Back in the days of limited TV channels, when a stream was but a small and narrow river, bank holiday viewing was built around the big war movie, something like Where Eagles Dare or The Heroes Of Telemark. As far as I can tell there hasn’t been a film about Operation Biting, a daring raid to steal German radar technology in 1942 and the first successful British paratrooper assault. Max Hastings’s hugely entertaining book makes you wonder why. It’s the sort of adventure days off on the couch were invented for.
There’s a wealth of background information before we get to the action itself. Dr RV (”Reg”) Jones was a brilliant physicist, a crack shot and a pioneer in infrared detection. Just the sort of chap to be offered a position in the air ministry and secret service as the second World War began, “investigating the role of science and technology in the enemy’s armed forces”.
Being naturally classically educated, Jones noticed a mention of Freya in signals intercepted by the code breakers in Bletchley Park. The goddess Freya had purloined a magic necklace from Heimdall, a servant of the gods who could see for hundreds of miles, day of night. Aerial photography identified Bruneval just north of Le Harve on the French coast as the likely site for Hitler’s electronic eye so an attack was proposed to Combined Operations HQ, which was directed by Commodore Lord Louis Mountbatten.
Hastings questions whether this royal relative who would meet his end at the hands of the provisional IRA in 1979 was a substantial figure but Churchill was an admirer. For Mountbatten, Combined Operations was the film set on which “heroic deeds [would] be enacted for the benefit of the British war effort”.
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There’s also Frederick Browning, the “father of the British airborne forces” according to biographer Richard Mead and husband of the more physically enthusiastic Daphne du Maurier, and a “fantastically indiscrete” French spy and professional chancer known as Rémy, among a cast of characters which makes The Great Escape look understaffed. The raid itself should have gone wrong but even the botched parachute landings helped confuse the Germans. Its success was a big and badly needed propaganda coup which was quite rightly celebrated in the press.
This is a rich-in-detail history which reads like a thriller and there are few if any who can match Hastings at this class of caper.
