Operation Biting, also known as the Bruneval Raid, was a British Combined Operations raid on a German coastal radar installation at Bruneval in northern France, during the Second World War, on the night of 27–28 February 1942. Several of these installations were identified from Royal Air Force (RAF) aerial reconnaissance photographs during 1941, but the purpose and the nature of the equipment was not known. Some British scientists believed that these stations were connected with successful German attacks on RAF bombers conducting bombing raids against targets in Occupied Europe, resulting in severe losses of pilots and bombers. The scientists requested that one of these installations be raided and the technology it possessed be studied and, if possible, extracted and brought back to Britain for further examination. Due to the extensive coastal defences erected by the Germans to protect the installation from a seaborne raid, the British believed that a commando raid from the sea would suffer heavy losses and give sufficient time for the enemy to destroy the installation. Officials decided that an airborne assault followed by seaborne evacuation would be the most practicable way to surprise the garrison of the installation, seize the technology intact, and minimise casualties to the raiding force. On the night of 27 February, after a period of intense training and several delays due to poor weather, a company of airborne troops under the command of Major John Frost parachuted into France a few miles from the installation. The main force assaulted the villa in which the radar equipment was kept, killing several members of the German garrison and capturing the installation after a brief firefight. An RAF technician with the force dismantled a Würzburg radar array and removed several key pieces, after which the force withdrew to the evacuation beach. The detachment assigned to clear the beach had initially failed to do so, but the German force guarding it was soon eliminated with the help of the main force. The raiding troops were picked up by landing craft, and transferred to several motor gunboats, which returned them to Britain. The raid was entirely successful. The airborne troops suffered relatively few casualties, and the pieces of the radar they brought back, along with a captured German radar technician, allowed British scientists to understand enemy advances in radar and to create countermeasures to neutralize them.
Background After the end of the Battle of France and the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk during Operation Dynamo, much of Britain's war production and effort was channelled into RAF Bomber Command and the strategic bombing offensive against Germany. However, bomber losses on each raid began to increase during 1941, which British intelligence concluded was due to German use of advanced radar equipment. The British and Germans had been competing in radar technology for nearly a decade at this point, with the German technology often at the same level as the British or surpassing them due to heavy investment in the fledgling technology. By the beginning of the Second World War, Britain had devised effective radar systems, primarily through the work of Robert Watson-Watt, although much of the technology was still rudimentary and Watson-Watt and other scientists had failed to devise an effective night-defence system in time for the German night-time bombing of Britain during 1940. Another British scientist working on radar systems and techniques was R. V. Jones, who had been appointed in 1939 as Britain's first scientific intelligence officer, and had spent the first years of the conflict researching how advanced German radar was in comparison to Britain, convincing doubters that the Germans had radar.
By examining leaked German documents, crashed Luftwaffe bombers and Enigma decryptions, and through German prisoner of war interrogations, Jones discovered that high-frequency radio signals were being transmitted across Britain from somewhere on the Continent, and he believed they came from a directional radar system. Within a few months of this discovery, Jones had identified several such radar systems, one of which was being used to detect British bombers; this was known as the "Freya-Meldung-Freya" array, named after the ancient Norse goddess. Jones was finally able to see concrete proof of the presence of the Freya system after being shown several mysterious objects visible in reconnaissance pictures taken by the RAF near Cap d'Antifer in Normandy – two circular emplacements in each of which was a rotating "mattress" antenna approximately 20 ft (6 m) wide. Having found proof of these Freya installations, Jones and the other scientists under his command could begin devising countermeasures against the system, and the RAF could begin to locate and destroy the installations themselves. Jones also found evidence of a second part of the Freya set-up, referred to in Enigma decrypts as "Würzburg", but it was not until he was shown another set of RAF reconnaissance photographs in November 1941 that he learned the nature of Würzburg. The Würzburg radar device consisted of a parabolic antenna about 10 ft (3 m) in diameter, which worked in conjunction with Freya to locate British bombers and then direct Luftwaffe night fighters to attack them. The two systems complemented each other: Freya was a long-range early-warning radar system but lacked precision, and Würzburg had a much shorter range but was far more precise. Würzburg FuSE 62 D also had the advantage of being much smaller than the Freya system, and easier to manufacture in the quantities needed by the Luftwaffe to defend German territory.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
