The Bruneval Raid

One of the reasons the British won the 'radar war' with Nazi Germany was that we knew precisely how the enemy system worked. This was thanks to a daring commando raid on a German Wurzburg radar site at Bruneval in northern France. Ostensibly, the British raiders had attacked and destroyed the station, but in reality key components had been stolen and the whole set analysed by British scientists. (What the 'boffins' did not know was that the British paratroops had orders to kill them, rather than let them fall into German hands if the operation went wrong.) Plucked to safety by Royal Navy landing craft, with Germans in hot pursuit, the raiders achieved complete success.