The unnecessary cost of Churchill’s ‘splendid’ raids
THE GREATEST RAID: ST NAZAIRE, 1942 by Giles Whittell 304pp, Viking, £20, ebook £9.99 ★★★★ ★
Amphibious raiding absorbed a lot of the home-based war effort in the dog days of 1942. It was a peculiarly British practice. In all the time that they occupied the French coastline the Germans didn’t bother to mount a single cross-Channel land attack. Some of the British brass thought they were wise not to do so and saw hit-and-run operations as a waste of time and resources.
The prevailing view, though, emanating from Churchill himself, was that raids were splendid. Emerging from the sea to biff the enemy wherever he presented himself was in the great tradition of Sir Francis Drake et al. It nurtured a fighting spirit and raised morale at home while demonstrating to our allies our determination to stay in the game.
The Combined Operations organisation was created by Churchill to do all that. Between December 1941 and August 1942, under the vainglorious Louis Mountbatten, it planned and oversaw numerous operations great and small.
Some were simply insane. Others had a semi-plausible military justification and the participants stood a chance of coming back alive. Operation Chariot falls into the latter category; though, as Giles Whittell’s absorbing account shows the practical gains were meagre and the cost in mens’ lives very high.
Operation Chariot was aimed at St Nazaire on the Loire estuary. It was an important base for the U-boats attempting to cut the vital convoys that linked Britain to the Americas. The submarine pens were not the target. Sheltered under thick layers of steel and concrete they were impervious to air or land attack. Instead, the raiders were to blow up the Normandie dock, so-called because it was there that the great transatlantic liner of the same name had been built.
It was the only facility on the French Atlantic coast large enough to house Hitler’s last remaining battleship, Tirpitz. Destroy the dock, the logic ran, and Tirpitz would have nowhere to go for repairs and would be unusable in the struggle to cut the Atlantic lifeline.
In the early hours of March 28, 1942, a flotilla of launches led by HMS Campbeltown, an obsolete destroyer packed with explosives, ran the gauntlet of batteries lining the estuary.
Campbeltown then rammed the dock gates while teams of commandos leapt ashore and set about blowing up port infrastructure. Some hours later, the delayed charges on the destroyer detonated, killing many Germans and putting the dock out of commission for the rest of the war. But this success came at a high price. Of the more than 600 who took part in the raid, 169 were killed and 215 taken prisoner.
At this stage of the British war anything that wasn’t a disaster was hailed as a triumph. So it was with Chariot and gongs including Victoria Crosses were lavished on the participants. Certainly, the action provided a propaganda feast for a public hungry for good news. In practical terms, however, the operation has surely to be counted a massive waste of lives and resources.
As Whittell acknowledges, the ostensible purpose of the raid was unconvincing. It was clear by now that Hitler was not going to risk sending Tirpitz south where sooner or later she was bound to share the fate of her sister ship Bismarck, sunk in May 1941. Tirpitz was far more valuable left sitting in a Norwegian fjord where the threat she posed to the Antarctic convoys forced a huge expenditure of British naval resources.
The real purpose was twofold: to rally national morale and to show Roosevelt and, in particular, Stalin that while baulking at strident calls for a “second front now”, Churchill was committed to a continental invasion as soon as he deemed it possible.
Whittell believes that Chariot achieved some success in the latter aim. I am not so sure. Compared with the death grapple the Red Army was locked in on the Eastern Front, Chariot was barely a skirmish and it is doubtful that Stalin was much impressed.
The extraordinary bravery of the participants shines out from the narrative. But with respect comes an overwhelming sense of waste. The commandos were the among the best
Of more than 600 who took part in Operation Chariot, 384 were killed or taken prisoner
trained and motivated in the British Armed Forces. Whittell rightly marvels at their remarkable “equanimity… in the face of death”. Throwing their lives away in what was little more than a stunt now looks both stupid and cruel.
There was worse to come. St Nazaire spurred Mountbatten to come up with a bigger and better operation to bolster his prestige, which was faltering. The result was Operation Jubilee – the August 1942 attack on Dieppe, a target that made no military sense whatsoever.
The outcome was a catastrophe that brought only one positive result. Thereafter, amphibious raids didn’t seem so splendid after all and there were to be no more.