The Paras - The Inside Story of Britain's Toughest Regiment. John Parker
us get home first. But then soon afterwards we heard the Spitfires up above to accompany us home. When we got back we were given leave, and the chaps found they were being treated like heroes in the pubs. Every pub you went into: ‘Have a pint, mate’ – even for Paras who weren’t on the raid. It was a great morale-booster not just for us, but the whole country. And we needed it. At the time we were losing everywhere and the papers picked up on it and gave us all a good boost. And it was right – the papers had been full of the Germans doing this and that and now we had caught them with their trousers down. It was one of the best-organized raids of the war.
That fact was rammed home by Mountbatten’s PR machine, which would become familiar to all who worked with him over the course of the war. He arranged for Johnny Frost and his men to get a hero’s welcome and for Frost to give an account of the raid in a radio interview for the BBC, which was broadcast on 2 March 1942. Briefed in advance by Mountbatten, Frost gave an enraptured interviewer a dramatic but carefully worded and unrevealing summary to provide the British public with a much-needed fillip:
We had a certain amount of worry about the weather and we were waiting for quite a few days before it was perfect. Then the day dawned and we felt it was now or never. We fed ourselves as we went along to the aerodrome and got into an aeroplane. We had never been so comfortable in an aeroplane before. Usually when we do our practice dropping we are fairly uncomfortable and worry about getting out. But this time no one worried at all and in fact every aircraft had its own little concert party going on the whole time. Even when we got to the French coast and opened the hole in the bottom of the aircraft, everyone looked out and had a good view of the coast and the sea and I rang up the pilot and made quite certain we weren’t dropped in the water because that’s the one thing we didn’t want. We were all dropped by our air force pilots in exactly the right places and we could see as we came down the landmarks that we’d been trained to look out for.
Once we arrived in France it was just a question of taking off our parachutes and forming up at a prearranged place which every man in the company knew in advance. It was quite perfect. There was snow on the ground but we could see everything we expected to see, by moonlight. Everybody in the company made a very good landing. Once we’d formed up, we then went on to do the job. At this time there were a certain number of shots going off. The Germans were prepared for something to happen. There was a certain amount of shots coming at us, but we couldn’t quite see where from. The Germans didn’t seem to know who we were or what we were. Altogether, I think they were quite astonished and very frightened too. We got exactly what we wanted and destroyed everything we could and once we’d done that, we noticed a certain number of German reinforcements forming up behind the woods not very far away.
We then thought that, having done everything we set out to do, we’d better withdraw to the beach. During this time part of our company were fighting the Germans who were holding the beach defences and they very successfully overcame them and held the beach for us. We then came down and made our signal to the Navy and we were very glad to hear their engines coming in. Once we were with the Navy again, our troubles were over.
The Parachute Regiment, which officially did not come into being until August 1942, had won its spurs – and its first Battle Honour. Needless to say, Winston Churchill did not apologize for stating when next the War Cabinet met, ‘I told you so!’
The vital piece of radar equipment, carried safely into the laboratories of RAF scientists, gave up its secrets. First-hand knowledge was gained of the state of German radar technology, particularly as applied to the enemy night-fighter system. Charles Cox, a modest man who died aged 84 in 1999, delivered his prize for scientific investigation in what had been one of the most remarkable exploits of its kind. Back in England, some time later, wearing RAF uniform and parachute wings, he went into a shop to buy a Military Medal ribbon. This somewhat surprised the shop assistant, since the MM is normally an Army decoration. ‘What have you been up to?’ he asked. ‘Not much,’ was Cox’s reply.
Much later Cox learned that he was lucky to survive the raid. At a reunion, one of his former colleagues on the raid revealed that the radar mechanic had been given orders, if he was captured, to shoot him. Thereafter he served at Air Ministry experimental establishments. After the war he opened a radio and television business in his home town of Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, and in 1982 was among the surviving Paras who attended the unveiling of a plaque at Bruneval by the Prince of Wales, in the presence of President Mitterrand of France.
In Churchill’s view, one of the significant areas still lacking in the development of Britain’s airborne forces was the key to the whole operation: the military glider. The Germans, as the Prime Minister had forcefully pointed out on numerous occasions, were well ahead of the game and had used gliders effectively in all their airborne operations. The enemy had been testing their use as a potential military tool since the end of the First World War. Prohibited from developing military aircraft under the Treaty of Versailles, German engineers turned instead to the study of glider flight, and by the early 1920s they had developed gliders with advanced designs.
The first gliding school in the USA was established at South Wellfleet, Massachusetts, by German pilots in 1929. When, ten years later, war came again, the Germans were ready with large gliders towed by Junkers to transport soldiers, artillery and light vehicles. In 1940 Germany became the first country ever to use gliders in war. Britain was years behind and even when its designers began to catch up, production was a slow business, partly because all factories capable of building gliders were already working full time on other wartime projects.
Churchill was given a demonstration of Britain’s first prototype glider during a combined airborne exercise on 26 April 1941, but the first would not come into service until the end of the year. Without gliders, the airborne brigades’ hands were tied. At that time only a limited amount of weapons and equipment could be dropped by parachute, and gliders were needed to supply such essential items as jeeps, light tanks and light artillery as well as acting as personnel carriers taking troops direct to battle fronts. The glider was a relatively fast and economical way of flying in reinforcements in support of parachute landings, the scale of which was limited by the carrying capacity of the old Whitley bombers. Stripped out, this aircraft could carry a stick of only ten men, and that at a pinch. As the Bruneval raid demonstrated, it was a hugely expensive business to carry such a small number of men in a single converted bomber: in that instance, 12 aircraft to move 125 men to the target in very cramped conditions. Even now, two years into the war, RAF resource managers maintained that they could not justify releasing decent planes for the purpose of large-scale deployment of airborne troops, and for the time being it was unthinkable to move a whole battalion by air and drop it into the target area in the way that the Germans had done in taking Crete.
Nor was Britain’s first glider, the Hotspur, any better than the Whitley in its carrying capacity – and it was certainly no match for the German gliders. It could carry eight men but not heavy loads such as a jeep, or even small artillery. The Mk I had been designed as a true glider, capable of soaring. It was quickly superseded by the Mk II, whose wingspan was clipped so that it glided directly to its target once released from its towline. Only the Horsas and Hamilcars, which came into use in late 1942, would be capable of carrying cargo as well as troops. Four hundred Hotspurs had been ordered, and although there was still a shortage in the latter part of 1941 and early 1942, it hardly mattered because at first there was also a shortage of pilots to fly them. As luck would have it, the 31st Independent Infantry Brigade was on its way back to England from India. On their arrival on 10 October 1941, the officers and NCOs of the brigade were informed that, as of that moment, they were all glider pilots. This came as something of a shock because few of them had ever clapped eyes on a glider, let alone flown one. They were trained infantrymen, not fliers. But they accepted the challenge with not a little apprehension and henceforth would be known as the 1st Airlanding Brigade.
The raising of airborne units was not the sole preserve of the Parachute