An RAF radio technician who had never fired a weapon in anger jumped into occupied France in February 1942 to unbolt a German radar dish with hand tools while under fire. This episode tells the story of Operation Biting, the Bruneval Raid, beginning with the crippling losses RAF Bomber Command suffered in 1941 and scientific intelligence officer R. V. Jones’s detective work piecing together the Luftwaffe’s two-layer radar system: the wide-area Freya early warning set and the precise 10-foot Würzburg dish that guided night fighters to within sight of a bomber’s exhaust. Bombing the site would leave nothing to study and a seaborne assault would be slaughtered in the ravine, so paratroopers were the only option.

We follow Major John Frost’s C Company of the 2nd Parachute Battalion, men who had not finished jump training, and the 51 Squadron crews who had never dropped paratroopers, through freezing rehearsals at Loch Fyne and a scale model built from French Resistance intelligence gathered by Gilbert Renault, code-named Remy. Flight Sergeant Cox went in wearing his RAF blue after the War Office refused him an Army uniform. On the night, half the Nelson detachment landed two miles off target, the radios failed, and the beach exit was covered by a machine gun until the missing men arrived just in time. The captured components revealed the Würzburg’s modular design and tunable frequencies, enabling Window, the aluminum strips cut to half the radar’s wavelength that blinded German controllers over Hamburg in 1943.

• The five detachments named Nelson, Jellicoe, Hardy, Drake and Rodney and their assigned tasks
• Why the raid needed a full moon and a rising tide, leaving a tiny window in late February
• How the chaotic extraction brought home Cox, the radar parts and German prisoners
• How German barbed-wire perimeters ordered after the raid made radar sites easy to spot before D-Day
• The price paid by French civilians who supplied the intelligence and sheltered stranded paratroopers