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St Nazaire, March 1942


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What you can do if you have balls of steel.....

 

MILITARY HISTORY

St Nazaire: the greatest Second World War raid of all

The mission was tantamount to suicide – camouflage an old destroyer for a daring raid on a French dock. Yet 1942’s attack on St Nazaire would prove a turning point in the war

Giles Whittell

Thursday March 10 2022, 12.01am, The Times

 

The British ship Campbeltown after being rammed into the dock gate at St Nazaire

The British ship Campbeltown after being rammed into the dock gate at St Nazaire

 

One morning in February 1942, Captain Micky Burn was in a taxi on the Mall when he saw a face he recognised. It belonged to a man in uniform. Burn had last seen him in Scotland, where they had both been training commandos to kill, climb and live off the land. Yet here he was in London, striding towards Whitehall, briefcase in hand.

Something was up. Burn knew it at once and jumped out of the cab. The man he’d spotted was Lieutenant Colonel Charles Newman of the Essex Regiment and 2 Commando. He had a young family, “a face like an old elephant” (as one junior officer described it) and a burning desire to have a crack at Jerry before it was too late. He was delighted to see Burn, who’d been on leave, fretting about whether to become a spy in order to do more for the war effort.

“You’ve got to come back,” Newman said. “This is it.”

 

The target, the Normandie Dock

The target, the Normandie Dock

© BATTLEFIELD HISTORIAN

 

Less than a month later Burn was squatting on the foredeck of a 1,300hp motor launch, advancing up the Loire estuary at dead of night to attack one of the most heavily defended targets in the Nazi Reich. He led a troop of well-armed commandos but for his own part carried only a Colt .45. His launch was one of 17 small and absurdly vulnerable vessels accompanying an old destroyer – HMS Campbeltown – that had been disguised as German and rebuilt as a floating bomb.

Their target was a giant dry dock next to the U-boat base of St Nazaire. Their goal was to destroy it so that Hitler’s last battleship, the Tirpitz, could not use it; and their attack, 80 years ago this month, has come to stand for British military glory at sea level, just as the Battle of Britain has in the air.

With four fifths of a century’s hindsight, it’s clear the raid on St Nazaire deserves this elevated status for its spirit of self-sacrifice. What is almost as striking, though, is how close it came to disaster.

 

Churchill said of the Tirpitz in January that year, “The destruction or even the crippling of this ship is the greatest event at sea at the present time. No other target is comparable to it.” He was obsessed with the threat he believed it posed to the convoys. To blow up the Normandie Dock would take the Tirpitz out of the Battle of the Atlantic – and yet, as many of those who signed up for the operation knew, the attempt was tantamount to suicide.

They signed up anyway. Britain was losing the war. Its forces had been driven swiftly from France and Norway. Singapore had capitulated to the Japanese. The might of the New World had not yet ridden to the rescue of the Old, and the frustration of British fighting men denied the chance to fight was reaching boiling point.

 

When Newman gave his commandos the chance to withdraw from the St Nazaire raid, none took it. But their letters home – to be delivered only in the event that they were lost in action – show they had few illusions about the stakes. “Dad dearest,” wrote Lance Sergeant Bill Gibson of 2 Commando, “don’t worry and don’t be too unhappy – remember what you always told me – to keep my chin up. I’ll have done what chance has made my duty, and I can only hope that by laying down my life the generations to come might in some way remember us, and also benefit by what we’ve done.”

 

For Burn, the operation was uniquely personal. Besides being a sometime lover of the Soviet spy Guy Burgess, he was a repentant former Nazi sympathiser. In 1935, aged 23, he’d taken a leave of absence from his job as a junior reporter on the Gloucestershire Echo and headed for Bavaria in search of a scoop to impress Fleet Street. The trip was a moral and reportorial disaster. He visited the Dachau concentration camp, met Hitler (twice), shared a podium at the Nuremberg rallies with a Dutch fellow sympathiser named Ella van Heemstra, and wrote it all up in breathless dispatches that mercifully no one published.

It didn’t take long for Burn to see his own naivety. Educated by the writings of worldlier American correspondents, he became disgusted with himself. “What sort of person was I then,” he wrote later, “to write from so sickening an attitude, and attempt such monstrous exculpations, such contortions to excuse the inexcusable?”

 

Two of the architects of the plan, Commander Robert Ryder...

 

Two of the architects of the plan, Commander Robert Ryder...

COURTESY OF CANON LISLE RYDER

 

...and Lieutenant Colonel Charles Newman

...and Lieutenant Colonel Charles Newman

IWM

 

The raid on St Nazaire offered atonement in spades. Newman, in charge of 246 commandos, and Commander Robert Ryder, the naval force commander, managed to convince themselves and their superiors that Fairmile B motor launches of the kind that carried Burn up the estuary were the most suitable craft available. In reality they were kindling: made of wood, powered by petrol engines with extra tanks on deck, they offered their crews and commandos no protection and every chance of incineration.

Newman and Ryder had been warned. John Hughes-Hallett, who helped plan the raid, let it be known he thought the launches “would all probably be blazing wrecks before they got alongside”. And a few days after that, Lord Mountbatten, head of Combined Operations, took Newman aside to level with him on his chances of survival.

“I am quite confident that you will get in and do the job all right,” he said, “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.”

 

Hughes-Hallett and others argued that a second destroyer should get the commandos home, but the Admiralty wouldn’t provide one. The clock was ticking (the raid had to coincide with a high spring tide to get the flotilla up the estuary by a route that would surprise the enemy), and Newman was damned if he was going to miss the chance to lead what he said would be “the sauciest thing since Drake”.

 

The flotilla left Falmouth on the afternoon of March 26. A lone Hurricane escorted it out into the Channel, then turned for home. On the launches, commandos cleaned their weapons and ate sandwiches. On HMS Campbeltown, Lieutenant Commander Stephen “Sam” Beattie served drinks on the bridge.

For the next 30 hours the weather held and so did the deception that this unlikely force was hunting submarines. In the Bay of Biscay the next day, when it turned northeast for St Nazaire, there was no sign the Germans were expecting it.

As dusk fell, millions of phosphorescent jellyfish lit up the sea and the atmosphere aboard the boats was “peaceful… out of this world”, one corporal wrote. At 10pm the launches passed a British submarine deployed to the mouth of the Loire to confirm they were on course, and they formed into two columns behind the Campbeltown for their attack run. On launch 192, at the front of the starboard column, Burn wished his men luck. Further back in the port column a junior medic found this “the time of greatest tension; all nerves keyed taut, palms sweating… Eyes straining to see through the darkness.”

 

Churchill had ordered Bomber Command to release aircraft for a diversionary raid, and soon after 11pm the first drone of their engines reached the flotilla. “We needed this,” Lance Sergeant Don Randall of 2 Commando recalled. The anti-aircraft guns lining the estuary would now be concentrated against air attack, or so he thought. “If a raid could begin now and last for three hours, we might complete the destruction of the dock installations and be on our way.”

But the air raid didn’t last. Worried about French civilian casualties, Churchill had also given orders that no bombs be dropped if the targets couldn’t be seen, and low clouds protected them. German troops defending the port were perplexed for 20 precious minutes by the Campbeltown’s German markings, and by German Morse signals flashed at them from the wheelhouse of the leading motor gunboat. But at 1.27am local time, flak battalion commanders confirmed to Kapitän Karl-Conrad Mecke of the 22nd Naval Flak Brigade that the impossible was happening. They were under attack. All hell broke loose.

 

A few older officers who’d seen action in the Great War had some idea what to expect. No one else did. Ordinary Seaman Ralph Batteson, on launch 306, said it was like “being trapped inside a massive dustbin crammed with fireworks at the instant someone tosses in a match”. For a few seconds coloured tracer arced silently towards them, then machinegun rounds began unzipping the launches’ wooden hulls. Then came the shells.

A single 37mm flak shell from the south bank of the river hit launch 192’s stern at around 1.30. It heaved one engine off its mountings, crippled the steering, tore a huge hole in the deck and sent bodies flying into the air. Burn was too stunned to act. The launch veered across the line of attack of the port column and slammed into a sea wall at 18 knots. Burn was thrown into the river, wearing a heavy pack that nearly drowned him. As he went under, a Corporal Arthur Young grabbed him by the hair and pulled him ashore at the foot of a flight of stone steps. Young had broken a foot and couldn’t move, so Burn left him there. He ran up the steps with his revolver and off into the night.

At 1.34 the Campbeltown hit the great south gate of the Normandie Dock at full speed. Its foredeck reared up over it as the front of its hull crumpled like foil below. It came to rest when its forward bulkhead hit the gate. Four tonnes of high explosive had been hidden behind it and was now ready to blow.

 

Motor gunboat 314, which was at the front of the St Nazaire flotilla

Motor gunboat 314, which was at the front of the St Nazaire flotilla

IWM

 

Sixty-nine commandos arrived on the destroyer. Under murderous fire, using bamboo ladders, they scrambled ashore and set about demolishing the pumping station that filled and emptied the dock and the winding gear that moved the gates at each end. The pumps were four floors below ground and Lieutenant Stuart Chant, already wounded in the arm and leg, led the way down with Lance Sergeant Arthur Dockerill, a former Ely Cathedral choirboy who whistled The White Cliffs of Dover as he worked. Once they’d set their fuses they had 90 seconds to get out, and did so as the station collapsed behind them.

The Campbeltown’s commandos showed what could be done against the Germans with careful planning and suicidal bravery. They fought back. They showed Roosevelt and Stalin that Britain was a worthy ally, and France that her invaders weren’t invincible. But they left utter chaos in their wake.

The launches arrived at a rate of about two a minute – one in each column – with no protection for their men and no contingency plans should things go wrong, which they did immediately. On the 192, fire spread from the engine room and leaking petrol set the surface of the water alight. Survivors heard their comrades screaming as they burnt alive in the river. Two boats back in the starboard column, the 248 took a direct hit. Three launches overshot, circled back and tried to find a way to land their men as planned on a stone jetty known as the Old Mole. None did. Flak shells disabled most of them and machinegunners shot men in the water as they abandoned ship.

Of the 12 launches that followed the Campbeltown upriver, only 2 put men ashore. Of the 17 that accompanied the destroyer in all – including a vanguard of 3 plus reserves and a torpedo boat in the rear – only 3 got back to England. The rest exploded, burnt, sank or were scuttled as they tried to run for home.

 

The plan, unbelievably, had been for the launches to pick up the commandos in orderly fashion when their demolition work was done. The rendezvous was the quayside upstream of the mole. When Newman got there around 3.30am with the fraction of his force that had made it ashore, they saw only burning wrecks.

“Two were visible as the last view I had of the flotilla that was to take us home,” Randall wrote. “They were end-up in the water, slowly sliding beneath the surface, their flames dousing as they went under, leaving only burning petrol on the surface to lighten the darkness of the night.”

Scarcely missing a beat, Newman told the commandos they would be walking home – via Spain. Five of them made it, with the help of the Resistance. The rest were killed or captured.

 

British servicemen captured during the raid: only 2 of 12 launches put men ashore. Of the 17 on the raid in all, 3 got back to England

British servicemen captured during the raid: only 2 of 12 launches put men ashore. Of the 17 on the raid in all, 3 got back to England

ALAMY

 

Not one of those who stepped ashore that night returned as planned to Falmouth. Instead, their first task was to break out of the old town of St Nazaire across a swing bridge that became known as the Bridge of Memories. It looked like a death trap, with sniper rifles and machineguns trained on it from every angle. But such was the commandos’ faith in “Colonel Charles” that the majority of his men rushed it without hesitation. Most survived, and Newman speculated afterwards that the enemy aimed high through inexperience. Others have suggested they did so out of mercy.

 

Micky Burn had his own plan. After leaving Young to manage with his broken foot, he’d set off at a jog up the east side of the U-boat basin, entirely alone. His instructions were to prevent German reinforcements entering the docks from the north end of the basin, but in more than an hour he saw no one, friend or foe. He decided to head back that way after the 3.30 rendezvous rather than risk the swing bridge with Newman. The decision may have saved his life, but he was forced into hiding and was discovered in the bowels of a minesweeper the next morning. As he was marched off, he exchanged glances with Beattie – also a prisoner after spending 12 hours clinging to a life raft in the estuary. Each knew what the other was thinking. What had happened to the Campbeltown? Why hadn’t it gone up? “At the latest she should have exploded an hour ago,” Burn wrote in his memoir. “It was hard not to show dismay, or seem in a hurry to get clear.”

What had happened was that a young navy lieutenant, Nigel Tibbits, had created one of the most extraordinary pieces of ordnance in the history of warfare. It consisted of four tonnes of Amatol – made from TNT and ammonium nitrate – cannibalised from 24 300lb depth charges, encased in concrete (to protect them from the ship’s impact on the dock, but also to concentrate the blast) and hidden deep under the forward gun.

Tibbits came from naval royalty. His father was an admiral; his great grandfather-in-law fought at Trafalgar. He was calm, confident, meticulous and the obvious first choice for the task. He primed the bomb with two sets of fuses in case one failed. One did, so that by the time Burn saw Beattie on the morning of March 28, they couldn’t help but fear the mission had failed.

Micky Burn, left, after his capture at St Nazaire in March 1942...

Micky Burn, left, after his capture at St Nazaire in March 1942...

MICHAEL BURN

...and in 2009 on a return visit to Colditz, where he spent the rest of the war

...and in 2009 on a return visit to Colditz, where he spent the rest of the war

 

 

For Tibbits, failure was not an option, even if success meant not returning. This was the trade-off he envisaged from the start. He did not expect to live, and over a picnic in the hills behind Falmouth one afternoon before the raid he told his wife, Elmslie, to prepare for the news that he was missing. “He had a premonition,” says his son, Andrew, who was three at the time. “But he was determined to go anyway. The one thing he was really scared about was that the whole operation would be a disaster because the fuses would get damaged… He wanted to make sure it blew up even if he blew himself up.”

It didn’t come to that. He stepped off the Campbeltown at about 3am confident his work there was done, but was cut down by machinegun fire on a launch that tried to carry him to safety.

Eight hours later – and nearly seven hours later than expected – the bomb went off. Dozens of German dock workers were aboard at the time. The blast destroyed the gate and flooded the dock.

 

Newman, Ryder and their men made history as Mountbatten said they would, by turning the impossible into the possible, albeit at a cost in lives of one in four of those who took part. But it was Tibbits who secured their place in the pantheon – not that the navy was quick to recognise it. He was not among the five raiders to earn the Victoria Cross, and when Elmslie went up to London to ask the Admiralty what provision would be made for the widow of a hero of St Nazaire, a clerk there suggested selling her engagement ring.

 

Burn spent the rest of the war in Colditz, liberated in 1945, and became a Times correspondent in Moscow and Vienna.

His past would haunt him in peculiar ways, and one coda to the story of the raid traces a direct link from the tyranny it confronted to the Pax Americana that followed.

It concerned Ella van Heemstra, Burn’s friend from Nuremberg. She spotted him in a German propaganda newsreel soon after the raid, being marched at gunpoint through St Nazaire. She was in Arnhem, and managed to get a message to Burn’s parents to say he was alive. She and Burn kept in touch during the war and after, when shortages in the Netherlands were acute. In October 1945 she wrote to him asking for cigarettes to trade for penicillin for her daughter, seriously ill with jaundice, anaemia and malnutrition. “I sent loads,” Burn wrote, “and she wrote back that the barter had saved the child’s life.” Years later he opened a newspaper to see a feature from Los Angeles on Ella and her daughter, who by then had recovered and flourished, and changed her name to Audrey Hepburn.

 

By then the raid had been etched in the history of Europe too. In 1947 its survivors returned to St Nazaire to march across the Bridge of Memories in civvies to a welcome in the new town from Paul Ramadier, France’s first postwar prime minister. “You were the first,” he said, “who gave us hope.”

Veterans or their families have returned every March since then, except last year and the year before because of Covid. They will be back again next week.

 

Giles Whittell’s book The Greatest Raid is published on March 17 (Viking; £20)

 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/st-nazaire-the-greatest-second-world-war-raid-of-all-rmg7z7bjt

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