“Churchill was comfortable with the idea of suicidal military operations if grand strategy seemed to warrant them.”

By Giles Whittell

TWO WEEKS before British commandos raided the German-held port of St Nazaire in March 1942, Lord Louis Mountbatten bumped into Colonel Charles Newman on the steps of Richmond House on the north bank of the River Thames. Mountbatten had recently been appointed head of Combined Operations by Churchill, with instructions to focus every ounce of his ingenuity on “the offensive.”

The Allies were losing the war. Singapore had fallen to Japan the previous month. The German army was advancing steadily across Russia to the Volga, and American forces had yet to be deployed in numbers in the European theatre. It was imperative, Churchill believed, to show Stalin, Roosevelt and the British themselves that they still had the stomach for the fight.

Newman had been named military force commander for the forthcoming raid. He was 37 but looked, as one of his junior officers said, like an old elephant. He had spent two years training as commanding officer of 2 Commando, and three weeks locked in a smoke-filled room planning the raid down to the finest detail. He was hungry for action, whatever form it took.

That is what was on Mountbatten’s mind. He pulled Newman aside to level with him on what was at stake.

“I want you to be quite clear that this is not just an ordinary raid,” he said. “It is an important operation of war. It is also a very hazardous operation. I am quite confident that you will get in and do the job all right, but, frankly, I don’t expect any of you to get out again. If we lose you all, it will be about equivalent to the loss of one merchant ship; but your success will save many merchant ships. We have got to look at the thing in those terms.”

Churchill was comfortable with the idea of suicidal military operations if grand strategy seemed to warrant them. As the Japanese advanced on Singapore he had cabled General Archibald Wavell to order that the battle must be “fought to the bitter end at all costs – commanders and senior officers should die with their troops.”

The officers on the St Nazaire raid did not do much more to disguise the approaching danger. At Mountbatten’s request, Newman gave his commandos the option of withdrawing with no blemish to their records. None took up this offer, but they all wrote letters to their families to be delivered should they not return.

Naval ratings assigned to the operation were given warm baths before setting sail, and clean underwear to cut the risk of infection when the fabric was driven into their wounds. To this extent the raiders – officers and men alike – had all been warned. Even so, few had any real idea of what was coming.

Operation Chariot, as the raid was codenamed, sent a flotilla of 17 small craft and one ancient destroyer up the Loire estuary in the dead of night into the teeth of some of the most formidable coastal defences in Europe. Radar-guided heavy artillery guarded the mouth of the estuary. Flak guns along the approaches to the port could be lowered in seconds to fire at surface ships instead of aircraft. The U-boat base that made St Nazaire a target of Allied air raids throughout the war, with eight-foot reinforced concrete walls and a roof eight metres thick – was considered too hardened for the commandos to attack. So their target was a giant dry dock instead – the biggest in the world. It was the only repair facility on the Atlantic coast big enough for the Tirpitz, the Nazi flagship, and the rationale for the raid was to put the dock beyond use.

The goal was to deny Hitler the use of the Tirpitz against the Atlantic convoys. To accomplish it, Newman and his chief co-conspirator, naval force commander Robert Ryder, wove three tricks into a single masterplan.

First, the destroyer, the HMS Campbeltown (formerly the USS Buchanan; built in Maine in 1918), was converted into a floating bomb. Four tons of high explosive were hidden behind her forward bulkhead, encased in concrete. Then the Campbeltown was given a makeshift disguise: the tops of her funnels were cut off at a slant to make them resemble those of a German torpedo boat, and for the attack run she flew the swastika of the Kriegsmarine, the German navy. The false flag was a legitimate ruse de guerre – but only if replaced with the Royal Navy’s white ensign when the shooting started.

The third trick was to approach by a route along which no attackers would be expected. The Charioteers would leave the main shipping channel dredged for warships and ocean liners and use a high spring tide to clear the sand bars in the outer estuary.

The Campbeltown ran aground twice, slowing to five knots and shuddering from bow to stern as her twin screws shook her free. The motor launches following her in two lines of six had no trouble with the shallow water, but everything else about them was a disaster waiting to happen.

They were made of wood – two layers of mahogany and one of calico in between. And they were gasoline-powered, with extra deck tanks to increase their range. This meant they chugged along in clouds of explosive fumes of their own making, like so much kindling. John Hughes-Hallett, Mountbatten’s head of planning, argued for two destroyers instead of multiple launches, which he thought “would all probably be blazing wrecks before they got alongside at all.” He was not far wrong.

The raiders left Falmouth, on the south Cornish coast, in balmy spring weather on the afternoon of March 26. The Campbeltown slammed into the southern gate of the Normandie dock at 1:34 a.m., British time, on the March 28. She was right on target and barely four minutes late. The amatol explosive in her bowels was timed to detonate about five hours later. But already the leading launch in the starboard column, launch 192, was ablaze and veering out of control across the path of the port column. A single flak shell from the south bank had taken out both her engines, her steering and several of her crew. Sub-lieutenant Richard Collinson had felt “curiously unafraid” in the final minutes of the attack run, but now, he wrote, “my adrenaline-fuelled euphoria vanished abruptly, and I felt completely nonplussed as to what to do next.”

The launch hit a harbour wall at 18 knots. Several of her commandos were thrown clear. Those who weren’t were soon forced overboard as fire spread from the engine room and leaking gasoline set the surface of the water alight.

Ahead and behind, the launches of the port column were being lit up by incoming shells and raked by machine-gun fire. Two boats behind the 192, launch 298 exploded, killing almost everyone aboard. Three launches overshot, circled back and tried to find a way to land their troops. None did. Of the 12 launches that followed the Campbeltown upriver, only two put men ashore. Of the 17 that accompanied the destroyer in all – including a vanguard of three and reserves and a torpedo boat in the rear – only three got back to England. The rest exploded, burned, sank or had to be scuttled as they tried to make their run for home.

The Campbeltown was a hugely effective landing craft by comparison. Laden with men as well as explosives, her foredeck reared up over the dock gate as the lower part of her prow peeled back to the bulkhead with the force of the impact. The commandos on deck were sitting ducks but dozens were still able to scramble down bamboo and iron ladders onto the gate and from there to mount lethal attacks on the dockyards on either side.

One soldier, Corporal Arthur “Buster” Woodiwiss of 2 Commando, single-handedly neutralized all opposition on the upstream side of the dock, rushing a gun emplacement on his own, fly-kicking a German grenade back where it had come from and destroying three more gun nests and their crews before the rest of his unit caught up with him. When it came time to withdraw, he made that look easy too, even though it involved retreating over the bow of the destroyer as German troops finally started to regroup. He recalled it all dead-pan:

“A large group of Germans were forming to cross the open area we had just left. Lying abandoned on the deck behind the shrapnel shields were Brens with 100-round magazines which had been fired as we sailed up the Loire. I set up three of these behind the shields and began firing all of them in turn to prevent [the Germans’] advance, and forced them to withdraw… I threw all the spare weapons I could find into the Loire, collected all the Tommy [gun] magazines I could carry, rejoined my section and shared out the ammo.”

For Woodiwiss and about 70 others the trouble lay ahead. There were no launches to take them home – so they set out to walk. This was the default Plan B, confirmed by Newman at an impromptu conference in a rail yard in the Old Town at 3.30 a.m. They were to strike out in small groups for the marshland north of St Nazaire, then walk to Spain. Five made it, with the help of French farming families and the Resistance. Every other commando who stepped ashore that night was killed or captured. Of the 264 who set sail, one-in-four died – the highest death rate of any British commando raid in the war.

In spectacular fashion, and thanks largely to Newman’s careful preparations, they destroyed the pumping station that filled and emptied the dry dock, and the winding gear that moved both of its gates. Out in the estuary the launch crews etched their names in history too, especially that of launch 306. Its skipper, Lieutenant Ian Henderson, opted first to save his crew and commandos from certain death by not putting them ashore. Then he sacrificed most of them and himself in a suicidal battle with a German warship at the mouth of the estuary.

But sacrifice was not the reason the St Nazaire raid became known as the greatest of all. Nor even was the success of the demolition squads on land. The raid owes its place in history to one moment and one man. This was Lieutenant Nigel Tibbits, a 28-year-old explosives expert from the Royal Navy’s school of torpedoes and mining at HMS Vernon in Portsmouth. It was Tibbits’ task to design, build and detonate the bomb in the Campbeltown. There was abundant scope for failure at each of these three stages, but he did not regard failure as an option. Tibbits was meticulous and insisted on the concrete casing not just to hide and protect the bomb but to concentrate the blast when it went off, and he rigged it with two sets of fuses to make sure it did.

Tibbits did not expect to survive. Before the raid he advised his young wife, Elmslie, to prepare for the likelihood that he would not return, and before dawn on March 28 he was caught in machine-gun fire on the deck of a launch as it tried to escape.

About six hours later the Campbeltown exploded. The dock gate was destroyed and the dock was unusable for the rest of the war. In principle Mountbatten’s goal of protecting Atlantic shipping from the Tirpitz had been accomplished. In practice, Hitler had already determined that his last battleship would stay in Norwegian waters. But Operation Chariot served Churchill’s broader purpose of demonstrating Britain’s will to win. On April 1, he cabled Roosevelt in delight about “Dickie’s [Mountbatten’s] show in St Nazaire.” And that summer he was able to remind Stalin, in person, that even as British forces waited for American help to attack the soft underbelly of the Nazi crocodile (he even drew Stalin a sketch of the great beast), they had already been busy targeting its snout.

Perhaps the most telling proof of the value of the raid, though, came after the war. In March 1947, Newman, Ryder and a column of fellow Charioteers returned to St Nazaire. Townspeople lined the streets as the veterans marched from the Old Town to the new. There, Paul Ramadier, the first prime minister of the new French republic, welcomed them and said: “You were the first to give us hope.”

Giles Whittell is the author of the upcoming book The Greatest Raid: St Nazaire, 1942: The Heroic Story of Operation Chariot. His previous works include: Bridge of Spies, Spitfire Women of World War II and Snow: A Scientific and Cultural Exploration. He is world affairs editor at Tortoise Media, having been the Times’ chief leader-writer for three years and the newspaper’s correspondent in L.A., Moscow and Washington.