A heroic Allied raid that dodged the Nazis (and Mountbatten’s bungling)
OPERATION BITING: THE 1942 PARACHUTE ASSAULT TO CAPTURE HITLER’S RADAR
384pp, William Collins, £19.99 (0808 196 6794), RRP£25, ebook £14.99
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Superficially, Max Hastings’s Operation Biting is a typical Second World War tale of derring-do. It’s proper testosteronedriven, Boy’s Own stuff – the story of how just over 100 British commandos dropped by parachute onto the coast of occupied France to steal a new radar installation from the Germans, then managed to escape with the equipment. Whole sections of Hastings’s book, in fact, read a little like Where Eagles Dare or The Guns of Navarone, those adventure stories by Alistair MacLean that readers of a certain age will vividly remember.
And even though this is a factual story, all the classic fictional elements are there. We get the daring reconnoitre by the French resistance of the radar site at Bruneval, on the Normandy coast; the bravery of the British commandos, who had to parachute out at night through a hatch cut in the floor of the RAF Whitley bombers; the firefight with the Germans on the snowy ground; the struggle to locate and capture the radar device; the courageous flight down a cliff to await rescue by Royal Navy landing craft; and the tortuous journey home across the English Channel.
As Hastings says, Operation Biting is a story that “lifts the spirit because it is that of ordinary people doing fine and difficult things well”. And the commandos who successfully completed this mission in February 1942 “were indeed heroes, whom it is a joy to celebrate here”.
But underneath all this congratulatory back-slapping, there’s another dimension, one that gives Hastings’s book a more troubling aspect. The senior officers who sent these men on this dangerous mission were amateurs at best, and negligent with the lives of others at worst.
Commodore Lord Louis Mountbatten, head of Combined Operations, was one of the most culpable. His 1938 confidential naval assessment had warned that while he had a “compelling manner and dynamic energy”, he also possessed a “naïve simplicity” and was “inclined to be surprised at the unexpected” – words that turned out to be prescient.
Hastings describes Mountbatten as “panting” for a chance to “carry his war to the enemy”, and leaping at the chance to oversee “Operation Biting”, as the proposed raid to capture the new German radar was known. He was helped by another glamorous figure, the Eton-educated Major
General Frederick “Boy” Browning, the commander of the Airborne Division.
Winston Churchill enthusiastically supported the work of Mountbatten and Browning: the British prime minister was always attracted by the romance of special forces. Such units were particularly useful to him after Dunkirk, when they could demonstrate that, in his words, “the completely defensive habit of mind which has ruined the French” had not penetrated the British psyche.
But Mountbatten, Browning and the other planners were responsible for a dangerously flawed scheme. For example, the parachutists were dropped away from their target and had to make their way to it on foot; and after dismantling the radar, they had to travel back across the Channel in slow landing craft that were especially vulnerable to attack by German naval patrols.
All this was compounded by an inadequate training schedule and haphazard organisation. During one of the rehearsals, the commandos waited patiently to be evacuated from a beach, only to discover that their rescue boats were searching for them in a different place. And later, on the night of the raid, the soldiers found that their white coveralls had been left behind, which meant they stood out as dark targets for the Germans against the Normandy snow.
As Hastings reveals, the attack couldn’t have succeeded without a huge element of luck. Not least that the German commander had decided to take the night off and visit Paris. Ironically, he was a cousin of Mountbatten’s: Prince
It’s Boy’s Own stuff: bold British commandos, firefights with Germans, an escape down a cliff
Alexander Ferdinand von Preussen. His men, lacking adequate leadership, reacted slowly to the arrival of the British commandos, and were confused about their intentions.
It was almost a miracle that the German radar was secured at the cost of only two British dead. As the Royal Navy commander in charge of rescuing the commandos from the beach later said, “Why the Huns did not clean up our comparatively small force, I shall never understand.”
Subsequent raiders, however, were not so lucky. Mountbatten was largely responsible for the disaster of the attack on Dieppe a few months later that led to the death of about 1,000 commandos and the capture of 2,000 more. And Browning will forever be notorious for his culpability for the “Bridge Too
Far” calamity at Arnhem in 1944.
Yet Hastings is evenhanded in his judgment about Mountbatten and Browning. In other hands, this story could have become a polemic about the British class system, a fable of how posh people sitting safe at home recklessly sent mostly workingclass soldiers into danger.
Operation Biting is proof that the detailed telling of a small piece of history can illuminate our understanding of a much greater whole. It’s one in a long line of Second World War books written by Hastings in an engaging and entertaining way. Now that almost all the veterans of the conflict are no longer with us, such work is especially valuable: all that remains is the history, and the historians who tell it.