At 01:34 on 28 March 1942 the old destroyer HMS Campbeltown, disguised as a German warship, smashed into the gates of the Normandie dry dock at St Nazaire on the Loire. Commandos poured off her deck and out of a flotilla of small boats to wreck the dock machinery. Hours later, with the ship still wedged in the gate and German officers aboard, the explosives hidden in her bow went off. The dock was out of action for the rest of the war, but most of the raiders never came home.
One dock and one battleship
The target was the dock built for the French liner Normandie, the only dry dock on the Atlantic coast of occupied France large enough for the German battleship Tirpitz. The British reasoning, as the National WWII Museum explains it, was simple: without a place to repair her in the west, the Germans were unlikely to risk Tirpitz in the Atlantic. The operation was code-named Chariot.1
St Nazaire lies about 8 kilometers up the Loire estuary, which made surprise hard to achieve, and its anti-aircraft guns and the French homes crowded around the docks made the port difficult to attack from the air. The answer was a ship that could be thrown away. Campbeltown, a First World War destroyer that the United States had handed to Britain, was lightened, armored around the bridge and decks, and given a German silhouette by removing two of her four funnels and cutting the other two at an angle. About 4.5 tons of explosive charges were sealed in concrete in her bow, set to go off hours after the ramming. Commander Robert Ryder led the naval force; Lieutenant Colonel Charles Newman led the commandos; Lieutenant Commander Stephen Beattie commanded Campbeltown.2
The run up the Loire
The force left Falmouth on 26 March, according to the National WWII Museum in New Orleans and Naval-History.net; the Commonwealth War Graves Commission gives 27 March. With Campbeltown sailed two escorting destroyers and 18 small coastal craft: motor launches, a motor gun boat and a motor torpedo boat.3
Shortly after midnight Campbeltown crossed the shallows of the estuary, scraping bottom twice, while flying a German flag. When searchlights caught the column and signal lamps demanded identification, the British answered with German recognition codes captured on an earlier raid in Norway and bought a few minutes. Then every gun opened up. Beattie hoisted the White Ensign, lost his helmsmen to fire on the bridge, and drove on at about 19 knots. Campbeltown struck the outer gate at 01:34 and rode about 9 meters onto it. "Well, here we are," Beattie is reported to have said, a few minutes behind schedule.4
Fighting ashore and the explosion
Commandos from Campbeltown blew up the pumping house and the winding houses that worked the dock gates within minutes. The wooden motor launches fared far worse: one after another they were set ablaze, and the landing place at the Old Mole was never taken. With no way home by sea, Newman led the survivors through the streets of the town in an attempt to break out into the countryside. Most were surrounded and surrendered when their ammunition ran out. Five men reached Spain and returned to Britain.5
The fuses ran late. Beattie, now a prisoner, was being told by a German officer that the damage would be repaired quickly when the charge exploded around midday. According to the National WWII Museum, hundreds of Germans were killed. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission states that the dock did not return to service until 1948.6
The cost and the honors
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission counts 612 Royal Navy and commando personnel in the raid, of whom 228 returned to England, 169 were killed and 215 were taken prisoner. The National WWII Museum gives 611 men and counts the prisoners differently, at 232 in one article and 265 in another. Of the dead, 105 were sailors and 64 commandos. The fallen lie in the Escoublac-la-Baule War Cemetery west of St Nazaire.7
Some 89 decorations were awarded, among them five Victoria Crosses: to Ryder, Beattie and Newman, and posthumously to Able Seaman William Savage, gunner on the motor gun boat, and Sergeant Thomas Durrant of No. 1 Commando, whose award was recommended by the commander of the German torpedo boat that captured his launch. In British tradition the operation is remembered as “the greatest raid of all”. More of the war is covered in our guide to the greatest battles of World War II.8
Also on this day
- 1879: Battle of Hlobane. At Hlobane mountain in northern Zululand, mounted troops of Colonel Evelyn Wood's column attacked abaQulusi Zulus during the Anglo-Zulu War.
