My first debts are to my splendid publishers HarperCollins in London and New York, and especially to Arabella Pike and Iain Hunt. My agent Andrew Wylie has provided staunch support as always. Most of my research for Biting has been carried out at the National Archives, the Imperial War Museum and the Airborne Assault Museum at Duxford, where Ben Hill and Jon Baker have been especially helpful. For a professional historian, it means much to be able to consult named individuals such as themselves at a given institution, as is no longer possible at the National Archives.
I am indebted to Tim Carson for giving me access to Manor Farm in Wiltshire, where his family has lived for the best part of two centuries and on the heights of which C Company trained before Operation Biting, when it was quartered at Tilshead, and to his brother David who contributed useful fragments of local information about Alton Priors in wartime. I exchanged very helpful emails with Major-General Ashley Truluck about the detail of that training programme, and also had a wonderfully fruitful email conversation with the expert battlefield guide Col. Paul Oldfield, who has made a close study of Bruneval. I am especially grateful to him for reading and commenting upon my draft MS, to which he has provided significant corrections. In October 2023 we shared a delightful outing to Alton Priors, to walk the ground scrambled over by C Company eighty-one years earlier.
Caroline Jones, archivist of Wellington College, most kindly found me material and photos of Euan Charteris. Hugo Frost was generous in giving me his time, to recall memories of his splendid father.
I must again emphasize my debt to the 2012 book Raid de Bruneval: Mystères et vérités by Alain Millet and Nicolas Bucourt, which offers all manner of fascinating facts and insights, based on the latter’s almost lifelong study of the raid. With a few exceptions, I have accepted their version of most of the night’s events, and especially of the routes taken across country by elements of C Company which landed short of the dropping zone, though of course some of this must remain speculative.
My secretary Rachel Lawrence remains the pillar of support which she has provided for most of the past thirty-seven years, and my wife Penny is the rock upon which everything in my life rests, not least the commitment to keep writing books in my seventy-ninth year.