"It had been a tiny triumph, but it had been a British triumph"

MAX HASTINGS talks to Rob Attar about a daring airborne raid that provided a much-needed boost to Britain's morale in the darkest days of the Second World War

- MAX HASTINGS

Rob Attar: Many of your previous books have focused on the big campaigns and the most famous events of the Second World War. So what drew you to the relatively unknown Operation Biting?

Max Hastings: Because I’m getting a bit older and a bit slower, I want to focus on miniatures rather than the big stuff. So I’ve been picking small episodes that seem to illustrate important realities about bigger things – and which are also jolly good stories in their own right.

The Bruneval Raid [Operation Biting] in February 1942 was a British success story at a time when not much else was going well. And it involved all sorts of fascinating personalities – starting, of course, with Churchill. At that stage of the war, when so many battles were being lost, he always wanted to keep raids going on the occupied coast of Europe. This was partly to remind the Americans that we were still in the war business, partly to cheer up the British people, and also partly to serve some very important objectives.

What were those objectives?

What was at stake really mattered. Bomber Command, during its attacks into Europe, was suffering more and more from German radar-directed fighters. The British were catching a new sort of radar they didn’t know much about, which the Germans called the Würzburg-Gerät.

The genius of British scientific intelligence, Reg Jones, always liked to think that he could work out anything just by thinking about it long enough – but in this case, both he and the Telecommunications

Research Establishment felt there was no substitute for getting a look at the real thing. And suddenly they saw this aerial photograph, in December 1941, of a radar station near Bruneval, about 12 miles away from Le Havre. They could see this black thing down there, which they were pretty sure was a Würzburg antenna.