records that ‘despite a multitude of difficulties and disappointments, there was no looking back. Airborne forces were now an integral part of the British Army, and presently wore on their heads the maroon-coloured berets soon to become famous, and on their shoulders Bellerophon astride winged Pegasus.’
In addition, Browning streamlined the training schedule yet still insisted upon quality rather than quantity, and even in those dire, dark days many men faced rejection as unsuitable. This procedure was conducted initially at Hardwick Hall, which became the combined home of the 1st Parachute Brigade and the Airborne Forces Depot. As training and exercises became more sophisticated, volunteers – as every aspiring paratroop had to be – were put through a gruelling programme of exercises to test both physical and mental stamina. It was tough; the toughest military preparation in the entire British Army, driven by the certain knowledge that airborne troops would often have to hit the ground running, often under fire from ground troops, fight their way forward from a DZ against well-hidden or heavily armed enemy formations, and survive that ordeal until they were able to link up with their own infantry or armoured troops; or, in some cases, perform their own predetermined assault and make what they hoped would be a successful exit.
However, theory and practice were seldom in harmony, and training had to be of sufficient calibre to meet all eventualities. Recruits were tested on their ability to jump from mocked-up fuselages, swinging from trapezes like circus performers and taking an air-sickness test by swaying back and forth for a quarter of an hour in a suspended boat. The physical training schedule was intensive and considered a hurdle for all who entered – and failed here. Out of it was born the dreaded P Company training unit. According to Alan Wooldridge, whose 35 years of military service included three years with 3 Para, this was:
designed to push you to the very limits of your physical endurance – and beyond it. They eventually introduced some favourites in this test of human endeavour, including the log race, where your unit carried a very heavy log over a long distance and you had to prove you were carrying your share. And then there was a test called milling where everyone went into a ring and flogged away at each other for a minute or so and the ones left standing were the winners. It seemed bloody stupid at the time – but it was all part of the overall scheme of things to get the right people. After that, you moved on to the jump instruction – how to land, how to fall and roll, and then jumping off towers high in the hangars against a large fan which slowed the body down, acting like an air brake. Finally they unleashed you in the cage beneath a barrage balloon, and you got to jump with a parachute from around 800 feet before an aircraft drop… it was nerve-racking and then exhilarating. Some, however, did not find it so. One officer who volunteered from my regiment [the Royal Warwickshire Regiment] completed the toughest part of the course with flying colours – and then decided he could go no further. He simply could not face the fact of jumping from an aircraft.
The finer arts of parachute training were instilled at Ringway and as the early months of 1942 passed a good deal of progress was made in improving both tuition and techniques, although mishaps causing quite serious injury and occasionally accidental death were not uncommon. Part of the problem lay with using bombers which had been converted for the task of parachuting troops. This usually meant exiting through a hole in the floor – and in many cases it was literally that. A bad exit could lead to a trainee taking a nasty knock as he left the aircraft; but in addition his rigging lines might become twisted together, the parachute canopy would not fully open and the rate of descent to earth would be dangerously swift and uncontrolled, although the worst malfunction was the ‘streamer’, in which a canopy failed to open at all. Local hospitals had a regular supply of patients ‘injured in training’. The causes were kept secret. The majority would have completed seven descents in the final two weeks of training, thus qualifying for their highly prized parachute wings. They were, however, in desperate need of another test. As Alastair Pearson recognized, the work-ups and training for operations across the Channel were never-ending: ‘We were put on alert and then stood down so many times, it became frustrating to all concerned. None of the operations ever came off and as I understood it, the problem then was that the Navy could never guarantee to get us back once we had dropped for our mission, completed the task at hand and were ready to come back.’
That was about to change, if only to a limited degree – but it was a successful change for all that. In October 1941 Commodore Lord Mountbatten was appointed Chief of Combined Operations with instructions from Churchill to breathe life into the raiding programme across the board, to insert sea-borne and airborne parties into sabotage and general troublemaking operations whenever and wherever possible. Mountbatten’s appointment was treated with open derision by many in the military and naval hierarchy, and he was dismissed by one commentator as a ‘vain and mendacious hustler’.
Over the following months his lordship personally pressed into action a number of highly risky ventures, anxious as ever to promote his own standing as well the department he was running. Some, like Mountbatten himself, were overambitious and even disastrous – the most controversial being Dieppe, where 3000 troops were lost. Some of the smaller operations – such as Operation Frankton, more popularly known as the Cockleshell Heroes’ mission – also ended in tragedy without doing any real or lasting damage to the enemy, nor much to boost the morale of the British nation. And yet many lessons were to be learned from the techniques and innovative equipment devised by swashbuckling team leaders and their scientific advisers who arrived at Combined Operations in those early months under Mountbatten, and these were to be adopted for mainstream Allied operations in the coming months.
In fact, Mountbatten began his programme under the Combined Operations banner with a series of smaller raids, the second of which was to be an attack on a German radar station near Le Havre. It was one of a number of such stations strung along the Channel coast by the Germans, and RAF intelligence had pinpointed these as the main cause of increasingly heavy losses to British Bomber Command aircraft over Europe. One of the keys to the increasing effectiveness of Luftwaffe fighters and ground-based attacks on the bombers was identified as a radar system known as the Würzburg. This vectored German night fighters on to individual bombers, and RAF aerial reconnaissance had taken photographs of a dish used by the system, on a cliff top near the village of Bruneval, 12 miles north of Le Havre. The RAF and Mountbatten’s communications experts at a special unit in Hertfordshire were anxious to get their hands on one of the radar sets and this was the key object of the mission.
The radar stations were all heavily defended against attack from the sea – which was the only direction in which the Germans suspected a raid might be mounted. In fact, the initial plan had been to launch a sea-borne attack using Commandos, but this was eventually ruled out as being too risky. The Army’s new parachute troops, now straining to be let off the leash, might prove the answer. In January 1942 Mountbatten called in ‘Boy’ Browning, who needed no persuading at all to accept, realizing that this was a great opportunity to provide his men with some real action at last.
C Company of the 2nd Parachute Battalion, under the command of Major Johnny Frost, who had come to the Paras from the Camerons, was selected for the operation. The raid was pencilled in for late February, for it had to coincide with favourable moon and tide conditions and these allowed a four-day window of opportunity. Another reason for this schedule was that many of the men were still in training and the work-ups for the operation would take time. Aerial and ground intelligence had provided an excellent visual plan of the area, and allowed analysts to assess that the stations were guarded by 30 full-time guards, with a garrison of around 40 men based in the village of Bruneval itself, half a mile away. Another 100 men – operators, signallers and coastal defence troops – were housed in farm buildings around the station, and at a villa called La Presbytère, and the shore was under constant observation from the pillboxes.
It was planned to drop the Paras in groups named after famous sailors. Nelson group, for example, under Captain John Ross and Lieutenant Euen Charteris, would hit the coastal defence troops and the Bruneval garrison. Drake group included Major Frost and an expert radio mechanic, RAF Flight Sergeant C. W. H. Cox, and would take the radar station. Rodney group, under Lieutenant John Timothy, would take on the troops and off-duty staff housed at La Presbytère. No. 51 Squadron, under Wing Commander P. C. Pickard, would provide the necessary aircraft and the Royal Navy would arrange their evacuation