Night Raid Page 16

  On the following morning, Major Peter Bromley-Martin, a bright and cheerful staff officer with a bushy moustache, came over to see Frost and explained that a site had been found about twenty miles away at Alton Priors, near Devizes, that was similar to the site of their demonstration for the War Cabinet. The men were to practise dropping behind enemy lines and capturing an enemy headquarters. Then they were to drop down steep hills to a canal, terrain that resembled sea cliffs, which was where the real show would be laid on for the top brass, probably in the Dover area. Bromley-Martin explained that the company would be broken into four units, each of which would be dropped at intervals and would have a separate task for which it would be differently armed.

  Frost took an instant dislike to the plan, and probably to the armchair staff officer who explained it. He insisted that he knew better. Everything in the British Army went in threes: a battalion was made up of three companies, a company was made up of three platoons and a headquarters section, and this should be the basis on which it operated in the field. He had experience of action and knew this was the way to function. The row rolled on into the afternoon when Frost followed Bromley-Martin back to Airborne headquarters and asked to see the general, only to be told that he was away. Another officer vehemently defended the four-unit plan. Frost argued with equal determination that he knew best and that if the demonstration was to look good it had to be done his way.

  On the following day Bromley-Martin returned to Tilshead and took Frost aside. Swearing him to utter secrecy, he proceeded to explain that the story of the demonstration was a cover and that his company had been selected for a top secret mission behind enemy lines in occupied France. The men were to land with a group of Royal Engineers, capture some new kind of enemy apparatus, dismantle it and escape down steep cliffs to the coast, from where the Royal Navy would evacuate them. The plan had been devised to achieve this specific object. It was finally explained to Frost that if he had any further objections to the plan, then he would be replaced and someone else would be found who approved of it. At this point, still aghast at what he had been told and with a swell of excitement at the task ahead, Frost forgot all his objections and agreed that the plan sounded very strong – as long as the drops went well.

  In fact, detailed operational orders for Operation Biting were still being drawn up in late January. The information from the French underground about the precise strengths and locations of the German defences had not yet come in. But planning was well under way. It had been decided that the mission would require technical support and that this would come primarily from the Royal Engineers section of the Airborne Division. They would jump with the rest of the paratroopers, but would not be expected to fight to capture the enemy installation unless absolutely necessary. Their responsibility would be the dismantling of the apparatus on the top of the cliff, and the paratroopers would then escort them down the steep gully to the beach, carrying everything that had been taken with them. This was why an unusual division of the company into four parties had been planned.

  Headquarters needed to know that Frost would go along with this, and indeed with any changes that might come up in the planning of the raid over the next few weeks. Hence the decision to confide in him the true purpose of the training. Leadership of the operation would be vital. But divisional HQ had to be certain not only that he was the right commander but also that he would not breach their trust and let the men know what their mission really was. If there was any breakdown in security and the enemy knew of the arrival of the paratroopers, it would spell disaster for the raid.

  Frost now enthusiastically set about organising a training schedule for his men. He kept to his word and did not reveal the true purpose of the training, despite tricky questions from his officers and senior NCOs. Company Sergeant-Major Gerry Alexander Strachan was a bull of a man who had been in the Black Watch, a tough Highland regiment, before transferring to the Parachute Brigade. He knew exactly how a company should be organised but was puzzled by the quantity of ammunition, usually in such short supply, that now started to arrive. Frost maintained that nothing was being spared for the demonstration. However, several men, like Sergeant Macleod Forsyth, immediately began to suspect that with all this ammunition being provided there was a combat mission in the offing.3 Frost explained that the demonstration was to be a combined operation. The RAF would fly the men over to the drop zones and the Royal Navy would extract them from the beaches.

  The company was split into four parties. An officer and nine sappers from the Royal Engineers arrived and started to train with the men. They had no more information about the real purpose of their training than anyone else. Reinforcements arrived from B Company to make up the numbers to the 120 men required. As they were transported around southern England in the bitter winter weather they would arrive back at their Tilshead base at all times of the day or night. The second-in-command, Captain John Ross, an unflappable, calm-talking Scotsman from Dundee, had to ensure that food was available for everyone at whatever time they got back. Despite the challenges, Frost was pleased to see that the company now started to settle down and to get on with its rigorous training regime.

  The men were equipped with a brand new weapon in the British Army, the Sten gun. This was a simple, easy-to-fire, light sub-machine gun with a side loading magazine that gave the weapon its distinctive look. Two British gun designers at the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield had designed the weapon to act as a homegrown version of the American Thompson sub-machine gun, the ‘Tommy gun’.4 The Sten, not unlike the Soviet AK-47 Kalashnikov in a later era, could be mass produced easily and cheaply and was the weapon SOE gave out for guerrilla, resistance and partisan operations. Manufactured in great numbers to equip the ever-growing British Army, it was an effective weapon at short range and could be fired at a sufficient rate to ensure that the enemy would keep his head down.

  Its biggest fault was that the chamber had a tendency to clog up, resulting in stoppages.5 The men of C Company soon discovered this horrible weakness and struggled to find ways to compensate. They now had to learn how to use the weapon in order to minimise the risk of blockages and to work together to lay down the firepower needed to be effective. Bruneval would be the baptism of fire for the Sten gun. Many questions would be asked of its combat use after the raid was over.

  Along with the Sten came a new radio communications system called the 38, which was intended to keep the company commander in constant touch with his officers. Lighter than the standard British Army radio in use at the time, it was carried in a backpack, along with batteries. The 38 also seemed to be temperamental and, like the new weapon, required a lot of practice to use efficiently.

  As this was a combined operation, it was not only the paratroopers who in January started to prepare for the raid. The air chiefs had to select a squadron to transport the Paras to their drop zones. Group Captain Sir Nigel Norman was put in command of the RAF operation. Norman was the most experienced officer in the RAF for this role. Before the war he had worked in civil aviation and his firm had helped in the design and layout of airfields at Gatwick, Birmingham and Manchester. From 1940, he had commanded the Central Landing Establishment at Ringway for some time. He had wanted to go on the first paratrooper mission to Italy but had been told he was not able to do so. In mid January 1942 he had begun to form a new wing to operate as an Army Co-operation Command to provide transport for airborne operations.

  After months of delays due to lack of aircraft, the Air Ministry finally began the process of preparing specialised squadrons to drop paratroopers. But, like Browning when he was asked to select the men to carry out the raid, Norman now had to confront the problem that he did not yet have a single squadron trained, ready and available to support Operation Biting. So he selected 51 Squadron from Bomber Command and ordered it to withdraw its twelve Whitley aircraft from bombing duties and to begin training for this new mission. Each aircraft would carry ten men.

  A hardened bomber unit, 51
Squadron had been flying night sorties over Germany and occupied Europe for nearly eighteen months. Its commander, Wing Commander Percy Charles Pickard, was a well-known and rather glamorous figure within the RAF. He had played a leading part in a dramatised documentary called Target for Tonight made by the Crown Film Unit in the summer of 1941, piloting his Wellington bomber, ‘F’ for Freddie, on an imaginary sortie over the Ruhr. The film had been widely shown in cinemas across Britain and had gone down especially well in the United States, where it won an honorary Academy Award. But Wing Commander Pickard was not just a film star in the eyes of his colleagues, he was a brave pilot who had already been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) and the Distinguished Service Order (DSO). He was one of the most experienced bomber pilots in the RAF. One of his pilots, Flying Officer Geoffrey Osborn, remembered him as a tall man and a magnificent leader who was widely liked, as he was known for looking after the crews he commanded. Dogs were not allowed on RAF stations but somehow an exception was made for Pickard, whose collie followed him everywhere around the base.6 Pickard and his crews now cut holes in the fuselages of their Whitley bombers and began training in the science of getting men in pitch dark right over their precise drop zone and then dropping them out of the base of their aircraft.

  On 7 February, Frost and some of his officers travelled to Thruxton airfield, where Pickard and his crews from 51 Squadron were starting their training. Frost was mightily impressed with the brash, confident attitude of the boys in RAF blue. Everyone recognised Pickard as the pilot who had starred in Target for Tonight and his coolness struck them all. RAF lingo at this point was all about understatement, about playing down the risks ahead and of assuming a casual, nonchalant attitude. All of this went down very well with the army officers and Frost concluded, ‘We were left in no doubt as to their efficiency and we felt that if anybody was going to put us down in the right place, they were the people to do it.’7

  The other component in the combined operation was the Royal Navy. Admiral Sir William ‘Bubbles’ James, the commander-in-chief at Portsmouth, was put in overall command of the operation. His rather unusual nickname came from the fact that he had sat as a four-year-old for his grandfather, the celebrated pre-Raphaelite artist John Millais, for a well-known Victorian painting showing a boy blowing bubbles with a pipe and a bowl of soap. The painting was later acquired by Pears Soap and used in a renowned advert for their product.8 Living down this childhood association, Admiral James had gone on to lead a distinguished career in the Royal Navy. In 1916 he had joined the codebreakers in Room 40 of the Admiralty and had later become Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence.

  Reporting to Admiral James was Commander Frederick Norton Cook of the Royal Australian Navy, who was appointed Naval Force Commander for the operation. Cook had joined the RAN at the age of thirteen and had spent his life at sea. In October 1939, he had been on board HMS Royal Oak when, at anchor in Orkney, it was hit by four torpedoes from a U-boat whose brave commander had dared to penetrate the holiest of holies of the Royal Navy, the anchorage at Scapa Flow. The Royal Oak went down in minutes with the loss of 810 men. In May 1940 he had been on HMS Curlew when it had been sunk off the Norwegian coast. Undeterred, Cook went on to establish and run the commando training base at the mouth of the Hamble in Southampton Water and he took part in some of the small-scale commando raids on the French coast during 1941. He named his training base HMS Tormentor.

  In mid-January 1942 he was called to a meeting at the offices of Combined Operations in London where he met Captain John Hughes-Hallett and Commander David Luce. Hughes-Hallett immediately launched into a detailed outline of the plans for an airborne operation to raid the French coast. Cook listened with growing puzzlement as to what any of this had to do with him. Then Luce interrupted his colleague and said, ‘Sir, shouldn’t we tell Cook that he is to be the naval commander of this operation?’ Cook realised that he had to pay serious attention to what was being said and the plans for the Bruneval raid were laid out before him. The planners told him that the first need was for complete secrecy. They explained that a conversation overheard in a pub could be reported back to Berlin in fifteen minutes, after which the entire stretch of French coast would be reinforced and on the alert for the raiders.9

  On 9 February, Frost and C Company left their barracks on Salisbury Plain. Told they were going north by train, they had to remove all their wings and other insignia for the journey for security reasons, to prevent anyone from spotting that a parachute unit was heading north for training. Their new destination was Inveraray in north-west Scotland, on the northern bank of the long, thin sea loch known as Loch Fyne.

  Inveraray was an old Scottish garrison town and the base from where much commando training and preparations for special operations took place. From there the Paras boarded the naval vessel HMS Prinz Albert, the parent ship of the flotilla of landing craft that were to take part in the raid and their base while in Scotland. A large and roomy vessel of about three thousand tons, the former Belgian passenger ship had been requisitioned by the Royal Navy after Belgium’s fall in the summer of 1940. The function of the Prinz Albert was to carry landing craft to their point of embarkation. They were then lowered over the sides using davits. In addition to its crew of about 200 sailors, it could carry up to 250 soldiers who would normally climb down the side of the ship into the landing craft when they had arrived at their destination. Two and a half years later, the Prinz Albert was to play an important role off Omaha beach on D-Day.

  After the desolation of Salisbury Plain, conditions on the Prinz Albert were rather good. The cabins and wardrooms on the naval vessel were far superior to the army barracks in Wiltshire and Frost and the officers were able to eat as much as they needed and to enjoy their spare time in the lounge given over to them as guests of the Royal Navy. The bar even served drinks at duty-free prices, and both officers and men took up the offer of cheap booze with relish.

  A group of infantrymen were also sent north to train for the mission and assigned to the Prinz Albert. Their role would be to provide covering fire from the landing craft that were to go into the beaches to extract the Paras. John Brooker was in the Royal Fusiliers and found life on board a naval ship very strange. He had to sleep in a hammock and received a tot of rum each day in true Royal Navy tradition.10 Sergeant Eric Gould of the South Wales Borderers also found himself training on the Prinz Albert, which became his home for a full seven weeks. He was delighted with what he called the ‘luxury’ conditions and later remembered, ‘We were looked after marvellously as far as food was concerned. By comparison to army food, navy food was far superior.’11

  On 12 February, soon after their arrival, the paratroopers were ordered to leave the ship, go ashore and make themselves scarce. So they deployed into the snow-covered hills above the loch. The captain of the Prinz Albert, Henry Peate, had been told that none other than Lord Louis Mountbatten was going to make a visit and he naturally assumed that the purpose was to inspect his ship and the flotilla of landing craft under his command. In fact, Mountbatten was visiting as commander of Combined Operations, in order to see the men who were going to take part in the raid. When he arrived on board the Prinz Albert he was astonished to find that none of the paratroopers were present. The embarrassed captain immediately gave orders to recall the Paras and the ship’s sirens were frantically hooted. Thinking the ship was in trouble, Frost and his men rushed to the shore, where they were quickly transported back to the command vessel.

  Mountbatten called all the men together, the paratroopers and the crew of the Prinz Albert alike. An inspiring speaker with a natural sense of command, he made a short but stirring speech which gave a great boost to everyone present. Mountbatten made it clear that they were working on a special mission. As far as Lieutenant John Timothy was concerned, he ‘blew the gaff’ that they were all now preparing for an actual mission and not a demonstration for the Prime Minister.12 But he did not give away any details of what that mission was. The sa
ilors were however told for the first time that their guests were parachutists. Few of them had ever met a parachutist before and the speech did a lot to impress the naval men with the calibre of the soldiers they were hosting. From then on they took a lot more interest in the Paras and in the task they were performing.

  The purpose of this stage of the training programme was to practise linking up with the navy in order to be taken off beaches along Loch Fyne by landing craft at night. The idea was that the same sailors who operated the naval vessels here would man them during the operation in France. Most of the Paras had never before seen the new mark of vessel, called an Assault Landing Craft (ALC). It was forty feet long and ten feet wide, with a flat bottom and a draft of only about two feet. It could carry thirty-five soldiers and had a crew of four. In the bows there were doors, and beyond them two ramps that dropped down to allow the men to disembark.