Raiders (14 page)

The Commandos of No.
11 SAS Battalion, who were dropped
in to blow up an Italian aqueduct in February 1941, can claim the honour of carrying out the first ever paratrooper operation by British forces.
Technically, the Bruneval raid was the second, but it was a far bigger and infinitely more important and hazardous enterprise.
It was also the first carried out by the 1st Airborne Division, the country’s first dedicated force of paratroopers, created on Churchill’s insistence.
It was half an hour after midnight on 28 February 1942 when the boots of the first British paratroopers thumped onto Nazi-occupied French soil.

The 120 men of C Company, 2 Para had under an hour to prove their worth to Britain’s war effort.
The best-case scenario envisaged by the Combined Operations planners was a successful removal of the radar dish, a light casualty toll, an orderly evacuation and safe passage back to the UK.
The worst case?
Slaughter on the beaches or capture and ‘interrogation’ by the Gestapo.

It was an unpromising start to the raid.
The two aircraft that had diverted to avoid the flak barrage dropped their ‘sticks’ over two miles south of the intended dropping zone.
As soon as he hit the ground, Lt Charteris realised that he and the twenty other men from the Nelson group had landed in the wrong place.
They had been handed the crucial task of capturing the beach and holding it so that the landing craft could come ashore.
Without Nelson, Lt Timothy’s reserve of thirty men was not strong enough to hold their other positions and simultaneously attack the German pillbox and all the machine-gun positions covering the beach.

Aware that catastrophe loomed without them, Charteris quickly assembled his men, and using the distant beacon of the lighthouse at Cap d’Antifer north of the villa to guide him, they set off in single file at a fast trot.
Within minutes, they had stumbled into the enemy and the first bursts of a short but brutal firefight cut through the still night air.

The intended dropping zone was a large area of open ground 600 yards east of the villa to the north of the Bruneval ravine, through which the road trailed from the village to the embarkation beach.
Several inches of snow lay on the ground and, under the bright moon, 100 British paratroopers were clearly visible as they quickly gathered up the nylon canopies.
The only sounds were the rustle of parachutes and the humming engines of the bombers as they disappeared back across the Channel.
The tension that every man must have been feeling at this moment was suspended by a brief, comic scene when several dozen of them, including Frost, unzipped their trousers and relieved themselves of several pints of processed tea.
‘It was not good drill,’ the Major conceded, ‘for now was the time when a stick of parachutists are most vulnerable and one’s first concern should be to make for the weapon containers.’

But there was no sign of the enemy and, within ten minutes, Frost’s group (‘Drake’) had located all the containers, gathered their weapons and equipment and formed up in the copse at the bottom of a shallow gorge, according to plan.
On Frost’s signal, the fifty men began jogging the short distance back towards
the coast in a silence broken only by the crunch of boots on snow.

The going was slightly harder as they came up the slope, especially for the radio engineer Cox, Lt Vernon and the rest of the sappers as they dragged their wheeled canvas trolleys and equipment for the Würzburg over the icy ground and through a maze of barbed wire.
While the engineers laid up below a ridge waiting to be called forward, Lt Young and his men split off towards the Würzburg installation close to the cliff’s edge, while Frost and his men took up position around the house.
Flanked by four men, Frost walked to the front door as calmly as a postman and blew on his whistle.
Immediately, the sound of explosions, machine gunfire and shouting shattered the eerie calm.
Bursting upstairs, Frost’s men silenced the only German inside the house, who had opened up on Young’s men from a first-floor window.

Leaving two of his men to secure the villa, Frost and the others raced the 200 yards over the frozen lawn to assist Young, only to discover that the Germans manning the Würzburg had been quickly overwhelmed.
Those that hadn’t been killed were taken prisoner.
Seized by terror when the assault began, one of them had fled and leapt over the 400-ft-high cliff.
It was his good fortune that he landed on a ridge about ten feet below.
After he was dragged back up, Private Newman set about interrogating him, but like the others he questioned, the man was virtually dumb with shock.

Sergeant Cox and the sappers arrived on the scene at the same
time and immediately pulled their tools from the trolleys and set about dismantling the dish.
The apparatus, they soon discovered, had been installed very securely, and the engineers were having difficulty in taking it apart.
When they began to come under heavy fire, Cox admitted, ‘We proceeded to rip the rest of the stuff out by sheer force.’

The fire was emanating from the direction of Le Presbytère farm in the woods to the north where the main German garrison was stationed.
It was only a matter of time before they were roused into action, but Frost’s men, in position and waiting for the counterattack, brought heavy fire to bear on the position.
Two rounds rang on the metal dish a few inches from Cox’s hands, but the RAF Sergeant was uncowed and continued with his work.

Slowly the fire from Le Presbytère intensified and enemy vehicles were observed manoeuvring through the trees.
Whether they were reinforcements or resident troops looking to move into a flanking position, Frost could not tell.
Worried about the threat from mortar units, which would have caused carnage among his men, he snapped at the engineers to hurry up.
Vernon and Cox had managed to remove the entire structure from its base as well as most of its component parts and they quickly loaded the final items into the trolleys.
They had dismantled the entire structure in under twenty minutes.
Leaving half his men behind to cover the withdrawal, the engineers and the rest headed towards the beach.
They had just begun to descend the steep slope when they came under raking fire from the pillbox that Charteris’s group
had been assigned to capture.
A number of men went down in the hail of machine-gun fire, including Company Sergeant Major Strachan, who took three bullets to the stomach.
Bleeding profusely, he was dragged to cover and administered morphine.

Frost was confused.
The beach was meant to have been secured and all German defences neutralised.
With his signallers unable to operate the faulty wireless sets, he was unable to contact Charteris, Timothy’s reserve group or his second-in-command, Captain John Ross.
He couldn’t send out a runner because every time they moved, the gunners in the pillbox opened up on them.

They had been lying up for about ten minutes when a voice further down the slope shouted: ‘Come on down!
Everything is all right, the boats are here.’
In all likelihood, this was a German trying to lure them into the open because almost immediately Captain Ross, who was close to the beach, yelled at them to stay where they were.
Frost was not a man to panic, even in the direst emergency, but he was becoming concerned.
‘Obviously something was seriously wrong,’ he recalled.
His anxiety increased when one of his men appeared at his shoulder to inform him that the Germans had retaken the villa, regrouped and were preparing to advance.
Frost immediately took a group of men back up the slope and sent the Germans running for cover.

When he returned, he was surprised to discover that the pillbox had been silenced and the sappers were on the move again.
They had been sliding so much in the icy conditions that they decided to abandon the trolleys and carry the bulky radar equipment down to the beach instead.
Sergeant Major Strachan, barely
conscious now, was being helped down with the rest of the party, barking incoherent orders at his men.

The three groups of the assault party, Drake, Nelson and Rodney, converged on the beach almost simultaneously, and Charteris was able to explain to Frost why the beach had not been secured.
The young Lieutenant, as it turned out, had done well to lead his men back to the area in such good time.
After a running battle with an enemy patrol near Bruneval village, he had followed the sound of the guns and arrived on the scene at the critical moment.
Frost’s men and the sappers were pinned down and the beach was still in enemy hands.
(In the darkness of the woods and the confusion of the running fight, a German soldier had attached himself to Charteris’s men in the mistaken belief they were his comrades.
On being discovered in their midst, he was promptly dispatched.)

The two sections of Charteris’s four that had been dropped in the right place and arrived at the original assembly point as intended had waited for over an hour for the rest to arrive.
Fearing the worst, Sergeant Sharp, the senior NCO, had decided to launch an attack.
Under the original plan, Sharp’s men were to have provided the covering fire while Charteris attacked, and he realised the seriousness of the situation if the beach was not taken.
The two sections had just begun moving out to their designated objectives when, to their relief, they heard an ear-splitting yell of ‘
Cabar Feedh!
’, the war-cry of the Seaforth Highlanders.
That could mean only one thing: Charteris and the other half of the group had arrived and gone straight in on
the attack.
Supported by Timothy and the reserve group, Charteris and his men stormed the beach, quickly clearing out the guardroom and silencing the strongpoint.
The offending pillbox on the cliff was put out of action and, in a matter of minutes, the enemy’s dogged resistance was overcome and the beach and cliff area were soon securely under British control – but it had come at a cost.
Two men were killed and six lay wounded, half of them seriously.

It was past two o’clock in the morning when the assault party began to assemble on the small beach at the mouth of the Bruneval ravine.
The raid might not have gone completely to plan, but the paratroopers had achieved what they had intended: to reach the objective, subdue the enemy and remove the radar equipment.
The apparatus now lay in the sand alongside the six wounded, all of whom had now been treated with morphine.
The white chalk cliffs towered above them, almost luminous in the bright moonlight.
The odd crackle of gunfire broke the stillness as the covering troops took up defensive positions to hold the area for the evacuation.
There was one problem: there was no sign of the Navy.

The signallers attempted to contact the ships but without success.
They flashed signals from a lamp but still the sea offered nothing but darkness and silence, save for the gentle lapping of the waves on the beach.
A thin mist sat over the water and it was impossible to see more than a few hundred yards.
As a last resort, it had been agreed that Frost would fire red flares from
a Very gun, one to the north and one to the south of the beach.
He did this several times, but still nothing.
Following the repeated disasters in training, Frost had always feared that the evacuation would be the most challenging element of the operation.
‘With a sinking heart,’ Frost noted, ‘I moved off the beach with my officers to rearrange our defences.’

The men had just taken up their positions and were braced for the countermeasures of the German reinforcements when one of the men shouted to him: ‘Sir, the boats are here!
God bless the ruddy Navy, sir!’
Indeed they were.
As if to make up for their late arrival, the support landing craft, carrying the Royal Fusiliers and South Wales Borderers, emerged from the mist firing every gun in their possession at the cliffs.
This had been their order, but with many of Frost’s men now back up above the beach, their heavy fire was no longer welcome.
The entire raiding party yelled at the top of their voices for them to stop, and the guns quickly fell silent.
Mercifully, no one was wounded.

The plan had envisaged six landing craft arriving in pairs, but reality had rudely punctured any hopes of an orderly evacuation.
They were well behind the strict timings laid out in the schedule, the sea was running high and German reinforcements were certain to be pouring into the area.
All six of the landing craft arrived at once.
The six wounded men and the Würzburg equipment were the priority and, once they were safely loaded into the first landing craft, the rest of the troops waded out up to their chests to scramble aboard the other five.
As they did so, the Germans appeared at the top of the cliff and started throwing grenades
and firing mortar bombs onto the beach.
It was a noisy and confused scene and there was no time to count heads.
Frost watched the disorderly scramble with dismay, but there was no alternative now.
The landing craft chugged out to the waiting Motor Gun Boats at a stately twelve knots, their maximum speed.
Once the troops had climbed aboard the larger, faster vessels, the landing craft were hooked to the stern to be towed back to England.