The Legendary Commando Raid At St. Nazaire | The Greatest Raid Of All Time | Timeline

hi everybody and welcome to this documentary on timeline my name is dan snow and i want to tell you about history hit tv it's like the netflix for history hundreds of exclusive documentaries and interviews with the world's best historians we've got an exclusive offer available to fans of timeline if you go to history hit tv you can either follow the information below this video or just google history hit tv and use the code timeline you get a special introductory offer go and check it out in the meantime enjoy this video [Music] a couple of years ago i made a tv program about my father-in-law who won a victoria cross at arnhem and since then i've been on the hunt for a follow-up another nugget of incredible heroism in the face of impossible odds of course most war stories are well known well documented and well celebrated the battle of britain rocks drift and so on but one day while trolling through a secondhand bookshop i came across a story that's hardly known or celebrated at all it's the story of an amazing battle a battle where more vcs were earned more quickly than any other action in the second world war it's a story full of ingenuity pluck and genuine courage it had the lot having read it i decided to do some digging and it turned out that while very few people in the outside world know anything about this extraordinary battle they certainly do in military circles and they call it the greatest raid of all in 1941 the battle of britain was won but the battle of the atlantic was still raging and we were losing german u-boats were running a mock among the convoys bringing supplies from america nine million tons of shipping had already been sunk and the shipyards in britain simply couldn't replace it fast enough britain was beginning to starve winston churchill said in his diaries the only thing that truly frightened me in the war was the u-boat peril said he was even more anxious about the battle of the atlantic than he was about the battle of britain and then into the equation sailed the terpits tirpitz was the fastest and most modern battleship in the war even though her armor was a foot thick she could thunder along at 30 knots and with eight 15-inch guns she packed a huge punch certainly the royal navy had very little in its arsenal to take on a ship of this magnitude and that was a nightmare for the people who worked here in churchill's war rooms each of these dots on this map represents a convoy movement if tirpitz got among them beyond the range of the royal air force we would almost certainly lose the war it was that simple there was however a drawback to tirpitz's size you see if she were to be damaged while out in the middle of the atlantic she couldn't very well go back to germany for repairs because that would mean limping past britain past the raf past our coastal fleet and that would be a death sentence for her so she'd have to go to a dry dock on the atlantic coast of france but there was only one dry dock on the atlantic coast of france that was big enough to handle a ship of tirpitz a size this one [Music] this is the normandy dock in san nazaire it had been built in the 30s when france was making giant ocean liners and now to make sure the tirpitz could never have a home on the atlantic seaboard it had to be destroyed now the only way that you could put this dock out of action is to destroy this gate and that was a problem it couldn't be done with a naval bombardment because the mouth of the estuary is actually six miles away in that direction it couldn't be done with a submarine because this whole area was crisscrossed with anti-submarine nets couldn't be done over land because northern france was in german hands and for two reasons it couldn't be done from the air either firstly second world war bombing raids were notoriously inaccurate only 22 of bombs landed within five miles of the target so the chances of being able to hit a dot gate from 6 000 feet in the sky were slim at the best of times and it wouldn't be the best of times because right next door to the dry dock were 14 u-boat pens these were some of the most precious facilities in the german armory and to protect them the san nazaire area bristled with 80 anti-aircraft guns and artillery pieces and in the town itself there were 5 000 troops destroying the dock then using conventional forces the army the air force the navy out of the question so the job was given to a group of men who really had only just been put together the commandos the commandos were the brainchild of churchill who'd seen similar outfits operate successfully in both the boer war and the first world war a small number of highly trained soldiers would get in fast do a huge amount of damage and then get out before the enemy had time to get organized churchill liked this he called it the butcher and bolt approach so what kind of men were they well if popular myth is anything to go by they were lantern jawed killing machines who could headbutt their way through outdoors the reality though was rather different gerard brett in my regiment was in my commando 12 commando and he'd written a book on the byzantine age or byzantine architecture or something one fellow who got a divinity degree from trinity college dublin lance corporal potts had been a a don at either oxford or cambridge they included the poacher a tt motorcycle rider so a mixed bag what they represented was a complete revolution in the concept of soldiering because they were chosen for their individuality their intelligence their initiative and nobody embodied that ethos more than this man mickey byrne i've got his autobiography here and what a life he had a privileged upbringing winchester oxford uh and then he met guy burgess the chap who went on to become a soviet spy and they became lovers mickey though became a nazi sympathiser went to germany met hitler got a signed copy of mine camp and was one of the very first people to be shown around dachau the concentration camp he knew bertrand russell he knew audrey hepburn he knew the king and queen he even met roosevelt he really was a telegraph obituary writer's wet dream but all things considered not the sort of man you'd expect to find in a commandos green beret by the start of the war however mickey had seen the nazi threat for what it really was and had found something else to suit his maverick streak the commandos people were left to make up their own minds in war anybody everybody may be killed and what decides the action may be the action of a private soldier who's left to command the change it wasn't put like that but the feeling we were given that every single one of us might be as important as a brigadier we were all individuals you know discipline did matter of course but i wouldn't have said it was absolutely first [Music] the commando forces were made up of volunteers from any of the regular army units and the philosophy of how they went about their daily business was a million miles from that of the conventional military for a start they didn't bother with barracks or regimental headquarters because the commandos didn't want to waste training time on mundane chores such as cleaning or maintenance instead they simply got digs in a nearby town and there was no sergeant major on hand to tell them what to do every minute of the day instead of saying parade tomorrow on the main square in weymouth it might be pray tomorrow at 10 o'clock on these um in the marketplace at dorchester and find your own bloody way there you know you weren't shouted out there wasn't any of this shouting or bullying or any anything that you got in the regular army you led by example so you know the officer had to do everything that you did if the officers can do it i can do it if the officers can do it unfortunately though the british army top brass were a deeply conservative bunch and they really didn't like the new commando philosophy the regular army were doing their best to get us disbanded they hated us some of them we were a nuisance and because our standards were so high we'd creamed off the best of the people in in the regiments and in fact a lot of a lot of ceos refuse to allow people to volunteer this resistance by the regular army certainly got churchill's back up what i have here is a letter he wrote to the secretary of state for war and he says i hear that the whole position of the commandos is being questioned they've been told no more recruiting and that their future is in the melting pot says he feels very strongly about this says the defeat of france by germany was accomplished by an incredibly small number of highly equipped elite while the dull mass of the german army came on behind and then here for every reason therefore we must develop the commando idea pretty clear-cut as 1941 due to a close japan joined the war and the royal navy had to send a fleet to the far east so there was even less to hold the tirpitz at bay what's more we were losing the battle of the atlantic we were losing in north africa and london was in ruins so if churchill's commandos really could smash up san nazaire it might give a sense back home that britain wasn't finished just yet everywhere almost we were on retreat and people were really becoming negative and so she wanted something which would be successful aggression [Music] the plan to destroy the 1500 tonne dot gate was codenamed operation chariot and it was certainly bold the commandos would get hold of a couple of destroyers from somewhere and sail them from cornwall over to western france and now one of these destroyers would be filled with explosives and while the raf distracted the germans with a bombing raid over san nezair they would somehow sneak it up the estuary without being seen by anyone in the gun emplacements here here here here here here here here and here or by anyone with a searchlight here here here and here and then to see what happens next we have to turn to the actual model built to plan the raid the destroyer with the explosives in it would ram the dot gates here and the commandos would jump off and right underneath all the guns positioned to protect the u-boat pens here they'd run around shooting anything that moved and blowing up anything that didn't then after the destroyer exploded destroying the lock gate they'd all meet here at this not at all exposed jetty and get back on the second destroyer which somehow wouldn't have been blown to pieces while it was uh hanging around in the estuary for a couple of hours waiting for them to finish it would then sail back down the estuary past all the guns and go home the plan was presented to the war office by louis mountbatten head of the combined operations unit and unsurprisingly it met resistance one commander in chief was particularly vocal i remember he started the meeting by saying well dickie oh cocky if you're prepared to lose all your sodas and all your ships i suppose you can take on this task which i regard as absolutely impossible i said it's the fact that it is regarded as impossible which makes it possible the germans will never think we'll attempt it [Music] mountbatten's enthusiasm certainly didn't rub off on the raf you can see here in these operation chariot minutes that the powers that be requested a force of about a hundred aircraft for the diversionary bombing raid in three waves but on the back vice marshal saundy says i don't agree that such a heavy scale of attack is needed we want about 20 whitley's which are bombers hanging around overhead dropping an occasional bomb and he's backed up by one of his advisors this chap called willits who really says that operation chariot can uh whistle for their hundred uh bombers he says bomber command can provide no more than 35 aircraft without prejudicing their other commitments you might have thought the navy would be keen especially since the operation was designed to neutralize the turpins but no the commander-in-chief here from plymouth command writes the plan entails the sacrifice of the landing party and endangers two valuable ships for a small chance of success he actually says negligible chance here there's another guy writing here who says i'm not hopeful as regards the result of the impact between the destroyer and the loch gates i think the lock gates will remain partially intact and the destroyer will look silly if that happens much of the proposed plan fails eventually though the navy did find one boat it was called hms campbelltown a clapped-out american world war one destroyer that was on loan to the british she was not ideal for the job known for her poor slow speed maneuverability and her large turning circle but these drawbacks didn't dampen the spirits of the commandos i thought we would get away with it that i would be wounded romantically and a beautiful nurse would look after me in hospital i was very young you're doing all this uh heavy training and nothing's happening so very frustrated so i think when we were finally briefed on the model i mean we thought well hell this is going to be something we had been trained both in the dark blindfolded in the day in every form of demolition to do with dock demolitions trains and anything so when we heard that we were going to blow up the dock installations at san jose i suppose really it was a feeling of elation at this stage people are saying well well what do you think to me you see and i said it's going to be a piece of cake we're going to go in there and not sick not number six because that reflected the the optimistic attitude we're going to go in there blow up this bloody dock and we'll be out we had volunteered after all for danger and it did seem an off chance that it was impossible and therefore it would succeed as the commandos prepared on land the navy set about the campbelltown the old tub would have to sneak past 80 gun emplacements on its way up the san nazaire estuary so it had to be disguised and they only had 12 days to do the work in the end they removed two funnels and sloped the other two backwards so at a glance it looked a bit like a german destroyer and then there was the problem of turning it into a time bomb this job was given to a brilliant young naval officer called lieutenant nigel tibbetts he was a shy chap with a stammer who when his girlfriend announced that she'd become fond of him replied well then i suppose we shall have to get married however while he was not desperately confident with women he was a whiz with explosives one of the best students the dartmouth naval college had ever seen but even he faced difficulties with how you turn a whole ship into a bomb the first problem he had was deciding where in the ship to place the explosives because you see if you can imagine this is the gate to the dock and this is the ship what's going to happen after it hits i mean is it just going to end up here in which case you want the bomb in the front or is it going to rear up in which case you want the bombs sort of in the middle toward the bottom i suppose theoretically it would be possible if the ship were going fast enough for it to actually ride right over the top of the gate and end up in the dock itself i mean who knew day and night tibbetts struggled with this until he decided on a spot 40 feet back from the prowl low down next to the keel then he had to work out how to set the explosives off back then there was no accurate timing device so he had to use fuses like this the idea is that you squeeze the top part here which breaks a glass capsule on the inside releasing acid that then slowly burns through a strip of wire now when that snaps it releases a spring which boins out setting off the detonator now this was very advanced in 1942 but there were a couple of problems first of all it was very susceptible to jolt and shock you wouldn't for instance want to ram some lock gates at 25 miles an hour with one of these on board because it might go off instantly killing everyone it was also very vague the strength of the acid varied from fuse to fuse the strength of the wire varied the tension of the spring varied tibbetts couldn't say to within an hour when the bomb might actually go off choosing what explosive to use however was fairly straightforward he went for amatol and to show how big a bang that produces we've placed a pound of something similar between the front seats of this car that was a pound tibbetts was going to use four and a quarter tons still even if the explosives and the fuses could be trusted to work properly and even if they could get across to france without being detected and up the estuary without being blown to smithereens and even if the campbelltown could hit the lock gates exactly right and the commandos could get off and do whatever it is they had to do they still had a problem how do they get home again because the navy wouldn't provide a second destroyer they were instead given 16 of these [Music] [Applause] today this fair mile ml is a tourist boat taking trippers around torbay and certainly it's better suited to this than it ever was for operation chariot they're made of bakelite bonded plywood it was a cheap mass production boat designed primarily to make the navy look bigger than it really was it certainly wasn't particularly good in the open sea it tended to roll badly in a swell which made everyone on board queasy it's not so bad if it was only used to bring the soldiers home but this little fleet would also be used to get half the commandos out to san nazaire as well [Music] so there'd be 15 commandos wedged down here with all their kit and when they got to the other end they'd be expected to get out and start fighting immediately there wasn't only seasickness to worry about because while each ship had small guns for and aft it didn't have any armor no really all that stood between the german guns and the men down here were um a few planks of wood and to make matters worse each boat was fitted with two 500 gallon long range fuel tanks which were completely exposed on the deck campbelltown was a bomb on purpose these things they were bombs by accident honestly it's hard to think of any vessel less well suited to the job in hand the commandos were hard men good fighters but they've been picked for their intelligence as well so they must have known that the chances of getting to san nazaire were small the chances of doing the job were microscopic and the chances of them getting home again on a wooden boat groaning under the weight of exposed fuel tanks past an alerted enemy were virtually non-existent they must have known that operation chariot for the vast majority was going to be a one-way ticket we were all of us told if we wanted to leave a letter for uh next of kin or your loved ones you could do so and you wrote on the envelope to be posted in the event of having to return [Music] and there was one sergeant bill gibson who i knew them all very well indeed and i remember seeing his face and i knew he knew he was going to be killed my dearest dad by the time you get this i shall be one of the many who have sacrificed their unimportant lives for what little ideals we may have i can only hope that by laying down my life the generations to come might in some way remember us and benefit by what we've done at the time like this i turn to you dad and god i hope there will be peace for everyone soon my love to everyone i'll remember you your loving son bill somehow i thought it's unlucky to write your announcement as your parents no my attitude was coming back [Music] two of men came to me and said would you take these letters home to our wives if we are killed and i said but wait a minute i'm going with you oh you won't be killed i said they were both killed the san nazaire raiders weren't allowed to reveal details of the operation to their loved ones but for the bomb designer nigel tibbetts recently married and the father of a young son the thought of keeping his wife in the dark was too much so he told her and she said afterwards they both sort of knew he wouldn't be coming back so as the commandos gathered here in falmouth in cornwall ready to join the campbelltown and the little boats that were anchored out there in the bay lord mount batman gathered them all together and very unusually he said to them that any man who wanted to step down could walk away without a stain on his character not one of them did [Music] at 2pm on the 26th of march 1942 the armada set sail with 264 commandos and 357 navy personnel on board that's a total of 621 men only 227 would come back i had just enough the light to read a book that i was was reading and i just concentrated on reading this book the thought that crosses your mind is i hope i'm going to be able to do my part uh you know without being overcome by by fear we chatted to each other about what we're going to do and i we all went through it with our blokes you know i i and my four guys just went through what we were going to do i certainly thought to myself my god i hope i'm not going to show fear in front of my men if i'm frightened kent such a purge would be the thing uh anticipation yes fortunately i think we were more worried about the the it being rough because uh it's very uh as you can imagine physically exhausting to be seasick all the time but we were lucky it was calm 33 hours later they arrived at the mouth of the estuary and the captain of the campbelltown lieutenant commander sam beatty instructed tibbetts to set the fuses on his bomb he then began to creep up the estuary ideally he'd have stuck to the deep water channel the channel the tirpitz would have used but this would have meant hugging the northern shore right under the noses of the german centuries so he had to go right down the middle despite the fact that the water even at high tide was just 10 feet deep [Music] to reduce the ship's draft much of the heavy armor and the big guns had been removed so if she did become grounded she'd be a sitting duck [Music] we did go across sandbanks a couple of times and dragged a bit going over [Music] but it was so quick that you hadn't got time to think good god if i'm marooned here i'd be shot to pieces it's hard to know really what the german gunners in this pillbox were doing when the campbelltown chug by i mean yes she'd been hurriedly converted to look a bit like a german ship but she was trundling right down the shallows he'd have thought that would have alerted them to the fact something was up but obviously it didn't because they didn't open fire and nor did the guns at the next pillbox or the one after that but then things started to go wrong [Music] the raf had finally agreed to stage a bombing raid but the pilots had been told not to bomb if there was cloud cover in case they hit french civilians unfortunately it was cloudy and they hadn't been told what to do instead so they just flew around alerting the germans to the fact that something was up their flag guns turned very easily down onto the surface of the river plus their searchlights with the germans now suspicious the campbelltown's heath robinson modifications and fake german flag wouldn't fool them for long and sure enough they were soon challenged by a signal from the shore but the british had a trick up their sleeves we found the um the german code books naval code books and the germans didn't know we had them and so we had the up-to-date passwords and counter signs and we were using them that's the constellation of the german signalman who was flashing signals asking who we were and we were we were flashing back the right answers were a friendly force coming in for the night we've got a damaged ship or something like this you see i'm putting them off twice the germans opened fire but each time they were silenced by reassuring signals coming from the campbell town this meant the ships could get nearer and nearer to the target eventually though the germans realized that yes unbelievably it really was a british raiding party sailing right through their front door they managed to get to this point here just 2 000 yards from the dock gates which are kind of just round the headland maybe you can see it just over there and all hell broke loose there was an awful lot of stuff hitting campbell down i mean we're absolutely hitting our poor little mls but the campbelltown being the big target you know and there was a sort of glare of searchlights the air was filled with things that whistled horned and shrieked and every one of them lethal the main focus for the german gunners was the bridge of the campbell town where the captain beaty was trying to keep a steady course by calling out steering directions the chap at the wheel was killed his place was taken by another rating who was killed almost immediately so then a chap called montgomery who was a royal engineer took over and he was standing there thinking what do i do with this when suddenly there was a tap on his shoulder and a voice said i'll take it old man and it was tibbetts the egghead the brilliant scientist from dartmouth the man who designed the bomb in the bow found himself at the wheel as the destroyer was on its final charge i remember a red-hot shell passing through the wardroom just over our heads and going on out didn't explode if just one shell hit the rudder or the engine or worse the bomb in the bow the mission would be over but at this point it wouldn't have mattered because bt was lined up on the wrong lighthouse so he was heading for the wrong target at the last minute a searchlight picked out the lighthouse over there the green one and beatty realized his mistake he barked out an order so tibbetts swung the wheel hard to the right to try and miss the jetty here and then hard to the left again and you're going to remember he's in a ship that doesn't handle doing 22 knots at night under a hail of enemy fire and yet he managed to just graze the uh the jetty there it is just an extraordinarily brilliant piece of seamanship they came round the old model but really shifting at this point and pretty soon you can pick out the duck gates there they are look there they are maybe i don't know 500 meters to go really cranking it up now the old girl imagine what it would have been like to have been doing this on that night in march 1942 dark searchlights cannon machine gun massive fire coming from that bank aiming straight for that what's the impact going to be like it's gonna be huge the ship reared up putting tibbetts as four-time bomb right over the gate and despite the firestorm bt turned to his men and said well there we are four minutes late the navy had done its part of the job brilliantly and now in the two and a half hours before campbelltown blew the army had to get ashore and create havoc yes the germans had fixed gun emplacements and yes they outnumbered the british by twenty to one but that was no problem because the raiding party remember were commandos they may have been picked for their intelligence and free thinking but my god they were tough [Music] the backbone of their training was speed marching and each commando unit would compete to see who could go the furthest in the shortest time one group went 63 miles in 19 hours another marched 53 miles from harlick to the top of mount snowdon and then down again in 17 and a half hours and remember they did this while carrying 60 pound packs on their backs determination is the most important thing even on speed marches where our great aim was to get the chaps to 15 miles in full tit in just under three hours finish up on the salt course and firing and then leisurely go up to the top of ben nevis it's all part of mentally equipping them to do anything not only was commando training tough but it was also revolutionary the regular army would stay fit by doing star jumps in pe kit the commandos trained in harsh terrain in battle dress they invented the assault course in fact their methods were so advanced they're still used by elite forces today a determination doing things which you thought you couldn't possibly do like on the tarzan course on a rope bridge or the death line and don't forget the champs and commanders weren't super men they were ordinary chaps from all walks of life but they were trained well trained to get the edge and instead of doing weapons training on rifle ranges commandos practiced in massive mock battles with live fire all the weapon training was geared to offensive action and little example the gun was normally fired on the ground but why not use it firing it from the hip and this was an innovation and they weren't just revolutionary with guns either they also learned unarmed combat stuff no regular soldier had ever even heard of how to tackle a bloke with your bare hands knock him out spoil his prospects and pinch his weapon and his gold watch to it he's got one the key element was getting themselves to convince themselves that you do anything and you can only do that in the military sense if you train people to urge them on and overcome their inner fears and give them supreme confidence back in san nazaire the commando raiding party would need all that confidence just to get ashore we went up on deck and we went to the bars of the ship well the 12 pounder had been hit there were a lot of dead bodies lying around there's a lot of blood on the deck and there was a hole in the deck i remember johnny proctor lying there with his leg blown off cheering us on when i came up on deck there was a brilliant flash and ear shattering explosion and i felt a blow on my knee which would felt like a sledgehammer and it knocked me on one side and i felt to the deck and i was lying there and suddenly somebody grasped the rook second pulled me on their feet and said you're right lad and it was major copeland he said bumblebee that portrayed don't hang about here it's decidedly unhealthy tibbetts and gough were there and they were holding their scaling ladders and these two chaps were laughing and swearing and so on and i think we probably dropped maybe even eight feet down onto the onto the dunk the next thing was germans and they said handy hook and i said handy hook to you while tiger was having a set to with jerry the demolition teams were on their way to their targets one of the main targets was this underground bunker because down there and i'm not absolutely certain how i actually get down there but anyway down there are the pumps that we used for emptying all the water out of the dock stairs the job of smashing this place up was given to a team of four commandos led by lieutenant stuart chant chant a stop breaker in peacetime had to place the explosives even though on the way to the pump house he'd been wounded in the left leg the right arm and both hands unfortunately the explosives had been pre-rigged in england with very short fuses so chant sent his men back up to the surface and relative safety knowing that when he lit the fuses he'd have just 90 seconds to climb seven flights of stairs and find his way through this maze of aerial walkways in the pitch black because there was no light down here then while pretty badly wounded he was a brave man [Music] [Applause] chant made it and the pumping house was gone and meanwhile other teams were having similar successes with the winding houses at both ends of the dock i went up to my colonel and saluted him and said so we've blown up the northern winding house and he said well done oh boy so i said i'm now ready to go back to england sir at half past two in the morning the surviving commandos came here where they'd arranged to meet the small boats that would take them home they were pleased as punch with the way things had gone but the elation was short-lived because the scene that greeted them out in the estuary was truly horrific almost all of the wooden mls with their exposed fuel tanks had been blown to smithereens according to witnesses the whole estuary was on fire cats were drowning there were pools of burning fuel on the water you had to kick for your feet i'm mad to try and steer the raft away from the river from the flames and it was absolutely inferno there was a sort of sea of black you could see sort of sinking boats and hear sharks coming from the river and so on and then very quickly the colonel said it was obvious that there was no transport home so he said right we'll fight our way out of the town and we'll split up into small groups and make our way severally across the spanish border i thought that's a bit of a tall order spain was a daunting 350 miles away but even before they could set off they'd have to fight their way out of san nazaire itself so that's 5 000 germans who by this stage were awake alert and organized against fewer than 120 brits half of whom were wounded if you're street fighter you must secure any crossing tiger watson came round this corner found himself face to face with a german sniper ran forward saw him lean forward pressed the trigger of my thompson sub machine gun and typically watson the magazine was empty sexy unfortunately his magazine wasn't empty and his shot broke my arm and bowed me over a party of germans ran up to him and one of them actually used the cliched expression for you the war is over and i thought well i still have to you know escape eventually but i don't feel quite up to it at the moment i knew i was of a certain i'd be killed because there was a watchpoint a tower and i had to go past it the germans must have seen me and i knew they'd far and they did but they hit me in the back and the arm and the leg chance the stockbroker who'd blown up the pumping house made it to this point when a machine gun bullet fired from the top of the u-boat pens over there took his knee joint out he was no longer able to walk so he was captured as well the commandos realized that they were trapped on an island and that the only way off it and into the town was across this bridge which was guarded by what must have seemed like half the german army by the time they got here there were only 80 of them left but plainly they still had some fighting spirit left because they just formed themselves into a sort of great big mass and charged captain ryan now led the assault across the bridge streams of bullets hitting those girders ricocheting off the roadway machine guns pom-poms rifles it was like a damn good november the fifth only more so bit by bit the commando numbers were whittled down until the remaining men low on ammo went to ground in the town corrin purden ended up in a cellar we suddenly heard all this shouting outside and then the door burst open and there were germans standing there with their girl scuttle helmets and their weapons looking terribly tense frankly if i'd been there and i'd have chuckled chucked a couple of hand grenades down and finished us off but they didn't and the colonel who had his pipe in his mouth just sort of walked up the steps and said well we've we've done what we came to do you know that's that [Music] as dawn broke the battle was pretty much over just five of the landing party would eventually make it to spain in freedom and 222 would escape the horror on the few remaining wooden boats of the 600 or so men who'd come to france the previous evening 214 had been taken prisoner and 168 were dead and worse still it was now seven a.m three hours after the bomb in campbelltown's nose was supposed to have gone off after we were washed ashore we were put in the back of the lorry driven into the town and we were in this this big room and they the germans brought in a a sailor they fished out of the river and put him on the table and and said you know you try and revive him we we try to get the water out of his lungs and by this time we were saying to one another you know the cable town hasn't gone up the british could only console themselves that despite the failure they had at least fought like lions they were patting us on the back there the germans were amazing yeah so i mean they probably couldn't believe it that that anybody would venture up into a submarine base heavily defended some of the stories of bravery were incredible out in the estuary one of the surviving mls had gone head-to-head with a much more powerful german destroyer the british gunner a commando called sergeant tom durhan was asked to surrender on a number of occasions but even though he'd been shot 16 times he kept on firing until he was overcome by the loss of blood and passed out but the story doesn't end there because the captain of the german destroyer was so impressed by darren's bravery that when he landed he took the trouble to find the most senior british officer and said look i don't know who was on that gun on that little ship but whoever it was should get your victory across and he got it one of five awarded as a result of the action that night so the commandos had fought well but all they had to show for it was a destroyed pumping house and two damaged winding stations even at 10 am the campbelltown still hadn't exploded and by this stage the ship was crawling with german souvenir hunters there was a real possibility the bomb might be discovered and defused at one point in the morning mickey byrne was marched along here right past where the campbelltown was embedded in the gates and that called for a remarkable piece of acting he couldn't look pleased that it was crawling with germans he couldn't look quizzical wondering why the bomb hadn't gone off and nor could he look afraid that it might go off at that precise moment blowing him to pieces among the prisoners was the campbelltown's captain sambiti who was being held in a nearby hut i was interrogated by a german who spoke very good english he discovered that i'd been in cameltown and he was remarking that it was no good ramming a stout cassoon like that with a flimsy ship at that moment there was a bang the blast wrecked the gate thousands of gallons of water roared in taking what remained of the british ship with it and the german souvenir hunters they found bits of them on the roof of the u-boat pens 400 yards away a german petty officer rushed into the room where we were lying saying we're going to shoot you all we're going to kill you all we just were so sort of exhausted and everything else that we were delighted that the explosion would occur and just said do please don't shout just get on with it hitler was so incensed that he later issued his infamous order that in future all captured commandos would be executed as spies small wonder damage to the normandy dock was so comprehensive that it was not repaired until 1947 two years after the war was over as a result tirpitz was denied a home base in the atlantic and as a result of that she was forced to spend most of the war in a fjord in norway she was finally destroyed by raf bombers in 1944 and incredibly this mighty battleship the pride of the german navy went to the bottom having never sunk so much as a fishing boat in the smoke of giant explosions the tirpitz kept sizes and sinks the price for rendering this great ship impotent had been high british dead around 400 germans at 16 french shot by mistake by ss troops still the attack did mean that churchill could say to the british and the world were not done yet and it helped in france as well one very important thing is what the french prime minister said to us enough first to turn to said nasa he said you were the first who gave us [Applause] hope and what of the men the commandos and the sailors who brought them on this the greatest raid of all [Music] while tommy durant the sergeant who took on a german destroyer was captured and died of his wounds shortly afterwards the bomb designer nigel tibbetts after he'd steered the campbelltown into the dock gate helped wounded men onto a nearby ml and headed for home but his little boat was hit by machine gun fire and as his wife had predicted he was killed [Music] after being captured mickey byrne was sent to colditz after the war he became a journalist and today he lives in wales where his hobby is reading poetry what a world we might have made tiger watson was sent to the spangenberg camp after coming home he qualified as a doctor and ended up in africa helping victims of leprosy i can't imagine all my senses being so alert you know every sense of hearing and looking and your heart pumping will certainly will be the most exciting thing in my life it made you feel that you you could stand up to the test i think that's was a relief to know that one didn't fall apart i'm sure the youth of today would do the same as we did i'm sure they would i think that somehow or other it's such a strange thing the phlegmatic british do this sort of thing and i could see us doing it again but i'm always reminded when i think about this and it was after the war i came across a quotation by mark twain who said that courage is recognizing fear courage is conquering fear and that's absolutely true couldn't be truer yes you were afraid but you couldn't afford to be a carrot today the great moments of military history are marked with imposing monuments and their anniversary is honored with much pomp and ceremony but to find a memorial to the greatest raid of all you have to go to a car park in falmouth in cornwall it's just a rock propped up against some railings and it seems rather small i've always had the feeling that anything that really offers some hope whether it's international or national or even individuals have the idea of your own and it's impossible never think so try it good night you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 302,814

Rating: 4.8832893 out of 5

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, greatest raid of all time, commando training, commando raid, ww2, the greatest raid, war stories, jeremy clarkson, greatest raid of all, world war ii, st nazaire raid, operation chariot

Id: SCMCr2Kh1wI

Length: 58min 24sec (3504 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Affentitten]

Imagine using a narcissist like this to narrate a story of self-sacrifice.