At midnight on 27 February 1942, 119 men of C Company of the British 2nd Parachute Battalion and one Royal Air Force technician parachuted into occupied France near the small coastal town of Bruneval under the codename Biting. Most of those troops were taken off the beach by the Royal Navy at 3:15 am the following day. With them was much of a German Wurzburg radar set, suspected by British technical intelligence to be part of the German air defence system that was starting to take a serious toll on the RAF’s night bomber force.
Sir Max Hastings is one of Britain’s best known writers on military history. His World War II books have covered some of the largest topics, such as D-Day and the Normandy campaign that followed, and he penned two weighty tomes on the final months of the war in Europe and the Pacific. But in his 2024 book, Operation Biting: the 1942 parachute assault to capture Hitler’s radar, the scope is much narrower, with all the action taking place in a little over three hours.
In Most Secret War—a book that everyone interested in the interaction between science, intelligence analysis and military affairs should read—R V Jones, who was the British Air Ministry’s assistant director of intelligence (science) during Operation Biting, explains the intelligence work on German radar that led to the raid. He claims credit for identifying the possibility of a raid at Bruneval. Recommendations were passed up the line and the operation was swiftly approved in January 1942.
Rehearsals took place over the six weeks before the operation, though none was completed successfully. The exfiltration rendezvous with the navy failed in every evolution.
Taking the operation live in occupied France therefore involved a substantial roll of the dice for all involved, with failure and capture the most likely outcome. The raid was probably launched as a result of three factors, only one of which was the technical intelligence value of the radar equipment. The potential for a boost in public morale in the advent of success also played a role, given the parlous state of the British mood at the beginning of 1942, when British forces had been defeated almost everywhere. Singapore fell only a fortnight before Biting.
Another factor—one less worthy in my judgement—was the desire to actually use the newly minted airborne forces being built in the British armed forces in the wake of previous successes with parachute and glider assaults. Hastings describes Major General Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning as evangelising a dawning age of airborne assaults—even the full-scale invasion of France would have been primarily an airborne operation in his vision. Not everyone was convinced (and rightly so—I’ll come back to the pros and cons of airborne forces in another article), but he swayed prime minister Winston Churchill and Lord Louis Mountbatten, the latter recently appointed as the head of combined operations. The same dynamic played out on a much larger scale in the fiasco at Arnhem in 1944.
Much could have gone wrong during this mission, and many things did. The drop into France didn’t achieve the planned concentration, with some sticks of 10 soldiers being dropped miles from the intended target. As it happened, that was a mixed blessing. The German defenders received reports of paratroopers being seen over a wide area and thus failed to identify the intended target. And, as Hastings relates it, some of the key figures in the German command in the area were more invested in a sinecure in France than in making a serious effort at maintaining a ready defence.
Given the narrow scope of the book, the physical book comes across as a surprisingly solid volume of 360 pages. But it’s published with a generously large font, and the final 100 pages are taken up by a series of appendices. The longest of those is a reprint of the technical assessment of the Wurzburg radar equipment retrieved in the raid. But it is of a highly technical nature and describes valve-based equipment that is totally obsolete today. As a result, the 30-page block of material is unlikely to appeal to anyone other than an octogenarian radio engineer. Another appendix lists the 120 men who took part, taking seven pages to do so. The other two appendices are of more interest, being the orders for the mission given to Major John Frost, and Browning’s post-operation report. Nonetheless, the impression given is one of padding a book that really could have been shorter.
I can’t resist closing with my favourite sentence in the book, although it has nothing to do with Biting. In describing an exchange between Churchill and Mountbatten, Hastings quotes Churchill’s response to Mountbatten’s request for a promotion at sea. That response was a question I can’t help but admire: ‘what can you hope to achieve, except to be sunk in a bigger and more expensive ship?’