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During World War II, Operation Biting was a Combined Operations raid to capture components of a German Wurzburg radar set at Bruneval, France, on 27/28 February, 1942.
This was the first raid for the 1st Parachute Brigade, conducted by 120 men of C Company, 2nd Battalion, with men of No.12 Commando providing protection during the Naval evacuation stage.
The paratroops were dropped in three groups together with a RAF radar expert responsible for identifying and removing the required parts.
The radar components seized, evacuation by landing craft became protracted under considerable enemy fire which No.12 Commando countered for an hour. It was later discovered the Royal Navy flotilla had been playing 'cat-and-mouse' with a German force of a Destroyer and E-boats who passed within a mile of the landing.
During the operation two British were killed and six captured. Two Germans were captured, one of whom was the Wurzburg's operator who provided a great deal of classified information.
Open source Text
Taken from The Battle Of The Beams (http://www.vectorsite.net/ttwiz7.html). There is a open source verification for this text on the home page Greg Goebel / In The Public Domain (http://www.vectorsite.net/index.html).
In the months leading up to the Channel Dash, R.V. Jones had been ramping up his hunt for Wuerzburg. Jones requested intensive aerial reconnaissance of known Freya sites in hopes they would turn up a Wuerzburg as well. On 22 November 1941, a PRU Spitfire had taken a picture of a radar site at Bruneval, a village on the French coast near Le Havre, that revealed a suspicious, indistinct object sited at the end of a path leading from the station.
Word of the mysterious object reached a daring RAF reconnaissance pilot, Flight Lieutenant Tony Hill, who decided to investigate personally. He overflew the site in his Spitfire on 5 December. The pictures revealed a neat radar dish about 3 meters (10 feet) in diameter. Jones decided it had to be Wuerzburg. Further reconnaissance missions over other locations revealed more Wuerzburgs, plus a new radar that other intelligence tagged as "Wuerzburg-Riese (Giant Wuerzburg)", of which more is said in the next chapter.
Jones suspected that Wuerzburg was critical to German air defenses and that the British needed to learn about it in detail. The German radar site at Bruneval was near the sea and had a convenient beach, raising the possibility that it could be seized in a raid. Jones hesitated to recommend such a risky plan but became convinced that it was justified. Churchill was enthusiastic about raids, both to bolster British morale and to keep the Germans off-balance, so a request went upstairs to Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations.
Mountbatten like the idea very much, and so a plan was devised to send in a team of paratroopers to photograph the radar in detail and carry off whatever components they could. A technical specialist was trained to make the jump with them and inspect the radar. The group would be picked up off the beach by a small naval task force. The operation was codenamed BITING.
On 27 February 1942, the raiding party of 120 Scotsmen under Major John Dutton Frost was dropped on Bruneval from twelve Armstrong-Whitworth Whitley bombers. Nothing went very much according to plan, but the raiders improvised competently and the raid was a success, with the paratroopers returning with vital Wuerzburg components, and a technician as a prisoner. Two British were killed and four taken prisoner, all four of whom survived the war. Five Germans were killed and two taken prisoner, including the technician.
British examination of the Wuerzburg components showed that it operated over a very narrow band, and had no provisions for dealing with countermeasures. It was much better built than British radars, with a modular design that made hunting down faults relatively simple. On the other hand, the technician proved to be much more poorly trained than his British counterparts.
BITING was the first operation of the newly-minted British paratrooper force, and a significant boost to British public morale at a time when the war was not going well for the Allies. It did much to make up for the failure to stop the Channel Dash two weeks earlier. Even the Germans, who generally had a low opinion of British troops, were impressed with the skill and dash of the raiders, and it remains the stuff of action movies.
Ironically, the success of BITING made the brass worry that the Germans might pull the same stunt on the TRE at Swanage, and so intelligence about German paratroops across the Channel quickly forced the mad relocation of the TRE to Malvern. The Germans, who were notoriously hard to trick twice, also promptly fortified their radar stations. A raid to seize Freya components on 17 August 1942, during the hideously botched "practice invasion" on the French port of Dieppe, ran into stiff German defenses and went home empty-handed. In compensation, the fortified radar stations were easy to spot and, if necessary, target.
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