Raiders (24 page)

For two hours, no enemy reconnaissance aircraft was spotted as the flotilla continued its course towards the French coast.
But shortly before midday, the raiding force came across two French fishing vessels.
Enemy radio operators were known to operate from these boats and Ryder was under orders to sink any that he encountered.
Atherstone
and
Tynedale
went alongside them and, having taken off the crews, sank both vessels.
The captains of both boats gave their word that there were no wireless sets on board either of the craft.
By that time, Ryder was reassured that the U-boat they had engaged had been unable to dispatch a sighting report to her Coastal Command.
(After the war, it was discovered that U-593 had surfaced in mid-afternoon and the captain made a report that contained one highly significant mistake.
He said the British flotilla was heading west, away from
their intended target.
They were in fact heading southeast.
The German coastal commanders assumed the ships were en route to Gibraltar and decided not to send out the five destroyers that patrolled that area.
It was a very poor error of judgement by the U-boat crew, and it would not be long before they were made to understand its magnitude.)

Darkness had fallen when one of the motor launches, ML 341, reported that she had lost the use of one of her engines and was unable to keep up with the flotilla’s fifteen-knot pace.
Coming at such a critical time, just a few hours before Z-hour, this was a blow on a number of counts.
The Commandos on board were an assault group tasked with capturing and holding the Old Mole, the re-embarkation for the raiding force.
One of the two back-up launches, ML 446, that had been brought for just such an eventuality, took the troops and a medical team on board, but they were two hours behind the others by the time the handover was completed.
Pushing twenty knots, ML 446 succeeded in rejoining the flotilla, but she was forced to line up at the rear of the formation.
There was now no chance of the assault party spearheading the attack on the Old Mole and that was a major cause for concern, as the demolition groups that would now go in before them had little more than a few pistols between them.

It was shortly after 2000, five and a half hours from Z-hour, when the force reached ‘point E’ off the French coast and came to a stop.
Ryder and Newman transferred from
Atherstone
to MGB 314, which hauled out to the front of the force as the rest of the ships fell into battle formation.
Two torpedo boats,
ML 160 and ML 270, were positioned behind them at the head of two columns of motor launches, twelve of them in total, to the port and starboard of HMS
Campbeltown
.
Two further torpedo boats, ML 446 and ML 298, brought up the rear.
Ryder was astounded that the flotilla had steamed so close to the heavily patrolled French coast without being detected.
So far, the good fortune had been all British.

Navigation was now the key challenge.
The submarine HMS
Sturgeon
, which had sailed from Plymouth twenty-four hours before the flotilla, was to act as a navigational mark for the raiders.
From that position, the force would be able to follow the precise course charted for them through the treacherous shallows of the Loire estuary.
The rendezvous point was known as Position Z and the responsibility of leading them there fell to Lt Bill Green in the lead gun boat.
In the pitch-black night and with no landmarks to assist him, it was some feat that Green not only brought them to the very spot but he did so almost to the second.
It was exactly 2200 when
Sturgeon
’s beacon flashed out of the darkness.
Passing within hailing distance of the sub, the crews exchanged greetings before it slipped beneath the surface, leaving no more than a ripple.
At the same time, the destroyers
Atherstone
and
Tynedale
broke off from the force and steamed away from the coast to await the return of any ships that survived the most ambitious, large-scale amphibious raid ever undertaken by British forces.

By coincidence, six hours earlier, Admiral Karl Donitz, supreme commander of Germany’s U-boat fleet, had made an inspection
of St Nazaire and asked Kapitänleutnant Herbert Sohler, commander 7th Submarine Flotilla, what the chances were of the British attacking the port from the sea.
He was reassured that an amphibious assault was out of the question.
Both men were preparing for another good night’s sleep when 611 British souls steamed through Position Z and into the mouth of the Loire.
In three-and-a-half hours’ time, the German commanders would discover whether Sohler’s conviction held true.

When the White Ensigns on the ships were hoisted, the raiders were still six minutes short of their target.
The 360 seconds had felt like six days to those who survived the gunfire of one of the most heavily defended military bases in the world.
‘It is difficult to describe the full fury of the attack that was let loose on each side,’ Ryder wrote after the war.
‘Owing to the air attack, the enemy had every gun, large and small, fully manned, and the night became one mass of red and green tracer.’

When MGB 314 – the command boat spearheading the approach – reached the east jetty, close to the entrance of the harbour, she was greeted with a burst of fire from the guard ship moored there.
Passing no further than 200 yards away, the British gun boat responded with a heavy fusillade from her pair of two-pounders and heavy-machine guns, knocking out one of the German gun positions.
The
Campbeltown
and the other ships followed 314’s example and, in the confusion, German guns also pounded the hapless ship, which was unable to depress its AA guns low enough to attack the flotilla.

The
Campbeltown
, the largest of the vessels, began to attract fire like iron filings to a magnet.
Scores of shells of all sizes punched holes in her hull and waves of machine gunfire swept over her decks.
There was not a part of the old destroyer that didn’t feel the full force of German gunnery skills.
The Commandos, lying on the decks behind the reinforced armour plates, could do nothing but pray that the flying shrapnel and ricocheting bullets failed to come their way.
Casualties were sustained from the opening seconds of the battle and they mounted rapidly.
The bridge of the
Campbeltown
drew such a weight of fire that Commander Beattie ordered his men to the wheelhouse below, where thin armour plates at least offered some protection from the efforts of the gunners of the smaller armaments.
The range of vision from there, however, was reduced to a small slit, no more than a foot wide, and it was through that gap that Beattie had to direct the destroyer onto a relatively small target that he hadn’t yet managed to identify.

With a shower of bullets and shells crashing into the hull, the thickly bearded Commander squinted through the slit, desperately trying to pick out the outer lock.
Campbeltown
was close to its full speed of twenty knots when a giant searchlight fixed the wheelhouse and left Beattie blinded by its powerful beam.
Almost instantaneously, his helmsman slumped to the floor, mortally wounded.
The telegraphist immediately leapt forward to take the wheel, but he too was cut down on the spot as fire raked the wheelhouse.
Tibbits, the demolitions expert, calmly stepped into the breach to steer the ship.
There were just seconds now before impact.

Beattie knew that if he failed to ram the outer lock gate head-on, Operation CHARIOT would be remembered as a very costly catastrophe, a waste of a great many talented, brave young men.
He kept his eyes on the gun boat in front, waiting for it to bank to starboard and allow him an open run at the dock.
At that moment, a huge shell from one of the larger gun emplacements crashed into the twelve-pounder gun forward of the bridge, instantly killing the gun crew and many of the Commandos lying around it, and leaving many others stunned or writhing in agony.
The massive explosion left Beattie dazed and dazzled, but through the smoke he recognised the landmarks of the harbour from the planners’ scale model back in Falmouth.
Passing the Old Mole on his port side, he realised he was off course and ordered a sharp wheel to the starboard.
As Tibbits swung the destroyer back on course, Beattie could now see the lock gate of the giant dock dead ahead of the point of his bow.

Battering her way through a maelstrom of tracer and incendiaries, punctured by a hundred shell holes, the dead and wounded lying on her decks, but her guns still blazing, the
Campbeltown
surged towards the entrance at full steam.
The motor gun boat swung away to starboard.
‘Stand by to ram,’ ordered Beattie calmly.
Those still alive inside the wheelhouse clung for dear life to whatever support they could find and braced themselves for the impact.
The dark outline of the dock’s structure appeared to rise out of the water before the impact.
A split second later, over 1,000 tons of warship travelling at 20 knots smashed into the thick metal wall of the gate.
The violence of
the collision shook the ship from bow to stern, sparks and debris flew in all directions and the harsh sound of metallic grinding filled the air.
What was left of the bow of the old destroyer hung over the lock gate, pointing skywards at an angle.
The impact was so powerful that the front of the ship was crushed back by twelve metres.
Through a barrage of artillery fire, with his men falling dead around him, Beattie had guided her straight into the centre of the target.
The four and a half tons of explosive below deck were sitting right on top of the gate.
He could not have been more precise in his positioning of the charge had he placed it there with a crane.
It was 0134 hours.
Beattie, a stickler for precise timing, looked at his watch and was heard to mutter: ‘Hmm, four minutes late.’

Leaving their dead and wounded comrades behind for the medics and the crew to attend to, the Commandos of Group Three leapt over the sides of the wrecked destroyer and, splitting into small parties, sprinted for their assigned targets.
Behind them in the harbour bloody carnage was being played out as the two columns of motor launches, carrying Commando Groups One and Two, were shredded by withering enemy fire.
Proving to be every bit of a problem as they had been in the rehearsal exercise, the searchlights lit up the little ships in a brilliant light that allowed the shore gunners to pick them off almost at will.
The small, lightly armed wooden craft were no match for the big-calibre shells or the sheer volume of fire from the smaller guns.
Very soon after the battle had begun, many of the launches were
ablaze and cries of agony rang out across the water, mingling with the burst of shells and the rattle of machine-gun fire in a hellish chorus.

The starboard column, carrying Group Two, was to land her Commandos at the Old Entrance to the harbour’s main basin, 100 yards from where the
Campbeltown
had come to rest.
The first motor launch, ML 192, had been hit by a shell during the approach and was burning furiously alongside the east jetty.
Her captain gave the order to abandon ship and the wounded were lifted into the Carley float life rafts.
Nine soldiers were killed or too seriously wounded to continue and four crewmen were also lost.
But Captain Michael Burn, the party’s leader, and four others managed to jump into the water and scramble ashore, swimming past the dead body of one of the section commanders as they did so.

The second and third launches in the column overshot the disembarkation point after the crew were caught in the glare of a powerful searchlight.
As they turned round to head back, ML 268, which had been fourth in the column and was carrying a large contingent of eighteen Commandos, was hit by relentless, close-range fire as she made her approach.
She burst into flames and then blew up as the auxiliary fuel tank on deck and the demolition party’s explosives caught light.
Half the crew jumped overboard in time but sixteen soldiers were killed in a huge explosion.

ML 156, the fifth of Group Two’s six launches, had already taken heavy fire when a direct hit on the bridge severely wounded its captain Lieutenant Fenton, the leader of the Commando
assault group, and a number of his men.
The ship’s second-in-command took over and pressed on towards the Old Entrance but, when heavy fire claimed him and the third officer, as well as one engine and the steering gear, there was no option but to withdraw.

Witnessing the bloody mayhem on the northern side of the Old Entrance, Lieutenant Rodier in ML 177, the final boat in the column, diverted at the last moment and went alongside the steep stone steps on the other side of the small quay where the enemy fire was lighter.
His quick thinking almost certainly saved many lives and ML 177 thus became the only one of the six ships in Group Two to succeed in putting its troops ashore.
It was, however, a hollow success, as there were no demolition parties to support.
They were on their own.
At this point, Commander Ryder’s gun boat appeared and disembarked Lieutenant Colonel Newman and his HQ party at the northern steps of the entrance.
Some of the German guns had been silenced by now and CHARIOT’s military commander was able to get ashore without the loss of any of his seven men.