The Raid on St Nazaire - How to make an explosive entrance

[Music] hello everyone and welcome to this wednesday video kindly sponsored by skillshare you've probably seen or heard of them before but just in case you haven't skillshare is an online learning community which contains a wide variety of skill improving classes that everyone can benefit from if you want to learn a new skill advance an existing one or just see how other people happen to make things work there'll be a video for you for fellow naval enthusiasts such as myself there are topics like illustration photography film and video and many others so whether you want to draw ships photograph ships or make videos about ships there are tips tricks and techniques to discover this month i've been watching a bunch of courses on audio because a few of you pointed out apparently my audio sometimes can be not the greatest i do apologize for that but you know there are so many things you have to do when you're basically a one-man band that some things slip by so this particular class by erin lillis this talks about how to do voice overs and other audio recording using a microphone so hopefully the results are a bit better in the first place and of course i matched up with this one by andre angelo which talks about removing background noise and other forms of audio editing for the inevitable times when of course i get it horribly wrong fortunately the video software i have does have an audio removal tool that's listed here so i'm also able to use the skills from this class there are no ads on the site and if you want to go and have a look and see perhaps if there's something you could make use of the first thousand of you that click on the link in the description below will get a one month free trial of skillshare so you can start exploring your creativity today so once again thank you very much to skillshare for sponsoring this video and now on with the show this story actually starts in the immediate aftermath of world war one the french port of san nazaire had acted as a major facility for the arrival and onward movement of american troops late in that war but this movement had been hampered by the fact that the port's extensive facilities were largely quite old dating well back into the age of sale that was fine for smaller ships but the larger modern vessels had somewhat limited options for docking unloading and repairs this in turn led to proposals to expand the ports infrastructure but they didn't really get anywhere for much of the 1920s as france was incredibly strapped for cash and upgrading the port infrastructure in one particular facility wasn't exactly high priority but towards the end of that decade with the liner normandy being proposed and it's over 1 000 foot hull having nowhere on the french atlantic coast that it could actually fit for dry docking some of the previous ideas were revived new designs were drawn up and an expansion undertaken which would include a massive dry dock that was actually named former exclusive louis joubert or the louis joubert lock after a local dignitary who had just unfortunately died the designation of a lock rather than dry dock was also technically correct as it had gates on both ends that connected to water as opposed to a dry dock which tends to have one gate at one end and solid mass at the other unless it's a floating one but regardless to the rest of the world however it would be rather originally dubbed the normandy drydock fast forward to world war ii and the french atlantic coast was in german hands operation berlin had seen the scharnhorst sisters take refuge in brest where the former marine national base had dry docks that could just about accommodate them but when bismarck was damaged there was a problem wedging that battleship into dry dock number eight in brest or the one next to it was almost certainly not going to work and the only dry dock capable of taking the ship in and allowing its underwater damage to be fixed was the one in san nazaire which also had the advantage of either forcing british bombers to fly another 80 to 90 miles as compared to going after breast if they went in a straight line which would take them straight over numerous anti-aircraft gun positions and luftwaffe fighter bases or several hundred miles further if they detoured around the french coast in the event the services of the huge dry dock weren't needed in may 1941 as bismarck was caught and sunk before making under luftwaffe air cover let alone anywhere near the french coast but as 1941 turned into 1942 the british had a problem tirpitz bismarck's sister ship was becoming fully operational but the royal navy was actually in a worse state to intercept the ship than they had been during operation arena boom back then they'd had two modern fleet carriers victorious and arc royal able to respond relatively swiftly to events in the north atlantic plus five fast capital ships king george v prince of wales hood renown and repulse all capable of catching the german battleship and in the case of the first three capable of going toe-to-toe with her at least on paper but now whilst america had just entered the war her only two fast capital ships north carolina and washington were not quite fully operational yet and the former was earmarked for the pacific in any case meanwhile although victorious was still around ark royal had recently been sunk by a u-boat illustrious and formidable were under repair after running into each other indomitable was in the indian ocean and even the much older furious was in refit in the united states in capital ship terms the situation was equally bleak prince of wales and repulse had just been sunk by the japanese hood had of course been sunk by bismarck and whilst renown was available it had become clear during bismarck's voyage that she could not go 1v1 with tirpitz which left king george v all alone as the only true operational ship that could both catch and kill tirpitz in the whole of the atlantic operational theatre as duke of york her sister ship and the third of the class was still on a shakedown cruise whilst the two nelson class had courtesy of hms rodney shown that they were perfectly capable of killing tirpitz nelson was under repairs after an italian torpedo bomber had blown a hole in her side taking an especially valued cheese with it and that left only rodney assuming that someone would be kind enough to slow terpits down should she come out this in turn meant that should the german battleship emerge into the atlantic waters there would be serious questions as to whether or not the royal navy could actually reliably stop her before she did something awful to the convoys and their escorts and a king george v versus tirpitz fight might be somewhat fair on paper but the royal navy never likes getting involved in fair fights if they can possibly avoid it and there was one potential achilles heel in any plans the germans might have for sending turpits into the atlantic the saint nazi air dock since if anyone managed to land any significant damage whether it be a swordfish or even a lucky destroyer she'd need to go in for repairs there and nowhere else if the dry dock could be rendered unusable then the ship would have nowhere in the atlantic to go and that in turn should persuade the germans not to send her out at all except for going after arctic convoy routes but those were easier to cover with mast cruisers and destroyers backing up the few royal navy capital ships available but exactly how to deny the use of this dry dock to the germans was something of a quandary turning most of central breast into a brick dust coloured impression of a moonscape hadn't done all that much to the docks used by the scharnhorsts drydock gates are incredibly strong but also vertical and don't present much of a significant target profile a direct hit is hugely unlikely and even if it did happen it'd likely only chip the top off the gate you might have a bit more luck if a bomb landed just outside the gates and then went off like a mine deep underwater but even then it was unlikely to do a tremendous amount hitting the lock gate machinery control houses would also work but they were also fairly small targets in theory if you dropped enough bombs then statistically you'd hit the targets that you needed but that would take vast amounts of time and resources plus it would cause significant losses amongst the bomber crews and amongst the french civilian population the latter of which were at this point still specifically a target to be avoided it were at all possible under uk bombing policy the royal navy's more conventional approach of shore bombardment stood a greater chance of working at least on paper but the position of saint nazier well into the loire estuary meant that for a ship with large enough guns to get inaccurate firing range would mean running a gauntlet of somewhat unknown shore and submarine defenses plus the ship would be well inside the strike range of multiple luftwaffe squadrons who wouldn't take too kindly to a royal navy vessel shooting up something that the germans thought was theirs secret agents were considered and whilst there was a relatively high degree of confidence that an agent might be able to get into the dry dock the sheer scale of both the dock and any of machinery associated with it meant that any concealable explosive charge that a single agent might carry would be pitifully inadequate for the job and the chances of sticking in a couple of dozen agents all humping a 75 pound explosive charge all at the same time were basically zero that left them with one option the year and a half old commando force an elite infantry unit that could if landed with the element of surprise fight their way to the machinery buildings and destroy them before hopefully falling back the problem here was that the main approach was heavily defended to bypass it you'd need a ship with a shallow draft but shallow draft craft that could make it to saint nazier tended to be small and unable to carry that many men as well as being distressingly fragile motor launches for example fell into this category an infantry landing ship could carry enough men but it was too deep draft and a smaller landing craft flotilla would be far too vulnerable and in any case didn't have the range but a small window of opportunity seemed to be open for march 1942. the spring tide was forecast to be quite high it would also come in at night which would help with concealment and it was theorised that a small destroyer if properly lightened might have its draft reduced just enough to make passage away from the dredged channel which was the most heavily defended part of the estuary on that particular night of the tide it would also be large enough to carry a commando force of appropriate size as well as durable and well-armed enough to survive any last-minute encounters with the shore defenses should that become necessary but whilst this force could certainly take out the machinery and anything else that might be of interest nearby such as the local defense headquarters and various gun positions that would be very usefully silenced if they wanted to escape breaking the lock gates themselves would be another matter for this it was proposed that since it was unlikely that the destroying question would make it back out once the defenses were alerted anyway a leaf should be taken from the submarines that had been used in the world war one raid on zebra and the bow should be packed with explosives the destroyer could then ram the gates which would also deliver the commandos right up close to their target the troops would then have to be evacuated on smaller craft which hopefully would slip through unnoticed as most of the attention was focused on the much larger destroyer whilst the commandos would ideally disable as many shore guns as possible during their assault and then the destroyer would explode taking out the gates and rendering the dry dock doubly unusable since it had worked during the stealth battleship raid on sherborg it was also suggested that the raf should conduct a bombing raid earlier in the evening to divert attention to the skies if some elements of this plan sound familiar to those of you who've read about the zebra grade of world war one that shouldn't be a great surprise as the officer who led that particular attack roger keys was the first director of combined operations and had led the unit until october 1941 and thus many of the broad strokes of both plans came from the same mind the exact details would now have to undergo a series of revisions ably assisted by numerous intelligent sources both from within france and from signals decryption as well as a wonder wonderfully detailed model of the harbour that the raf had built from recon photos and the aid of a pair of young pyromaniacs captains pritchard and montgomery who'd emerged from the evacuation of france with a burning desire to teach themselves the fine art of reducing very large structures into very small piles of rubble with copious amounts of well-placed explosives the first draft of the plan had called for two destroyers one to lead the operation and be the floating bomb and the other to provide fire support and transport the men away but the navy was loathed to provide two ships when they knew one was certainly not going to be coming back and even in the best case the second was probably going to need weeks if not months of repairs this evolved into the idea of using an old free french destroyer the uragen which was currently a depot ship but as this would involve widening the scope of the secret planning to include de gaulle and a large number of free french officers the idea was dropped for security reasons however as only a single destroyer was considered this was where the idea of evacuating on motor launches had originated from and that would stick for the rest of the planning it also incorporated the use of a motor torpedo boat to attack either the inner gate with torpedoes if the outer gates happened to be opened or if the mtb was still around and undetected when the main charges on the destroyer went off or they could just use it to torpedo another smaller dry dock gate if it looked like they needed to leave asap these weapons would carry extra large warheads and act on a time delay as compared to the more regular torpedoes that an mtb might otherwise carry with the french out of the picture but with now only one destroyer to give up the admiralty conceded the use of the old hms campbell town formerly uss buchanan one of the 50 old u.s destroyers provided in the destroyers for bases deal with just under four weeks to go until the high tide that would allow the raid to happen at all the destroyer went into devonport for a rapid refit and makeover much of her internal division was ripped out the 4-inch guns were replaced with 3-inch weapons the torpedo launchers the depth charges and their launchers were also removed and a number of 20 millimeter oerlikons took their place this resulted in a ship that had a fair degree of short-range rapid-fire capability against exposed targets but nothing in the way of long-range weapons or significant anti-armor capability it also meant that the ship would be much more vulnerable to flooding but it was also much lighter a little bit of this was made up by the fact that armor plate needed to be installed it had to be at least thick enough to be proof against shrapnel and small arms fire and this was needed to protect the commandos on the main deck and some of the crew so armor plating was also installed around the bridge two of the four funnels were removed and the other two were altered to resemble the angled funnels of small german destroyers and the finishing touch was just over four tons of high explosive set into a concrete caisson in the bow this was made up of a number of 400 pound depth charges liberally supplied with fuses and installed above the main fuel tanks just aft of the forward gun mount since it was felt that if they were installed any further forward they might be crushed by the impact and some ideas about storing the explosives right aft and then bringing them forward after the ramming was completed were very quickly squashed by those who would actually be responsible for the operation the prospective commandos were trained repeatedly in exercises conducted against the king george v dock in southampton which was somewhat similar to their target whilst an argument in the background was conducted about how many members of the press should be invited along but since the ministry of information balked at the idea of using journalists as human shields the navy ended up saying that they would only permit one or two to be present along with motor torpedo boat 74 and motor gunboat 314 the former having now had its torpedo tubes fixed to fire over the bow so that the weapons could be discharged over any anti-torpedo nets they might find and the latter acting as a command vessel 16 motor launches equipped with extra fuel tanks and light weapons made up the attack force with a submarine assigned as a forward navigational beacon and two hunt class destroyers to cover the raid overall and give the motor launchers somewhere to drop off the men if they themselves were too badly damaged to make it home the motor launches were fitted with additional 500 gallon fuel tanks so that they'd have the range to make it to saint nazir and back although there were some fairly strict instructions to use the fuel in the tanks first rather than the fuel in their main tanks and then fill those tanks that were on deck with sea water because it was appreciated that putting a 500 gallon fuel air explosive bomb on your back was probably not conducive to long-term survivability if you happen to come under automatic weapons fire although as it turned out there would still be a fair amount of fuel in some of the motor launches tanks when the defenses ended up engaging the raiders with some fairly predictable consequences but speaking of the defenses the germans had just over two dozen heavy guns just under four dozen anti-aircraft guns as well as searchlights a destroyer a minesweeper and a trawler all assigned to the permanent defense of san asia and of course some of the heavier anti-aircraft guns could in a pinch be used as anti-surface shore defenses as well plus whatever transient coastal craft mine sweepers torpedo boats u-boats and other such craft might happen to be in harbor at the time although most of these latter craft in normal circumstances might not be able to make themselves ready in time to repel an attack assuming that surprise was actually achieved but they also might well be in place to block any attempt at an exit nonetheless the small fleet headed out at 1400 on the 26th of march 1942 along the way they would encounter two french fishing boats taking the crew's prisoner before sinking the boats themselves in order to preserve the secrecy of the operation as they were concerned that some of those boats might have a wireless aboard and there might be a gestapo or similar agent who might report their position the admiralty thought that some german coastal forces might be active in the area they were technically correct and so they sent out another couple of hunt class destroyers to join up with the flotilla later in the afternoon after the main fleet had sailed although as it turned out they wouldn't actually rendezvous with a flotilla until after the actual raid itself was done nevertheless the 26th turned into the 27th as the four swung west of the french coast and they spent most of the 27th heading approximately east into the upper reaches of the bay of biscay early on in the morning of the 27th they were sighted by u593 a brand new u-boat that had been damaged and was making its own way back to nazia for repairs after its maiden voyage after a while the surface u-boat which wasn't sure if the formation it could see in the darkness was hostile or not was spotted by the british flotilla and the two destroyers plus motor launch 298 and motor launch 446 raced over to sink or suppress it they also spotted a few french fishing trawlers and hms atherston one of the two hunt class destroyers broke off to go and deal with them the u-boat on the other hand fired two recognition flares at the tyndale the other destroyer the first flare got no response the second was replied to with five long flashes from the tyndale's searchlight mainly this was to try and delay the u-boat but by sheer good fortune kriegsmarina practice at the time was to give long flashes on the signal lamp if it wasn't possible to return a recognition signal this lulled the u-boat into a full sense of security and gave the destroyer a chance to close the gun range and launch an attack the submarine then crash dived and tried to fire its half torpedo tube but the tube had been damaged in the attacks that had sent it home in the first place and all that that was accomplished was flooding a tank with enough water to counterbalance the lost weight of a torpedo that was now refusing to budge and be lost thus out of trim and despite the crew's best efforts the submarine then popped back up to the surface one of those on the tyndale recalled to our amazement the u-boat surfaced slowly stern first and they stopped beam on to tyndale and ahead of her bow it would have taken only a couple of minutes full ahead to ram her but instead we stopped quite close with the u-boat to our port bow and under fire from the pom-pom and small arms she was too close for the main armament to bear the u-boat stern rose up to an angle of 45 degrees her propeller turning slowly and remained at this angle as she slid beneath the surface on the surface itself tyndale was so near the submarine that she could not drop a full pattern of depth charges without causing herself serious damage she may have fired two depth charges from her side traps over the disturbed water where the u-boat had dived but the destroyer would not have been doing more than about 10 knots it was then i think that the azdik was damaged tyndale then turned away from where the u-boat had dived to work up to a safe speed to fire a full pattern of depth charges returning about 20 knots when a full pattern was dropped on an estimated position for the u-boat without help from the damaged azdek u-593 as it turned out had dived again and escaped the depth charges atherstone turned up and was also unable to find the sub which stayed hidden until about 1400 that afternoon upon which she delivered her report of a british force presence but critically her captain thought the force was a collection of mine lane craft heading west which resulted in the five torpedo boats that the admiralty had heard about being sent to patrol north of san nazaire along the usual approaches to the loire estuary instead of heading out to intercept the flotilla in its actual position the french trawlers the atherstone had gone after had been left alone as they hadn't seen the entire british formation but around noon others were spotted from the main formation and it's two of these ships that would be boarded and then sunk becoming bored below decks after almost two days at sea some of the commandos began to entertain themselves building sandwiches with such unlikely fillings as soap toothpaste or hair cream and then trying to get unsuspecting comrades to eat them slightly dodgy food aside night fell and just after 2100 the attack force split with the covering forces i.e the two destroyers remaining out at sea and the strike force heading in the motor launch is forming two columns with the motor torpedo boat at the head of one and the motor gun boat at the head of the other with campbelltown in between raising a german naval ensign as a ruse daguerre to strengthen the impression of her being a german ship to anyone who might spot her at this stage moto launch 341 developed engine difficulties and after having transferred her commandos had to turn for home as she was unable to keep up with the rest of the formation at 2200 they passed hms sturgeon the submarine that had been sent ahead of them to act as the navigational beacon at 2330 raf bombers appeared over the town although the target was obscured by cloud and thus only a few bombs fell as they were under orders to only drop bombs if they could see a valid military target paradoxically this caution had a disproportionate effect as the lack of significant air-dropped explosives compared to the number of bombers that they could hear above them convinced some that a parachute landing was being made outside the town focusing attention in exactly the opposite direction to the incoming ships for a while although it also meant that the entire port went to high alert which turned out to be something of a two-edged sword as it meant the shore defense gun crews and the various ships crews both of the permanent guard ships and those who were just in port for the moment were ordered to their posts whereas under air attack alone they most likely would have remained in their shelters at half past midnight the attacking ships began to pass over the shallow area of the loire estuary on the high tide campbelltown actually touched the seabed twice but managed to extricate herself both times surprise seemed to have been achieved and they were on schedule for their o130 appointment with the dry dock unknown to them a patrol vessel had in fact seen them but in a strange quirk of fate no one had actually given that ship a radio and so it was entirely unable to report the approach of the british ships but with minutes to go at 22 minutes past one in the morning search lights on both sides of the river flicked on and another signal light demanded their id the alert defenses had spotted the incoming ships at quarter past one and by 18 minutes past one it had been established that no friendly ships were expected then it was just a case of somebody running over to the appropriate communications equipment to coordinate the defense batteries something that had apparently taken them another three to four minutes but motorgun boat 314 had a response signal ready to send it had been captured from a german ship a few months earlier being challenged by both a gun battery and the harbour master station the small craft signaled the latter to wait and then sent the gun battery the purloined signaled along with a message two damaged ships in company request permission to proceed without delay this caused some hesitation and some of the batteries seemed to stand down and their searchlights switched off now they were challenged again by the harbour itself and they repeated the process but during this exchange a light flak emplacement opened up a sporadic fire anyway with every moment precious the motor gun boat and the destroyer both signaled they were being attacked by friendly forces which caused a brief lull in the firing as questions ran rampant through the defending forces but an authoritative answer from the shore defenses commander came back soon enough and a few minutes later all the shore defense batteries that could bring their guns to bear opened up at once but the deception had carried the attackers to within a couple of minutes of their target and so at 0-128 as fire came in the creek's marina ensign came down where upon the gather commanders quickly shredded it for souvenirs and the white ensign was raised and the british ships returned fire the harbour guard ship was quickly knocked out but the shaw batteries in general proved more resilient campbelltown increased speed as the bridge was both raked with gunfire and searchlights trying to blind the crew in return everything from the commandos machine guns to the 20 millimeter orlicans to the three-inch weapons and a few of more enterprising mortar crews lit up at once but it was too late for even the blinding searchlights to stop the camel town the ship had already cited its target and by keeping a bearing on passing features that were outside of the blazing searchlight beams it held a true course slamming into the dot gates at 0-134 only a few minutes late a brain gunner on motor launch 457 watched her go past in between shooting at searchlights with his machine gun and would later recall she was a memorable sight plowing along brilliantly lit up by searchlights the british battle ensen streaming over her stern she was now heading for the dry dock at full speed her sides alive with the flashes of the shells that were hitting her continuously it was a sight that i shall never forget the motor launchers were also giving as good as they got with the commandos lending supporting fire from brens lewis guns and the odd marksman with his rifle plus one un enterprising man who'd brought along a 55-caliber anti-tank rifle of all things and was having great fun making the life of german searchlight crews and exercise in frustration of course this only completed the first stage of the operation now the surviving commandos on the campbell town which was quickly being made into the world's largest colander by every german gun that had a shot and some of the commandos on the motor launches had to disembark and complete their objectives there were eight teams assigned in total a mortar section to help take out machine gun and other emplacements a pair of assault sections to take the fight to the defenders directly and establish perimeter and five demo sections to actually blow everything up however whilst campbelltown had made it through and hit the dry dock with quite the impact a fair number of motor launches had been damaged crippled or sunk already especially towards the rear of the column and so a good number of the commandos either wouldn't make it sure or wouldn't make it in time to have any significant impact one of the commandos officers was aboard the campbelltown and recalled feeling the impact and then a flood of questions passed through my mind where exactly had we hit and can we get off from the bows i dashed through the smoke round that beastly hole in the deck and found in the clear light of illumination from german searchlights that not only had we hit the dock gate centrally but we were actually clean through it with our bow sticking out over the dry dock interior i found gough in his party and having seen that they were busy getting the big iron rung ladder into position dashed back amidships through the narrow doors gangways and well deck covered with many wounded sailors which were a job to get through and i had to be rather rough in dragging them out of the way where they lay across the path for my chaps coming off the landing forces then advanced from objective to objective silencing guns searchlights and bunkers on their way to the pump house which was duly rigged with explosives despite mounting casualties from enemy fire these assaults being most successful as compared to the more diverse targets along the harbour front further away from the normandy drydock where the motor launches were coming under punishing fire sub-lieutenant richard collinson was manning an orlikin on motor launch 192 when we were hit on the water line under the bridge port side forward by something pretty big which sort of rolled her over considerably and knocked her engines off beat for a second and all the water splashed down on us on the after gun another shell landed plum in line with us amidships and went off with a hell of a crump about 50 yards short and then another one hit us on the pork quarter and jolted us badly and then the next thing was this one that hit us in the engine room and that was just one big woof which stopped the engines they were turned right off it blew the port side of the engine room out and the deck off and we started blazing furiously small groups of commandos who did make it ashore in these areas did the best that they could but arriving in small groups often having lost equipment having to swim and with men being picked off all the time there was little they could do although some would survive improbably nasty injuries with one lance sergeant being shot through both lungs but simply slipping into unconsciousness when a friend gave him a morphine injection and later waking up in hospital wondering what happened the winding houses would be rigged for demolition as best they could be and with as many of their objectives complete as possible the remaining commandos began to realize there weren't anywhere near enough motor launches left intact to evacuate by although some men from campbelltown had managed to board the motor gunboat when it came by to ensure that the ship was stuck fast as well as motor launch 177 which had shown up a little bit earlier but by this point any motor launch that came close was going to be torn apart by the alerted defenses unfortunately for all involved moto launch 177 badly overloaded would be sunk on her way out of the harbour by the more distant shore defenses the action around about this time was recalled thus by one of the commandos involved we moved up on the dark side and i noticed fife had rather heavily laden with rifle and wireless set so i took his rifle my own having been blown to fragments on campbelltown cheatham 10 yards ahead stopped us and we stood in the shadows and watched the crew of the ships in the dry dock running aboard all this time fife was trying to contact hq on his set the call droned on and on with pauses for five to say no reply sir can't hear a sound all through our movement fife continued his efforts to establish communication and certainly was through no fault of his that we failed to do so soon we reached the inner drydock gate and onto the bridge at m to see if i could get reports of progress fire of all sorts was pouring from the high buildings on the other side of the basin and the dock road seemed light as day i saw a lone figure under a deserted wooden gun tower mickey byrne he reported that he alone of his force had managed to get ashore and asked me if i had seen morgan jenkins with his protection and demolition party who were to have blown this bridge i knew nothing of their progress mickey said i'll wait a little longer for them and then rejoin we pushed on toward the bridge at g and i took cheatham's place in the lead we tried to get along the dock road parallel with decent nazier basin but every time we moved we were fired at by gunners on the ships in the basin so we doubled back and tried to get round the buildings 12 foot walls barred our way and time was flying so i decided to chance the basin road again bunching together we ran and dodged from cover to cover and managed always keep one jump ahead of the machine gunners on the ships they always fired at the place that we had just left therefore the commandos still left to shore resolve to try and fight their way out of the town and from there make their way to somewhere they might be evacuated from but the garrison managed to cut them off and surround them and the fighting ground the advance to a standstill before the commandos ran out of ammunition and for the most part were forced to surrender five men who managed to get separated in all the chaos and found themselves in the open air of the countryside would make their way across most of france over the pyrenees to spain and eventually back to the uk they would be the only ones to succeed in doing this out at sea the motor torpedo boat had managed to torpedo the old lock gates since the sea wood gates of the primary target had not yet been breached and was then ordered to withdraw but it would be hit and sunk when it stopped to pick up survivors of a motor launch that had already been sent to the bottom motor launch 306 ran into the german torpedo boat jaguar and engaged it in a somewhat one-sided fight that nonetheless only ended when the motor launch was boarded and sergeant durant manning the aft machine gun was rendered physically unable to keep firing as a result of several mortal wounds out at sea the atherston and tyndale spotted four of the five german torpedo boats the other one being jaguar which were deletedly on their way back and tyndale engaged them in a 10 minute gun duel that surprisingly enough ended with the numerically superior germans having turned away which afforded the british ships the chance to then pick up casualties from the returning survivors which at the time totaled the motor gunboat and just two motor launches but with an increasing number of luftwaffe aircraft showing up it was decided to scuttle the small craft and head home at top speed even as the destroyers anti-aircraft guns and a mixture of raf and coastal command aircraft which could now operate in the early dawn light fended off opportunistic luftwaffe attackers as it turned out three more motor launches from the attacking force had survived for a grand total of six out of the 18 small craft assigned to the mission or seven if you include the one that had to turn back beforehand these three showed up at the rendezvous a little later but after waiting for a few hours without any sign of the destroyers which had of course already left and having shot down a junkers 88 and damaged a large seaplane that had come to attack them they decided to make their own way home at 10 o'clock that morning which they would succeed in doing it just took them a little bit over 24 hours meanwhile back at the dry dock gates the fuses aboard campbelltown were supposed to have gone off at half past four in the morning and numerous fuses had been set to ensure that this happened but as the sun rose the battered shape of the destroyer was still there and the germans began clearing up the debris and casualties from the night's activities prisoners were being interrogated propaganda films were being made and the ship was being searched and possibly thanks to the concrete or the damage to the bow or the flooding that had resulted nobody noticed that several tons of explosive were still sitting there and so a tall group of high-ranking officers and others was organized to have a look at what appeared to be the failed british attempt to put the dock out of action one of the prisoners was in the process of being told in his interrogation that the damage wouldn't take long at all to repair when around noon the bow of the destroyer the doc gates the tour party and several hundred others in the immediate vicinity all vanished as the ship's explosive payload detonated sweeping the remainder of the ship into the dock on a tidal wave of water the dock was out of action for the rest of the war indeed it wouldn't actually be back in service until a couple of years after the war ended although the breach itself would be sealed and the dock mostly pumped out again a few months later this was only possible to do by physically sealing the seaward gate with a solid embankment which rendered it impossible for any large ship to use the dock and put paid to any thought of sending turpets into the atlantic even if the deteriorating state of the craig's marina's fuel supplies would have allowed that to happen anyway there was another knock-on effect of the assault the fact that it had succeeded prompted a renewed set of works on the atlantic wall diverting a huge amount of labour tens of thousands of tons of concrete and steel many anti-aircraft guns machine guns and batteries of heavy artillery all in the aid of constructing thousands of bunkers almost none of which would ever see any action but all of this came at a very high cost just over a third of the 612 men involved actually made it back 228 over the two days after the raid and the five commanders who took the long route via spain 169 men were killed and another 215 were captured fortunately this all happened half a year before hitler's infamous commando order which directed the allied special forces were to be shot on site immediately regardless of if they surrendered or not and so the majority of those taken prisoner would eventually survive the war the operation would result in the award of five victoria crosses four distinguished service orders four conspicuous gallantry medals five distinguished conduct medals 17 distinguished service crosses 11 military crosses 24 distinguished service medals and 15 military medals in addition to four men who were awarded the quarter gir by france and another 51 who were mentioned in dispatches that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for dry dock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 206,242

Keywords: wows, world of warships, Royal Navy, Kriegsmarine, St Nazaire, Commando, HMS Campbeltown, Bismarck, Tirpitz

Id: Tl9jt5BjFAI

Length: 42min 5sec (2525 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 23 2022