Raiders (12 page)

All planned tasks were completed.
On Maaloy, four coastal gun emplacements, one anti-aircraft battery, searchlight and generator were blown up, fuel and ammunition dumps set ablaze, the German barracks and HQ were demolished in the naval bombardment.
On Vaagso, every single fish-processing factory was destroyed by fire or explosives, and every German office, billet, barracks or hut was burnt out or demolished.
Other targets destroyed included the W/T Station and mast, the transport depot, a beach mine store, a telephone cable hut, the Ulvesund Hotel (the German strongpoint) and the operating mechanism of the main lighthouse.
The road was cratered between North and South Vaagso and the apparatus in the telephone exchange at a neighbouring hamlet was smashed beyond repair.

The raid gave hundreds of elite troops vital combat experience and the experience gained there was absorbed into future Commando training instruction.
The success also provided a welcome boost to the morale of the army as a whole as it rebuilt itself after Dunkirk.
The Navy had carried out its tasks with
barely an error, safely transporting men to and from the objective and protecting the area during the assault.
The RAF were equally impressive, arriving bang on time and maintaining constant air cover throughout, seeing off the enemy, laying smokescreens, drawing off the Luftwaffe and bombing Herdla airfield into disuse.
Above all, the three services had proved they could work together to pull off an audacious and highly effective assault on enemy territory.
In short, the raiders had carried out exactly what the planners had tasked them to do and hoped to achieve.
It was a major coup for Mountbatten and Combined Operations, proving that a complex but clear plan could be carried out to near-perfection if freedom and flexibility was granted to the men on the ground.

Ten days after the force returned to Scapa, the following dispatch, introducing the official summary of the operation, was submitted to the Admiralty by Sir John Tovey (aka ‘Splashguts’), Commander-in-Chief, Home Fleet.
‘The operation was well conceived, planned and rehearsed with skill and thoroughness, and executed with great efficiency, precision and boldness.
Though a minor operation, it affords a fine example of smooth and effective cooperation between the three Services and reflects great credit on Rear-Admiral H.
M.
Burrough, C.B., Brigadier J.
C.
Haydon, D.S.O., O.B.E., and all officers, ratings and ranks taking part.
The cooperation of the aircraft of Coastal and Bomber Commands was most effective.
The operation could not have proceeded without it.’

Impressive enough though they are, the statistics, bare facts
and official reports that you can read in the National Archives at Kew do not reveal the true significance of the intense, six-hour running battle in a remote corner of the Norwegian coast.
In the wider context of the world war, Vaagso was a minor operation, a mere butcher-and-bolt skirmish on the northern fringes of a massive conflict.
It would be months before the raid’s greater significance began to emerge and years before its impact was fully understood and appreciated.
Ultimately, its consequences were wildly disproportionate to the original aims.

The short-term strategic gains were impressive enough.
News of the raid set alarm bells ringing in the corridors of German High Command.
Intercepted intelligence reports revealed bitter recriminations between Berlin and the German HQ in Oslo.
The British had intended the raid to be no more than a harassing operation to divert German resources from ANKLET, the larger operation to the north (which ended in failure, and prematurely, much to Churchill’s fury).
No one had imagined for a minute that it was ARCHERY, not ANKLET, that would cause the greatest consternation in Berlin.
And cause not mere unease, but pure panic.
For Hitler, Operation ARCHERY confirmed his long-held suspicion that it was in Norway that the Allies would one day launch their inevitable invasion of the mainland.
Rich in natural resources, it was a country vital to his war effort and had to be safeguarded at all costs.
To that end, Hitler insisted 30,000 troops be immediately dispatched there and ordered the renovation of Norway’s coastal defences.
By mid-1944, over 370,000 German troops were stationed in Norway, effectively
sitting on their helmets at a time when they were desperately needed to shore up Germany’s crumbling fronts in eastern and southern Europe.
From then on, Hitler also began concentrating most of his naval forces in Norwegian waters, where the Royal Navy and RAF were able to keep them penned in for the rest of the war, picking them off one by one and preventing them from breaking out into the Atlantic to attack convoys.
By the end of the war, most of Germany’s major warships had been eliminated.

The first amphibious assault on an enemy coastline involving soldiers, sailors and airmen might not have been one of the key points in world history, but it certainly led to one.
The men who carried it out were the pioneers of a form of warfare that revolutionised military thinking.
The first steps of the D-Day landings in Normandy were taken in Vaagso.

BY THURSDAY, THE
troops had all but given up hope.
For three days, they lay on their beds in full battledress waiting for the order to climb aboard the twelve Whitley bombers lined up on the runway outside.
But every afternoon, the staff officer arrived at the airfield to announce that the operation had been postponed and the air was filled with the sound of 120 men cursing and groaning as one.
Three conditions had to be satisfied.
They needed a full moon, or as good as full; they needed a rising tide and a calm sea for the landing craft so that the Navy could get them off the beach as quickly as possible once the task was completed;
and they needed no more than a light wind so that they didn’t take casualties when they went in.
But it was late February and the weather was playing havoc with the plans – and their nerves.

If the raid didn’t go ahead on Thursday, it would be back to the mud and monotony of Tilshead barracks for another month of training until the next full-moon period – and the men had had quite enough of Tilshead and quite enough of training.
But on this occasion, there was a difference to the familiar routine.
When the staff car swept past Thruxton’s guardroom and up to the wooden troop huts, it wasn’t the staff officer who stepped out of the back, but Major General ‘Boy’ Browning himself, Commander of 1st Airborne Division.
The weather was clear.
They were to take off that night, he told them.

Major John Frost, the commander of the raiding force, was as pleased as anyone to be seeing some action at last, and there was a bounce in his step as he made a final tour around the airfield huts to visit his men.
He found them in high spirits.
Some were busily fitting their parachutes and checking their weapons; others sat around, smoking and drinking mugs of tea and chatting excitedly.
In one of the huts, the men were singing at the top of their voices.

After two months of exercises and rehearsals, it was now that Frost was able to reveal the object and destination of the mission.
Until then, Operation BITING had been veiled in secrecy.
Its details were known to the Prime Minister and his War Cabinet and a handful of scientists, but no one else.
Not even the four other officers who were to take part in the raid.
Now he could
put them out of their mounting curiosity and finally tell them where they were going and why.

There was a beautiful, clear sky above them, strewn with stars, when the men of ‘C’ Company formed up and marched around the perimeter of the airfield.
The piper played the regimental marches of Scotland as the twelve sticks of men filed out to the twelve Whitleys of No.
51 Squadron RAF.
Frost was enjoying a last cigarette and a flask of tea fortified with rum when he was called to the telephone.
It was Group Captain Sir Nigel Norman, the man who planned the air element of the operation.
The French coast, the RAF man warned, had taken a dumping of snow and returning crews had reported that the anti-aircraft flak in the area around Le Havre was a little ‘lively’ that night.

Frost swore under his breath as he hurried out to his aircraft.
It was too late to swap their khaki uniforms for the white smocks issued for winter warfare.
As he prepared to climb aboard the twin-engined bomber, the familiar figure of Wing Commander Charles Pickard, the squadron leader on the night, approached him.
Pickard, the hero of innumerable bombing raids and a name known throughout Britain’s households, made no effort to hide his unease about the raid as Frost passed him his flask of tea and rum.
‘I feel like a bloody murderer,’ he said.
It was not an auspicious start to the first major operation carried out by British paratroopers.

No element of the British armed forces lost a greater percentage of its men during World War Two than Bomber Command and,
at the start of the conflict, a good number of those losses could be attributed to Germany’s night-time detection system.
The eminent scientist R.
V.
Jones, Britain’s first Scientific Intelligence Officer, who had been working on radar technology for many years, was convinced that Germany was using some form of night-time early warning radar system to alert them to the imminent approach of British bombers.
Bomber Command’s losses had increased steadily throughout 1941 and the crews who survived the raids into the continent backed up Jones’s suspicions.
Flying sorties every night the weather allowed, and losing men and aircraft at an alarming rate, Bomber Command was desperate for any help they could get from their shadowy colleagues in the top-secret Intelligence Section of Britain’s Air Ministry.
No one was more eager to help them, or better qualified, than the brilliant physicist Reginald Victor Jones.

Images from the RAF’s Photographic Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) were the key to cracking Germany’s radar system.
Stripped of their armament to reduce weight and increase speed, Supermarine Spitfires, fitted with cameras, were dispatched on lightning sorties over occupied Europe to spy on German developments and activities.
Using the PRU images in conjunction with other intelligence sources, Jones soon discovered that high-frequency radio signals were being transmitted across Britain from a directional radar system somewhere across the Channel.
It was known as ‘Freya’, but how it worked, Jones had very little idea.
These were the very early days of radar and little was known about a system which would revolutionise war in the air and at
sea by VE Day.
In the autumn of 1941, an RAF photographic unit returned from a mission to Cap d’Antifer near Le Havre with a fresh batch of images, revealing a suspicious installation at a private property.
Flight Lieutenant Tony Hill, one of the unit’s most skilled and daring pilots, went to investigate it more closely.
He overflew the site in his Spitfire on 5 December and, within twenty-four hours, Jones was running over the images with his magnifying glass.

As always the pictures were brilliantly clear and precise and Jones’s eye was immediately drawn to a dish-like object, roughly ten feet in diameter, sitting in the front garden of an ostentatious villa on a 400-foot cliff above a beach near the village of Bruneval.
Jones was convinced he had found the missing element he had been so desperately looking for.
The vertically standing dish, shaped like a saucer, was known as a Würzburg and it worked in combination with Freya.
Further RAF images soon revealed a whole chain of radar apparatus strung out along the shores of western Europe facing Britain.
Before he and his fellow scientists could devise a way of confounding or even defeating the German early warning system, Jones needed to know how it worked.
There was only one way to find out.

Knowing Churchill’s enthusiasm for any form of offensive action, Jones immediately suggested a raid to capture the Würzburg at Bruneval.
His idea was sent up to Combined Operations Headquarters in Whitehall, where Lord Mountbatten and his staff were only too happy to lay on the suitable arrangements.
Plans were immediately set in motion to mount the raid
at the earliest possible opportunity.
The 1st Airborne Division was the obvious choice to execute the raid.
Unlike a large amphibious landing force, paratroopers could be inserted quickly and remain undetected in the crucial early stages, allowing them to capture and hold the objective while the engineers set about their work.
The operation was given the go-ahead in early January and scheduled for mid-to late February.

The force handed the task was C Company of the 2nd Parachute Battalion, plus some sappers from the Royal Engineers and a handful of men from B Company to make up the numbers.
When they arrived at the training base at Tilshead in Wiltshire at the end of January (‘a miserable sort of place with mud everywhere’, he noted), Frost still had no idea about the nature of the mission he had been assigned.
He found it difficult to disguise his disappointment when he was informed by the liaison officer from divisional headquarters that he and his men had been chosen to carry out a parachuting demonstration for the benefit of the War Cabinet somewhere on the Dover coast or Isle of Wight.
The liaison officer held out the prospect that C Company would almost certainly be chosen to carry out a raid in enemy territory at some time in the future, but that was little consolation.
When the young officer began to tell Frost how he was to organise his men, Frost’s moustache began to twitch with barely disguised fury.

The following day, the liaison officer returned to Tilshead and, binding him to the strictest secrecy, he told Frost the truth.
The demonstration was just a cover story, he explained.
The raid was
to take place within the month.
‘I had no further objection to raise,’ wrote Frost.

When training for the operation began, the men had only just completed their parachute jumping course and only a few of them had leapt from a moving aircraft more than five times.
At this stage of the war, only a small handful of British service personnel had qualified to parachute.
In the months to come, thousands of fully trained paratroopers would be available to jump from aircraft all over Europe, but the 1st Airborne had only just been founded and equipment, including aircraft, was extremely hard to come by.
Such was the strain on resources in rebuilding the army after Dunkirk that the small, fledgling airborne force barely had a parachute between them or an aircraft to jump out of, let alone qualified instructors to show them how to do it.
Major Frost recalled that when he joined the Paras, ‘a damaged parachute and jumping-helmet captured from the Germans were the only models available and for aircraft .
.
.
four Whitley Mark IIs were seldom simultaneously serviceable.’
But once Mountbatten’s Combined Operations HQ and the War Cabinet became involved, every resource and item of equipment Frost needed to carry out the raid were made available to them.

The training, which took place mainly on Salisbury Plain, was intensive and exhausting.
Neither time nor the weather was on their side.
All the equipment they had been promised soon began to arrive by the crate-load at Tilshead, providing further evidence for the men that they were about to be sent on a major operation.
The item of equipment arousing the greatest amount of
interest was the recently invented Sten submachine gun, a fully automatic rifle/pistol hybrid that made their bolt-action Lee Enfield .303 rifles look distinctly old-fashioned.

In the second week of February, the raiding party took the train to the west coast of Scotland to carry out training exercises with the Navy.
They were quartered near Inveraray, aboard the
Prince Albert
, the parent ship of their landing craft which, all going to plan, would provide their means of escape from France after the attack.
The freezing cold waters of Loch Fyne might not have been the most popular of training areas for the men, but the exercises did at least focus the minds on the challenges they faced.
Embarking 120 men, with equipment, casualties and prisoners, in the dark and under fire, was, they soon realised, by no means a straightforward procedure.
‘The possibility of being left stranded on the coast of France after we had done our job was unpleasant,’ Frost recalled.
‘And in the end we went on the raid without having had one really successful evacuation.’
The high point of the training in Scotland was a visit from Combined Ops chief Lord Mountbatten who, without giving away details of the raid, made a stirring address to all ranks, naval and military.

Back at Tilshead, they carried out a practice drop with the Whitley bombers detailed to take them in on the night.
It was the first time that No.
51 Squadron had ever dropped parachute troops but, unlike every other element of the training, the exercise passed off successfully.
The cold ground was rock solid and there were a few sprains and bruises, but no serious injuries.

The raiding party consisted of 120 all ranks, divided into three groups with the code names
Drake
,
Hardy
,
Jellicoe
,
Nelson
and
Rodney
, who were each given separate tasks to carry out on the night.
Major-General Browning chose the names as a salute to the Royal Navy, whose men and vessels would, if all went to plan, evacuate the raiders and their top-secret prize and return them safely to Portsmouth.
BITING was to be a combined operation in the purest sense.
The RAF was to deliver the Army to the target by air, the Army would execute their tasks on the ground, and the Navy would transport them from France by sea.

For security reasons, it was not possible for Jones or any other leading scientist in possession of highly confidential information to join the raiding force.
Were they to fall into enemy hands, they would be subjected to the Gestapo’s most extreme forms of interrogation to extract their invaluable store of secrets.
And yet, it was important that an engineer with more than basic knowledge of radio technology joined the sappers tasked with dismantling the Würzburg.
Were they unable to remove the apparatus, the engineer would at least be able to photograph it and scrutinise its parts at the scene.
Any information whatsoever was to be welcomed by Jones and his colleagues down at the Telecommunications Research Establishment at Worth Matravers, near Swanage, on the Dorset coast.