They Had Fifteen Minutes to Steal a German Radar | Operation Biting, 1942

February 1942. British bombers are being met over Germany night after night, in the right piece of darkness, at the right height, and nobody in London can work out how. A young physicist named R. V. Jones knows the answer is a gray parabolic dish called Wurzburg. What he cannot get from a photograph is how it is built, what frequency it runs on, and whether it can be blinded at all. So a reconnaissance Spitfire brings home a picture of one of them sitting in open grass on a clifftop in occupied France, ninety yards from a two hundred and fifty foot drop. And Combined Operations decides to go and take it. This is the story of Operation Biting: a hundred and twenty paratroopers dropped onto a snow covered field at a quarter past midnight — a villa with no wire and no sentry outside it — a Royal Air Force radar mechanic who had never been in an aircraft, kneeling in the mud with a crowbar while tracer goes over his head — half the assault force dropped two miles off target, so the only way home is still held by the Germans — flares fired at an empty black sea — and, in the boxes they carried down that cliff, the reason thin strips of metal foil would blind the night defense of an entire country over Hamburg eighteen months later. Sources: R. V. Jones, "Most Secret War: British Scientific Intelligence 1939-1945" (1978) George Millar, "The Bruneval Raid: Stealing Hitler's Radar" (1974) Taylor Downing, "Night Raid: The True Story of the First Victorious British Para Raid of World War II" (2013) John Frost, "A Drop Too Many" (1980) Combined Operations Headquarters report on Operation Biting, The National Archives, Kew Airborne Assault Museum (ParaData) and Imperial War Museums records on Operation Biting Chapters: 00:00 Fifteen Minutes on the Cliff 00:56 The Dot on the Photograph 03:17 The Lone House 04:32 The Man Who Had Never Flown 05:59 Twelve Whitleys 07:28 The Villa 08:44 Crowbars on the Cliff 10:12 The Beach Is Still Theirs 11:49 The Boats 13:05 What Was Inside the Boxes #OperationBiting #BrunevalRaid #WurzburgRadar #JohnFrost #ParachuteRegiment #CombinedOperations #RadarWar #WW2Raids #WW2History #MilitaryHistory #BattleLogs