Operation Biting

A review of Sir Max Hastings' new book on the Bruneval raid, February 1942

It is sometimes the case that book reviews say more about the reviewer than the reviewed. Hopefully I won’t fall into that trap here, but with the reader’s indulgence I will start my review of this excellent book by Sir Max Hastings by observing that reading it was a little like dancing through my own daisy field, recognising as I did many of the remarkable characters who have populated the pages of my own books. These range from Major John Frost, Commanding Officer of Second Battalion Parachute Regiment, who fought in the Iraq Rebellion of 1941; both ‘Colonel Gilbert Renault (‘Rémy’) and Wing Commander Charles ‘Pick’ Pickard, subjects of the Amiens raid in 1944, to Commodore Lord Louis Mountbatten, later Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia between 1943 and 1945. So I felt at home reading this remarkable account of the Bruneval raid – Operation Biting – in February 1942. I suppose it is what happens when one shares the same paddock as a thoroughbred.

In short, this book is brilliant. Hastings’ great strength lies both in his story-telling and in his development of character. One might quibble occasionally with his judgements about historical events but in terms of his ability to tell a great story and build a picture of a character he is quite unsurpassed. Operation Biting was a brilliantly conceived, quickly planned and expertly executed combined arms raid (i.e. the Army, Navy and Air Force working intimately together, not something very common even at this stage of the war, and a product of the new Combined Operations organisation led by Mountbatten) to capture a piece of German radar equipment perched on a clifftop near Le Havre and thus determine what radio signal technology the Germans had at their disposal. It was also populated by the cast of such characters that would easily make it a Hollywood blockbuster. The challenge in making this story into a film would be in determining who would be the lead character, there being so many of them. The story began, as they often do in films, with a studious, white-coated boffin in his laboratory. The man who lay behind virtually all the technical radio wave innovation in Britain during the war, Dr R.V. Jones, noticed in late 1941 that the Germans had built a Würzburg radar station atop a Normandy cliff. He suggested that ‘we’ could ‘get in there’ and grab it. And so we did. It was Jones who was to produce the seed of the most successful British special forces raid of the war, a raid that was, as Hastings observes, ‘an authentic little triumph’ at a time in the war when there was little good to write home about.  It wasn’t the first raid of its type: the first was a parachute assault in 1941 by the 11th SAS, Operation Colossus, but it was certainly the most successful. One hundred and twenty men of the Royal Engineers and the paras landed by parachute (against RAF advice), grabbed the Würzburg, fought a bloody little battle against the Germans before escaping from the beach below the cliff courtesy of the Royal Navy.

As Hastings observes, the story ‘is above all a people story, their histories and experiences as fascinating as the tale of the raid itself.’  With a cast of sparkling characters ranging from Mountbatten, the aristocratic naval officer with the matinee-star idol looks to the two extraordinarily brave resistance operative working to ‘Rémy’ in his CND réseaux – Roger Dumont and Charles Chauveau, the pages of this book burst like a bunch of blooming spring flowers. Dumont and Chaveau exemplify for me why the CND was to become one of the most critical – and successful – resistance networks of the war. Hastings describes the group as Gaullist, though this is wrong. The CND worked directly to the Secret Intelligence Service, and was to play a significant role in British intelligence successes that revealed the secrets not only of the V1 and V2 sites but also of the Atlantic Wall, in preparation for D Day in 1944. The two men travelled through rings of German security to Bruneval to get the low-down on the secret site from friends in the town. They then took a stroll across the verboten cliffs pretending to be tourists looking at the sea. Stopped by a German sentry, Chauveau chatted to the man amiably in perfect German. Disarmed, the hapless guard spilled the beans, agreeing to give the men a guided tour and revealing inter alia that the defences did not include any land mines. It takes a certain kind of chutzpah to be a spy, and Rémy’s CND was full of brave French men and women who carried out a crazy litany of such deeds against their oppressors.

Another fascinating portrait painted by Hastings is that of Frost’s boss, General Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, and his wife, the novelist Daphne du Maurier. The interior Browning was very different, as Daphne was to discover, to the exterior. The exterior Browning exemplified the very epitome of martial manliness, which du Maurier craved and led the 24-year old into marriage with a decade older Browning in 1931. The interior was very different, exhibiting all the symptoms of what we now know as Great War-induced PTSD. Hastings records of this intermittently happy marriage a letter du Maurier wrote to her mother. "I feel I mustn't leave Tommy [his family nickname] too much... He has these awful nervy fits of misery, ten times worse than Daddys old horrors. All harking back to that beastly war... He clings to me just like a terrified little boy. So pathetic, it wrings ones heart." In 1941 Daphne sought solace in the arms (and bed) of her landlord, Christopher Puxley. When Puxley’s wife found out about this affaire d’amour, Mrs Browning and her children decamped to Cornwall, where the magisterial Rebecca was born.

A final curiosity is revealed by Hastings. The German officer responsible for the Wurzburg was one of Mountbatten’s cousins, the twenty-nine-year-old Captain Prince Alexander Ferdinand von Preussen. Who knew? Fortunately for von Preussen perhaps, he was out-of-town for the big event.

There’s much more I could say, but my word limit was reached long ago. You’ll have to buy the book and read it for yourself.