One of the books I read on holiday (seven in two weeks - not difficult to see what I was mostly doing!) but without a doubt one of the best of that crop..
Max Hastings is 79 now, and getting on, but he continues to write the kind of 'ordinary' people focussed military history that I love.. as he says himself at the start of the book.. "All my books aspire to tell ‘people’ stories, because these are what history is about. This one is especially so".
This book focusses then on the then nascent Parachute Division's first major operation of WW2, an air assault on the north coast of France to capture a German radar installation known as "Würzburg", but it does it by describing all the major participants and personalities involved in the planning, preparation and the actual assault, as this was one of the first major combined operations actions where all three main services were involved....
In February 1942 RAF intelligence had been baffled by a newly-identified radar network on the coast of occupied Europe, which they codenamed Würzburg (and in my mind I kept misreading that as Wurlitzer 😁).
The eminent (and stupidly clever!) scientist Dr RV (Reg) Jones proposed an assault in order to capture key components and as the one at Bruneval in Normandy was the nearest, that was the one that was chosen.
Given that period of the war, with little or no British victories, with Britain and her Commonwealth standing alone against a Germany that had already occupied all of Western Europe and just completed the successful invasion of Norway, not surprisingly Winston Churchill enthused about the idea and made Lord Louis Mountbatten the chief of Combined Operations with a brief to do exactly that.
Combined Operations seems to have been a bit of a circus as Mountbatten, an ego centric if there ever was one*, bought in his cronies to run the operation some of whom were "interesting" to say the least, but out of it came the basic plan of a company of the newly-formed Airborne Forces under the command of John Frost (yes, him of Arnhem fame) dropped on the target by the RAF from (grudgingly given) converted Whitely bombers (as they had no dedicated transport aircraft at that time - the Dakota was a long way down the line). Once the raiding party had suppressed any defence, they were then to dismantle key components of the radar, and rescue would be by Royal Navy landing craft from the cove at the bottom of the cliff the radar was mounted on.
Following an astonishing recon of the site by RAF spotter plane and also the selfless and brave actions of the French Resistance, the raid eventually took place on the night of 27/28 February 1942 and not surprisingly was far from being as easy as all the planners were sure it was going to be. In heavy snow, 120 men landed (most of them paratroopers but they also brought with them dedicated engineering resource in order to identify the radar parts required), but some of whom were mis dropped almost two miles from their objective.
 |
| "Squadron Leader Percy Pickard, Commanding Officer of No. 51 Squadron RAF [hugely experienced, but his plane was one of those that dropped its load of para's off target], inspects a captured German helmet with parachute troops after the Bruneval raid, 28 February 1942. On the night of 27/28 February Pickard's squadron of Whitleys dropped 'C' Company, 2nd Parachute Battalion (commanded by Major J D Frost) near a German Wurzburg radar site at Bruneval near Le Havre in northern France - its objective to seize components of the radar and then evacuate them by sea". Picture courtesy IWM |
The Para's nonetheless launched the assault with the troops they had, against an increasingly strengthening German defence, but dismantled the German radar, and after three hours in France eventually escaped in the nick of time by landing-craft across the Channel (in a Force 5 storm) to Portsmouth. All their radio's were lost in the drops and it was only by almost the purest chance that the Para's managed to signal the Naval forces that they were ready to be evacuated - and then only as German lorried and mechanised reinforcements could be seen coming down the coastal road!
In the end then, despite the obvious flaws and stupidities in planning, and being such a small operation in the grander terms it was a huge success - at that stage of the war a very, very much needed fillip to public morale, and what a cast of characters -
- the ‘boffin’ Reg Jones - acerbic, not suffering fools gladly, but undoubtedly a genius;
- the peacock Mountbatten (Hasting's sets his stall out early on how he sees his performance), the troubled husband of Daphne Du Maurier (also seemingly mad as a bucketful of frogs);
- Gen. ’Boy’ Browning, who commanded the Airborne Division; with a reputation now tarnished by his performance there, but who Hastings thinks may now have been overly criticised and deserves recognition of the huge work he did in first establishing and building the Airborne Division;
- ‘Colonel Remy’, the French secret agent whose men reconnoitred Bruneval at HUGE risk;
- Major John Frost, who led the paras into action - in Hastings' (and my) opinion the perfect battlefield commander who would never have suited higher command ;
- Charlie Cox, the little RAF technician who stripped the Würzburg and did his parachute training in a single day - what a hero;
- Wing-Commander Charles Pickard, a legendary bomber pilot who led the drop squadron (but was backwards in coming forwards to admit that his plane was one of those that mis-dropped 😏)..
- Tony Hill who flew the photo reconnaissance Spitfire that bought back the pictures so badly needed by the planners
- Fred Cook the RAN officer commanding HMS Tormentor (the former Household Brigade Yacht Club at the mouth of the River Hamble) and responsible for the Naval element of the operation
* Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer, the former Chief of the Imperial General Staff, once said to Mountbatten (allegedly) "You are so crooked, Dickie, that if you swallowed a nail, you would shit a corkscrew". 😏
