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  So, when war came in September 1939, the Germans had three forms of operational radar. The naval radar known as Seetakt was used for gun aiming at sea and operated on a wavelength of around 80 cm. The Freya system was in use by the Luftwaffe for air defence at about 125 MHz on a 2 m wavelength and had a range of 50 miles. And there was Würzburg, used for directing anti-aircraft guns on a wavelength of 53 cm with a range of about 18 miles, and accurate to within 100 yards. The range and complexity of these radar systems were quite different from the uniform system created in Britain. And while British radar had developed around the use of huge, tall towers, the Germans were using tiny rotating bowl-like reflectors and had produced several pieces of apparatus that were relatively small and mobile. Moreover, all the German radar was superbly engineered, with a stability and precision of performance that far exceeded anything produced in Britain.

  Most importantly, these developments had taken place without anyone in Britain knowing of their existence. It was a massive failure of British intelligence gathering. It was all very well for Robert Watson-Watt to climb church towers with his miniature torch-cum-telescope in order to survey the countryside of East Prussia. But the fact that the SIS had no one in scientific intelligence to monitor what was happening in Germany was a blunder of major proportions.

  The result of this failure was soon manifest after war was declared. On 18 December 1939, two squadrons of RAF Wellington bombers, a total of twenty-four aircraft, were sent out over Wilhelmshaven, the German naval base on the North Sea. At this point, the war was still known as the Phoney War, since military action in the west had not yet begun. RAF Bomber Command was working under a strict dictum from the War Cabinet not to bomb German property or to risk killing German civilians in case it provoked Hitler into launching retaliatory raids against Britain. So the mission of the Wellingtons was to identify any German naval shipping outside the harbour and to attack it at sea.

  As the twin-engined bombers approached the German coast the newly trained radar operators were on the lookout using their Freya radars. They picked up the approach of the slow-moving bombers about fifty miles out to sea. Initially their reports were disbelieved. The German controllers could not fathom why the British would attack on a clear, bright winter’s day when visibility was so good. After a short delay, however, a squadron of Messerschmitt 109 fighters was scrambled and directed out to intercept the Wellingtons on their flight path over the coast. Within minutes the fighters had virtually massacred the Wellingtons, who were flying without any fighter escorts of their own. Ten Wellingtons were shot down, while two more were so badly damaged they had to ditch in the sea on the return home. The crews knew that they would be lucky to survive for a quarter of an hour in the freezing winter sea. Only one crew was rescued. The other was never found.

  Sixty-six RAF aircrew were lost in this single incident, half of the bombing fleet. The Luftwaffe speculated that it had been some sort of suicide mission. The RAF concluded that the losses had been the consequence of a failure in formation flying.6 They had no idea that the Luftwaffe had tracked the bombers with their Freya radar sets. Without the RAF realising it, the radar war had begun. Warfare would never be the same again.

  4

  Airborne

  The dazzling new science of radar was not the only new technology developed for military use during the 1930s. The concept behind the parachute had been known about for some time, and its deployment paved the way for the creation of a new type of military unit: airborne forces.

  In Greek mythology the winged horse Pegasus had carried his master through the air to attack the fire-breathing monster, the Chimaera. In the late fifteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci had made detailed drawings of a pyramid-shaped parachute. In 1797, a Frenchman jumped from a balloon over Paris with a primitive modern-style parachute. By the late nineteenth century jumping out of a balloon with the assistance of a parachute had become a regular circus or fairground act. There were many showmen and several women who made a living by jumping to the ground in this way, breaking their fall with a silk umbrella or sheet.1

  During the First World War the military developed two types of parachute. There was the ripcord design opened by the parachutist as he fell, and the type that opened automatically when a static line linked to a rail inside the plane pulled by the weight of the falling pilot opened the parachute. But on the Allied side only observers in kite balloons overlooking enemy lines were allowed to use them as they were particularly vulnerable to being shot down by enemy aircraft making a surprise attack. Although the technology was understood and a supply was available, parachutes were not given out to pilots in the Royal Flying Corps (or, from April 1918, the RAF) because it was thought it would discourage them from fighting and encourage them to bail out and abandon a dogfight instead. As far as the chiefs behind their desks in Whitehall were concerned, a pilot should stick with his aircraft and even if necessary risk a crash landing. Thousands of lives could have been saved if parachutes had been distributed, enabling pilots to bail out of aircraft that had been damaged or were on fire.

  In the inter-war years the first nation to realise the possibility of dropping troops equipped with parachutes behind enemy lines was Russia. In the Soviet Union, parachuting and gliding began to develop as a popular hobby in the 1920s and 1930s. This was a modern sport without any bourgeois associations and seemed to fit well with Soviet ideals of building a new society. It was not a big step for the skills involved to be utilised by troops equipped with parachutes or transported by glider as a military force. By the mid 1930s the Soviets had developed the technique of towing several small gliders behind a single, large aircraft in order to get troops to inaccessible areas of the battlefield or to transport them behind enemy lines for a surprise assault. The troops had to be tough, independent minded and able to survive the drop and organise themselves quickly on the ground. The concept of airborne forces was born.

  In September 1936 the Soviet Red Army held extensive manoeuvres near Minsk in Belarus and showed off its parachute force to foreign observers from Britain, France and Czechoslovakia. Major General Archibald Wavell was sent by the War Office in London to attend the exercises. Wavell came from a typical military background. His family had come to England from Normandy in the thirteenth century and had produced a long line of generals, including both his father and grandfather. But in many ways Wavell was an unusual soldier in the conservative and tradition-based British Army of the 1930s. He wrote poetry and was something of an academic. A distinguished linguist, he had learnt Urdu and Pashtu on the North West Frontier, and had also learnt Russian before the First World War when the army had sent him to Moscow for a year. It was because of his fluent Russian (a considerable rarity in the higher echelons of the British Army) that the War Office asked him to lead the British delegation to observe the manoeuvres of the Soviet army in 1936.

  Wavell watched the exercises carefully as the Red Army put 1200 tanks through their paces. He noted that only three or four broke down and was extremely impressed. The second day’s manoeuvres were even more remarkable. About 1500 paratroopers were dropped on to the battlefield in front of the foreign visitors. They were supposed to represent a ‘Blue’ force that had to occupy a series of bridges over a river and delay the ‘Red’ force that was about to counter-attack. Wavell was impressed to see that despite the danger of the parachute jump, none of the paratroopers were injured, indeed most were seen fighting ferociously soon after they had landed, many of them moving at the double. But despite this and Wavell’s interest in new ideas and in finding ways of increasing the mobility of the army, he concluded in his official report that although it had been a ‘most spectacular performance’, the ‘tactical value’ of the paratrooper action was ‘doubtful’.2

  Wavell’s conclusion became the official view of the British Army. Although its senior officers recognised that parachutists could be useful as saboteurs behind enemy lines, there were not enough aircraft available either as transports for par
atroopers, or to tow gliders. An era of financial restraint did not seem the moment to develop apparently fantastical ideas and build up an entirely new type of military unit. It was easier to stay with the traditional modes of combat. So, the War Office resolved, there was ‘little scope for the employment of airborne forces on a scale sufficient to exert any major influence on a campaign or battle’.3 They took no action to create or train airborne forces, or even to learn how to do such a thing in the future.

  In Germany, on the other hand, there was much enthusiasm for this new arm of warfare. As the German military was already beginning to think in terms of aggression, its generals were keen to find new ways of launching surprise attacks that would help to destroy the morale of its enemy in the early, decisive stages of a campaign. The dynamic use of airborne forces also seemed to offer the opportunity of speeding up offensive action, which fitted in with the ideas about Blitzkrieg, lightning warfare, that were developing within the German military. Accordingly, training began in top secret to develop forces of both paratroopers and of glider-borne troops. This took place at a base outside Stendal near Magdeburg and in late 1937 a parachute school was opened within the Luftwaffe. It was to be the German air force and not the army that provided the first regiment of paratroopers, known as Fallschirmjäger.

  Training was thorough for what was seen from the start as an elite unit. The first phase was dedicated to learning the basic techniques of landing, how to transmit the shock of hitting the ground into a roll and spread the impact across the body. Alongside this, recruits had to learn how to handle the parachute harness and how to pack a parachute. German airborne troops would always jump in parachute rigs they had packed themselves, psychologically putting the responsibility for preparing his chute on to the parachutist himself. Next came training sessions in a captive harness swinging above the ground and in mastering the process of leaving an aircraft fuselage.

  Then came the air phase of training. An experimental group tried dropping first with manual chutes and then with automatically opening parachutes that were triggered as the parachutist left the aircraft. The Luftwaffe decided to use automatic parachutes activated by a static line anchored to a rail or steel line inside the aircraft. To qualify as a trooper within the Fallschirmjäger it was necessary to make six jumps, the first of which was made from an aircraft flying at about 600 feet. The last was made as part of a squad or ‘stick’ of paratroopers from about 400 feet in simulated battle conditions.

  But getting the paratrooper on to the battlefield was only the first stage of the training. The Fallschirmjäger had to be trained in fighting on the ground, in order to take full advantage of the strengths of this type of assault, that is speed and surprise, and to minimise the weakness of the troops, that is their lack of heavy weapons. They received extensive training in light infantry techniques, in carrying out demolition under fire, in fast movement behind enemy lines, in the disruption of communications and in causing maximum chaos to the enemy. The Fallschirmjäger were only lightly armed, each man usually jumping with nothing but a Luger automatic pistol and a few grenades in his pockets. Rifles and sub-machine guns were dropped in canisters that had to be retrieved and opened before being distributed to the men who had landed.

  However, all of this training would have been worthless without the ability of the recently formed Luftwaffe to provide the right sort of aircraft in sufficient numbers to transport the paratroopers to the battlefield. The aircraft chosen was the Junkers Ju 52, a sturdy, reliable workhorse developed in the early 1930s as a civilian airliner and flown on flights around Europe by Luft Hansa. Hitler made the aircraft famous by flying across Germany in a Ju 52 while campaigning for the 1932 elections, and he continued to use it after he became Chancellor.4 The military version of the Junkers was robust enough to land on rough airfields and to take considerable punishment. Its three engines made it highly reliable and each Junkers could carry eighteen men, or tow two gliders with nine men in each. Hundreds of these transport aircraft were built for the Luftwaffe to transport freight, to drop bombs and to carry paratroopers. General Kurt Student was put in charge of the Fallschirmjäger forces and by 1939, four thousand parachutists a year were graduating from training school.

  The French and the Poles also both took tentative steps towards developing their own airborne forces after the Russian demonstration. Despite the secrecy, by early 1939 it was known in London that the Germans were developing airborne forces. The Deputy Chiefs of Staff made a request to set up an inter-service training centre to investigate what the Germans were up to and to report back on the feasibility of forming airborne units in Britain. Again, the British military turned down the opportunity. The voices of conservatism prevailed. A group of officers from all three services, tasked with assessing whether it was worthwhile trying to follow the German example, questioned ‘whether the present is the time to direct effort to the production of a weapon which may never be used’.5 It was six months before the outbreak of the Second World War.

  By the late 1930s, the Germans had moved rapidly ahead and during three years of training and development had learnt many lessons about how to organise airborne forces. Hermann Göring, the head of the Luftwaffe, showed a personal interest in the development of the Fallschirmjäger. Airborne units were on standby in September 1938 to help ‘liberate’ the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia had there been a struggle there. In the event, the British and French handed over the region to Germany without a fight at the diplomatic conference held in Munich. Airborne forces were once more on standby when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939 to seize vital river crossings but, again, were not called upon in the end.

  On the morning of 10 May 1940 the whole world woke up to the remarkable potential of airborne forces. As a curtain raiser to the mighty offensive in the west against Holland, Belgium and France, Hitler unleashed his newly trained airborne forces on a key target in Belgium. Fort Eben-Emael was reputed to be the largest and most heavily defended fortress in the world. On the first morning of the offensive in the west, about six hundred airborne troops assaulted the fort and the nearby bridges over the Albert Canal. One hundred and fifty of them were parachutists and about half of these were engineers who landed on the roof of the fort with heavy explosives. The other 450 men landed by glider inside the fort. The defenders were soon completely overwhelmed by the surprise attack and the ferocity of the airborne assault.

  Speed was essential for the German storm-troopers and within ten minutes nine installations had been captured. In a few hours the German engineers had blasted the massive structures with heavy satchels of explosive carried on poles. At noon on the following day the mightiest fort in Europe surrendered and two bridges across the canal were captured intact. No one could ever doubt the effectiveness of airborne troops again.

  The loss of a key defensive stronghold on the opening day of the German assault had a massive demoralising effect on the Allied armies. But it was just the beginning of a whole new phase of warfare. The well-trained and highly motivated German army focused its attacks combining fast-moving armour and air support in a series of hammer blows. Within six days a key battle against the French had been won at Sedan and German forces broke through across the Meuse river into north-east France. The French Premier phoned the new British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and told him ‘We are defeated. We have lost the battle.’6 Within days the Dutch and the Belgians surrendered. In six weeks France had collapsed and the British Army had withdrawn to Dunkirk, abandoning everything except the weapons each man could carry. In the summer of 1940, Britain itself faced the possibility of invasion. The Cabinet soon wanted to find out if German airborne troops would be used to capture key sites in Britain, like RAF radar stations or control rooms, ports or airfields, or the political and military headquarters from where the nation’s fragile defences were commanded.

  It was in this context of humiliating defeats in France and the threat of paratrooper drops in southern England that Churchill
made one of his most courageous and visionary decisions. On 22 June 1940, the Prime Minister sent an instruction to his chief of staff, General Hastings Ismay, to pass on to the full War Cabinet: ‘We ought to have a corps of at least five thousand parachute troops. Advantage must be taken of the summer to train these forces who can nevertheless play their part meanwhile as shock troops in home defence. Pray let me have a note from the War Office on the subject.’ No doubt he stamped his instruction with his famous ‘Action this Day’ sticker.7