Operation Biting: The 1942 Parachute Assault to Capture Hitler’s Radar

A storied episode of airborne combat serves as a study in courage and chaos in this gripping account. Historian Hastings (The Abyss) revisits Operation Biting, a British paratrooper raid on Bruneval, a coastal village in German-occupied France; the operation aimed to capture a new German air-defense radar so that British scientists could develop countermeasures to it. The plan, Hastings contends, was a dangerous long shot, requiring 120 lightly armed paratroopers to drop behind enemy lines, dismantle and haul away the radar, capture a German radar operator, and fight their way to a beach for evacuation. Hastings, himself a former paratroop officer, probes beneath the glamorous aura of airborne warfare to its very unglamorous realities—“almost all the paratroopers’ first action on landing was to satisfy a desperate need to relieve aching bladders”—and unplanned turns of fortune. (Many paratroopers missed the drop site by miles, but their fatal mistake effectively confused the Germans as to the objective of the raid.) The outsize impact of seemingly minor decisions loom large in Hastings’s vivid narrative—he follows two French Resistance agents who gathered crucial intelligence on the radar station before the raid, assisted by a naive German sentry who gave them a tour of the site—and colorful personalities stand out. (He riffs on the “childlike vanity” of Lord Louis Mountbatten.) The result is a jewel of military history that highlights human-scale daring amid the mass carnage of war. (Oct.)