3

Boy

As he traced the defile at Bruneval with his fingertip on Tony Hill’s sensational photo, Reg Jones had said to his assistant Charles Frank, ‘We could get in there’, and Mountbatten’s first impulse was similar. The moment his planners set to work, however, they were obliged to tell their nautically-minded commodore that a seaborne assault was ‘not on’. German troops guarded the coast and radar site. They had enjoyed eighteen months of occupation in which to entrench, wire and probably mine the Channel approach. If British troops landed on the beach below Bruneval, they would be dead long before they could scale its cliff or force a passage up its narrow ascent path.

The only credible method of attacking the installation would be to deliver men by air and by night atop the high white cliff on which the Würzburg stood. Somebody pointed out that even the Germans, pioneers of parachute warfare, had never attempted an operational drop in darkness, but the leaders of Britain’s new airborne forces believed such an assault now to be within the powers of their own men. If the attackers achieved surprise, they might overrun the position; hold it while engineers stripped the radar set of its vital components, then descend the defile to make their escape to the beach, for a rendezvous with Mountbatten’s landing-craft.

A huge amount of luck would be needed to get a force in, then keep it ashore for two or three hours, without the Germans rallying their considerable local strength to overwhelm it. But Churchill was eager, Mountbatten was enthusiastic, and there was impatience to test in battle Britain’s parachute soldiers, men of the embryo Airborne Division. This was led by another famous figure of those times, Major-General Frederick Browning. ‘Boy’, as he was known within the army, anticipated his own and his formation’s first hour of glory quite as eagerly as did Dickie Mountbatten that of Combined Ops.

At the inauguration of Browning’s command, in the autumn of 1941, his formation’s staff was dubbed by their chief ‘the Dungeon Party’, because its officers spent some weeks in office accommodation two floors beneath Westminster’s King Charles Street, before removing to cheerier quarters. Until Churchill assumed the premiership, the British armed forces’ experience of parachuting related solely to its usefulness as a means of escape from a doomed aircraft. Even this was a concession to modernity brought into general service by the RAF only after 1918. While the ‘Great War’ was being fought, though German pilots were equipped with parachutes and occasionally enjoyed opportunities to use them, among their British counterparts only observation balloon crews were issued with these indulgences. Such equipment, commanders reasoned fantastically, might if universally provided encourage ‘windy’ airmen in action to abandon their cockpits prematurely.

In the 1930s the British Army learned that the Russians and Germans had created substantial bodies of paratroops, but took no steps to emulate them. Airborne units demanded extravagant resources, not least of scarce aircraft. They must perforce be lightly armed, and thus vulnerable, especially as they descended. Once on the ground, they could move no faster than their feet would carry them. As the ground forces expanded sluggishly, there seemed many higher priorities.

Then, in the summer of 1940, Britain’s dominant warlord committed himself to airborne warfare, just as he embraced combined operations. Churchill ordered that the army should form ‘a corps of at least five thousand parachute troops’. The War Office decreed the creation of a specialist training centre, the Central Landing Establishment. It was to be located at Ringway, near Manchester, chosen because it was far removed from the coastlines threatened with invasion, and no impediment to the busiest fighter and bomber airfields of southern and eastern England. Its first RAF commander was baronet Sir Nigel Norman, a reserve officer whose considerable gifts had been deployed before the war on the design and construction of civil airports, including Gatwick and Birmingham. Unfortunately, however, Ringway was plagued by its region’s poor weather. During the ensuing years many training days would be lost when low cloud or high winds made parachuting impossible. The school’s early months were also dogged by resistance from the Air Ministry to the provision of dedicated aircraft, and by a lack of enthusiasm among senior soldiers for yet another new gimmick which the erratic prime minister had wished upon them. John Frost wrote long afterwards: ‘The endemic trouble with British Airborne Forces was that the Army never really believed in them.’

On the airfield, after some frightful early accidents, several of them fatal, order slowly evolved from confusion. Nothing, though, could alter the fact that time-expired Whitley bombers, which were all the air marshals would allocate to Ringway, were little suited to dropping parachutists. Their construction required that men exit from a hatch cut in the floor, to avoid hitting the plane’s double tail boom. A careless jumper struck his teeth on the rear lip of the aircraft’s ‘arsehole’, with painful consequences – a so-called ‘Whitley kiss’. Men with false teeth, of whom there were then many, were debarred from service because it was thought these must be lost in a drop. Only much later in the war did the superb American C-47 Dakota, with a door exit matching that on the German Junkers Ju-52, become available in quantity, and dominate 1943–45 airborne operations.

The RAF assumed responsibility for teaching soldiers to parachute. This was seldom less than a nerve-racking, because life-threatening, activity. While all US Army paratroopers carried reserve ’chutes strapped to their chests, British wartime jumpers did not. A ‘roman candle’ – the compacted silk cylinder beneath which a man found himself descending at literally breakneck speed when an ill-packed canopy failed to deploy – was not survivable. Once, after exiting the hole an officer’s rigging lines became entangled in the plane. All efforts to retrieve him failed and in the end the pilot flew as slowly as possible out over the sea, where he was cut loose ‘in the hope that he would not hit the water too hard’. This flash of optimism proved unjustified.

Ringway’s RAF instructors nonetheless developed a fine reputation for skill, courage and powers of reassurance. Almost none of that generation of trainees had previously taken to the skies, even as aircraft passengers, before they embarked on airborne training. Yet now, on their first ventures above the ground, they were invited to quit first a balloon cage – for the two initial jumps of the training course – and five times thereafter an aircraft in mid-flight.

Before the war was ended, Ringway’s instructors came to include former schoolmasters, professional footballers, boxers; a cycle champion and a circus acrobat; a ‘Wall of Death’ motorcyclist and a ballet dancer. One instructor accumulated a score of fourteen hundred descents, including sixteen in a single day, setting an unbroken record. Their senior officer, F/Lt. John Kilkenny, dubbed ‘ringmaster of Kilkenny’s circus’, was himself a veteran of sixty-eight jumps.

This tall, thin, faintly camp but fatherly ex-NCO became famous to successive classes of trainees. He introduced them to airborne warfare with an enthusiastic oration before they made their first descent, from a captive balloon winched upwards until four hundred feet above the airfield: ‘Gentlemen, someone once described parachute-jumping as “dicing with death” in the skies, a frightful phrase, quite apart from being grossly untrue. You simply do exactly the same as you [have practised in ground training], the only difference being that you have a parachute and there’s a bit farther to fall. I have it on good authority that our parachutes are good ones – they ought to be, at sixty quid apiece. I know that tomorrow you’ll jump simply beautifully out of the balloon … It’s a piece of cake. One final word of advice. This neighbourhood is rich in pubs, and it’s quite easy just by walking the hundred yards to the [civil] airport to get very drunk. Do so by all means, but not the night before a jump. That’s all – and good jumping tomorrow!’

The army’s initial paratroop unit was one of the newly-formed army Commandos, No. 2, which was arbitrarily rebranded as the ‘11th Special Air Service’ battalion – usage that pre-dated Lt. Col. David Stirling’s later appropriation of the title in the North African desert. Because the new art was perceived as at best exotic, at worst highly dangerous, it was decreed that all those who jumped must be volunteers. A rule was introduced that any man who, during training, decided in a balloon cage or aircraft that he could not go through with a descent should be permitted to return to his former unit without disgrace. This was a privilege of which thirty trainees availed themselves during Ringway’s first months. On school flights ever since an occasional pupil has flinched, when confronted with the vacant sky beyond the aircraft door – refusals in a given ‘stick’ or sequence of jumpers can be infectious. Once a man completed the course, however, and became a qualified parachutist with embroidered wings sewn beneath the shoulder of his tunic, it was a court-martial offence to refuse to jump, because of the disastrous disruption such conduct must inflict upon an operation. British Army parachutists were paid a cash bonus for each of their early descents, and then received a small addition to their pay for having secured the qualification, just as they did for passing an Arabic or Gurkhali exam.

An early parachutist described an exit from a Whitley, seized by the slipstream and momentarily dragged horizontal: ‘It simply and almost, it seems, apologetically, whisks you away from the plane on the end of your parachute … Then, if you are the right way up, your legs are whipped up so that you seem likely to kick your own nose, and you feel as if your fall has been arrested by a giant hand grabbing your braces.’ A Grenadier officer reported on his first jump, with fellow officer Henry Wright. After leaping from the aircraft, he wrote, ‘the next recollection I have is of Major Wright with parachute open and canopy fully filled, some one hundred and fifty feet above me. My parachute, sir, had not then fully opened, and I had the gravest doubt as to whether it would function before it had been repacked. I was unable to devise a method of repacking it in the limited time at my disposal. As I was also unable to think of any satisfactory means of assisting the contraption to perform the functions which I had been led to suppose were automatic, in my submission I had no alternative but to fall earthwards at, I believe, the rate of thirty-two feet per second, accelerating to the maximum speed of one hundred and seventy-six feet per second … This I did … And having dropped a certain distance, my parachute suddenly opened, and I made a very light landing.’

And so to battle. In February 1941 thirty-eight officers and men were dropped in southern Italy to destroy the Tragino aqueduct, which supplied water to two million Italians. This was a mildly absurd operation, codenamed Colossus, conceived chiefly to revive the flagging morale of 1st Parachute Battalion – then still known as 11th Special Air Service – whose soldiers were weary of an idleness which had corroded their spirit. The raid achieved little: damage to the aqueduct was swiftly repaired; all but one of the paratroopers was captured. Their Italian interpreter, a forty-five-year-old former head waiter at London’s Savoy Hotel named Fortunato Picchi, was most unfortunately shot as a traitor to Italy, though a naturalized Briton. Churchill’s people, when informed of Colossus, were impressed to learn that their armed forces had acquired some parachutists, even if the mission had been less than an unqualified success. The Tragino aqueduct assault was an exercise in public relations rather than strategy, but served its limited purpose in keeping alive hopes that the British Army might usefully build a corps of paratroops, and that it was not wholly inactive, beyond the North African desert.

By November 1941 No.1 Parachute Training School, as the Manchester base was now known, qualified a hundred jumpers a week, their right shoulders adorned with coveted ‘wings’, though a substantial proportion found graduation delayed by suffering landing injuries. One trainee wrote later: ‘The RAF at Ringway, from the station commander to the lowliest aircraftsman, extend a welcome to would-be parachutists that is probably unique in the three services. In the surrounding pubs they are feted. Yet it is not so difficult to understand. The men who go there are under few illusions about the type of war they are going to. The fact that they have chosen one of the most dangerous ways of going to the war explains the willingness of the RAF instructors to make the preparation for this solemn undertaking as pleasant as possible. We noticed this most forcibly in the dining hall. At our first dinner we were confronted not by odiferous stew and sour-faced army cooks but instead by delectably cooked meals that looked, smelt and tasted excellent, served by young women in white overalls and coquettish chefs’ caps … They smiled with a serenity that was a joy to behold, and dispensed second helpings with a goodwill that was nothing short of amazing.’

Those were the days before the Parachute Regiment was formally embodied: its maroon beret would be introduced only in November 1942. Meanwhile volunteers for airborne service retained the headgear of their former regiments, including the bonnets of Scottish units. In September 1941, 11th SAS was abruptly redesignated 1st Parachute Battalion, founding element of 1 Para Brigade, which soon also acquired a second battalion. The men’s new allegiance was distinguished merely by shoulder lanyards of different colours, that of 2 Para being yellow.

In October 1941, Frederick Browning was appointed to command what was to become a full-blown airborne division, of mixed parachute and gliderborne units, and thereafter expand to corps strength. A Guardsman to his fingertips, for the next three years Browning would play a central role in the development of Britain’s sky warrior force. Most immediately, he acted as a guiding influence on the Bruneval raid, selecting and training the men to execute it. His staff, in conjunction with Mountbatten’s people in Richmond Terrace, took over detailed planning for the ground assault and subsequent withdrawal to the beach, where the navy, in the person of Fred Cook, would become responsible for their escape back across the Channel.

Most wartime histories which feature Browning focus upon his service record, mentioning as an aside that he was married to the novelist Daphne du Maurier, author of Rebecca and other great romantic bestsellers. Yet their relationship was extraordinary, and influenced the general he became, at the climax of an enduringly enigmatic life. Never less than flawlessly turned out, he was viewed by his contemporaries as the pattern of a Guards officer: decisive, assured, patrician, brave. But the outer man masked one of the most complex and indeed troubled personalities ever to reach high command.

Born in 1896, to a successful wine merchant father, he grew up in a large house behind Harrods store in Knightsbridge. He passed through Eton and Sandhurst – for which he failed the entrance exam before being admitted thanks to Grenadier regimental influence – then in 1915 joined a battalion in France. After only two months on the Western Front in which nothing especially memorable or terrible happened to him, Browning was invalided home under circumstances that have never been explained, diagnosed with nervous exhaustion. The cause appears to have been a condition known in the family as ‘Tommy’s tum’ – at home ‘Tommy’ was his nickname. At irregular intervals throughout his childhood, he was convulsed by agonizing stomach pains. These eventually receded, as they did in the course of 1916. In September that year, Browning was again passed fit for service, and returned to France. He found that only six of those with whom he had served a year earlier were still in the line: his absence had spared him from participation in the summer bloodbaths of the Somme.

The ensuing year was – by the murderous standard of the Western Front – for him relatively uneventful. Everything changed, however, at the end of 1917, season of Passchendaele. Browning’s battalion was committed to seize a German position, Gauche Wood, across an open field. Casualties were devastating. He, still only a lieutenant, found himself sole unwounded survivor among seventeen officers. He assumed direction of the remains of three companies, which deployed on the left end of the wood after five hours of fierce hand-to-hand fighting. They repelled a German counter-attack and endured devastating incoming shellfire before being relieved. Browning received a DSO, and for the rest of his career enjoyed a hero’s reputation, which erased comrades’ memories of his peculiar 1916 medical travails, such as might have condemned a private soldier of that era to the glasshouse, or worse.

Yet the emotional scars of Gauche Wood never healed. For the rest of Browning’s life he suffered what is now known as post-traumatic stress. Though always attractive to women, after the war he seemed unable to form lasting relationships: the ‘right girl’ eluded him. In the autumn of 1931 he was a thirty-four-year-old major passing his leave sailing with a fellow bachelor officer along the south-west coast in his twenty-foot cruiser Ygdrasil, when one evening they tied up at a mooring off Fowey in Cornwall. They were observed from the shore by twenty-four-year-old Daphne du Maurier, a budding novelist, who was completing one of many idyllic summers in that haven, writing The Progress of Julius, a quite extraordinary work for a young woman to have created, a bleak tale of a heartless monster.

Du Maurier was struck by Browning’s dark good looks. But, contrary to the plot of a proper romantic yarn, the couple did not meet to speak on that trip, nor indeed until the following April. When they did so, she was smitten. Browning possessed both the physical attributes and apparently dominant personality which she demanded from a man. Though she had already had several affairs, she always struggled to define her own sexuality – and, come to that, her rightful gender. Now Browning seemed to meet all her requirements, and she made plain her eagerness to go to bed with him.

This prompted a new twist in the couple’s courtship: confronted by a beautiful and fascinating young woman one of whose novels he had already chanced to read, the major turned her down – to borrow P.G. Wodehouse’s phrase – like a blanket. Affairs, Browning said, were ‘sleazy’. ‘Nice girls’ didn’t do ‘it’. Du Maurier’s difficulty was that she had always despised ‘nice girls’. She realized, however, that she must have Browning on his terms, or not at all. Three weeks after they met, she wrote to a friend: ‘He is the best-looking thing I have ever seen, lives for boats and all the things I live for … He is one of these people with terrific “ideals” and I’m scared of giving him a shock.’

During the weeks that followed, the besotted du Maurier sought in vain to persuade the Grenadier officer of the joys of Bohemian romance. He, on the other hand, ‘is trying to teach me that those ways of living are messy and stupid and very, very young’. It had to be marriage – or nothing: ‘It will take at least five brandy-and-sodas, sloe gin and a handkerchief of ethers to push me to the altar rail.’ Yet in the summer of 1932, the romantic novelist herself proposed to the major – and was accepted, once he recovered from the shock of finding Daphne seizing the initiative. Friends who asked her father Sir Gerald, the famous theatrical actor-manager, how he felt about the alliance were told of his relief: ‘My dears, I am delighted – I thought she would have had a baby with a Cornish fisherman by now!’

Their subsequent marriage was notably complex but intermittently happy, though she never reconciled herself to the army. She ‘couldn’t see the sense in military life … bugles and khaki and people yelling all the time and saluting’. ‘Tommy’, however, was ‘the most charming person in the world’. They were not rich, because the Browning family money had vanished in the 1929 crash. Fortunately, though, Daphne’s novels were already on a path to achieving the bestsellerdom which she craved. Her income dramatically raised the bridegroom’s standard of living.

Emotional issues nonetheless persisted. She wrote to her mother: ‘I feel I mustn’t leave Tommy too much … He has these awful nervy fits of misery, ten times worse than Daddy’s old horrors; all harking back to that beastly war … He clings to me just like a terrified little boy, so pathetic, it wrings one’s heart.’ She noted the contrast between Major Tommy at Pirbright, his tunic blazing with medals, barking out orders, and the sobbing retarded adolescent who sought solace in the night – a comfort which she found hard to provide, because she had always recoiled from acquiring emotional dependants. In the words of her biographer: ‘She wanted what she thought she had married, an utterly self-reliant war hero, somebody calm, solid and stable … The nurturing side of Daphne was almost non-existent and it horrified her to have any kind of care demanded of her.’

She described Tommy’s departures for duty as being like those of ‘a miserable boy being sent to school’. She also shrank from his enthusiasm for stately home weekends, when she wanted only to mess about in boats. She scorned the duties of an army wife: ‘Can you picture me going around the married quarters and chatting up forty different women? “And how is the leg, Mrs Skinner?” “Dear little Freddie, what a fine boy he is” (this to a swollen-faced object obviously suffering from mumps).’ In 1936, when she wrote her first big bestseller Jamaica Inn, Tommy was commanding his battalion. In the following year, she began to create Rebecca while enduring misery as the now colonel’s wife during an Egyptian posting.

The approach to war found her a stellar literary success on both sides of the Atlantic, while her husband raged at the unpreparedness of the British Army and the ‘incompetent nincompoops at the War Office’. Only Winston Churchill, he told Daphne, understood the nation’s unfitness to fight. He himself was once again suffering attacks of ‘Tommy’s tum’, of which she was impatient, just as her shortcomings as a homemaker irritated him. In the autumn of 1940, when Browning was commanding an infantry brigade, she wrote to a friend confessing her recent behaviour had been that of ‘a sour old army wife in an Indian hill station, who has a disapproving eye on all gaiety’. Yet she and Tommy had been less than ten years married. She began to conduct a flirtation, which in the summer of 1941 turned into an infatuation, with Christopher Puxley, owner of the big house in which the Brownings were billeted, even as she penned another huge literary success, Frenchman’s Creek.

It was not easy for a woman to be at ease with an ambitious, thrusting, energetic army officer preoccupied with his own role in a world war, even as she herself became alienated from all these things. She wanted only peace, Cornwall, her children and especially her new-born son, together with her rightful existence as a writer. According to her biographer: ‘She didn’t understand half the things he talked about, and some of the tasks allotted to him were so secret he couldn’t talk about them anyway. But she knew, all the same, how very important Tommy was becoming, and what a Herculean task he had just been given – the formation of First Airborne Division.’

Even as the Bruneval raid was incubating, a domestic melodrama unfolded. Christopher Puxley’s wife Paddy discovered her husband in the arms of Daphne. Soon afterwards, and inevitably, the Brownings quit the couple’s house. Daphne and the children decamped to Cornwall. Her intimacy with Puxley continued, however, though she was at pains afterwards to insist – scarcely credibly – that it had not then been fully consummated.

Browning supposedly knew nothing of this. He wrote almost daily adoring little notes to his ‘beloved Mumpty’ and the children. He filled his few leisure moments by sketching boats he would have built for them with her earnings, once the war – ‘this filthy business’ – was over. Posterity’s image of the general is dominated by his role at Arnhem, the 1944 battlefield disaster for which he bore a heavy responsibility. Yet in 1941–42 he was perceived as an effective, imaginative and intelligent officer, a gifted organizer and martinet, a rising star. Not long after his appointment to First Airborne, Browning commissioned the artist Edward Seago to design its shoulder badge, which became a sky-blue Bellerophon astride Pegasus the winged horse. Col. Charles Carrington, a shrewd observer of wartime senior officers, admired Browning, obviously without discovering much of the inner man. He described the general as ‘ebullient … indeed a beau sabreur, bursting with health and high spirits and self-confidence, an Elizabethan type looking just like Sir Richard Grenville of the Revenge, and perhaps aware of the resemblance’.

In the twenty-first century, however, Browning’s role in Biting becomes far more interesting when it is understood that, even as he hastened from meeting to exercise area, supervising training and attending operational conferences, he was privately haunted by demons and a profoundly troubled relationship with his wife. To be sure, complications in wartime marriages were common enough. But Browning’s exceptionally uneasy private persona goes some way to explain his often irascible behaviour. He deserves more credit than he nowadays sometimes receives, for his role in those early days of British airborne warfare, when he exercised senior commands while battling secret stresses. Geoffrey Powell, who later served under him, wrote of Browning, ‘He possessed all the virtues as well as some of the defects of his background. He was devoted to the interests of his men, and they in their turn both liked and admired him, despite a barrier of reserve which few succeeded in penetrating.’

An important factor is often missed, about the conduct of commanders in conflict. To civilians – the mass of the world’s population – war seems the ultimate horror, causing them to recoil from its prospect and even more from its reality. Yet it offers to professional warriors the most significant opportunities of their careers, which they eagerly exploit. In the Second World War many officers of all three services, who had struggled through decades of duty to secure sluggish upward steps in rank, achieved meteoric advancement. America’s Dwight Eisenhower entered the struggle as a fifty-one-year-old colonel, and emerged from it three years later as a five-star Supreme Commander. Bernard Montgomery was in 1940 a mere divisional commander, at fifty-two relatively old for such an appointment in war, but within four years he was a field-marshal and Britain’s most famous soldier.

Likewise on the much smaller canvas of Bruneval, all those involved, especially Mountbatten and Browning, saw in the raid a notable opportunity to enhance their own laurels. This was in no way discreditable, but a cynic should notice that among the martial orchestral theme in those days – aircraft engines, shouted orders, gunfire, the tramp of marching boots – also discernible were the voices of ambitious men, competing to be heard, heeded, promoted.

The scene of cross-Channel operations against Bruneval

In mid-January 1942, it was decided that Operation Biting, as the assault on Bruneval was now codenamed, should be executed by a single company of 1 Para Brigade, whose tasks would be to suppress the German defences; to protect engineers charged with dismembering the Würzburg set; then to cover their retreat to Mountbatten’s landing-craft, which would close upon the little beach below the cliff to evacuate the raiders and their prospective prizes. A hundred-odd fighting soldiers should suffice to do the business. Browning consulted with the brigade commander, Richard Gale, who said that of all his companies in training, though 1 Para was more experienced, he thought 2 Para’s C Company, overwhelmingly composed of Scots, was shaping best.

It was decided these men should be shifted from the battalion’s camp at Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire to Tilshead in Wiltshire, five miles west of Browning’s new divisional headquarters at Syrencot House, and within reach of the south coast, where most of the rehearsals with the navy must take place. They could take off for the operation from Thruxton, an airfield near Andover of which the runway was newly completed. On 14 January, ten days before the chiefs of staff approved Biting, C Company was told to prepare for detached duty – ‘special training in Combined Operations’.

And even as these novice warriors armed and prepared for a task which commanders knew – though the paratroopers did not – should happen by the end of February to conform to the need for a full moon and enough tide to ensure the landing-craft did not strand, there was a further vital requirement before anybody could jump anywhere: intelligence. The Spitfire photographs of Bruneval had enabled Reg Jones to identify its Würzburg. To mount a successful attack, however, the planners needed pinpoint information about the local defences. How many German troops were deployed within reach of the site? Were the approaches or the beach below mined? How quickly might the immediate defenders be reinforced? These questions could and must be answered not by cameras or signal decrypts but instead by observers on the ground – old-fashioned spies, going about their business in the fashion practised for countless centuries, and now being learned anew by men and women of the French Resistance.