by Ross Kemp
In all, the Allies would launch more than thirty-six major operations to sink the Tirpitz while keeping her confined in waters where she could inflict no damage on her enemies. So long as there was a war to be won at sea, it was vital that Tirpitz did not enter it. St Nazaire featured in the planning from the outset because it possessed the only dry dock in Europe with sufficient capacity to accommodate the giant battleship for refuge and repairs. The theory was that if the British could somehow deny the Tirpitz a safe haven in the Atlantic, she would never dare venture out of the Baltic or the fjords of Norway and risk the fate of her sister ship a few months earlier. The Bismarck, having sunk HMS Hood in the Denmark Strait, was immediately hunted down and sunk by the Royal Navy as she ran for St Nazaire for repairs to damage caused by torpedoes from Swordfish biplanes.
Aerial bombing was a long way from being a precise science at that time and the lock gates of the ‘Normandie’ dry dock were far too small a target for the RAF bombers operating from several thousand feet. An amphibious assault on the port was the only plausible option, though it was one fraught with grave peril and major logistical challenges. When such an attack was first proposed, all senior officers connected with its planning understood the great hazards it would entail for those they tasked to execute it. Admiralty files reveal the minutes of an inter-services meeting on 19 September in which it was suggested that protection forces should be landed in the harbour to hold positions while demolition groups went about their tasks. There was agreement around the table that an extremely high casualty rate was a price worth paying. ‘If this operation is to be carried out I think we must accept the very possible if not probable loss of the landing parties,’ the minutes note. ‘If they achieved the destruction of the 5 lock gates it may be considered that the operation should be carried out in spite of the regrettable loss of life.’
Admiralty, Air Ministry and Combined Operations files from the autumn of 1941 reveal the heated disputes between the services and other government officials over the details of the proposed attack. Eager to hit targets of their own choosing, and with resources increasingly limited by heavy losses, the RAF were reluctant partners from the outset. The number of aircraft they offered for a diversionary bombing raid fell far short of the figure sought by their colleagues in the Navy and Army. Churchill, worried about casualties to French civilians, narrowed the scope of their usefulness still further by insisting the RAF could only drop their bombs if the dockyard targets were clearly visible. The Navy, meanwhile, despite standing to gain the most from neutering the Tirpitz, were averse to the idea of sacrificing any of their precious warships in an enterprise that would end in the certain destruction of at least one of them. The Army, as ever overstretched and under-resourced, saw little point in committing several hundred of its best men to an operation that, in all likelihood, would end in their death or capture. Such was the wrangling that, in a memo dated 18 October, Charles Lambe, the Director of Plans at Combined Operations, called for the operation to be scrapped.
But the squabbling stopped in early January with intelligence reports that Tirpitz had been declared ready for combat operations and was preparing to leave Kiel in the Baltic and sail north to Trondheim on the Norwegian coast. The Admiralty took this as evidence that the most powerful battleship afloat in western waters was preparing to break out into the North Atlantic. Tackling the Tirpitz was given urgent priority. Lord Louis Mountbatten, who had been appointed Director of Combined Operations in October, now had the full attention of the three services.
Combined Operations HQ worked closely with several intelligence organisations to plan the raid, which was code-named Operation CHARIOT and given the approval of the Chiefs of Staff Committee on 3 March. The main objective of the operation was to put the Normandie dry dock out of action. The planners had established that the only feasible way to do this was to convert an obsolete destroyer into a floating ammunition dump and ram her into the outer gate of the dock, having negotiated an estuary made highly treacherous by the sandbanks below her surface and the network of heavy gun batteries strung out along her banks. Long-delay fuses would detonate several tons of high explosive several hours after the raiders had withdrawn. As soon as the destroyer made impact, Commando demolition groups were to storm ashore and cause as much damage as possible to the port installations while protection parties kept the enemy at bay. Their tasks completed, the survivors were to re-embark in a flotilla of smaller ships known as Fairmile Motor Launches and, protected by destroyers waiting out at sea, run the gauntlet of German retaliatory strikes on the return voyage to home waters.
There was no part of the operation that didn’t carry the highest risks to those taking part in it. Surprise was the key. The further the force could sail up the Loire estuary without being detected, the greater their chance of pulling off the most daring amphibious raid ever undertaken. The odds against the raiders could barely have been longer, nor the stakes higher but, were they to succeed in their mission, they would have accomplished two great feats. Not only would they have forced the enemy to strengthen his defences all along the western coast of Europe by allocating men and materials urgently required elsewhere, they would have effectively eliminated Tirpitz from the war at sea.
Lieutenant Colonel Charles Newman, commander of No. 2 Commando, was chosen to lead the assault forces on the ground. A civil engineering contractor by trade, he had served sixteen years as a territorial officer with the Essex Regiment before the war. At thirty-eight, he was relatively old, and his friendly, avuncular manner only reinforced the impression and endeared him to his men. There are few pictures of him without a pipe stuck in his mouth and a smile on his distinctive face. He had a large, very hooked nose (broken several times), a small moustache and a large pair of ears that, according to one of his junior officers, gave him the appearance of a kindly elephant. Behind the cheerful, relaxed manner, however, lay the soul of a warrior, who demanded the highest standards from those in his command.
No. 2 Commando were to provide 173 men, roughly half the unit, to form the assault and protection groups in the raid. The five assault groups, each comprising two officers and a dozen other ranks men, were to assist the Navy in attacking targets during the approach. Once the landing parties were ashore, they were to attack enemy positions, blockade possible lines of enemy approach and cover the withdrawal of all troops during re-embarkation. Each of the seven protection parties was made up of one officer and four men and armed with three Thompson submachine guns and one Bren gun between them. They were to defend the target positions while the demolition teams, armed only with Colt pistols, went about their tasks. Anticipating combat at extremely close quarters, 2 Commando’s second-in-command, Major Bill Copland, was ordered to oversee the training of 100 men in the dark arts of nocturnal street fighting. The demolition teams were to be made up from groups of officers and men from 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9 and 12 Commando. Newman’s HQ group, two demolition control parties, Copland’s 2iC group, a reserve of fourteen men and a twenty-eight-strong special task party completed the complement of landing forces. The special task party was ordered to attack the defences at the southern entrance of the dry dock if HMS Campbeltown were to get into difficulties and failed to ram the gate.
The demolition parties, working in groups of five to thirteen men, underwent an intensive three-week training course in dockyard demolition, beginning in the shipyard of Burntisland on the Firth of Forth under the expert supervision of two Royal Engineer captains, Bill Pritchard and Bob Montgomery. Pritchard, who had been awarded a Military Cross for blowing a bridge under enemy fire during the Dunkirk evacuation, was the son of the dock master in Cardiff and, having trained as an engineering apprentice in the dockyards of the Great Western Railway, there was probably no one better qualified in Britain to offer advice on how best to destroy the installations of St Nazaire. At the heart of his training methods was the belief that the total destruction of an installation as large as the Normandie dry dock could only be achieved b
y the placing of explosives in the structure’s weakest spots. The positioning of the charges, he argued, was far more important than the amount of explosive used. By coincidence, Pritchard and his friend Montgomery had drawn up plans on how best to destroy St Nazaire dock as part of a Royal Engineering theoretical training exercise.
After Burntisland, the demolition group was split into two and transferred either to Cardiff’s Barry docks or Southampton’s King George V dry dock, whose design had been based on the one in St Nazaire. Each of the ten demolition parties concentrated on the destruction of specific targets, including lock gates, bridges, pumping stations, winding machinery and power houses. By the time the sappers assembled at Falmouth with the rest of the raiding force, they had been put through their paces so intensively that – it was said without exaggeration – they would able to carry out their tasks in pitch darkness or wearing blindfolds.
The Commandos were split into three groups, each with its own subparties of assault, protection and demolition teams. Group Three, the largest, would travel and disembark from the Campbeltown after she had rammed the outer gate of the dock. Groups One and Two were dispersed among the motor launches, and were to land at two separate points, from where their demolition and protection parties would fan out. Group One was to land and secure the Old Mole, about 600 yards south of the Normandie dock, and destroy the enemy gun positions protecting the southern quays. This was one of the key tasks of the raid, for it was from the Mole, a 100-yard-long stone jetty, that all the troops were to re-embark. The demolition parties were then to advance into the nearby Old Town and destroy targets including the power station, swing bridges and lock gates of the smaller, new entrance into the main basin of the docks. Group Two, under the command of Captain Micky Burn, were to rush ashore at the Old Entrance to the St Nazaire basin, halfway between the Old Mole and the Normandie dock, eliminate various gun installations, destroy the locks and bridges at the Old Entrance into the basin and then form a defensive block to prevent an enemy counterattack. Group Three, under the 2iC Major Bill Copland, were to knock out the gun emplacements and hold the area around the Campbeltown, before the demolition teams set about destroying all the operating machinery associated with the Normandie dock.
Commander Robert Ryder was serving an unofficial punishment, languishing in a dull desk job as naval liaison officer to the Army’s Southern Command in Wilton, when on 26 February 1942 he was summoned to London to a meeting at Combined Operations HQ. He was more surprised than anyone to find himself sitting around the same table as Lord Mountbatten and Admiral of the Fleet Sir Charles Forbes, the Commander-in-Chief, Plymouth. His surprise turned to astonishment when he was informed that he had been selected as the naval commander for a major inter-service assault on an enemy-held port. Only a few months earlier, the thirty-four-year-old adventurer, who had taken part in several global expeditions, had received a letter from the Admiralty informing him that he had ‘incurred their Lordships’ displeasure’. The Admirals’ discontent related to an incident twelve months earlier when the Commando ship he captained, Prince Philippe, was sunk following a collision in thick fog. British Admirals never like to see one of their ships slip beneath the waves and, although he was not held responsible for the loss, Ryder was sent for a ‘rest cure with the Army’ in Wiltshire. It was a job wholly unsuited to Ryder’s adventurous temperament.
Until his mishap off the West Coast of Scotland, Ryder had distinguished himself as a sailor of great courage and daring. He had served in submarines, sailed from Hong Kong to the UK in a boat he helped build himself, and he had commanded a three-masted topsail schooner during an expedition to the Antarctic. Shortly after the outbreak of war, the Q-ship he commanded (a heavily armed, disguised merchant vessel) was torpedoed in the Atlantic and he spent four days adrift clinging to a wooden plank before being rescued. Sitting around a Whitehall table with the Royal Navy’s top brass, Ryder might have been excused for believing that he had been forgiven for the collision incident. After the war, he wrote that, to his great amusement, he was to discover that he had been chosen for the St Nazaire job because there was no other officer of suitable experience available.
Ryder had shown he was a highly resourceful man, but even he was going to be hard-pressed to pull together the many elements of a complex plan in just over three weeks. He was not helped by the fact he had no support staff, no office and, crucially, no old destroyer with which to ram the outer lock gate of the dry dock. The inability of the Admiralty to produce a suitable ship to be sacrificed in the raid was threatening once again to scupper the entire operation. On the last day of February, while all other elements of the force were being hastily assembled, Mountbatten vented his fury on his brother officers in the Senior Service. The Navy had offered a large submarine destined for the scrapyard instead, but this was considered by both Ryder and Newman to be wholly unsuited to the nature of the operation. In a terse, handwritten MOST SECRET memo from Combined Operations, an official scrawled that Mountbatten ‘urgently requires a decision by Monday as to the destroyer’. Having considered and dismissed all other options, Mountbatten dangled the warning that the operation would have to be cancelled if the Navy was unable to deliver an expendable vessel by the meeting of the raid’s planners three days later. The threat of being held responsible for the raid’s abandonment appears to have had a remarkably galvanising effect on the Admirals. Within days, the HMS Campbeltown was on her way from Portsmouth to Devonport for a very rapid refit.
The UK’s shipyards were building new warships as fast as it was humanly possible but at this stage of the war, Navy resources were stretched to the limit. The reluctance to commit any vessel to certain destruction – no matter how outdated and decrepit – was understandable, but if there was one ship that the Royal Navy could probably survive the war without, it was the Campbeltown. She was launched in 1919 as the USS Buchanan, one of fifty antiquated warships given to the Royal Navy by the United States in exchange for the lease of some of Britain’s naval bases around the world. On her last legs, she would have been no match in a fight with the Kriegsmarine. Converting her for the raid involved two main challenges: 1) allowing for the addition of almost five tons of explosives she had to be made light enough to pass over the Loire estuary’s many shoals; 2) she had to be modified to resemble a German destroyer.
That both these engineering feats were completed within ten days was a testament to the hard work and skill of the men of the Devonport dockyard. All her compartments below deck were stripped out, her three 4-inch guns, torpedoes, depth charges and forward gun were removed and replaced with a light, quick-firing 12-pounder and eight 20-mm Oerlikon AA guns. Anticipating heavy fire from the German coastal guns, the bridge and wheelhouse were plated with extra armour. Two further rows of armour were installed along the sides of the ship to protect the Commandos lying on the open deck during the final approach. Her rear two funnels were removed and the forward two were reduced and repositioned at an angle to resemble those of a German destroyer. The huge explosive charge, secured in a concrete block, was placed in a hidden compartment between the bridge and the bow, where it was likely to cause the greatest amount of damage to the dock. Ryder was delighted when the elderly captain of the Campbeltown was replaced by Lt Cdr Sam Beattie, an old friend who had joined the Navy in the same year. Beattie had plenty of experience on destroyers and Ryder wrote later: ‘I could wish for no one better.’
Combined Operations’ original plan of attack envisaged the use of two lightened destroyers, one to ram the Normandie dock and the other to act as an escort and troop carrier. But if securing one old destroyer had proved hard enough, acquiring two was impossible. Faced with the problem of transporting over 100 Commandos laden with weapons and demolition equipment to and from the target, the planners found there was only one plausible alternative and that was to deploy a flotilla of ‘little ships’. This was to be made up of sixteen Fairmile ‘B’ motor launches (MLs), a gun boat and a motor torpedo boat. Twelve of
the MLs were to transport small squads of Commandos and the four others were each mounted with two torpedo tubes to boost the force’s firepower. It promised to be a cramped voyage for those on board. In normal circumstances, the MLs had a crew of sixteen, but that number was increased for the raid.
The sixty-five-ton vessels, designed for escort, patrol and anti-submarine roles, could reach a maximum speed of twenty knots, but their speed would be of little help when they came within range of St Nazaire’s coastal defences. Made from plywood, they were completely ill-suited to the task of assaulting one of the most heavily defended ports in the world. The thin sheet of armour around the small bridge was small comfort for the crew within. The Commandos on the deck outside were even more vulnerable – even a rifle bullet could breach the ship’s timber sides. In order to extend their range for the 850-mile return voyage, each of the vessels was fitted with an additional fuel tank, on the deck, carrying 500 gallons of highly combustible petrol. It would take just one accurate or lucky shot from the shore to turn one of the mini-troop carriers into a floating inferno. Given the extreme frailty of the motor launches, the element of surprise during the approach to the target was imperative. The closer they advanced to the target, the greater their chances of success.