by Ross Kemp
Commander Beattie and Lieutenant Tibbits, the two men who had guided the Campbeltown onto the target, were among fifty or so naval personnel and Commandos who had been taken aboard Lieutenant Rodier’s ML 177, many of them carrying severe wounds. They had almost reached the mouth of the river when they were hit by a shell that killed most on board, including Rodier and Tibbits. Those who weren’t killed outright died of their wounds in the freezing water. Beattie and the few other survivors were later rescued by the Germans after several hours in the water.
Commander Ryder, aboard his HQ gun boat MGB 314, was horrified by the grisly spectacle in the harbour. Bodies of men floated in water, the badly wounded cried out in agony, motor launches exploded and smouldered, oil burned on the surface of the river and fountains of water burst skywards from the shower of shells raining down from the coastal batteries.
‘All this time MGB314 was lying stopped about 100 yards off the Old Entrance,’ wrote Ryder in the Dispatch submitted to the Admiralty two weeks later, ‘and although fired on continually by flak positions and hit many times she was by the Grace of God not set ablaze. On looking round the harbour, however, I counted about seven or eight blazing M.L.s and was forced to realise that MGB314 was the only craft left in sight . . . It was clearly impossible for MGB314 to return. With some thirty to forty men on board and her decks piled with seriously wounded I decided at 0250 that she was in no position to take off the soldiers we had landed. It was unlikely that MGB314 would survive another five minutes with the fire that was being concentrated in her direction so I left at high speed.’
As she withdrew downriver, the gun boat was caught in the glare of the searchlights and immediately subjected to heavy crossfire from both banks. In spite of being badly wounded, Able Seaman Bill Savage, the gunlayer manning the forward gun, a quick-firing three-pounder, kept up a vigorous stream of return fire. Savage, who was completely exposed without an armoured gunshield to protect him, must have known it was only a matter of time before the sheer weight and accuracy of the enemy’s many guns got the better of him. The citation for his posthumous Victoria Cross stated that it had been awarded ‘in recognition not only of the gallantry and devotion to duty of Able Seaman Savage but also of the valour shown by many others, unnamed, in motor launches, motor gun boats and motor torpedo boats, who gallantly carried out their duty in entirely exposed positions against enemy fire at very close range.’
It was as obvious to Newman as it had been to Ryder that there was going to be no evacuation as planned. He too could see the blackened hulls of the smouldering motor launches out on the oil-choked river. Roughly 100 Commandos, many of them wounded, had slowly congregated, group by group, around the HQ building by the Old Entrance. With every minute that passed, more German reinforcements poured into the town, pinning the British down with their backs to the river. The question facing Newman was simple: surrender, or try and fight their way out and head for neutral Spain? There was only going to be one answer. Surrender was not covered in the Commando training manual.
The only possible escape route was through the dockyard and the outskirts of the Old Town, over a narrow bridge spanning the southern entrance to the U-boat basin, into the labyrinth of backstreets and alleys and out into the countryside. The Commandos were running out of ammunition, they were heavily outnumbered and many of them were carrying wounds, but their one advantage was their street-fighting skill.
The men spilt up into five groups of about twenty and moved out in the darkness through the network of warehouses. Almost immediately, a series of skirmishes broke out and the crack of grenades and rattle of machine-gun fire echoed across the giant submarine basin. Several men fell in quick succession with wounds too severe for them to continue. All their comrades could do was inject them with morphia, wish them luck and press on.
The Commandos regrouped at the end of the warehouse complex and paused in the shadows of a building, pondering their next move. To their right, they could see the bridge, but to reach it they had to dash across over 100 yards of open ground. Heavy fire was pouring in their direction from buildings and a machine-gun pillbox on the town side. But there was no talk of giving up. As one, eighty men rose from the shadows and burst towards the bridge, firing their weapons. Writing about the event after the war, Lieutenant Purdon recalled: ‘A hail of enemy fire erupted as we crossed the bridge, projectiles slamming into its girders, bullets whining and ricocheting off them and from the cobbles. There was a roar of gunfire and the percussion of “potato masher” grenades as we neared the far end.’
The defenders fled at the sight of the stampeding British troops, who immediately split and disappeared into the backstreets of the town centre. The charge was a heroic gesture of defiance by the Commandos but, for the great majority of them, it was to be their last. The Germans had surrounded the town and cordoned it off with heavily armed checkpoints while hundreds of other troops carried out an intensive sweep, street by street, house by house. Some Commandos holed up in homes, cellars and alleyways, while others chose to break out while there was still darkness to cover them. The close-quarter fighting continued for several hours but, as the sun cast its watery light over the French port, it became obvious that, with ammunition almost expended, any further attempt to flee would end in certain death.
Newman and the other survivors were gradually rounded up and taken up the road to the de-luxe hotel L’Hermitage in La Baule, which had been converted into a temporary hospital and prisoner camp. Here they were reunited with other ‘Charioteers’ – soldiers and sailors – who had been plucked from the river or found wounded around the dockyard. Over three-quarters of the 200 raiders who were captured were carrying at least one wound, some so severe that several men did not survive to make the transfer to the permanent POW camp a few days later. Only five men succeeded in evading capture. Helped by French civilians along the route, all of them made it safely into Spain and back to England, rejoined their units and saw further action before the war was out.
Daylight revealed an apocalyptic vision in St Nazaire. Dead bodies, British and German, were strewn around the dockyard and streets of the town. Some were floating in the harbour; others lay washed up on the banks of the Loire. Buildings had been turned to rubble, fires burned and sunken ships and boats sat low in the water, billowing smoke. On realising the hopelessness of their situation, the Commandos slowly emerged from hiding and gave themselves up throughout the morning and afternoon, but the town remained tense for many days afterwards. Sporadic bursts of machine-gun fire crackled through the streets as nervous Germans, expecting to find a ‘Tommy’ in every nook and cranny, leapt between doorways and alleys firing at shadows.
The raid had come as a huge shock and it quickly reverberated through the chain of command back to Berlin. There was open fury among Hitler’s High Command that a small raiding party had managed to infiltrate such a heavily defended and strategically vital centre of German military operations – and wreak so much devastation. Some of the locals, meanwhile, thought the long fight through the night heralded the start of their country’s liberation and attacked German soldiers, triggering a brutal crackdown by the authorities.
In general, the Germans treated their British captives with decency, and over the coming days they would bury their enemies with full military honours. But there were a few instances of cruelty and inhumanity. Some of the severely wounded were dumped unceremoniously into transports and others were treated harshly by some medical orderlies at L’Hermitage.
As the Commandos were continuing the fight in St Nazaire, the eight of the seventeen ‘little ships’ that had survived the pounding of the coastal gunners were racing to make their rendezvous with Tynedale and Atherstone. The destroyers, however, were running late, having encountered a group of enemy torpedo boats, which they saw off after a brief but fierce engagement. Ryder’s gun boat (MGB 314), which was taking on water having been holed on the starboard, came across the torpedo boat ML 270 as they left the Loire and they bo
th went alongside the destroyers shortly after daybreak to transfer their wounded into the care of the medical teams. Two other launches (ML 156 and ML 446) had already done the same, having arrived an hour earlier. Once the rest of the men and the crews were taken aboard the warships, the four smaller vessels were scuttled and the destroyers made smoke to get away from the heavily patrolled coastline as quickly as possible. Three other launches – ML 160, ML 307 and ML 443 – were several hours ahead of them, having decided to make the most of the darkness and head straight back to England. They were the only ones of the original eighteen to make it from Falmouth to St Nazaire and back.
The crew and Commandos aboard ML 306, under Lieutenant Henderson, had good reason to believe that they had slipped the German net too. By 0530, they were some fifty to sixty miles from the mouth of the estuary and making good speed towards the safety of home waters. The fourteen Commandos aboard, who had not managed to get ashore, were feeling aggrieved at having missed out on the main action when they felt the engine cut and heard the call from the bridge to go to action stations. Henderson had spotted the phosphorescence from the bow waves of an enemy destroyer squadron.
One of the five, the Jaguar, broke away from the others to investigate and, quickly identifying the suspicious vessel as a small British motor launch, Kapitänleutnant Friedrich Paul approached her, expecting her to surrender. Henderson and the Commandos aboard had no intention whatsoever of capitulating, in spite of the fact their vessel was over ten times lighter, made from wood not steel and one of her two Oerlikon 20-mm guns was jammed. The only other armaments were two .303-inch Lewis machine guns mounted on the bridge and the assorted small arms of the Commandos, which didn’t amount to a great deal as nine of the men were part of a demolition team and carried nothing more powerful than a Colt pistol.
Jaguar turned on her searchlight and opened up with all her light weapons. A murderous enfilade tore through the British ship from close range, shredding wood and flesh. The German captain could have sunk the launch at any point with his main armament but he wanted to have it as a prize and, once he had overcome his shock that he had a fight on his hands, he seemed to be enjoying the sport being offered by the spirited Tommies. A game of cat-and-mouse followed as Henderson tried to outmanoeuvre the destroyer, which was attempting to ram him. When Jaguar, which was faster, managed to make impact, the launch was turning away, but the shunt was powerful enough to catapult several men overboard. German guns poured fire into the British vessel, knocking out the Oerlikon and inflicting very heavy casualties. When the crewman manning the Lewis guns was cut down, Sergeant Tom Durrant leapt up to take over the position.
Fed up with the resistance, Paul finally brought his main 4.1-inch guns to bear and a single shell into the flimsy craft caused death and devastation. Paul’s call to surrender was met by a heavy burst from Durrant’s Lewis guns. Durrant sustained wounds from the German guns to both arms, both legs, chest, head and stomach but he continued to battle his superior opponent as if they were meeting on equal terms. A repeated call to give up drew an even longer burst from Durrant before he was finally silenced, slumping to the deck mortally wounded.
With the naval officers and senior crewmen all dead, dying or wounded, Lieutenant Swayne, the demolition group leader, finally offered their surrender. Of the twenty-eight men on board, twenty lay dead or wounded. The survivors were taken back to France where they were reunited with their comrades at L’Hermitage. The following week Kapitänleutnant Paul, a chivalrous commander of the old school, sought out Lieutenant Colonel Newman at the POW camp in Rennes, and reported the brave fight put up by the men aboard. He singled out Durrant in particular for his gallantry, recommending the Sergeant receive the highest award for his heroic, bloody stand.
As the morning wore on, back in St Nazaire, the Commandos still fighting, in hiding or in captivity were dismayed not to have heard the Campbeltown go up. It seemed that either the fuses must have failed or the Germans had discovered the huge charge and made it safe. After so much blood had been shed, it was a bitter blow that the main objective had not been achieved. The scuttled ship on the lock gates represented a serious inconvenience rather than a major catastrophe.
Once the fighting was over in the dockyard area, the Germans began the task of taking away the dead bodies that lay in great numbers around the quays, jetties and warehouses. (The Germans removed their own dead first and left the British till later, so that the locals were led to believe their occupiers had scored an overwhelming victory.) Hundreds of people, mostly German servicemen, crowded down to the Normandie dock to witness the extraordinary spectacle of the British destroyer lying over the southern lock gate, its crumpled bow angled towards the sky over the empty dock and its stern sitting heavily on the river bottom on the other side.
The German naval authorities who went aboard to examine her were at a loss to understand why the British would go to such lengths and sacrifice the lives of so many frontline troops. The lightened destroyer was never going to have the weight or force to destroy the gate, so why bother? As an act of defiance to show that the British were not a spent force, it was an impressive performance, but in practical strategic terms, it had achieved very little. The destroyer could be dismantled and the lock gate patched up.
The clock had just struck twenty-five minutes to eleven and Lieutenant Commander Beattie was in the office of one of the port buildings, wrapped in a blanket, wondering why the charge had failed to blow. At the very moment his interrogator was mocking the costly stupidity of the raid, the Campbeltown offered a retort far more potent than any words the exhausted Beattie could have done. An almighty explosion, as loud as anyone in the vicinity would ever hear, shattered the relative calm that had been restored to the Atlantic port.
The roar of the blast was heard across town and many miles beyond. Around the town, buildings shook, windows shattered, and people standing hundreds of yards away were blown off their feet. Between 350 and 400 people, mostly enemy servicemen aboard the destroyer or alongside the dock, were killed instantly. Their number included several senior officers accompanied by their collaborating mistresses. Body parts rained down on the dockyard. The front of the ship ceased to exist, the lock gate was blown to pieces and collapsed, and what was left of the Campbeltown was swept into the dry dock by several million gallons of water from the estuary.
In the short term, the eruption caused panic and fury among the Germans and did little to speed up or improve the quality of the medical attention being received by the wounded at La Baule. Many suffered at the hands of vindictive orderlies, enraged by the news of the explosion. Around St Nazaire, startled troops, fearing a fresh attack and a civilian uprising, rushed through the streets, firing their guns at any figure they suspected of being unfriendly. Homes were turned upside down and the locals manhandled as the search for the ‘Tommies’ intensified. Two days later the town had once again settled down into some form of normal life when the delayed-action torpedoes fired by Lieutenant Wynn’s boat blew up the lock gate to the U-boat basin and sparked more pandemonium and paranoia.
On that first morning, to the hundred or so British soldiers and sailors still within the area, all facing a long spell in captivity, the deafening boom of the Campbeltown explosion was a sound as satisfying as it was shocking. In one ear-splitting second, a gallant defeat had been transformed into a glorious victory. The Normandie dry dock had been put out of action for years to come. Tirpitz would find no refuge or respite from Royal Navy guns in St Nazaire now. Not one of the 169 deaths had been in vain.
Of those 169 men to give their lives, 105 of them sailors and 64 Commandos, most perished during the attempted landings in the ferocious start to the action. Medals were showered on the raiders, many of them posthumously, but it took many years to piece together the whole story. Newman and Beattie, two central figures in the drama, and 200 other participants languished in German POW camps until the end of the war in Europe three years later. Savage, Durrant, Newman, Ryder
and Beattie were all awarded the Victoria Cross. Four Distinguished Service Orders, seventeen Distinguished Service Crosses, eleven Military Crosses, fifteen Military Medals, four Conspicuous Gallantry Medals, five Distinguished Conduct Medals, twenty-four Distinguished Service Medals, four Croix de Guerre were also awarded and fifty-one men were Mentioned in Dispatches. Tirpitz never dared venture out into the Atlantic and spent the rest of her life trying to thwart relentless Allied attacks. She finally met her end up a Norwegian fjord in November 1944 when she was sunk by RAF Tallboy bombs.
Operation Deadstick
6 June 1944
WHEN PLANNING FOR the Allied invasion of Europe began in earnest at the start of 1943, teams of military strategists scoured highly detailed maps of Normandy looking for weak spots and strong-points in the terrain. Once the beaches for the amphibious landings on D-Day had been chosen, attention focused on thwarting a German counterattack that risked driving the British, US and Canadian forces back into the sea. Their eyes were inevitably drawn to a small pinprick of a village, deep behind enemy lines, lying midway between the coastal town of Ouistreham and the city of Caen, roughly four miles from the centre of each. The sleepy hamlet of Bénouville comprised no more than a few houses, a church, some smallholdings, a maternity hospital and a café. Hardly could the locals have guessed that, back in England, some of the sharpest military minds in the world had identified their tiny community as the key to D-Day’s success.