afterwards promoted to brigadier-general, but Gen. Joachim Stever, the 336th’s divisional commander, was sacked. Less than three months later the formation was redeployed to the Eastern Front, where it fought until finally destroyed at Sevastopol in May 1944. Many of those in its ranks who had been stationed around Bruneval in February 1942 never came home from Russia – no more was ever heard of Sgt. Treinies, who had stubbornly defended Stella Maris, nor of the ineffectual Lt. Huhne. There is no record of any Wehrmacht decorations being awarded for the defence of Bruneval.
The worst consequence of Biting was that it gave Britain’s warlords, notably Browning, Mountbatten and their staffs, an inflated notion of their ability to breach the walls of Festung Europa, and an insouciance about the powers of the enemy to frustrate them. Amid the exhilaration of success, there is scant evidence in the written reports of hard questions being posed about the muddle of the drop, C Company’s near-fatal sluggishness in breaking through to the beach, the indifferent showing of the navy – and thus, how near the operation came to failure.
The Bruneval plan devised in Richmond Terrace by Casa Maury and Hughes-Hallett assumed that Fred Cook’s landing-craft could cross the Channel in both directions, very slowly, while between passages the raiders conducted a three-hour land battle, without the enemy intervening, even after the evacuation. This indeed proved the case on 28 February, but would never happen again. Even Reg Jones and his staff displayed naivety, by inviting Dennis Vernon to take flashlight photographs while under enemy fire. Meanwhile, the hour-long resistance mounted by the handful of Germans at Beach Fort – the villa Stella Maris – showed what havoc the enemy might have wrought had the soldiers billeted in Bruneval responded to the 0025 alarm by manning the pillboxes which the paratroopers found empty, instead of hastening in the opposite direction towards Hill 102, the higher ground east of the hamlet. The absence of any senior army officer from the locality probably went far to explain the confused reactions. It was as unlikely that in a single night all these elements of good fortune should have favoured the British, as that John Frost should have drawn four aces in a mess poker game.
The success of Bruneval caused airborne forces, and explicitly Browning, to assume the principle held good that it was acceptable to land parachute attackers at a significant distance from their objectives, to achieve a tidy drop. Here again, on 28 February 1942 C Company enjoyed a success never repeated, by securing surprise in overrunning the Würzburg site, despite having been seen landing forty-five minutes earlier, more than half a mile away. At Arnhem in September 1944, Browning embraced the plan for 1st Airborne Division to land early in the afternoon between five and eight miles from the vital bridge for which the British came, to please the RAF who were apprehensive about enemy flak closer to the objective. A despairing Polish Maj. Gen. Stanisław Sosabowski appealed against the madness of such a course, exclaiming in the midst of its exposition: ‘But the Germans, general … The Germans!’, only to be mocked.
On the day of the Arnhem drop the men of 2 Para, commanded by Frost, did not approach their objective until 2000, by which time the Germans – unsurprisingly to anyone save Browning and his staff – had secured the Rhine bridge, and defied all subsequent efforts to dislodge them. Frost and his gallant but doomed battalion were thereafter confined to the north bank, a stepping-stone to nowhere. In fairness to Browning, foremost blame for the Arnhem disaster lies with his superiors – Montgomery, the American Lewis Brereton and the RAF chiefs who imposed an impossibly flawed air plan – but Browning was the man in charge on the day.
With the exception of Bruneval, all the most brilliant airborne successes of the war were coups de main achieved by landing men on top of their objectives – the Luftwaffe operation at Eben Emael in 1940; German commandos’ rescue of Mussolini from captivity on the Gran Sasso mountaintop in September 1943; and the 5 June 1944 British descent on Normandy’s Caen canal bridge. It is notable that all these successes were achieved by troops delivered in gliders – precursors of modern helicopter-borne assaults – rather than by parachutists. The only slender chance of success for the 1944 Market Garden objective of securing a Rhine crossing would have lain in accepting the losses inescapable if some American and British gliderborne troops or even parachutists had been landed immediately alongside the Dutch bridges – in the midst of Arnhem, Nijmegen and other crossings – instead of miles away. Such a tactic would, in the end, almost certainly have proved far cheaper in lives.
Arnhem, which made Frost a legend portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in the film A Bridge Too Far, destroyed the reputation of ‘Boy’ Browning in the eyes of almost all those who knew the inside story of what took place. There was the poor planning; Browning’s strained relations with his American counterparts, especially the great Maj. Gen. Jim Gavin, who thought him a posturing caricature of an English gentleman and wrote in his diary: ‘[Browning] unquestionably lacks the standing, influence and judgement that comes with a proper troop experience … His staff was superficial … [British senior officers] never get down into the dirt and learn the hard way.’
Then there was the misjudged appointment of Roy Urquhart, who lacked experience of parachute warfare, to command 1st Airborne; Browning’s own subsequent failure to ‘grip’ the battle – to respond swiftly to the unfolding calamity which destroyed half his command. John Frost also deplored the decision to launch Operation Market Garden in daylight: experience at Bruneval and elsewhere had convinced him the Germans disliked fighting in darkness, a vulnerability that should have been exploited.
Moreover, many of 1st Airborne’s units had suffered grievously in the Mediterranean fighting, and others were of less impressive quality than those of 6th Airborne, which distinguished itself in Normandy. Above all, in the eyes of insiders, there was Browning’s obsessive determination to lead into battle a sky army such as he had striven since 1941 to bring into being; to earn for himself the laurels for which he yearned, after five years of war in which he had never led troops in action. This hunger caused him recklessly to dismiss the overwhelming intelligence evidence of a strong German armoured presence at Arnhem such as must spell doom to Airborne troops almost bereft of mobility and heavy weapons, and to commit his divisions to a project which, from the outset, most of his subordinates thought misconceived.*
Today Browning’s reputation has arguably fallen too low. He devoted himself single-mindedly to transforming the embryo battalions of the early war years into the large parachute forces which Britain possessed by 1944. The success achieved by 6th Airborne Division on D-Day and in the weeks that followed should be cast in the balance of Browning’s record against the disaster at Arnhem. He was an efficient, forceful manager, whose misfortune it was to fail the decisive test of a wartime general: that of high command in battle. He yearned to prove himself at the head of fighting men and when he did so, was found wanting. Ismay – the scepticism of the prime minister’s chief of staff being perhaps surprising – described Browning as ‘a first-class leader, but as wild and disorganized as Mountbatten’.
After the war Browning left the army and became private secretary to Princess Elizabeth, remaining in her service at Buckingham Palace when she ascended the throne in 1952. She and her husband Prince Philip esteemed him as some of his fellow soldiers did not. The general experienced persistent difficulties with alcohol abuse, and was obliged to retire from royal service after suffering a nervous breakdown. He was never a man at ease with himself, yet his marriage to Daphne du Maurier survived and even, in its peculiar fashion, prospered. She grieved deeply when he died in 1965.
Mountbatten was more fortunate. On 2 March 1942 he sent a note to the prime minister, emphasizing the role in Biting of his polo chum ‘Bobby’ the marquis: ‘The plan for this operation was devised by Wing-Commander Casa Maury, and submitted on January 1.’ Two days after this missive Churchill, still basking in the afterglow from Biting, summoned Mountbatten and told him he was to assume the enhanced title of Chief of Combined Operations and join the Chiefs of Staff Committee, with the acting ranks of vice-admiral, lieutenant-general and air marshal.
Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, First Sea Lord and chairman of the Chiefs, was so appalled by this elevation that he wrote at length to Churchill, saying he feared it might not enjoy the support of the navy: ‘I am afraid I feel so strongly that it is wrong that I cannot shoulder this responsibility.’ Pound disliked even more the alternative, that people might reach the correct conclusion – that the appointment was made against his advice, which must weaken his authority. Worse, Mountbatten could be thought to have secured his advancement because of his royal blood. ‘Apart from the above, the Service will not understand a junior Captain in a shore appointment [emphasis in original] being given three steps in rank.’
The prime minister dismissed not only Pound’s strictures, but also the objections of Alan Brooke and others. The appointment was duly made. There was rejoicing only among Mountbatten’s courtiers in Combined Ops, notably including ‘Jock’ Hughes-Hallett, the naval officer later held responsible for much of what went wrong with the August 1942 Dieppe raid, who said: ‘My own reaction was one of exhilaration, almost exultation. At one stride our organisation had penetrated the very centre and citadel of power.’ Cabinet minister Leo Amery believed the appointment presaged Mountbatten’s eventual promotion to run the Chiefs of Staff Committee.
Amery proved mistaken – Alan Brooke assumed the chairmanship in succession to Pound – but the politician’s view reflected the prevailing mood in Whitehall. Mountbatten was a rising star in the only firmament that mattered, that of the PM, and a lot of important and sensible people did not like it. Brooke wrote that he and his colleagues were always filled with trepidation when it was known that Mountbatten was to visit Chequers and bend the prime minister’s ear: ‘There was no knowing what discussions he might be led into … and let us in for.’ When Lord Louis as CCO consequently attended the Chiefs of Staff Committee and reported on his weekend discussions with the prime minister, there were sometimes unpleasant surprises.
Combined Operations never again secured such an undisputed success as that achieved at Bruneval. A month later, on 28 March 1942, Mountbatten’s command presided over a much more ambitious attack on the port of St Nazaire. This succeeded in its objective, blocking the dry-dock’s lock gates to prevent their use by German capital ships. But the defenders from the outset harrowed British attacking vessels with fire. Losses were heavy – of 622 soldiers and sailors committed, 168 were killed and 210 taken prisoner. Doubts persist about how much the lock mattered to the German naval war effort, though they expended substantial effort on its repair. The award of five Victoria Crosses to participants, dead and alive, was believed by cynics† to have been intended to assuage the grief caused in a bloody shambles, by identifying candidates for glory.
Much worse was the calamity at Dieppe in August, for which to this day nobody has identified a credible purpose, save that the seaside resort was quite wrongly judged vulnerable to attack. Of six thousand men committed, most of them Canadian, 980 died and over two thousand became prisoners. Mountbatten’s sponsorship of Dieppe, which killed many good men, should have damaged his reputation much more gravely than it did, had it not seemed at the time to be in the national interest to shield from blame a certified hero. If Mountbatten had been disgraced, his principal sponsor, the prime minister, must also have been tarnished.
Thereafter, as the Allied war effort turned towards major amphibious landings in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, France, raiding went out of fashion. Its principal purpose – to sustain an impression or illusion of momentum in Britain’s struggling war effort – became redundant, as huge operations supplanted gestures. Combined Operations, and Mountbatten himself, could claim to have played a part in identifying the difficulties and addressing the challenges posed by amphibious landings, but the principal players in the raiding game were gamblers, entrusted by the prime minister with the lives of men as stake money.
Bruneval remained unique, as an operation which received indispensable assistance from German lassitude and incompetence. Never again would the enemy prove so obliging. At both St Nazaire and Dieppe, local forces showed what havoc energetic defenders could inflict upon seaborne invaders. Both bloodbaths had a profound psychological impact on planning for D-Day in Normandy. These 1942 demonstrations of how amphibious assaults should not be done caused 1944 commanders and their staffs to make the most meticulous preparations, and to concentrate overwhelming force, to ensure success.
Mountbatten and his colleagues in Richmond Terrace could assert with justice that for Operation Overlord resources were made available to the Allies which simply did not exist two years earlier. Moreover, much that went wrong in early combined operations reflected not merely commanders’ and planners’ misjudgements, but also wider institutional failures in the British armed forces that were much mitigated by the time of D-Day. Nonetheless Mountbatten did foolish things for which he was fortunate to secure forgiveness – Churchill shipped his favourite east to become Supreme Commander in South-East Asia before his shortcomings as CCO had become widely known. Such Richmond Terrace acolytes as the Marquis de Casa Maury vanished from the counsels of the great.
Mountbatten in his new role achieved considerable success not as an operational warlord, which he never was, but instead as maître d’ for Britain’s floundering Asian war effort, a figurehead function to which his talents were well suited. He provided an infusion of glamour in a theatre that badly needed it. In the wake of Arnhem, ‘Boy’ Browning was dispatched to become his chief of staff at the supreme commander’s enormous headquarters in Ceylon, modern Sri Lanka, a droll final wartime pairing for the two principal conductors of Biting.
Mountbatten subsequently held naval commands before becoming in 1947 the last viceroy of India, and later First Sea Lord and chief of defence staff. As Admiral of the Fleet Earl Mountbatten of Burma, in 1979 he was murdered by the IRA off the coast from his home in the west of Ireland. His career had always tottered only narrowly on the credit side of absurdity, but his end possessed a tragic sort of dignity that must have gratified him. He performed best in roles which required showmanship. As Chief of Combined Operations in 1942, he endowed the post with an energy which was serviceable, though he was unsuited to bear responsibility for the execution of naval and military operations. He parlayed plausibility, royal connections and public popularity to rise ever higher, despite the failures with which he had been associated. Noel Coward had much to answer for, in making Mountbatten a celebrity, through In Which We Serve. After it was showered with American awards, including a special Oscar for Coward, and beat Casablanca to become the New York Critic Circle’s Best Film, its real-life star became almost unsackable.
Charles Carrington, who was not given to extravagant praise of any portion of Britain’s war effort in either of the great conflicts in which he participated, afterwards described Biting as ‘the most successful combined operation, both in its planning and execution, that I have seen in ten years of active service’. The Germans agreed, acknowledging in their after-action report: ‘The operation of the commandos was well-planned and executed with great daring … The British displayed exemplary discipline when under fire. Although attacked by German soldiers they concentrated entirely on their primary task. For a full thirty minutes one group did not fire a shot, then suddenly at the sound of a whistle they went into action.’ Long after the war, Mountbatten was enchanted to receive a letter from fallschirmjäger commander Gen. Kurt Student, who said that he had been watching the great man’s television autobiography, in which he claimed personal credit for conceiving the Bruneval assault. The German officer applauded, and said he could confirm that ‘the successful execution by Major Frost sent a great shock through Hitler’s headquarters’.
C Company’s mission had a clear, limited objective, as less successful later raids did not. John Frost lamented that never again did Britain’s warlords organize a company-strength ‘party’ on the modest scale of Bruneval – preferring larger and grander schemes, wherein whole brigades or even divisions were engaged, with far less impressive results. A historic lesson about special forces, now as then, is that they should remain special, and thus small. In the course of the war, and not least because of the apparently interminable four-year intermission between Dunkirk in May 1940 and D-Day in June 1944, many of the ‘private armies’ which Churchill encouraged at the conflict’s outset were permitted to balloon beyond their rightful functions or usefulness, and to continue in being after their original roles had become redundant. This applied to Commandos, the Special Air Service, the Long Range Desert Group. Brooke wrote after the war: ‘I remained convinced … that the commandos should never have been divorced from the army in the way they were. Each division should have been responsible for maintaining a battle patrol capable of any commando work that might be asked of it.’
Though Brooke was more enthusiastic about airborne forces, arguments also persisted about the scale and rightful employment of these. For all the glamour associated with winged warfare, lack of mobility and heavy weapons imposed chronic limitations, if airborne formations were obliged to engage in sustained combat. Massed parachute drops enjoyed barely a quarter-century of prominence in the mainstream of armies, before silk canopies were supplanted by helicopters as the principal instruments for transporting soldiers by air into battle. It was a distinguished wearer of the maroon beret and survivor of Arnhem, Col. Geoffrey Powell, who later expressed a personal conviction that the British Army in North-West Europe should have used the bold and eager volunteers who formed the parachute formations to stiffen its line units. ‘Eisenhower would have been better served in the autumn of 1944 by another half-dozen infantry or armoured divisions … than by First Allied Airborne Army … It is not easy to justify the scarce resources which the Americans and the British devoted to their fine airborne forces, and to the aircraft which flew them into battle.’
Back in February 1942, however, the Bruneval raid offered Britain’s novice paratroopers an outstanding, almost unique opportunity to demonstrate the potency of surprise assault from the sky. When the prospect facing Britain was still so grim, it was a great thing for the nation’s war effort that such eager warriors as Johnny Frost and his men, together with Reg Jones, Rémy, Roger Dumont, Charles Pickard, Charles Cox and the other remarkable personalities who played their parts, were at hand to conceive and execute a brilliant little coup which lifted the spirits of Churchill’s people, and impressed their enemies as had few actions of the British Army since the onset of war.
* The author has addressed the Arnhem story at length in Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944–45 (Macmillan 2004).
† Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris in 1977 forcefully expressed to the author his contempt for the St Nazaire decorations list, as an example of the Royal Navy’s ill-judged self-promotion.