Raiders (27 page)

Fed up with the resistance, Paul finally brought his main 4.1-inch guns to bear and a single shell into the flimsy craft caused death and devastation.
Paul’s call to surrender was met by a heavy burst from Durrant’s Lewis guns.
Durrant sustained wounds from the German guns to both arms, both legs, chest, head and stomach but he continued to battle his superior opponent as if they were meeting on equal terms.
A repeated call to give up drew an even longer burst from Durrant before he was finally silenced, slumping to the deck mortally wounded.

With the naval officers and senior crewmen all dead, dying or wounded, Lieutenant Swayne, the demolition group leader, finally offered their surrender.
Of the twenty-eight men on board, twenty lay dead or wounded.
The survivors were taken back to
France where they were reunited with their comrades at L’Hermitage.
The following week Kapitänleutnant Paul, a chivalrous commander of the old school, sought out Lieutenant Colonel Newman at the POW camp in Rennes, and reported the brave fight put up by the men aboard.
He singled out Durrant in particular for his gallantry, recommending the Sergeant receive the highest award for his heroic, bloody stand.

As the morning wore on, back in St Nazaire, the Commandos still fighting, in hiding or in captivity were dismayed not to have heard the
Campbeltown
go up.
It seemed that either the fuses must have failed or the Germans had discovered the huge charge and made it safe.
After so much blood had been shed, it was a bitter blow that the main objective had not been achieved.
The scuttled ship on the lock gates represented a serious inconvenience rather than a major catastrophe.

Once the fighting was over in the dockyard area, the Germans began the task of taking away the dead bodies that lay in great numbers around the quays, jetties and warehouses.
(The Germans removed their own dead first and left the British till later, so that the locals were led to believe their occupiers had scored an overwhelming victory.) Hundreds of people, mostly German servicemen, crowded down to the Normandie dock to witness the extraordinary spectacle of the British destroyer lying over the southern lock gate, its crumpled bow angled towards the sky over the empty dock and its stern sitting heavily on the river bottom on the other side.

The German naval authorities who went aboard to examine her were at a loss to understand why the British would go to such lengths and sacrifice the lives of so many frontline troops.
The lightened destroyer was never going to have the weight or force to destroy the gate, so why bother?
As an act of defiance to show that the British were not a spent force, it was an impressive performance, but in practical strategic terms, it had achieved very little.
The destroyer could be dismantled and the lock gate patched up.

The clock had just struck twenty-five minutes to eleven and Lieutenant Commander Beattie was in the office of one of the port buildings, wrapped in a blanket, wondering why the charge had failed to blow.
At the very moment his interrogator was mocking the costly stupidity of the raid, the
Campbeltown
offered a retort far more potent than any words the exhausted Beattie could have done.
An almighty explosion, as loud as anyone in the vicinity would ever hear, shattered the relative calm that had been restored to the Atlantic port.

The roar of the blast was heard across town and many miles beyond.
Around the town, buildings shook, windows shattered, and people standing hundreds of yards away were blown off their feet.
Between 350 and 400 people, mostly enemy servicemen aboard the destroyer or alongside the dock, were killed instantly.
Their number included several senior officers accompanied by their collaborating mistresses.
Body parts rained down on the dockyard.
The front of the ship ceased to exist, the lock gate was blown to pieces and collapsed, and what was left of the
Campbeltown
was swept into the dry dock by several million gallons of water from the estuary.

In the short term, the eruption caused panic and fury among the Germans and did little to speed up or improve the quality of the medical attention being received by the wounded at La Baule.
Many suffered at the hands of vindictive orderlies, enraged by the news of the explosion.
Around St Nazaire, startled troops, fearing a fresh attack and a civilian uprising, rushed through the streets, firing their guns at any figure they suspected of being unfriendly.
Homes were turned upside down and the locals manhandled as the search for the ‘Tommies’ intensified.
Two days later the town had once again settled down into some form of normal life when the delayed-action torpedoes fired by Lieutenant Wynn’s boat blew up the lock gate to the U-boat basin and sparked more pandemonium and paranoia.

On that first morning, to the hundred or so British soldiers and sailors still within the area, all facing a long spell in captivity, the deafening boom of the
Campbeltown
explosion was a sound as satisfying as it was shocking.
In one ear-splitting second, a gallant defeat had been transformed into a glorious victory.
The Normandie dry dock had been put out of action for years to come.
Tirpitz
would find no refuge or respite from Royal Navy guns in St Nazaire now.
Not one of the 169 deaths had been in vain.

Of those 169 men to give their lives, 105 of them sailors and 64 Commandos, most perished during the attempted landings in the ferocious start to the action.
Medals were showered on
the raiders, many of them posthumously, but it took many years to piece together the whole story.
Newman and Beattie, two central figures in the drama, and 200 other participants languished in German POW camps until the end of the war in Europe three years later.
Savage, Durrant, Newman, Ryder and Beattie were all awarded the Victoria Cross.
Four Distinguished Service Orders, seventeen Distinguished Service Crosses, eleven Military Crosses, fifteen Military Medals, four Conspicuous Gallantry Medals, five Distinguished Conduct Medals, twenty-four Distinguished Service Medals, four Croix de Guerre were also awarded and fifty-one men were Mentioned in Dispatches.
Tirpitz
never dared venture out into the Atlantic and spent the rest of her life trying to thwart relentless Allied attacks.
She finally met her end up a Norwegian fjord in November 1944 when she was sunk by RAF Tallboy bombs.

WHEN PLANNING FOR
the Allied invasion of Europe began in earnest at the start of 1943, teams of military strategists scoured highly detailed maps of Normandy looking for weak spots and strong-points in the terrain.
Once the beaches for the amphibious landings on D-Day had been chosen, attention focused on thwarting a German counterattack that risked driving the British, US and Canadian forces back into the sea.
Their eyes were inevitably drawn to a small pinprick of a village, deep behind enemy lines, lying midway between the coastal town of Ouistreham and the city of Caen, roughly four miles from the
centre of each.
The sleepy hamlet of Bénouville comprised no more than a few houses, a church, some smallholdings, a maternity hospital and a café.
Hardly could the locals have guessed that, back in England, some of the sharpest military minds in the world had identified their tiny community as the key to D-Day’s success.

The reason for Bénouville’s importance lay right beneath the feet of its inhabitants in the form of two small bridges running consecutively over the Caen Ship Canal and the River Orne.
The waterways are almost exactly parallel to one another, separated by 400 yards of flat farmland.
Whoever controlled the bridges on 6 June 1944 controlled the course of the battle on the left-hand – eastern flank – of the invasion.
If the Allies could somehow capture the bridges before the dawn landings began, and hold them until major reinforcements arrived, they would close off the only feasible route for a German counterattack against the British Army landings at Sword Beach.
It was from this direction that German 711th Infantry Division and the tanks of the formidable 21st Panzer Division would race to engage the British as they waded ashore and attempted to break out.
In short, whoever held the bridges held the key to D-Day.

It was decided that the most effective way of seizing the bridges was by a glider-borne
coup de main
operation, under the cover of darkness, a few hours before the main assault forces came ashore.
The task would not just represent a mighty responsibility but also a mighty challenge.
The 6th Airborne Division, commanded by Major General Richard ‘Windy’ Gale, was tasked
with securing the left or eastern flank of the Allied invasion.
Gale asked Brigadier Hugh Kindersley, the CO of the division’s glider infantry brigade, to recommend the best group of men to carry out the assignment.
Without a second thought, Kindersley put forward ‘D’ Company, 2nd (Airborne) Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, known to all as the ‘Ox and Bucks’.

It would have come as a major surprise to his first commanding officer in the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry that the gap-toothed private by the name of John Howard would one day play a leading role in the largest invasion in the history of warfare.
Howard was plagued by homesickness as a young recruit, but he persevered.
He had served for six years when, in 1938, he applied for an officer’s commission only to be turned down in spite of having all the necessary qualities and qualifications.
Snobbery may well have been a factor.
Howard was from a working-class background.
His father was a barrel-maker at Courage Brewery in London and barely brought home enough money to feed and clothe his nine children.

After joining the police, Howard rejoined his regiment when war broke out and rose rapidly through the ranks.
This time, there was to be no social prejudice to hold him back.
Within five months he was Regimental Sergeant Major and was offered a commission and joined the Ox and Bucks.
By mid-1942, he had been promoted to Major and took command of a Company that he soon turned into one of the finest in the British Army.

After impressing the staff officers during a three-day exercise to find the best unit for the D-Day assignment, Howard’s D Company (D Coy) was chosen to spearhead the British assault.
The planners considered that two platoons were needed to seize each bridge but, in case of heavy casualties or the loss of a glider, D Coy’s four platoons were reinforced with two extra ones.
Howard chose two from B Company, commanded by Lieutenants Dennis Fox and ‘Sandy’ Smith.
Most of the 170 men that made up the
coup de main
party were from London or its suburbs.
Howard was invited to play a significant role in planning the specifics of the assault.
The two landing zones he chose for the six troop-carrying Horsa gliders were situated in fields between the Caen Canal and the River Orne, so that if the Germans blew one of the bridges, the force would not be stranded on the far bank.

The final three-week training course, which began in late April at Ilfracombe in Devon, was extremely tough even by Howard’s exacting standards.
Howard was a great sports enthusiast and he set out to create a culture of fierce competition among his men.
His training methods were imaginative and resourceful.
He switched between day and night exercises in order to simulate the reality his men would experience on the battlefield.
He took the company to bombed-out areas of Southampton to accustom them to a street-fighting environment in a war zone.
Only Howard knew why the men were being pushed to the very limits of their endurance, but slowly they began to suspect that they had been assigned some form of special mission.
Others might
have been pushed to the brink of mutiny by Howard’s punishing regime, but his men not only respected him, they genuinely liked him.
For a start, he would never ask them to perform an assignment he wouldn’t carry out himself.
He was strict but down-to-earth, ‘one of the boys’ at heart who had risen through the ranks and never forgot his humble background.
Far from being aloof and removed, Howard would often sit down with the other ranks and polish his boots with them.

When the training was over, the entire battalion was told to march the 130 miles back to their camp at Bulford on Salisbury Plain, carrying eighty pounds of weapons and equipment.
D Coy completed it in just four days, two of them in torrential rain and two under a scorching sun.
It was this Herculean effort that convinced the higher authorities once and for all that Howard’s men were the right ones to carry out one of the most momentous tasks in the history of the British armed forces.
Under Howard’s training regime, D Coy of the Ox and Bucks, a harmless-sounding unit, had become elite Special Forces in everything but name.
Howard was nothing if not meticulously thorough.
He thought deeply about every scenario that might unfold on the night and trained all his men in each of the tasks they were assigned so that they were interchangeable.

At the end of May, the extended group of D Coy was split up from the rest of the battalion and driven from Bulford to a camp in the village of Tarrant Rushton in north Dorset, five miles from the picturesque market town of Blandford Forum.
As the men climbed down from the trucks and saw the canvas
community, the barbed-wire fencing and the guards patrolling the perimeter, they realised that this was no ordinary transit camp.
When they were informed that they were not to leave the camp under any circumstances, speculation was rife as to the nature of the special mission they had been assigned.
Training was light so as to minimise the risk of injuries.
The weather was hot for the first few days and the men spent much of the time sunbathing or playing football and other sports.
In the evening, they played cards, gambled, watched films in the tented cinema or went to the NAAFI to supplement their meals.
The food, by all accounts, was dreadful, even by the low standards of army catering.

On the morning of 27 May, Howard summoned six platoon commanders to his Nissen hut, the only solid structure in camp, which served as the briefing room.
Maps, aerial photographs and Top Secret files lay in neat piles and a twelve-by-twelve-foot scale model of Bénouville, exact in its detail down to the last bush and ditch, sat on a table in the centre of the room.
It was now that Howard revealed D Coy’s mission and objective.
Slowly and methodically, Howard talked his junior officers through every phase of what had been code-named Operation DEADSTICK.
The room soon became thick with cigarette smoke as the men, poring over the model and the RAF’s recce photographs, ran through every step and possible eventuality.
It was almost midnight when the meeting broke up.

Straight after breakfast the following day, the group filed back in and another entire day was spent going over the procedure.
That evening, Howard addressed the entire extended company and finally put an end to the mounting speculation.
He told them everything except the name of the place where they were going.
Over the following week, platoon by platoon, the men were summoned to the hut and talked through the operation, until every last detail was drummed into them.
‘They stood round the model, at first struck dumb by its complexity, fascinated and impressed by its detail, and before long they all seemed to know every inch of the area on which they would be working,’ Howard wrote in the private papers that were published almost sixty years after the event.

The following day, the twelve pilots of the six Horsa gliders were brought over and introduced to D Coy.
‘A damn good crowd,’ Howard called them and, helped by some inter-service banter, they quickly struck a close bond with the men who would carry them into battle.
Only one jarring note was struck: the pilots were horrified by the combined weight of men and equipment that their unpowered, plywood aircraft were expected to carry.
There would be thirty fully laden men in each Horsa, plus extra equipment and ammunition, which made them about three-quarters of a ton overweight.
There was no choice but to jettison valuable provisions and equipment.
For Howard, the hardest part of all was telling two men from each glider that they’d have to stay behind.

The invasion of Normandy was scheduled to take place on Monday 5 June.
Each day in the week leading up to it, fresh aerial reconnaissance photographs and intelligence were fed into
the planning of the operation.
On 29 May, Howard was alarmed to learn that poles designed to stop aircraft landing were being constructed in the very fields that he had designated as their landing zones.
Known as ‘Rommel’s asparagus’, after the German General who had ordered their construction along the Normandy coast, the poles were laid out at intervals and would tear off the wings of all but the smallest aircraft.
Howard was told that the white dots in the photographs were just the holes that had been dug, not the poles themselves.
But he was only partly reassured.
He harboured two fears that would nag him until the moment the gliders were scheduled to land.
Firstly, with the holes now dug, it was obvious that the poles could be installed at any time.
Secondly, did their appearance suggest that the Germans had got wind of the operational plans and were busy reinforcing their defences in anticipation of their arrival?

Four days before they were scheduled to be flown in, the men were reminded of the dangers that awaited them in France when they were each issued with a small survival kit to help them escape through enemy territory.
They were given a small amount of French francs and a number of items to sew into their battledress, including silk maps of France, a file, a hacksaw blade, fishing hooks, a trouser button with a compass embedded in it and Benzedrine tablets or ‘Bennies’, a stimulant to help the exhausted stay alert, which were especially popular with bomber pilots.

Major General ‘Windy’ Gale, commander of the 6th Airborne Division, came down to Tarrant Rushton to address the troops, delivering the memorable lines: ‘The German today is like the
June bride.
He knows he is going to get it, but he doesn’t know how big it is going to be.’
By Friday night, with forty-eight hours to go, the weather turned for the worst as the hot spell gave way to strong winds and a heavy grey sky.
On Sunday morning, a dispatch rider roared up to the camp on his motorcycle and handed Howard a brown envelope.
Inside, there was just one word: ‘Cromwell’ – the code-name confirming that D-Day was on the following morning.

Howard’s first course of action was to get the entire company to sit down and write a letter to their loved ones.
Most of the men found this task far harder than anything they were asked to do out in the field.
Writing the letter put the challenge that lay ahead into sharp focus.
Each man asked himself the same question:
Is this the last contact I will have with home?
Even Howard admitted, years later, that he could barely write to his wife Joy for all the tears welling up.
Most of the older soldiers had children and it was especially hard for the eight men in the company whose wives were pregnant.

The weather deteriorated as the day went on and by late afternoon gales were lashing the Channel.
Howard was not surprised to be informed that the invasion had been postponed – but he was worried.
The longer they waited, the more time the Germans had to strengthen their defences at the landing sites.
As wind and rain lashed against the canvas, making sleep almost impossible, Howard prayed all night for a rapid improvement in the weather.