Operation Biting
The 1942 Parachute Assault to Capture Hitler’s Radar
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
THE SUNDAY TIMES #1 BESTSELLER
'Reads like a thriller… I couldn't put Max Hastings's new book down' DAILY MAIL
'Hastings is a master of drama, a writer intimately familiar with the mind of the soldier' THE TIMES
Operation Biting was one of the most thrilling British commando raids of World War II, and probably the most successful. In February 1942 RAF intelligence was baffled by a newly-identified radar network on the coast of Nazi-occupied Europe, codenamed Würzburg. The brilliant scientist Dr RV Jones proposed an assault to capture key components. The nearest accessible enemy set stood upon a steep cliff at Bruneval in Normandy. Winston Churchill enthused, as did Lord Louis Mountbatten, chief of Combined Operations. A company of the newly-formed Airborne Forces was committed to the operation, which took place on the night of 27/28 February. Amid heavy snow 120 men landed, some of whom were misdropped almost two miles from their objective. They nonetheless launched the assault, dismantled the German radar, and after three nail-biting hours in France and a fierce battle with Wehrmacht defenders, escaped in the nick of time by landing-craft across stormy seas to Portsmouth.
Max Hastings recounts this cliffhanging tale in a wealth of previously unchronicled detail. He portrays its remarkable personalities: the ‘boffin’ RV Jones; the peacock Mountbatten; the troubled husband of Daphne Du Maurier, Gen. ’Boy’ Browning, who commanded the Airborne Division; ‘Colonel Remy’, the French secret agent whose men reconnoitered Bruneval at mortal risk; Major John Frost, who led the paras into action; Charlie Cox, the little RAF technician who stripped the Würzburg and became an unexpected hero; Wing-Commander Charles Pickard, a legendary bomber pilot who led the drop squadron. Seldom have so many fascinating personalities been brought together to fulfil a mission that became a front-page triumph in a season of British defeats.
Recounted in Hastings’ familiar best-selling blend of top-down and bottom-up action detail, Operation Biting tells a story that has become almost forgotten yet deserves to rank among the epic tales of courage and daring that took place in the greatest conflict in history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A storied episode of airborne combat serves as a study in courage and chaos in this gripping account. Historian Hastings (The Abyss) revisits Operation Biting, a British paratrooper raid on Bruneval, a coastal village in German-occupied France; the operation aimed to capture a new German air-defense radar so that British scientists could develop countermeasures to it. The plan, Hastings contends, was a dangerous long shot, requiring 120 lightly armed paratroopers to drop behind enemy lines, dismantle and haul away the radar, capture a German radar operator, and fight their way to a beach for evacuation. Hastings, himself a former paratroop officer, probes beneath the glamorous aura of airborne warfare to its very unglamorous realities—"almost all the paratroopers' first action on landing was to satisfy a desperate need to relieve aching bladders"—and unplanned turns of fortune. (Many paratroopers missed the drop site by miles, but their fatal mistake effectively confused the Germans as to the objective of the raid.) The outsize impact of seemingly minor decisions loom large in Hastings's vivid narrative—he follows two French Resistance agents who gathered crucial intelligence on the radar station before the raid, assisted by a naive German sentry who gave them a tour of the site—and colorful personalities stand out. (He riffs on the "childlike vanity" of Lord Louis Mountbatten.) The result is a jewel of military history that highlights human-scale daring amid the mass carnage of war.
