Raiders (15 page)

The bodies of the two men killed in the raid had been left behind deliberately, but shortly after boarding Frost learned that six men, who had become lost, had arrived at the beach a minute after the last landing craft had pulled away.
Frost hid his distress but knew there was nothing they could do for them now.
There could be no turning back.
He could only hope that the men would be treated well by their captors.

While the crews of the gun boats handed out blankets and generous tots of rum to the sodden paratroopers, they explained why their arrival had been delayed so long.
The force had been lying offshore, as planned, waiting to launch the landing craft, when a German destroyer and two torpedo boats passed within a mile of them and the wireless operators had been unable to respond to the signallers’ promptings.
It was most probably the light mist that saved them from being detected, but it had been a close shave.
Had the German ships passed any closer or spotted Frost’s Very flares, the evacuation force would have been attacked and the paratroopers would have been stranded ashore.

Fifteen miles out from the French coast, a squadron of Spitfires
arrived to escort them back home.
German divebombers had been expected to stalk the flotilla from daybreak, but no attack materialised.
Destroyers came out to join the escort and it was the afternoon by the time they steamed past the Isle of Wight and into Portsmouth.
Once in the harbour, the destroyers saluted the raiding force, ‘Rule Britannia’ rang out from Tannoy speakers and the Spitfires swept down low in tribute before disappearing back to their bases.

In the early evening, the raiders boarded the troopship
Prince Albert
to be welcomed by Wing Commander Pickard and his crews.
A throng of photographers and reporters were there in numbers to report on the success of the highly daring raid, the first significant operation by a new breed of soldier.
‘The limelight was strange after weeks of secrecy and stealth,’ said Frost.
‘All we really wanted was dry clothes, bed and oblivion; but before that there was some serious drinking to be done.’

The following day a Hurricane was sent over the Channel on a reconnaissance flight to Bruneval.
A group of German officers was standing round the foundations where the Würzburg had been operating twelve hours earlier.
The sight was too tempting for the pilot and, turning back, he swooped on the gathering and opened fire with his four wing-mounted cannons.
Before climbing out of the dive, he had the pleasure of watching the grey-coated Germans diving into the shallow hole.

That night C Company returned to Tilshead and Frost was climbing into a hot bath, looking forward to a quiet evening
and a good night’s sleep, when he was called to the telephone and instructed that he was to be in London for a meeting at nine o’clock.
A staff car, he was told, was on its way to pick him up.
Driving through the blacked-out streets of London, he was taken to a building on Birdcage Walk, between Buckingham Palace and Westminster, and led below to an underground bunker.
Dressed in his Cameronians uniform, he was met by Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee; the replica of Bruneval stood on a table in the centre of the room.

Soon the room began to fill up with the most important figures in the British administration of the day: Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, Secretary of State For War Sir James Grigg, First Lord of the Admiralty ‘AV’ Alexander, First Sea Lord Sir Dudley Pound, Chief of the Imperial General Staff General Sir Alan Brooke and Chief of the Air Staff Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal.
Frost felt increasingly anxious about the prospect of addressing the War Cabinet about details of the raid and he was relieved to see the more familiar face of Commodore Lord Mountbatten, the Combined Operations chief.

‘Suddenly the Prime Minister was there, siren-suited and with outsize cigar,’ recalled Frost.
And Churchill approached him, saying: ‘Bravo, Frost, bravo, and now we must hear all about it.’
To the young Major’s relief, Mountbatten as Chief of Combined Operations laid out the details of the raid.

The six wounded men all made full recoveries, although the life of Company Sergeant Major Strachan hung in the balance for
several days.
Within a few months he was back in uniform and promoted to Regimental Sergeant Major.
The six men left behind became prisoners of war.
French Resistance chief Colonel Rémy survived the war but ‘Pol’(Roger Dumont) was exposed by the signal sent from England congratulating him for his work on Bruneval.
He was shot by a German firing squad.
Many of the paratroopers who took part in Bruneval were killed in subsequent operations.

Four weeks after Bruneval, Private Newman, the German-Jewish interpreter, was captured during the Combined Operations assault on the dockyard at St Nazaire, in what has since been dubbed the ‘greatest raid’.
Fortunately his true identity was never revealed and after the war he settled in England for good.
Pickard was not so lucky.
Three times he was admitted to the Distinguished Service Order before meeting his death two years after Bruneval when he led the low-level Mosquito bombing raid on a prison at Amiens to free the hundreds of French Resistance men held there.

Major Frost and Lt Charteris were awarded the Military Cross, and Flight Sergeant Cox and two sergeants received the Military Medal for their roles in Bruneval.
Company Sergeant Major Strachan was later awarded the Croix de Guerre, Lt Young was Mentioned in Dispatches and the scientist R.
V.
Jones was given a CBE.
For Frost, Bruneval turned out to be little more than a light diversion and skirmish compared to the actions and operations in which he subsequently became involved.
He saw heavy fighting in the bloody campaigns in Tunisia, Sicily and Italy, but
it was for his leadership and gallantry at Arnhem, immortalised in the film
A Bridge Too Far
, that he was to be best remembered.
Badly injured and captured at Arnhem, he saw out the war in a POW camp.
He retired from the army as a Major General in 1968 and became a farmer in West Sussex.

‘So what did we get out of all this?’
This was the question that Churchill barked across the table at his Cabinet Ministers and Chiefs of Staff when Frost had joined them in their bunker.
Radio technology is a complex subject and this is the wrong place to explain its finer details, but in brief, the capture of the Würzburg was a significant breakthrough for the British.
As a result, Britain was able to improve its own radar network, and, in the words of R.
V.
Jones, the man leading the scientific fight against the Nazis, the Würzburg provided, ‘A first-hand knowledge of the state of German radar technology, in the form in which it was almost certainly being applied in our principal objective, the German nightfighter control system .
.
.
it had provided us with the equivalent of a navigational “fix” in confirming the “dead reckoning” in our intelligence voyage into the German defences.’

But these were not the only happy consequences of the Bruneval venture.
Soon after the raid, the German authorities issued orders that all radar installations were to be protected by barbed wire – to the delight of the RAF’s Photographic Reconnaissance Unit.
The smallest details in an image were often the key to revealing the true nature of an object or location being
photographed.
Barbed wire was too thin to be detected from the air, but its presence was revealed by the grass which grew longer and darker underneath it as well as from the debris that became caught in it.
Subsequently, Jones and his colleagues were able to identify several more sites of interest to them.

The British scientists and military planners were not the only ones to appreciate the quality of the Bruneval raid.
The official German report recorded that ‘the British displayed exemplary discipline when under fire.
Although attacked by German soldiers they concentrated entirely on their primary task.’

The success of the raid boosted the status of Combined Operations and secured the future of British airborne troops.
Bruneval is the first battle honour awarded to what today is known as the Parachute Regiment or, more often, ‘the Paras’.
The War Office immediately expanded the fledgling force and, by the war’s end, thousands of paratroopers had served with great distinction and courage in all major theatres of the war.
More often than not, they were the first troops in.

In the wider scheme of the war, Bruneval was a very minor affair.
The name was spoken over breakfast tables and in pubs around Britain in the days following the raid, but it was soon overtaken by events elsewhere and forgotten.
One place where it hasn’t been forgotten – outside of the Parachute Regiment – is Bruneval itself.
If you drive around the little village today you will pass along the Avenue du Colonel Rémy, Rue Lord Louis Mountbatten, Rue Roger Dumont and Rue Major Frost, but you won’t find the villa where Frost blew his whistle to launch
the assault.
The Germans knocked it down soon after the raid in the mistaken belief its presence had given away the Würzburg.
The Rue Major Frost will lead you to the tree-lined rectangle of Le Presbytère farm and continues up to the site of the villa.
The foundations of the building are still clearly visible and if you walk out towards the cliff you will come to a scruffy dirt circle.
It was there that Flight Sergeant Cox and the sappers wrenched the Würzburg from its base while under heavy fire.
And it was there, it can be said, that the glorious tradition of the Paras was born.

IT WAS 2320
when, in rapid succession, five British-trained Commandos leapt from a Halifax bomber over the frozen wilderness of the Hardanger Vidda in the Telemark region of central southern Norway.
Jumping from just 700 feet, their chutes billowed open and floated in a neat diagonal line through the moonlight towards the vast white expanse stretching out to all horizons.
Somewhere in that frozen wilderness were four comrades who, for three months, had battled starvation and some of the harshest conditions on the planet as they waited and waited and waited .
.
.
Finally, the raid was on.
The saboteurs knew from
the huge risks they had been asked to take that their objective was of great importance – an impression underlined by their carefully worded orders.
What they didn’t know was that Prime Minister Churchill in London and President Roosevelt in Washington were anxiously monitoring their mission.
Operation GUNNERSIDE was one of the most important raids of the Second World War.
It wasn’t until after the conflict that they learned quite how important.

At the outbreak of the war, Albert Einstein was one of a very small handful of people in the world who understood the terrible potential of atomic power.
To most scientists, even very eminent ones, the notion that a single bomb could annihilate an entire city was absurd.
Churchill was extremely sceptical too, but it wasn’t long before he was persuaded of the dire threat it posed.
London, the intelligence suggested, was the first target on Hitler’s list.
The reasoning was obvious: destroy the British capital and the war was won.
Britain would surrender and the United States would be unable to help launch an invasion of Europe.

A great number of Germany’s leading physicists – many of them Jews – had fled the Nazis for Britain and the United States, bringing with them warnings of the rapid advances being made to build an atomic weapon.
So began frantic efforts by the Allies to beat Germany to the bomb.
In the US the atomic research programme was known as ‘The Manhattan Project’ and no expenses were spared in its development.
To their advantage, the Americans did now have many of the world’s leading experts in
their field, following their flight from the Nazis, but they were months off the pace, years even, and it was going to take a lot of time, effort and resources to overhaul their German counterparts.
For fear of causing widespread panic, strict secrecy blanketed this apocalyptic arms race.
No more than a few dozen scientists, military chiefs and senior politicians were aware of its existence.

German scientists had been working on three different approaches to developing nuclear energy.
At the start of the war, the one considered most likely to succeed involved the production of a liquid known as deuterium oxide or ‘heavy water’.
The fluid was used as a moderator to slow the nuclear chain reaction in unenriched uranium.
This was a laborious, costly process and the entire world’s stocks of the fluid could be found in a few canisters inside a heavily protected hydroelectric plant known as Vemork in an ice-bound valley deep in the interior of Nazi-occupied Norway.
But minute by minute, splash after splash, the stock of this potentially deadly liquid was increasing and Germany was inching that bit nearer to building the most powerful weapon in the history of warfare.

In May 1941, intelligence sources signalled that Germany had demanded a ten-times increase in Vemork’s heavy water production to 3,000 lb per year.
By January 1942, production was ramped up to 10,000 lb per year.
Churchill didn’t need the code-crackers at Bletchley Park to decipher the significance of the updates: Hitler was demanding rapid acceleration in the race to build the first atomic weapon.
In June 1942, Churchill flew
to New York to meet Roosevelt.
Nuclear energy was high on the agenda of priority topics.
The two leaders of the free world agreed that every effort should be made to thwart Germany’s bid to build the world’s first ‘super-explosive’.
After the war, Churchill wrote: ‘We both felt painfully the dangers of doing nothing.’

Destroying the stocks of heavy water at Vemork was considered the most effective way of retarding Germany’s nuclear energy programme, but that was a great deal easier said than done.

An inside job was implausible.
At that stage of the war, the Norwegian Resistance was no more than a fledgling operation with limited resources and very little offensive capability.
There was also the problem of Vemork’s remote location.
Roughly 150 miles from the coast, accessible only by one winding road, it sat on a steep, rocky slope of a narrow valley at the foot of the Hardanger Vidda, a beautiful but forbidding wilderness – the highest plateau in western Europe – where only the most experienced outdoorsman could survive for any significant length of time.
The 3,500 square miles of terrain features barren, treeless, undulating moorland punctuated by hundreds of peaks, lakes, rivers, streams and marsh.
In the summer, the Hardanger is a magnet for hillwalkers and nature lovers.
In the winter, only the hardiest and most intrepid venture into its wind-blasted and frozen interior.
When the Germans invaded Norway, they went around the Hardanger and they never advanced more than half a day’s march into it, for fear of being caught out by the volatile weather.

Bombing the plant was rejected on a number of grounds.
Innocent lives were very likely to be lost and the hydroelectric plant, the principal centre of economic activity in the region, would be put out of action.
What’s more, it was thought unlikely that an air raid would succeed in destroying the heavy water, which was stored under several storeys in the basement of the solidly constructed plant.
But such was the urgency of the situation that there were even discussions about blowing the Møsvatn Dam at the head of the valley – a course of action that would have led to the deaths of hundreds, possibly thousands of civilians, with no cast-iron guarantee that the heavy water stocks would be put beyond use.
After endless series of meetings and streams of interdepartment ‘Top Secret’ memos, the planners reached the conclusion that the only plausible option was a ‘
coup de main
’ raid carried out by elite Commandos in a joint mission involving the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and Combined Operations.

Established on Churchill’s order in the summer of 1940, SOE’s purpose was to wage guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines, to train and assist local resistance groups and carry out espionage and sabotage tasks – or, in Churchill’s words, the clandestine unit of highly trained irregulars was ‘to set Europe ablaze’.
Many of the SOE operatives were refugees from the Nazi-occupied countries who, after completing their training, were reinserted into their homelands on specific missions.
The work was amongst the most dangerous in the war.

In the early days, the organisation was not highly regarded
within Whitehall.
The ‘Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’, as it was dubbed, was thought to cause more trouble than its achievements were worth.
Existing intelligence and espionage services, local resistance groups and governments-in-exile all had cause to complain about its activities.
When SOE was first approached about plans for an attack on the Vemork hydroelectric plant, it saw an opportunity to establish its credentials and silence its many critics.

The rough plan was for an advance party of SOE-trained Norwegians to be dropped by parachute onto the Hardanger.
They would live in the wild and act as a reconnaissance unit and reception committee for a force of British glider-borne Commandos.
Their task was to find a suitable dropping zone in the rugged terrain, guide in the aircraft, lead the British troops to the plant and help them escape.
Airborne operations were best undertaken under cover of darkness, which ruled out any missions in the summer months when there was near-permanent daylight.
During the summer of 1942, the instructors of SOE’s Norwegian unit were ordered to pick a handful of exceptional recruits with the aim of dropping them into Norway as soon as the RAF considered the nights long enough for them to operate in relative safety.

Operation GROUSE was the name given to the advance party and it was to be led by Jens Anton Poulsson, a pipe-smoking, Norwegian Army cadet and expert mountaineer who grew up in the town of Rjukan, a mile or so from the Vemork plant.
The three men he put forward to make up the team, Claus Helberg,
Knut Haugland and Arne Kjelstrup, were also born in Rjukan.
Helberg, a brilliant skier and man of adventure, had sat next to Poulsson in school.
The families still lived there but their sons were under strict instructions not to make contact with them.
Haugland, one of the best underground W/T operators of the war, had worked with the embryonic Norwegian Resistance but escaped to Britain after being arrested on several occasions.
Kjelstrup, a plumber, was born in Rjukan but raised in the suburbs of Oslo.
Short and powerful, he had shown during Germany’s Blitzkrieg invasion that he was not a man to shy away from a fight, even in the face of overwhelming odds.
The four men would set up an operating base in one of the small wooden huts dotted over the Hardanger used by walkers, hunters, fishermen and skiers.

The men were SOE recruits of the Norwegian Independent Company who had passed through a number of top-secret Special Training Schools (STS) across Britain, learning the dark arts of irregular warfare.
(The unit was also known as the Linge Company after Martin Linge, the Commando leader killed in Operation Archery.) By the time they had completed the intensive and gruelling series of courses, they had become masters in close combat, demolition and sabotage, silent killing, wireless operation, intelligence gathering, propaganda and training local resistance militia.
At the Norwegians’ main base in the Highlands of Scotland, the men underwent training in outdoor survival in extreme conditions .
.
.
but their instructors soon realised that there was not a great deal they could teach the Norsemen.
The
great majority of them were first-class outdoorsmen who since childhood had learned how to survive in the most exacting conditions nature can present.

Surviving in the wild was one challenge, but overcoming German defences and destroying the heavy water supplies was quite another.
Einar Skinnarland, SOE’s agent in the Rjukan area with contacts inside Vemork, had cabled London to report that there were 20 German soldiers stationed at Vemork, 35 billeted in a nearby school, 100 more a ten-minute drive down the road at Rjukan and a further 20 in billets near his family home at the Møsvatn Dam at the head of the narrow, winding valley.

Skinnarland was told he would learn of GROUSE’s arrival through a concealed message on the BBC Norwegian Service on the night they were to be dropped in.
The announcer would say ‘This is the latest news from London’ rather than the customary ‘This is the news from London.’

By the end of the summer, the GROUSE party were put on standby to depart.
They had completed the advanced courses of the SOE training, received their orders and reached a peak of physical fitness.
Having packed and repacked their equipment over and over, they waited to be summoned to Wick Airfield.
As always in parachute operations, they were at the mercy of the weather.
If it was too cloudy or windy, the RAF couldn’t drop them.
On two separate occasions in a month, they pulled on their parachutes and boarded the aircraft, the adrenalin pumping hard as they flew over the coast of their homeland and stood
over the hatch in the floor poised to leap, only to be told the drop had been cancelled.
On the first occasion, thick cloud meant that they were unable to locate the drop zone; on the second, engine trouble and heavy anti-aircraft fire over the coast combined to thwart them.
The intense frustration felt by the four men is evident from Poulsson’s blunt comments in his operational notes.

A third attempt was made at nightfall on 10 October 1942.
Once again, the four young Norwegians stood in line as the RAF dispatcher pulled open the hatch and the freezing wind rushed through the floor.
Below, the snowbound plateau glistened under the bright moon.
At 2318, the dispatcher hurled out half a dozen containers of supplies and equipment.
There was no turning back this time.
The young Norwegians were going home.
Poulsson was the first to leap, followed barely a heartbeat later by Haugland, Kjelstrup and Helberg.
Moving at 200 miles an hour, it was important not to hesitate; a few seconds delay could mean separation from the rest of the group by hundreds of yards.
The dispatcher tossed out the final two containers and slammed shut the hatch.
The rear-gunner counted the silk chutes drifting in perfect symmetry towards the frozen landscape.