Operation Würzburg Seizure: British Heroes’ Mission in Nazi-Occupied Normandy, Germany

In February 1942, RAF intelligence was baffled by a newly identified radar network on the coast of Nazi-occupied Europe. Max Hastings reveals the extraordinary mission to seize the equipment and how it made heroes of the Paras for the first time. One day in December 1941, the brilliant young scientific intelligence officer Dr Reginald Victor Jones was poring over an aerial photograph of a Normandy cliff. The image showed a new type of radar, christened Würzburg, which the Germans were exploiting to make mayhem with overhead British bombers. Jones’s finger traced on the photo a defile leading up from the beach below the cliff. He said eagerly, We could get in there. Here was the seed of what became, two months later, the most successful British special forces raid of the war. One hundred and twenty men of the Royal Engineers and Parachute Regiment, led by Major John Frost, who later became a hero of the 1944 bridge at Arnhem, dropped into Normandy, overcame the German.