HEROIC RAID THAT LEFT THE GERMANS ALL AT SEA
The Greatest Raid Giles Whittell
Penguin £20
★★★★★
At the beginning of 1942 it seemed that we were losing the war. We had been driven from the Continent, Rommel had us on the run in North Africa and Singapore had fallen to the Japanese. Although the Americans had entered the war, it would take time for them to mobilise and, in the meantime, the Red Army was being pulverised by the Wehrmacht. Churchill demanded that something be done to show our allies that we were still in the fight.
The result was the most spectacular commando raid of the Second World War, a seaborne assault on the Germanheld French port of St Nazaire. It was a major U-boat base, but it was also home to the only dry dock on the Atlantic Coast capable of refitting the German battleship Tirpitz. Churchill was terrified of the prospect of Tirpitz wreaking havoc among the North Atlantic convoys, and it was thought that wrecking the port facilities at St Nazaire would limit its options.
But St Nazaire was teeming with Germans and bristling with guns; indeed, it was so heavily defended that the local commander had dismissed the idea of a British attack as madness.
On the night of March 27, 1942, an obsolete destroyer, HMS Campbeltown, steamed towards the French coast. She was accompanied by a collection of 17 petrol-driven motor launches, flimsily constructed and highly combustible, laden with highly trained commandos.
As Giles Whittell makes clear in this enthralling account of the raid, the men were all fully aware of the suicidal nature of the mission, but they had volunteered anyway. Their fighting spirit was to stun the Germans.
Initially surprise was on their side, but once the German gun emplacements were alerted they unleashed a storm of shells that blew most of the wooden motor launches out of the water. But HMS Campbeltown, though raked with fire, ploughed on regardless and rammed the massive steel gates of the dry dock at full speed. Demolition parties raced ashore to blow up other targets, but it was Campbeltown herself that packed the heftiest punch: primed with four tons of explosives, she later erupted with devastating effect.
The goal of the raid was achieved but British casualties were horrific. Was it worth it? Whittell weighs the evidence judiciously and, on balance, the answer is probably yes. Whittell is critical of much of the planning and he compares the unleashing of the motor launches to the Charge of the Light Brigade. Inter-service rivalries bedevilled the operation, and after the war it was confirmed that Hitler would never have sent Tirpitz into the Atlantic.
But the effect on morale was priceless. The Americans were impressed, Stalin was reassured that we meant business, and the British public at last had something to cheer about. Long-term, it may have contributed little to winning the war, but the heroism on display that night was unsurpassed and Whittell is right to call his book The Greatest Raid.