As the men of 2 Para approached Bruneval, they sang songs like “The Rose of Tralee.” German anti-aircraft fire provided an unwelcome backbeat. A water bottle, filled with rum, was passed round. The date was February 27, 1942, the target a German radar post on the Normandy coast. The plan was to get in, get out and go home, with breakfast waiting in Portsmouth. A mere 120 men took part in this operation, yet the stakes were enormous. “This was no grand armada,” Major John Frost, the commander, reflected. “We were so very much by ourselves.”
“I felt as though I was acting in a play,” another soldier wrote. There was indeed something weirdly theatrical about Operation Biting, a dissonant blend of action and farce. The stage was a square mile of the French coast, the principal actors larger than life. Or perhaps that’s just the way that Max Hastings has chosen to tell this story. He’s a master of drama, a writer intimately familiar with the mind of the soldier — “All my books aspire to tell ‘people’ stories, because these are what history is about.” Yes indeed. There are few things in life more dependable than a war story told by Hastings.
Operation Biting was the brainchild of RV Jones, a brilliant physicist with a talent for communication. Hastings calls him “an authentic wartime star”; soldiers and politicians alike loved him. Having access to top secret German intercepts, Jones became intrigued by repeated references to something called Freya. In Nordic mythology the goddess Freya had a fling with Heimdall, who had the power to see, in darkness or light, objects far distant. To Jones that suggested radar, but surely the Germans wouldn’t be so obvious. Never underestimate a British boffin with a classical education.
It took Jones about a year to piece together the puzzle of German radar. He eventually pinpointed an installation at Bruneval, just 90 miles from the English coast. Wouldn’t it be nice, he thought, if British commandos could attack and steal some of the equipment? That idea appealed to Winston Churchill, who had a childlike attraction to adventure. Early 1942 was a time of unremitting gloom, when the prime minister needed a dramatic victory, no matter how small. Bruneval seemed the perfect target for his newly formed airborne battalion. With typical grandiosity Churchill demanded that “specially trained troops of the hunter class” should unleash “a reign of terror”.
There are few things in life more dependable than a war story told by Max Hastings.
Hastings unfolds this little drama at a delightfully leisurely pace. The first seven chapters focus on the principal characters, whose bizarre stories he gleefully shares. The Bruneval operation fell into the lap of Lord Louis Mountbatten, the newly appointed commodore of Combined Operations. Hastings, never one to suffer fools, is wonderfully acerbic, calling Mountbatten an “extreme narcissist” who was attracted to the glory that a successful raid might bring. “If he lacked depth of intellect, he compensated with a driving enthusiasm that bore him far toward the greatness he craved,” he writes. Churchill, who shared Mountbatten’s best qualities and his worst, adored his new commodore.
We also meet Frederick “Boy” Browning, commander of the airborne battalion, another dangerously impetuous individual. He craved glory, but was forever overshadowed by his famous wife, the novelist Daphne du Maurier. Notoriously lascivious, she was instantly attracted to this soldier hero and keen to offer him “the joys of a bohemian romance”. He, however, was stubbornly old-fashioned when it came to matters sexual and insisted on marriage first. She reluctantly relented, but did not get the studmuffin she sought. In public Browning was the picture of a dashing warrior, but in private he was a nervous wreck suffering from PTSD. His tendency to whimper helplessly while resting his head on her lap rather annoyed the hard-bitten du Maurier. None of this is perhaps relevant to Operation Biting, but it’s fascinating nonetheless. Hastings is a superb military historian with a delightful talent for gossip.
With typical grandiosity Winston Churchill demanded that “specially trained troops of the hunter class” should unleash “a reign of terror.”
The success of Biting owed much to the efforts of Gilbert Renault, aka Colonel Rémy. Before 1939 he was an inveterate loser successful only at fathering children. Then came the war and an opportunity to act upon his extreme French patriotism by spying on the Germans. Espionage also offered the opportunity to indulge his passion for luxury — fine wines, good food and plush hotel rooms. Two of Rémy’s recruits managed to obtain a tour of the Bruneval complex by telling an accommodating guard that they were desperate to see the view from the cliffs. He kindly informed them that there were no mines on the beach. The Germans in this story seem straight out of ‘Allo ‘Allo!
The 120 men who took part in the operation mainly consisted of dour Scots, already accustomed to a tough life. “Many of them,” Hastings writes, “were physically smallish men, a legacy of the slums from which their families came, but they were also iron hard.” They were not the sort “to make docile household pets”. In peacetime, a fair few might have indulged in petty violence, but this was wartime and Britain had need of their innate thuggery. They were not, in truth, well trained for the task at hand, having completed only a dozen practice jumps, none at night. Their toughness was, however, complemented by a naïve belief in their invincibility.
The shooting in this book doesn’t start until well over halfway through and is over rather quickly. That’s appropriate, the raid itself took only a few hours. One third of the force was dropped hopelessly off target and did not contribute to the fighting until the very end. That proved an advantage since it confused the Germans as to what the British were attempting to do. The enemy, on this occasion, contributed greatly to the success of the operation by being uncharacteristically incompetent.
“Airborne assault always has been, and always will be, a chancy business,” Hastings writes. So much can go wrong, and so much usually does. Part of the appeal of this story, however, is that “Biting … defied all the probabilities of disaster”. It produced the kind of success that only the deluded (men like Mountbatten) would have predicted. There were no injuries when paratroopers hit the ground. Bullets flew everywhere, but few hit flesh. Casualties on both sides were minuscule. With remarkable efficiency, the British purloined all the important components of the German radar installation. The troops then neutralized a single German machine gun unit that blocked their escape. There followed a tense moment when it appeared that the landing craft would not arrive to take them away, but rescue came in the nick of time. The operation unfolded like something out of a comic book. If Hollywood were to produce a film based on this book, critics would dismiss it as unrealistic.
Operation Biting is not a typical war story. War histories are usually studies in failure. So many catastrophic mistakes. So many needless deaths. What a relief then, joy even, to be able to read about a battle with a happy ending and genuine heroes — a day that went well. The plan was to get in, get out and go home, and that’s precisely what happened.
Gerard DeGroot is a professor of modern history at the University of St. Andrews and the author of several books, including The Bomb: A Life and The Seventies Unplugged
