Target for Tonight

Everything was right. The moon was bright, but ghostly and tricky with mist. Swarms of British attack planes thundered down on the night's target, peppered & salted it with bomb, cannon, machine gun. In the milky darkness half a mile away, big Whitley bombers dropped clusters of parachute troops, their faces and even their teeth blackened by burnt cork.

This was a lightning raid on the German radio-detector station at Bruneval, twelve miles northeast of Le Havre on the French coast. It is well known that the British have an effective short-wave device for locating planes at night or in clouds. Less well known is the fact that the Germans have a locator equally effective. The German device worked perfectly on the U.S. Catalina patrol bomber which spotted the Bismarck last May: the bomber had been followed through the clouds by radio detection from the German battleship, and the instant the plane appeared it got such a hail of ack-ack fire that it had to retreat.

The radio eye at Bruneval, blamed for heavy casualties to British night sweeps over Europe, had been marked by the British for destruction. The parachutists overcame the astonished Germans in the station and blew it to ruins. Other Germans blocked their way to the beachhead where they were to embark and escape, but these Germans were taken in the rear by Army troops which had landed from light craft, backed up by the guns of Navy ships. The parachutists joined the troops on the beach, embarked under a shield of Navy shellfire, and the whole force moved triumphantly off under a screen of fighter planes. German fighters buzzed up in angry pursuit, but they bounced, for the most part, off the British umbrella.

The Air Force end of this complex operation was handled by Wing Commander Percy Charles Pickard. who had a pilot's part in the British film Target for Tonight. No doubt the Germans would build another detector station. But, Airman Pickard and his Army and Navy colleagues, in faultless timing, perfect coordination and complete success of their mission, had fought a fine war in miniature.

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