Dan Snow's History Hit - Destroying a Nazi Stronghold: The St Nazaire Raid

Episode Date: March 27, 2022

On 28 March 1942, in the darkest months of World War Two, Churchill approved what seemed to many like a suicide mission. Under orders to attack the St Nazaire U-boat base on the Atlantic seaboard, British commandos undertook “the greatest raid of all”, turning an old destroyer into a live bomb and using it to ram the gates of a Nazi stronghold. Five Victoria Crosses were awarded - more than in any similar operation.Giles Whittell, author and journalist, has unearthed the untold human stories of Operation Chariot. Giles joins Dan on the podcast to discuss how the most daring British commando raid of World War Two was fundamentally misconceived - its impact and legacy secured only by astonishing bravery.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. 80 years ago, on the 26th of March 1942, a small flotilla of boats and ships left Falmouth in Cornwall. Just past midnight on the 28th of March, that convoy crossed over the shoals at the mouth of the Loire Estuary on the Atlantic coast of France. They were about to launch one of the most daring, one of the most impossible raids of the Second World War. And perhaps because it was so impossible they achieved a stunning success. The target of the British commandos and Royal Naval personnel was the huge dry dock in Saint-Nazaire, the kind of port facilities required for one of the world's biggest battleships, the Tirpitz, if it went on a foray into the Atlantic and needed repairs after meeting Royal Navy ships. Hitler was so furious about this

raid that he actually sacked the chief of staff of the army of occupation in the West and it refocused his attention on strengthening that Atlantic wall. This is Operation Chariot and the San Jose raid. I'm interviewing Giles Whitwell, he's been at the Times, he's written Bridge of Spies and Spitfire Women of World War II and all sorts of things. And so this is the latest of one of his brilliant books. It is a truly extraordinary tale. If you wish to listen to other podcasts about remarkable episodes from World War II, or you want to watch hundreds of documentaries, we've got so many documentaries about World War II available on our Netflix of history, our History Hit TV,

the world's best history channel. You just follow the link in the description of this podcast and you get taken there. You get two weeks for free if you sign up today. Make sure you join the Revolution, folk. Tens of thousands of people are now watching History Hit TV every single day. Go over there and check it out. In the meantime, though, here's Charles Whitwell talking about Operation Chariot. Charles, thanks so much for coming on the pod. Thank you for having me. The San Jose U-Boat Race.

I mean, you wouldn't want to be given orders to go on this raid, would you? I mean, did it come from Churchill? Well, it came with his approval, but it really came from Mountbatten and from his senior planner, John Hughes Hallett, who were under intense pressure at that time in the war to come up with a range of options, to use the current Pentagon jargon, to show that Britain was still in the fight. And Mountbatten, you will recall, had been very much in the fight himself and very nearly died with the sinking of his own

destroyer the previous year, and was of one mind with Churchill of the need to sacrifice to show both the US and FDR, but more particularly Stalin, that Britain was very much still fighting and not simply waiting for the Eastern Front to tip the balance or for the US to come into the war. So Saint-Nazaire was one of a range of raid options that Hughes Hallett came up with and presented to Mountbatten. Mountbatten was extremely gung-ho in his new role then as head of combined operations. Man, I mean, as a Seven Years' War fan, the ancient tradition of the Brits hurling money in young men at the French coast to prove that they're still in the game. Anyway, this is a great example from the second one. What is Saint-Exupéry? Tell me about it. It's quite difficult to get to, isn't it? Give me a sense of the geography and what's there. Okay, so it's about a third of the way down the coast of the Bay of Biscay, if you're

measuring from Aschen and the sort of tip of Brittany. It is at the estuary of the Loire River. It is at the estuary of the Loire River. From the moment of the fall of France until the raid in March 1942, Hitler, the Nazis, the Tod Organisation had been hardening it with unbelievable amounts of reinforced concrete to create these U-boat pens. It was one of two really significant U-boat bases on the Atlantic seaboard and with unbelievable numbers of artillery battalions, so that it was like a mangle or the jaws of death, whatever you want to call it. And they regarded it quite sensibly, the Germans, as impossible to attack. So this was

Mountbatten's favourite phrase, it will be possible because it is, I'm paraphrasing here, because it is considered impossible, because it really is impossible. And so you had the big guns at the outer edges of the estuary and the closer in you got and the closer the shores of the river got to you, the smaller the artillery, but more accurate and more deadly. And that's what they were faced with. So what's the plan here? What's the key act that they think they've worked out they can get in there? So first of all, the target was to take out the biggest dry dock in the world. Roosevelt would have preferred them to go straight for the U-boat pens, which were causing absolute havoc at that time in the war on American shipping way over the

other side of the Atlantic. But the plan was to go for a more realistic target, namely this giant dry dock, which was reckoned accurately to be the only one on the Western seaboard big enough for the Tirpitz, which was Hitler's flagship, the surviving sister ship to the Bismarck, a giant battleship which at that time was holed up in the Baltic. And Churchill was terrified and obsessed with the idea that it would head out into the Atlantic and wreak even more havoc on transatlantic convoys than the U-boats were already doing. So the idea was to deny the Atlantic to the Tirpitz by wrecking the only dry dock where it could have been repaired. Because one of the things that had proved to be a fact about big capital ships by that point in the war was that they needed,

always needed, extensive repairs after any sustained military operations, even if they were lucky enough not to be sunk. So that was the target, the Normandy dry dock. And they reckoned that they could destroy it. It's almost like a movie, and I feel that I'm giving spoilers to say what the plan was, but I'll say what the plan was, and many people will know this anyway. That's right.

Lots of people will know the story, but they just want to hear it from an expert. So it was to take a ancient destroyer and turn it into a floating bomb and sail it as fast as possible directly at the downstream gate or cassoon of the dry dock and impale it on the gate and in due course have it blow up. on the gate and in due course have it blow up. And the reason it's called the greatest raid of all is that that central aim worked. And in my analysis, and you're very kind to call me an expert, I'm a Johnny-come-lately to this story, it's been told many times very, very grippingly. The person who is undercredited is Nigel Tibbetts, who turned it into a bomb. There were five Victoria Crosses awarded. He did not win one of them.

He died on the way out. He'd almost reached freedom, but was gunned down on his way out of the estuary. But the work that he did to turn it into a bomb that actually blew up as required was quite remarkable. And so one of the things I did in as far as was possible with the strictures of lockdown was to look into his background and the story of his personal life, apart from anything leading up to the raid.

And he was an extraordinary, meticulous young man, only 28 at the time, but he managed to inspire amazing confidence in his superiors when he came up with a plan that consisted of using between three and five tons of amytol, the explosives that you find in normal depth charges, packing them into the front of the destroyer, right up against the forward bulkhead, encasing it all in concrete, and then affixing to it multiple redundancy fuses, so that if one lot didn't work, the next lot would. And what caused unbelievable tension and dismay on the morning of the raid was that the damn thing wouldn't go off.

And it didn't go off. And it didn't go off. And at this time, dozens of the commandos had been killed. The survivors were in terrible shape, looking at each other as they were hauled in one by one from the sea and taken off to captivity. And they couldn't obviously articulate their worry, but they communicated it to each other. When's the damn thing going to go off? their worry, but they communicated it to each other. When's the damn thing going to go off? And then about five hours late, it did. How many commandos were on this raid? There were just north of 600 altogether, of whom about half were naval personnel commanding the motor launches and HMS Campbelltown, the destroyer. And the remainder were commandos divided up between the deck of the Campbelltown and the launches and all the commandos were volunteers. I was going to say, were you allowed

to volunteer for this and were they told it was pretty suicidal? All the naval personnel had no choice in the matter. They were just given a final warm bath, which apparently is naval tradition. They were just given a final warm bath, which apparently is naval tradition. The commandos were all volunteers in that they had volunteered for the independent companies, which became the commandos, and they were given the option of withdrawing without any blemish to their record. And famously, none did. And you're right that from a perspective of 2022, it's very hard to imagine volunteering for this kind of mission because it was clear to them that it was nigh on a suicide mission. And yet I think it's hard to understate how anxious for a scrap, to use their phrase, they were by the March of 1942.

Most of them had been through two years of immensely boring slash frustrating training. Arduous, but boring. And the raids that they'd been sent on had been inconclusive or failures or embarrassing. So those whom Charles Newman, their commander, picked out and offered the chance to go were by and large desperate to take it. picked out and offered the chance to go were, by and large, desperate to take it. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're hearing all about the raid on San Jose 80 years ago. More coming up.

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Well, she doesn't make it any further. I mean, night falls, it's flat calm. They are, in a sense, very lucky with the weather in that it's overcast. They are extremely unlucky with the air raid, which was sent in to distract the attention of the air defences with which Saint-Nazaire was bristling, because they were under orders, and these were direct orders from Churchill, not to drop their bombs unless they could see their targets. And because of the cloud cover, of course, they couldn't see their targets. And so almost

no bombs were dropped. And quite quickly, the German commanders in charge of the defence became suspicious, but not quickly enough to prevent the flotilla with the Campbelltown near the front getting past all the heavy guns. And a crucial part of this, and this may be in answer to your earlier question, is that it had been decided, and John Hughes Hallett claimed credit for this later on, that there would be a way past the defences if you avoided the dredged channel into the port and kind of surfed on a spring tide over the shallows. And that's what they did. They reckoned there would be 12 to 14 feet of water at high tide at sort of one in the morning on the 28th. There was no doubt that the motor launches

would get over there was considerable doubt whether the destroyer would so they stripped the campbell town formerly the uss buchanan of everything on it except a few minimal guns the big bomb and fortunately all the sherry and cigarettes and other booze in the wardroom. And it had to slow down to get over the shallows to about 12 knots. It nearly ran aground twice and slowed right down, but it screwed sort of ground through the mud at the bottom of the estuary and then it picked up speed again. sort of ground through the mud at the bottom of the estuary and then it picked up speed again and then once it was committed Sambiti the captain ordered full speed ahead which was

about 18 knots he very nearly chose the wrong target it was very difficult to be absolutely certain that he was headed for the south kasun of the dry dock because there were a couple of landmarks that he had to identify correctly at first sight. But he did a shimmy to starboard at the last minute, straightened up and at full speed hit the lock gate right in the middle. And the Campbelltown sort of rode up over it and stuck there at 1.34 British time.

And then there was a sort of, well, it was confusion and no one quite knew what was going on either side, really knew what was going on. Well, by then it was pandemonium. There had been tremendous confusion on the German side and credit to the attackers, they kept a bluff going longer than they ever expected to. And part of the bluff was that the Campbelltown would be disguised so that in silhouette, it would look roughly like a German torpedo boat. They'd sliced the top of the funnels, for example. They cut the number down from 42. When I say sliced sliced it sort of beveled it to make it look more like the German equivalent and they were flying a German flag and this commander Ryder the naval force commander liked to remind people long after the war was a legitimate ruse de guerre

so long as you weren't shooting so they used the swastika flying out from the back of the Campbelltown right up until the point until the defending forces realised that they were not friendly and then lowered it, put up a bedraggled white ensign and started firing back. So at the point that the Campbelltown hit the lock gate, it was being deluged with incoming fire from both sides of the river. It was an extremely dangerous place to be. Nonetheless, there were commandos packed onto the deck with minimal defences and bamboo ladders waiting to clamber over. And one of the incoming shells just blew a huge hole in the foredeck and everybody had to clamber around it. There's a story of one particular commander who had a leg blown off

almost immediately and just sat there. I think cheerfully would be slightly overstating it, but certainly was in command of his faculties, sort of urging everyone else on as they dodged past him to pile off the bow of the Campbelltown. He amazingly survived, but it was a very, very dangerous place to be. And then they all ran around us causing trouble, but then most of them were rounded up, weren't they? Yes. It all went terribly wrong, but for the first half hour, the commandos who came off the Campbelltown did some incredible things. Their movements were planned to within the nearest few feet by Charles Newman, who was a great planner.

And I think one of the interesting details about this was that Newman, in command of the commandos, was a great planner. Robert Ryder, in command of the naval contingent, wasn't. I mean, it's an old cliche that planning is the first casualty of any battle, but actually, for the first half hour, it went unbelievably well. So, even though there were casualties right at the beginning, those who were deputed, for example, to take out the gun positions on the starboard side did so. Buster Woodywiss, one of the Lance Sergeants, took out three gun positions, practically single-handed. On the port side, demolition groups took out the pumping station, which alone practically disabled the whole dry dock. Another unit disabled all the winding gear that was supposed to pull the

gate in and out. Another unit ran all the way down to the fire under the dock and did the same thing with the other winding gear so that the northern gate couldn't go in and out. This was big, heavy metal stuff that they were destroying. They'd practiced night after night on docks all over Great Britain, in Cardiff, for example, and Southampton. And all the training bore fruit. For the first half hour hour everything went according to plan Charles Newman couldn't have been happier and then it came time to withdraw and he and his officers waited for all the commandos who they expected to join them at a sort of mustering point to do so and it was then that they found out that only two of the 12 motor launches who were bringing supporting forces

had actually managed to land them. So they proceeded to the disembarkation point and saw that all the launches that were supposed to pick them up were burning or gone. And that is the part of the operation that is hard to fathom now. I mean, talking about it, I realise that there was one really good reason for choosing motor launches,

which is that you knew that they were going to get over these sandbars. But on every other ground, it was a bizarre and perplexing decision because they were just kindling. They were petrol driven. They travelled along in clouds of their own explosive petrol fumes, and they duly blew up as soon as they were hit. And the casualties were horrific, and there was nothing as a result to take the commandos home. Amazingly, some of them managed to walk home. Many of them were captured, but some of them managed to walk home via Spain, didn't they? Five, yes. It's hard to believe now, isn't it, that that was their sort of default contingency

plan. Newman reminded them of it quite cheerfully. Well, chaps, look as if we're going to have to walk home. So when they realised that the boats had either escaped or burnt, about 70 of them made this incredible dash for freedom over what has become known as the Bridge of Memories. It's still there, a lifting bridge at the southern end, the downstream end of the big U-boat pen. You can see the bridge, you can see the U-boat pen itself. It's been too big for local Nazarian authorities to destroy. Anyway, into the teeth of machine gun fire, they ran across. Most of them survived, unbelievably. They then hid in the new town, what was then called the new town.

And most of them were in due course picked up and sent off to prisoner of war camps. But as you say, some of them, a grand total of five, got away. And one of them in particular, I found his story fascinating because he wrote about it. Unfortunately, all the survivors are dead now. But George Wheeler was one of those who walked, or the combination of walking and hitchhiking and finally picking up some help from the British consulate in Barcelona for a relatively civilised car ride from there to Madrid to freedom. And Wheeler was an interesting character because he was a graduate, not of Oxford or Cambridge, but of Exeter. And he could have entered the army as an officer, but he chose to do so as an enlisted man and if you'll forgive the shorthand he had a bit of a chip on his shoulder, a slight resentment I think towards some of the high-born officers in the group and he was absolutely determined to get

home one way or another and it's really interesting to see him over the course of that night begin to take control of his own fate. And he was asking his superior officer, who was actually younger than him, quite early, soon after they got over the bridge, don't you think that we should stay in small groups to improve our chances of getting away? His commanding officer, who at that point was Bill Tiger Watson, said, you can, I can't, I've got to stay with the bigger group, I've got those responsibilities. And so Wheeler went off with one other and crept away into the night, headed north according to the plans that they'd been given, into the marshlands north of the Loire, and very, very carefully and slowly,

north of the Loire and very, very carefully and slowly, walking at night, laying up during the day, got to Nantes and beyond, and with the help of resistance and sympathetic French farming families, made it all the way to the Spanish border and beyond. I mean, it's an extraordinary story. The Campbelltown does explode. Finally, the delayed charges blow up. There's a great cinematic moment, which I'm never sure is true, where the German commandant goes, you see what a waste of time that was? And then it blew up straight away.

But who knows? Yeah, I mean, we weren't there. We weren't there. But there is an amazing photograph of Captain Sam Beattie being questioned by his captors. He's wrapped only in a blanket just before that alleged moment. And he gave a fairly detailed blow-by-blow account of the conversation. And I don't think he was one to exaggerate.

Anyway. So that might be true. So there might have been epic timing. Yes. What's the point of this? There was an equivalent exchange, I think, on the dockside. There's one boat you won't be using again, at which point it blows up. I forget the exact wording of the exchange as related by Beatty.

I could look it up. But it was, why on earth would you have bothered? And Beatty was basically non-responsive. He didn't have to respond in the end. The explosive did the talking for him. He didn't have to respond in the end. The explosive did the talking for him. So that was very annoying for Adolf Hitler. Did this raid work? I mean, it was terrible losses when over 300 men didn't return. But did it achieve its purpose? Did it sort of keep Britain in the war? And did it actually hurt the German surface fleet ability to dry dock, etc? Well, I think the short answer is yes. It did deny the Tirpitz a dry dock. It has become clear after the event that the Tirpitz was never going there anyway. Hitler had already decided that he couldn't risk it going out into the Atlantic and anyway, it would serve a more valuable purpose being kept in the North Sea

and the Baltic and keeping a very large number of British ships monitoring it there. But the fact remains that that option was closed off to him. Hitler was furious, as you say. It does appear that he diverted at least a few divisions back to the Atlantic seaboard that he might otherwise have used further east. But I think with this distance, what is probably true is that the real sense in which it succeeded was the sense that Churchill wanted it to. Namely, it showed Roosevelt that Britain was a worthy military partner, not simply a supplicant waiting for the might of the new world to come to the rescue of the old. And it gave Churchill a concrete military action that was unequivocally a success to point to when making the argument that Britain wasn't just relying on Soviet blood to soak up the might of the Nazi war machine. And so I have devoted a whole chapter of the book to this

episode a few months after the raid when Churchill flies in a converted liberator to Moscow to make this case to Stalin. And he draws a picture of a crocodile and lays it in front of Stalin in their meeting room in Moscow. And this is where he offers the plan to attack the soft underbelly of Europe. But he also makes the point that British forces had already been attacking the snout of the crocodile. And I don't think in that conversation he specifically equates the snout with San Jose, but he could not plausibly have made the argument that he was doing that, I think, without San Jose. And also, I guess, quite usefully, it made Hitler focus on the ports on the Atlantic seaboard, and D-Day famously happened over a beach. So

Hitler pouring more and more resources into defending these ports that the Allies would just sidestep. Yes, there were lessons learned from Saint-Nazaire for D-Day. There were lessons learned that arguably encouraged Mountbatten in the folly of Dieppe as well, which came much sooner and really could only have been authorised by a commander like Mountbatten who thought he was somehow invincible, that to undertake the impossible was necessarily smart tactics. I mean, Brian Villaloring, the Canadian historian, has shown after the event that not only was it wrongheaded, but he probably wangled authorization for Dieppe without going through the proper channels, either with the other military commanders or with Churchill.

And I think it's fair to conclude that he was emboldened in that by Saint-Nazaire. Thank you very much indeed for coming on the podcast. Talk about it. What's the book called? The Greatest Raid. The Greatest Raid. Go and get it, bud. Thank you very much.

Thanks for having me. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks. You've reached the end of another episode. Hope you're still awake.

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