by Giles Milton
Tibbits groped his way towards the vast block of concrete and steel that filled much of the bow of the ship. With extreme care he now activated the three eight-hour Time Pencil fuses that were designed to detonate at seven o’clock the following morning. It was the most stressful moment of his life. From the moment he released the acid on to the piano wire, the men aboard the Campbeltown would be sitting on a massive suicide bomb. A single fault in either the acid or the wire would trigger the detonator.
There were countless other dangers to be faced before the Time Pencils were due to detonate, as all the men knew. They were hoping to sneak through the mouth of the Loire in the guise of a German destroyer, but that guise could not hold for ever. At some point they would surely be identified as enemy shipping.
As midnight approached, the Campbeltown reached the point at which the estuary met with the sea. After a further thirty minutes the men on the bridge sighted the half-submerged wreck of the Lancastria, sunk two years earlier during an aerial attack by German junkers. They were now just seven miles from their goal and were entering the dangerous shallows.
As the commandos shivered on deck, they could feel the ship ‘churning and shuddering through the mud’.21 At one point her keel scoured the bottom of the estuary. But Captain Beattie kept a cool head under pressure and managed to drive her relentlessly through the silt.
* * *
It had been a dull night for Korvettenkapitän Lothar Burhenne, commander of the Naval Flak Battalion on the east bank of the Loire estuary. He had spent much of the night with his eyes clamped to his night-vision binoculars, watching English bombers circling in the sky above. Their behaviour was most unusual. They were flying in strange formations and dropping very few bombs. It was almost as if they were there to divert attention.
Shortly after 1 a.m., Burhenne turned his binoculars towards the charcoal-grey estuary. He had to pinch himself, such was his astonishment at what he saw through the light of a dim moon. A flotilla of vessels appeared to be heading in the direction of the docks.
Burhenne snatched at the telephone and fired off this news to the harbour master. He was told not to be so idiotic. He then called his commanding officer, Captain Mecke, and informed him of what he had seen. Mecke’s suspicions had already been aroused by the behaviour of the English bombers overhead. Now, as a precaution, he flashed a warning to all the troops guarding the estuary: Achtung landegefahr! Beware landing. A minute or so later, one of the dockyard searchlights was snapped on to the estuary, illuminating what appeared to be a German destroyer. She was accompanied by a dozen or more smaller vessels.
On board the Campbeltown, Signalman Pike had been anticipating this moment for hours. Now, in this moment of tension, he flashed a message in German: ‘Two damaged ships in company – request permission to proceed in without delay.’22 The message caused surprise on shore and deceived the Germans for a further five minutes. But at 1.28 a.m., after a rush of hasty phone calls, the ruse was unravelled. The ships in the estuary were not friend but foe.
Seconds later, a dozen searchlights lit the flotilla and every gun on the shore began blazing fire on the Campbeltown. Quick-firing cannon, machine guns and the coastal batteries unleashed a lethal rain of metal on to her exposed upper decks. If the vessel had been using the dredged channel, she would have been sunk in an instant.
As Captain Beattie cranked the Campbeltown to eighteen knots, a staccato of bullets hit the bridge, puncturing the thin steel. The side of the ship was ‘alive with bursting shells’23 that sprayed shrapnel and freezing seawater across the deck. The shells alarmed Tibbits. If a single one landed on the bow of the Campbeltown, it risked detonating her bomb with devastating consequences.
Chief Petty Officer Wellstead clutched at the wheel, desperately trying to steer a course through the glare of searchlights and flying tracer. He ducked and dodged the machine-gun fire, but the fire was so intense that he was eventually hit and killed. His place was taken by the quartermaster, who was trying to catch Captain Beattie’s steering directions when he was also struck by a bullet.
One of the saboteurs, Bob Montgomery, was about to step forward to steer the ship when Nigel Tibbits tapped him on the shoulder. ‘I’ll take it old boy,’ he said.
The Campbeltown was now taking direct hits on all sides. Her funnel and bridge were shot out and machine-gun bullets had penetrated all the way through to the boiler room. At one point there was a terrific explosion on deck, ‘like the noise of someone banging a steel door with a sledgehammer’. A shell had burst next to Stuart Chant, another of the saboteurs, sending shrapnel deep into his flesh. He stretched out his arm in the darkness and was shocked. ‘My leg was wet and sticky and my right arm was spurting blood down into my hand.’24
The shellfire was so intense that Captain Beattie was finding it hard to locate his target. The great steel caisson of Normandie Dock was lost in the drifting smoke and even the adjacent Mole was no longer visible. As he peered through the smoke and tracer fire, a German searchlight fell on the Old Mole for a second, giving him the perfect steer. He shouted to Tibbits, telling him to crank the vessel to port. They had 500 yards to go.
Beattie gave the engine a final blast. As she thrust towards twenty knots she began to judder violently. Less than sixty seconds to go. They were on course. The caisson lay directly ahead.
The ship’s bells pealed through the gunfire, a warning for the men to brace themselves. They felt her snag slightly as she dragged the torpedo nets on the sea bottom. And then, at exactly 1.34 a.m., she smashed headlong into the caisson.
Major Copland, one of the commandos, was thrust forward on deck. He had the feeling that Beattie ‘had applied super-powerful brakes to a very small car’. Debris rained backwards from the shattered bow of the vessel, spilling on to the deck. ‘Sparks, dirt and planks seemed to be flying everywhere.’25
Captain Beattie dusted himself down, checked his watch and smiled. ‘Well there we are,’ he said in a cool voice. ‘Four minutes late.’26
* * *
Captain Stephen Beattie’s most urgent task was to examine the damage to the caisson, but this was not easy in the half-light of flares, searchlights and burning petrol. He inched his way forward and was satisfied to discover that he had scored a direct hit. The bow of the Campbeltown had crumpled back some thirty-six feet, leaving her stuck to the caisson in a tangle of shredded metal.
Now, urgently, he ordered the valves to be opened in order to flood the stern of the ship. This would prevent the Germans from towing her off the caisson before she exploded on the following morning. While he was examining the damage, the commandos and saboteurs began leaping ashore and advancing towards their targets through smoke, searchlights and sustained machine-gun fire.
The key goal for Bill Pritchard’s saboteurs was the pump house. This was known to contain four massive impeller pumps situated in a fortified chamber some forty feet below ground. After the caisson itself, the pumps were the single most important target for destruction. Without them, the Normandie Dock could be neither filled nor emptied of water.
Stuart Chant was the nominated leader of the four men assigned to destroy the pumps. In spite of severe wounds caused by the exploding shell, he led his fellow saboteurs through the fire-swept dockyard towards the pump house. The men were weighed down with sixty-pound rucksacks filled with specially designed explosives. They blew the locked steel door with one of Cecil Clarke’s limpets and then clattered down the circular iron staircase in near darkness.
Chant’s wounds were bleeding profusely, yet he hauled himself down into the echoing chamber of the pump house, followed by his little team. Here, deep below ground, the only noise was the distant boom of explosions until one of the saboteurs, Arthur Dockerill, started singing: ‘There’ll be blue birds over the white cliffs of Dover.’27 It was a surreal moment, even for Dockerill, but it broke the tension.
The men set their charges in the gloom. Chant and Dockerill then ordered the others back upstairs while
they primed the detonators. These were timed to explode within ninety seconds, leaving them precious little time to race back up the spiral stairs. They had just reached safety when 150 pounds of high explosive shattered through the main impeller pumps, an explosion so loud it ‘cracked our ear-drums’.28 A huge concrete block was tossed through the air, the windows were shattered and the ground juddered violently as the inside of the pump house was ripped apart.
Bill Pritchard and his team were meanwhile destroying the machinery that operated the northern caisson. As they went about their work, the commandos kept up covering fire, shooting at the German gun emplacements. The dock area was by now a vision of hell, lit by ghastly flares of burning oil. Sirens and alarms were overlaid with bursts of tommy-gun fire and the agonized screams of wounded and dying men.
Many of the commandos were still in their motor-launches. Trapped in the flare of German searchlights and unable to get ashore, they were sitting ducks. Half the launches had already been shot to pieces and the water was strewn with gruesome, half-submerged corpses.
* * *
The dockyard battle raged until about 3 a.m., when the ferocity of the shoot-out began to abate. Three out of every four men were now dead or injured and the Germans were starting to round up survivors. Escape had proved impossible, for just two launches and the motorized gunboat had survived the onslaught. These were now heading back to the destroyers waiting out at sea.
Scores of wounded had been left behind in the dockyard. Colonel Charles Newman was still in overall command and attempted a break-out with a few of the men. It was no use. The Germans had thrown a cordon around St Nazaire and Newman, like most of the other survivors, was to find himself a prisoner of war.
Survival that night was a question of luck. Stephen Beattie had been conferring with Nigel Tibbits aboard one of the motor-launches when the deck was raked with machine-gun fire. Beattie was unscathed but Tibbits was hit and collapsed into the water. He was never seen again.
Beattie himself was eventually captured as he struggled ashore, wet and naked but still counting the hours until the Campbeltown was set to explode.
As dawn broke above St Nazaire, a scene of utter carnage was revealed to the captured survivors. The ground was strewn with corpses and twisted metal and smoke was drifting listlessly through the chill morning air. Beattie knew that the ship was set to explode at 7 a.m. and passed a tense few hours as a prisoner of war, waiting for the church clock to strike the hour. It eventually rang seven. And then there was silence. Nothing.
Tibbits had warned that there could be a delay of up to two hours. He had also warned that if the bomb hadn’t blown by 9.30 a.m., then the Time Pencils would have been fatally damaged in the collision with the caisson. As the hours passed – first eight, then nine – Beattie feared an even more humiliating outcome: the bomb had been discovered and defused by the Germans.
By 10 a.m. the Campbeltown was awash with German military personnel – naval officers, gunners and submarine commanders, along with scores of soldiers who had taken part in the previous night’s battle. They could be seen clambering below decks, poking their heads into the mess decks, the cabins and even the wheel-house. It was not long before there were 150 men on the upper deck of the ship and many more below.
Beattie continued to count the minutes, but when another hour had passed he reluctantly concluded that the Time Pencils had failed. The bomb was not going to detonate.
He tried to put a brave face on the outcome. The impeller pumps had been destroyed – a reason for optimism – and the dock had been badly damaged. But the caisson was still intact and that, in his eyes, made the mission a failure. Nigel Tibbits had sacrificed his life for nothing.
The final insult came when Beattie was interrogated by a German intelligence officer, who began gloating in English. ‘Your people obviously did not know what a hefty thing that lock-gate is,’ he said. ‘It was really useless trying to smash it with a flimsy destroyer.’
At that very moment, exactly as he spoke those words, St Nazaire was hit by an earthquake of such magnitude that the ground felt as if it were being ripped apart. ‘An explosion of unbelievable violence’, was how it felt to the town’s assistant mayor, Monsieur Grimaud. The Campbeltown’s funnel was sent spinning into the clear morning air and a forty-foot chunk of steel hull was flung into the gardens of the Santé Maritime. It was as if a giant were playing havoc with a Dinky toy.
Beattie heard the explosion with quiet satisfaction. Cool as ever, he smiled at his interrogator. ‘That, I hope, is proof that we did not underestimate the strength of the gate.’29
The impact of the blast was even more devastating than Beattie had dared to hope. As the Campbeltown ripped herself to pieces, the impregnable steel caisson was thrust inwards by the force of the blast, turning it into a 160-ton chunk of flying debris. The collapse of the caisson was followed by a tidal wave of water that smashed into the dry dock, sweeping the mangled remnants of the Campbeltown along with it. The two tankers inside the dock, Schledstadt and Passat, bore the full force of the onrush of water. They were plucked upwards by the deluge and dashed against the wall of the dry dock.
Those who rushed towards the Normandie Dock were greeted by a scene so macabre that it would be for ever imprinted in their brains. The wharves, cranes and storehouses were festooned with human remains, the grisly remnants of the hundreds of German sightseers who were on the vessel when she blew out her bowels. The exact death toll was never discovered: some reckoned it was as high as 400.
Hitler was furious when he learned of the sabotage. He ordered Field Marshal von Rundstedt to conduct an immediate inquiry. Not satisfied with its findings, he ordered General Jodl to undertake a second inquiry. This didn’t satisfy him either. The facts were indeed difficult to accept: the saboteurs and commandos had successfully carried out an operation that even Lord Mountbatten had considered ‘absolutely impossible to undertake’, yet ‘brilliantly achieved’.30
Winston Churchill was gleeful when he learned of the destruction of the Normandie Dock. A ‘brilliant and heroic exploit’, he said, and called it ‘a deed of glory intimately involved in high strategy’. The men who had taken part won their share of glory. Five Victoria Crosses were awarded, including one for the cool-headed Stephen Beattie. Four men won the Distinguished Service Order and seventeen were awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, including the deceased Nigel Tibbits. But the operation had come at a heavy price: 169 men dead and a further 215 taken prisoner.
The Normandie Dock was to remain a ghostly ruin for the next decade. It was so badly damaged that repair was impossible in wartime. As for the Tirpitz, she didn’t venture into the Atlantic for the rest of the war.
Three years earlier, Gubbins had written that successful sabotage operations required surprise, speed and mobility. He added that the most effective operations were those undertaken in stealth and at night. ‘When the time for action comes,’ he said, ‘act with the greatest boldness and audacity.’31
This is exactly what his men had done. It was a textbook guerrilla operation, one that had been lifted straight from the pages of the little pamphlets written by himself and Millis Jefferis.
11
Masters of Sabotage
RUTH JEFFERIS FELT increasingly like a war widow in the late spring of 1942. She had moved the family to Buckinghamshire shortly after her husband’s appointment to the Firs, renting a tumbledown little lodge, Rose Cottage, in Cudlington, a village some three miles from Whitchurch. It was ideal for her three young sons, John, David and Jeremy, and might have made the perfect family home, were it not for the fact that one member of the family was constantly missing. Millis was never at home.
Ruth had been genuinely touched when he had filled their Mill Hill house with flowers: it had been an unexpected gesture that partially compensated for his long absences at work. But the flower episode had been two years ago and was little more than a memory. Now, on the rare occasions when he did pitch up at home, he wa
s morose and silent for ‘his thoughts were directed on his work’.1 The worst moment of all came when he offered to take Ruth on a forty-mile drive through the countryside. She was hoping to catch up on his news and share stories about the boys, but he didn’t say a single word for the entire journey. His head was so filled with weaponry that he wasn’t able to speak.
One night a bedtime argument got out of hand and Ruth stormed out of the house, suitcase in hand. She had only gone a few yards when she heard bare feet on the pavement behind her. It was Millis coming after her, offering to carry her suitcase. Ruth melted when she heard this and forgave him for his distracted mind. It was wartime and her husband had a vital role to play.
She eventually took matters into her own hands, applying for a job at the Firs in order to be closer to her husband. By the beginning of summer, she was working in the explosives unit, helping to pack specially designed shell-cases with deadly concoctions. She found herself working alongside ‘a dozen or so little Welsh girls’ who had been hired by Stuart Macrae. He had followed Gubbins’s initiative and hired female staff in a bid to keep one step ahead of the increasing workload. The first influx of girls was soon followed by a second, and then a third, until there were scores of them working alongside the growing ranks of inventors and engineers. The girls were overseen by a stiff-collared welfare officer named Miss Wond. She was known, inevitably, as Fairy.
The girls were initially unhappy to have been dispatched to the Firs and complained incessantly to Macrae. ‘They just hated it at the start and were longing to get back to Wales.’ But the generous measures at the mess bar coupled with the full-blooded male company soon caused them to change their minds. One of the girls had to be repeatedly hauled from the sentry box, where she spent her evenings in the arms of one of the guards. ‘What was surprising,’ said Macrae, ‘was that although quite a big girl, she favoured a little sentry.’ He asked what made this particular sentry so special and was told, with a nudge and a wink, that he ‘was not built in the normal proportions’.