Operation Biting
William Collins 384pp £25 The Week Bookshop £19.99
“War histories are usually studies in failure,” said Gerard DeGroot in The Times: they’re packed with “needless deaths” and “catastrophic mistakes”. So it’s a welcome change to read Max Hastings’s rollicking new book, which tells the story of a successful British parachute assault in 1942 on a German radar installation. “Operation Biting” was the brainchild of a “brilliant physicist” named R.V. Jones, who’d become intrigued, while studying German intercepts, by 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.” And the “boffin with a classical education” was right. Using radar installations on the Normandy coast, the Germans were gaining crucial advance warnings about British bombing raids. Jones conceived a plan to “attack and steal some of the equipment”, thus giving the British the chance to study the German technology.
Operation Biting took place in the early hours of 28 February, when “120 men of 2 Para were dropped by the RAF” close to a radar site near Bruneval, said Patrick Scrivenor in Literary Review. The men removed the radar disc and “associated technology” before being evacuated by landing craft from a beach. Not everything went smoothly: some paratroopers were “dropped two miles short of the target”, and the evacuation was “bedevilled” by unexpected German resistance, which led to two deaths. Still, the raid met its objectives, and ultimately helped Britain counter German radar defences.
Hastings characterises his story as one that “lifts the spirit”, said Laurence Rees in The Daily Telegraph. But beneath the “back-slapping”, it had a “more troubling aspect”. Operation Biting was planned by Louis Mountbatten, head of Combined Operations, and Frederick “Boy” Browning, commander of the Airborne Division. This pair were responsible for two of the biggest disasters of the War – respectively the raid on Dieppe later the same year, and the “Bridge Too Far” calamity at Arnhem. Operation Biting could easily have followed that pattern. In planning, it was “dangerously flawed”, and its success ultimately depended on a “huge element of luck” – not least the fact that the German commander happened to be away that night in Paris. Operation Biting is “engaging and entertaining”. In other hands, it could have been a quite different book – “a fable of how posh people sitting safe at home recklessly sent mostly working-class soldiers into danger”.