Operation Biting
The 1942 Parachute Assault to Capture Hitler's Radar
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4.3 • 7 Ratings
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
In this enthralling history, internationally bestselling author Max Hastings recounts the odds-defying Operation Biting, a 1942 parachute commando raid on Northern France to steal vital components of German intelligence—one of the most thrilling British commando raids of World War II, and one of 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. British intelligence proposed an assault to capture key components. Incredibly brave agents of the French Resistance risked their lives to probe the German defenses on the Normandy coast. Then a company of Airborne forces were dropped into France in the dead of night amid heavy snow. Launching their attack, the allied soldiers dismantled the German’s radar, and after three nail-biting hours and a fierce battle with Wehrmacht defenders, escaped in the nick of time using landing-craft that carried them back across the stormy seas to Portsmouth.
Operation Biting retells this dramatic operation through a gallery of amazing characters from Winston Churchill, who promoted the raid, to Lord Mountbatten, who commanded Combined Operations, to the brave unsung commandos who fought their way through enemy territory.
A cliffhanger of a story that ratchets the suspense to the last page, Operation Biting sheds new light on an exciting and little-known chapter of the Second World War.
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.
