Shortly after midnight on the morning of 28 February 1942, the men of 2nd Paratroop Battalion, C Company, dropped through a small opening in the floor of the fuselage of their modified bombers, floating down and landing in a foot of fresh snow on level ground, about 600 yards from their intended target near the town of Bruneval on the Normandy coast. A perfect drop, despite heavy anti-aircraft fire. Led by Major John Frost, who would later distinguish himself at Arnhem during Operation Market Garden (and who would eventually be portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in the movie A Bridge Too Far), the paratroopers fought off German troops while they captured and dismantled a German Würzburg air-intercept radar system. But when they arrived at the designated evacuation point on the beach below the cliffs, there was no sign of the Royal Navy. Frost sent up red signal flares, which also gave away their position to the Germans. Thankfully, the six landing craft drew up to the beach before the counter-attack could begin, and radar scientist Donald Priest was able carefully to stow the captured gear. The evacuation was messy but successful – for the first time, British scientists would have a good look at German radar, and begin to devise the means to defeat it.
The Second World War was fought not only with guns, ships, and aircraft, but also with a wide range of new technologies that were just being invented when the conflict began. As the American scientist Vannevar Bush pointed out, it was ‘the first war in human history to be affected decisively by weapons unknown at the outbreak of hostilities’. Bush was the head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), a massive United States federal agency established in 1940 by President Roosevelt that mobilised American scientists and engineers to develop those ‘unknown’ weapons. Almost as soon as OSRD was established, a British team – called the Tizard Mission after its leader, Henry Tizard – arrived in the US to offer the hard-won fruits of its science and technology, developed over a decade of preparing for war with Germany. The OSRD scientists immediately recognised the benefits of these British inventions, such as airborne radar and the proximity fuse, and established offices in London and across England so that the two nations could cooperate on their development.
By the time of the Bruneval Raid, the United States had entered the war, and OSRD scientists and engineers were working side by side with their British counterparts to get these new weapons to the front lines. When the Würzburg radar was examined, British scientists at the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE, where Donald Priest worked) figured out that they could fool it by scattering from aircraft clouds of aluminium foil. These reflected back to the radar, which would pick up the large returns and confuse them with the actual Allied aircraft. But TRE was unable to manufacture the thin slivers of foil – later nicknamed ‘chaff’ – in sufficient quantities, so they turned to OSRD’s radar laboratories at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard, as well as to American industrial giants such as Reynolds Metals Company. Together, they designed and built machines that spewed out almost a million pounds of chaff per month, equipping all the British and American bombers after 1943. German radars were indeed fooled – during one of the early bomber raids, British radio intercept operators heard the German controllers tell their fighter pilots to break off because the Allied bombers were ‘multiplying themselves’. Throughout the war, chaff kept German air defences on the back foot, cutting Allied bomber losses by up to two-thirds and allowing them to attack their target successfully.
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