I have just read a new book about an amazing group of men that changed the course of World War 2. It is “SAS Shadow Raiders” by Damien Lewis and I want to share it with you.
It is about a small group of British soldiers – the beginning of the famous Special Air Services – who parachuted into France behind enemy lines to steal a highly sophisticated German radar and sneak it back to Britain. It was early 1941 and Britain was bleeding. Hitler had marched across Europe crushing nations. As Churchill said, Britain and the Allies were fighting “to rescue not only Europe, but mankind, from the foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny which has ever darkened and stained the pages of history.” They were suffering huge losses. The Germans seemed to know about the British air raids in advance and Britain was losing a high number of RAF planes and airmen. The British military had radar of course, but according to intelligence sources Germany had developed a more sophisticated radar, devastatingly effective in detecting aircraft and ships. The British radar boffins first saw one of these radars in a photograph taken by a Spitfire pilot on a recce flight over the coast of France. It became known as the Wurzburg Dish. The only way the British scientists could find out how to defeat the radar, was to find out how it worked, so the plan was to send soldiers into occupied France to steal it. Had this book been been fiction, I would have said the plot was too far-fetched. A top-secret mission was launched: Operation Biting. Because of the heavy German guns along the French coast, it was “suicide” to land soldiers from sea, so the small group of highly trained soldiers were dropped behind enemy lines. Somehow they escaped being shot down, survived a shoot-out with the German soldiers guarding the radar, dismantled and carried it down a cliff at night to a tiny beach where a British ship eventually picked them up – after it had evaded patrolling German war boats and found the right beach in the dark. Back in Britain scientists studied the stolen radar, and worked out how to blind it by something quite simple: scattering masses of strips of tin foil from aircraft. This “replicated radar echoes as if thousands of allied warplanes filled the skies” and totally confused the German military. This allowed Allied aircraft to penetrate deep inside Germany. The tin foil ruse also allowed D-Day to happen “in the greatest fakery ever, creating a procession of landing craft, destroyers and battleships where none in truth existed, while the real D-Day fleet steamed unnoticed towards the Normandy beaches”. It was of course this Allied invasion – the largest seaborne invasion in history – that led to the defeat of Hitler and the liberation of Western Europe from Nazi control 75 years ago. I thought about this when Victory in Europe Day was celebrated last week on May 8. If it had not been for that small group of tough soldiers who stole the radar from under the Nazi’s noses, the war in Europe may have had a very different outcome.
