A conversation took place during the small hours of 26 October 1941 between Winston Churchill and General Sir Alan Brooke, for the convenience of the nocturnal prime minister, though inconvenience of his diurnal companion. Churchill observed that a man’s life is akin to a walk down a long passage with closed windows on either side: ‘As you reach each window, an unknown hand opens it and the light it lets in only increases by contrast the darkness of the end of the passage.’ In those bad days of the Second World War – and ahead of Pearl Harbor, they were still almost unremittingly bleak for Britain – even the prime minister with his passion for offensive action could identify scant opportunities for initiating big operations against the Axis. The ‘end of the passage’ – the path to Allied victory – remained opaque. Four days after Churchill’s remark to Brooke, he felt obliged to write to Gen. Sir Claude Auchinleck in Cairo that ‘Whipcord’, a plan to invade Sicily, must be abandoned as ‘beyond the compass of our stride’.
The greatest conflict in human history was not conducted at an even tenor of ferocity, anguish, sacrifice. In every belligerent society with the possible exception of Russia, there were lulls in the slaughter – significant periods when nothing momentous took place. The term Phoney War was coined to describe the period between September 1939 and April 1940, when the French and German armies, together with a relatively small British Expeditionary Force, confronted each other in passivity. But there were other ‘phoney wars’ later, when not much happened, measured against the standard of Stalingrad ’42 or Normandy ’44.
Following 1940 defeat in France, Britain remained fiercely engaged at sea and in the air. On land, however, while relatively small imperial contingents fought the Germans and Italians in the desert, and thereafter also the Japanese in South-East Asia, most of the British Army was confined to its home islands, rearming and training for a resumption of the continental struggle against major German armies which would not take place until the final year of the war. This did not mean that Britain’s warlords were idle. Alan Brooke, who became Chief of the Imperial General Staff in December 1941, faced the relentless strain inseparable from strategy-making and the new partnership with the United States. Nonetheless many would-be battlefield commanders were left chafing in remote regions of the United Kingdom, eager to engage the foe and exercise the career opportunities that war had opened to them, while having no scope to do so as they merely inspected training, supervised exercises and awaited the deliveries of weapons, vehicles and equipment which alone could fit their formations to fight the Germans or Japanese.
At all costs, however, and being especially mindful of American public opinion, Churchill was insistent that Britain’s home army should not be seen to be entirely idle. He pressed for raids on the continent, pursuing objectives which might fulfil useful purposes, or sometimes attacking targets that had no value at all – they were merely accessible to small amphibious forces. Many generals recoiled from this sort of petty piracy, and on the other side the Wehrmacht declined to bother with it. German doctrine held that wars were won by big battalions, on great battlefields. Hitler’s commanders rejected perceived sideshows and trivia, and so did most of their American counterparts.
Britain’s prime minister, by contrast, loved adventures, whether personal or national. In January 1942, a raid was proposed which promised a genuine prize. The British and Germans were locked in an electronic conflict, to empower their own air forces and frustrate those of the enemy, through ever more potent refinements of radar. New installations had appeared upon the Channel coast of France, which were obviously vital to Hitler’s defences against the RAF’s bombing campaign. Neither aerial reconnaissance nor Ultra decrypts, nor even monitoring of German pulse transmissions, could tell Britain’s ‘boffins’ all that they needed to know about these latest weapons – for radar was, of course, a weapon.
Thus, Scientific Intelligence at the Air Ministry proposed an assault on the German installation at Bruneval,* a wooded hamlet twelve miles north of Le Havre. The burgeoning Combined Operations Command seized on the scheme. It seemed practicable, even allowing for the straitened resources of Britain’s army, navy and air force of those days – ‘within the compass of our stride’, to recall Churchill’s phrase. Bruneval was not far from home, barely ninety miles across the Channel from Portsmouth. A descent on the site promised opportunities to test new men, tactics, weapons, equipment – indeed revolutionary means of making war. Churchill enthused. The chiefs of staff agreed. Plans were made and preparations set in train for a night assault codenamed Biting, to be launched during February’s full moon, which should illuminate the battlefield in a fashion indispensable to success. Engineers would be sent, to dismantle and carry home components of the Würzburg, while a company of the newly-formed 1st Parachute Brigade shielded the treasure-hunters. An assault of this kind was ideally suited to a glider landing, but in January 1942 Britain’s embryo glider force was nowhere near ready to go into action: parachutists must do the job.
In the absence of a British campaign on the continent, such small business consumed the attentions of big men. Later in the war, when the destinies of armies and of nations were disputed daily on vast battlefields, forays on the scale of Bruneval would pass unnoticed in the operations rooms of the great. Men would fight and die in their thousands without much disturbing the digestions of the conflict’s directors. In February 1942, however, when the British and American peoples were being served a relentless diet of defeats, such a venture as Biting assumed a significance attainable only in that time and place. It was as if the floodlights of a great football stadium were turned upon a match played within lines painted over a mere fraction of its turf. Such glamorous figures as Commodore Lord Louis Mountbatten and Maj. Gen. Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning competed for its laurels. The operation later became famous as an early demonstration of the courage and enterprise of the fledgling French Resistance movement, of which Gen. Charles de Gaulle was the inspiration and figurehead.
Biting seemed to me to offer an opportunity not merely to relate a small British triumph, but to set the story in the wider context of the personalities, each fascinating in a different way, from the brilliant Scientific Intelligence officer R.V. Jones, through Mountbatten, Browning, France’s ‘Colonel Rémy’ and his comrades, the RAF’s drop leader Wing-Commander Charles Pickard, airborne forces’ first star Major John Frost, and Flight-Sergeant Charles Cox – a plucky little twenty-eight-year-old radar mechanic who allowed himself to be ‘volunteered’ for the key role in Jones’s technological adventure. All my books aspire to tell ‘people’ stories, because these are what history is about. This one is especially so.
I should begin by paying tribute to my delightful friend the late George Millar, himself a wartime warrior as well as a fine journalist. George authored a 1972 account of Bruneval, enriched by opportunities to conduct personal interviews with some of those who took part, then mostly alive and very much kicking. Mountbatten, still preening himself about Biting, contributed a foreword in which he wrote of how ‘we in Combined Operations pulled off a small but completely successful raid under the noses of the Germans’.
I have drawn significantly on George’s narrative, while also using personal testimonies that are held in the Imperial War Museum archives and at the Airborne Assault Museum at Duxford, together with copious material in the National Archives. Much information is now available, above all the secret military reports, which reposed in files that remained closed when George wrote. Among published sources I should pay special tribute to the 2012 Raid de Bruneval: Mystères et vérités, by Alain Millet and Nicolas Bucourt BEM, which offers a mass of detail about Biting, especially the German side, some of which came new to me. While there are points in it to quibble about, this French account is by far the most comprehensive study by authors on either side of the Channel. In September 2023 Nicolas proved an enchanting and boundlessly knowledgeable guide to Bruneval, which increased my debt to him. It deserves saying that only a personal visit to the scene makes the Biting story fully comprehensible, because no photograph or map can properly reveal the intractability of the terrain, especially on the steep approaches to the evacuation beach.
I am grateful to Julian Jackson and Robert Gildea for identifying to me some notable recent French accounts of wartime Resistance, especially Philippe Kerrand’s 2022 biography L’étrange colonel Rémy, which has been invaluable. I profited from having interviewed in 1980 for my own early book Das Reich some thirty former Résistants, from whom I learned much about wartime France that astonished me, both for good and ill. In Finest Years, I discussed at length Churchill’s enthusiasm for what I dubbed military theatre, a significant element of Britain’s war effort when bigger things were unachievable. In The Secret War, I addressed Resistance across Occupied Europe.
In 2019 soldiers of the modern 2 Para staged a reconstruction of Biting for army instructional purposes. The resulting film, today accessible on YouTube, gives something of the flavour of the action on the night of 27/28 February, though it is marred by the absence of the snow that carpeted Normandy in 1942, and makes little of the blunders and mishaps which took place. These are inseparable from any battle, but an understanding of them is important, to those who seek to grasp the real events behind the Bruneval legend.
Appendix IV, the British analysis of the German technology captured at Bruneval, will be incomprehensible to most readers, as are its details to me, but it seems important to the completeness of the narrative of the raid, for the benefit of techno-cognoscenti.
It may add fractionally to my own credentials as a chronicler that in 1963, as an officer cadet with 10 Para TA, I completed the Parachute Regiment’s basic training and jump course, and mingled with hoary veterans of John Frost’s generation. I became familiar with the weapons used by C Company at Bruneval, and once participated in a 3 Para mass night drop in Cyprus, which convinced me that airborne assault always has been, and always will be, a chancy business. I remember, as if it was yesterday, the moment when the men about to board our RAF Argosy in November twilight were given the sobering warning by our company commander that refusal to jump was a court-martial offence. Almost twenty years later, I served as a shivering spectator at one of 2 Para’s battles in the Falklands war, in which the battalion performed in a fashion that showed its men worthy successors to John Frost and his band. I have seldom felt more privileged than on the night in 1992 when I was among guests at the great dinner in the Guildhall, attended by many veterans of World War II, to celebrate the Parachute Regiment’s fiftieth anniversary. My son once asked to borrow for a fancy dress party my old airborne smock, last worn on marches across East Falkland. He observed, justly enough, that I would never need it again. Nonetheless I declined in the tones of a grumpy old man, saying: ‘That’s not the point.’
The Bruneval raid was a thrilling action that had important consequences. The plan for the attack, conceived by Mountbatten’s and Browning’s staffs, should never have worked. It demanded that the defenders should sleepwalk through the attackers’ Channel crossing; acquiesce relatively passively in the presence for three hours in France of a small, ill-armed force which a serious German counter-attack would have crushed with ease; then indulge the raiders’ slow-motion escape across the Channel, unmolested by the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine. Yet Biting, for some extraordinary reason, defied all the probabilities of disaster, such as befell many other wartime special operations. Its story lifts the spirit, because it is that of ordinary people doing fine and difficult things well. I am a sceptic about the word ‘hero’, daily prostituted in twenty-first-century newspapers: when I served as an editor, people were branded as ‘heroes’ or ‘heroines’ in our pages only with my explicit consent. But those who contributed to the little victory at Bruneval, many of whom were killed later in the conflict even though they survived the night of 27/28 February 1942, were indeed heroes, whom it is a joy to celebrate here.
MAX HASTINGS
Chilton Foliat, West Berkshire, and Datai, Langkawi, Malaysia
November 2023
* Some local people in Normandy are irked that Operation Biting is always linked with Bruneval, when technically both the Freya and Würzburg radars were sited within the village boundaries of La Poterie-Cap d’Antifer. Bruneval is merely the hamlet above the defile leading to the beach, nonetheless its name is now indelibly associated with the 1942 raid, and it seems too late to undo this.