What was the St Nazaire Raid?
The St Nazaire Raid, code-named Operation Chariot, was a British attack on the night of 27 to 28 March 1942 on the great lock at St Nazaire, the only dock on the Atlantic coast of occupied France that could take the German battleship Tirpitz. The old destroyer HMS Campbeltown, loaded with explosives, rammed the outer gate at 1:34 a.m. while Commandos blew up the dock machinery. Hours later she exploded and wrecked the gate. The dock was out of action for the rest of the war, but most of the raiders were killed or captured.13
The raid was a gamble on surprise: a few hundred men in small wooden boats and one old destroyer went five miles up a defended river into one of the main German naval bases in France. The British commander in chief at Plymouth, Admiral Sir Charles Forbes, judged it harder than the Zeebrugge Raid of 1918.14
One dock for the Tirpitz
In early 1942 one of the Admiralty's greatest worries was that the new German battleship Tirpitz would follow the Bismarck into the Atlantic and then make for a base in western France. Only one dock on that coast could take her: the great lock at St Nazaire on the Loire, built for the liner Normandie. The official naval historian Stephen Roskill gives its size as 1,148 feet long and 164 feet wide. Giant gates called caissons closed it at each end, so it could be pumped dry and used as a dry dock.15
St Nazaire was more than a dock. It was one of the chief German bases for the war against Atlantic shipping, and massive concrete U-boat pens stood there, some of them still under construction at the time of the raid. The port lay on the north bank of the Loire, some five to six miles up the estuary from the open sea.16
The timing mattered. In February 1942 the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had escaped from Brest up the English Channel, the episode told in our article on the Channel Dash, and six weeks later the raid on St Nazaire was launched.17
The plan: a destroyer as a bomb
The idea of a surprise attack on the dock came from the Plans Division of the Naval Staff. The outline plan was worked out at the headquarters of Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Chief of Combined Operations, and approved by the Chiefs of Staff.18
The weapon was HMS Campbeltown, an old destroyer that had served in the United States Navy as USS Buchanan until 1940, when she was handed to Britain as one of the fifty destroyers traded for bases. She was lightened so that she could cross the sandbanks of the estuary at the top of a spring tide, and altered to look like a German warship. About three tons of explosive were sealed into her bow, timed to go off some two and a half hours after she rammed the outer gate of the lock.19
Commandos were to land over Campbeltown's bow and from motor launches at two other points, the Old Mole and the Old Entrance, and destroy the pumping station, the machinery that worked the gates and other targets. They came from No. 2 Commando with detachments from other units, 44 officers and 224 other ranks under Lieutenant Colonel Charles Newman of the Essex Regiment.20
Commander Robert Ryder led the naval force from a motor gunboat, MGB 314, with sixteen motor launches, some carrying troops and some armed with torpedoes, and a motor torpedo boat, MTB 74. Lieutenant Commander Stephen Beattie commanded Campbeltown. Two Hunt-class destroyers, Atherstone and Tynedale, were to escort the force at sea.21
The run up the Loire
The force sailed from Falmouth at 2 p.m. on 26 March for a passage of more than 400 miles. After dawn on 27 March the destroyers hoisted German colors, and that morning Tynedale attacked a U-boat, which crash-dived.22
Ryder feared that the U-boat had given the force away, and he steered southwest for a while to mislead the enemy. Roskill writes that the U-boat survived and reported the ships, but that the Germans did not connect the sighting with St Nazaire and sent the torpedo boats based in the port out to sea. Those boats were indeed away that night, five by Roskill's and Ryder's count and four in the German Naval Staff's war diary, which says they were sweeping the routes because of the danger from mines.23
The ships also met French fishing trawlers. Two were boarded, their crews were taken off and the boats were sunk. At 8 p.m. Ryder and Newman moved to MGB 314, and at about 10 p.m. the force found a British submarine posted off the estuary as a navigation mark. The escorting destroyers then parted company, and 621 men in Campbeltown and eighteen small craft went on alone.24
Around midnight the Royal Air Force bombed the port to distract the defenders, but low cloud spoiled the bombing and the aircraft put every gun crew on alert. Even so, the force got within two miles of the docks before the searchlights came on at about 1:30 a.m. Ryder's signalers then answered the German challenges in German and claimed to be friendly ships, and the bluff bought a few minutes before the shore guns opened up in earnest.25
Ramming the gate
Under fire from both banks and blinded by searchlights, Beattie steered Campbeltown straight at the dock. At 1:34 a.m. British time on 28 March, four minutes later than planned, she rammed the outer gate of the Normandie lock and stuck fast in it. According to the port authority and the CWGC her bow drove about 10 meters (33 feet) into the gate. Her crew then scuttled her in position.26
The Commandos aboard her went ashore at once. Their demolition parties blew up the pumping house and the building with the gate machinery, and set other buildings on fire.27
The motor launches fared far worse. Their wooden hulls and petrol tanks were exposed to point-blank fire, and boat after boat was set ablaze. At the Old Entrance and at the Old Mole only a few landed their troops as planned. Ryder went ashore to check that Campbeltown was firmly in place, then ordered MTB 74 to fire her delayed-action torpedoes into the lock gate at the Old Entrance.28
The fight ashore and the escape at sea
MGB 314 lay off the Old Entrance under heavy fire, taking aboard men from Campbeltown. By Ryder's count he could see seven or eight launches burning around him. With his boat packed with wounded and no way to take off the soldiers, he decided at 2:50 a.m. to withdraw. On the way out Able Seaman William Savage, the gunlayer of the boat's pom-pom, was killed at his gun.29
Ashore, Newman's men learned that the launches had been sunk and that there was no way home. Newman decided to break out into open country instead. His Victoria Cross citation tells how he led a charge across a bridge covered by German machine guns. The survivors fought through the streets until, their ammunition gone, they were overpowered and taken prisoner. A handful slipped away and got back to Britain, five by the CWGC's count.30
Only a few launches made it down the river. At about 6:30 a.m. the German torpedo boats returning to port ran into the escorting destroyers, and after a short exchange of fire they turned away. Of the eighteen light craft, four came home. The rest were sunk or abandoned, some destroyed by the British themselves because they could not make the voyage.31
One fight is known from a Victoria Cross citation. Sergeant Thomas Durrant, a Royal Engineer attached to the Commandos, manned a Lewis gun in motor launch ML 306. His citation records that, wounded many times, he kept firing at the bridge of a German destroyer at close range, even after its commander called on the launch to surrender. He died of his wounds.32
The explosion and the days after
Campbeltown did not blow up on time. She exploded late in the morning of 28 March, at 11:30 French time by the port authority's account and at 11:45 in the German Naval Staff's war diary. German officers and men were aboard inspecting her, and onlookers, mostly French shipyard workers by the German war diary's account, stood nearby. Many were killed. The blast destroyed the outer gate of the lock.33
That day the German Naval Staff's war diary called the attack a nuisance raid that had ended in an enemy defeat. It recorded first reports of 67 German dead, 62 badly wounded and 74 slightly wounded, the victims of the explosion included, and of 21 British soldiers killed and 140 captured ashore.34
On 30 March MTB 74's delayed torpedoes went off at the Old Entrance. In the confusion German troops opened fire around the port, and many French workers were killed. The German war diary records that the army declared a state of siege in St Nazaire, that 80 civilians were arrested and that a number of people were shot after courts-martial.35
The raid also reached Hitler. On the afternoon of 28 March he ordered the headquarters of the U-boat command moved away from the coast at once. Roskill writes that it left Lorient for Paris on 29 March.36
Losses and Victoria Crosses
Forbes reported naval losses of 34 officers and 157 ratings killed or missing, out of 62 officers and 291 ratings who had sailed. Of the Commandos, 34 officers and 178 other ranks out of 44 officers and 224 other ranks did not return. Many of the missing were in fact prisoners of war. Roskill writes that more than half of the naval losses were men taken prisoner.37
Final totals differ. Roskill gives 85 killed and missing for the Navy and 59 for the Army, 144 in all. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC), which counts 612 men in the raid rather than 621, gives 169 killed, 215 captured and 228 men who returned to Britain. The CWGC cares for the graves of the raid's dead at Escoublac-la-Baule War Cemetery west of St Nazaire, and those with no known grave are commemorated on the Brookwood Memorial.38
Five Victoria Crosses were awarded. Ryder, Beattie and, posthumously, Savage received theirs in the London Gazette of 21 May 1942. Beattie's was also given in recognition of his unnamed ship's company, and Savage's of the men in the small boats. Newman and, posthumously, Durrant followed in June 1945, after the war in Europe had ended. Newman had been taken prisoner in the raid.39
What the raid achieved
The main object was achieved. Air photographs showed the gate wrecked, and with the pumps and gate machinery also destroyed the Tirpitz could not use the dock. It stayed out of action for the rest of the war and was not usable again until 1947, by the port authority's account, or 1948, by the CWGC's.40
The two sides judged the result very differently. After the Commanding Admiral in France reported, the German Naval Staff wrote that the enemy's success had been slight and that of the defenses great. Roskill concluded that the raid shook German confidence in their coastal defenses and led them to tie down still more men and weapons in garrison duty.41
In Britain an official account of the raid was published as early as 1943. Roskill later set it beside Drake's attack on Cadiz in 1587 and the Zeebrugge Raid of 1918 as an example of calculated boldness in raiding. For the wider picture of the fighting in the West see our guide to the Western Front of World War II and our military history of Britain.42
