C OLIN GUBBINS’S WEST African triumph led to a subtle change in the way he was treated by his enemies in the War Office. For more than a year, senior generals had spoken to him as if he were ‘a somewhat disreputable child’, one whose goals were ‘not deemed worthy of serious attention’. Some had even dismissed his team as ‘harmless, back-room lunatics’ 1 and argued that the entire Baker Street organization should be dismantled. Only now did they awake to the fact that Gubbins had been steadily establishing a network of agents and saboteurs that stretched from tropical Africa to the Arctic Circle.
Operation Postmaster was one success. Another, less spectacular, was the so-called Shetland Bus. Gubbins had succeeded in establishing a regular link between the Shetland Islands and Norway, using fishing skiffs to smuggle agents and explosives into Nazi-occupied territory. By the spring of 1942, almost a hundred saboteurs and 150 tons of explosives had been infiltrated into the country. An array of bold sabotage operations was now being planned.
But there was one Norwegian target that Gubbins’s men were unable to attack, even though it lay at anchor in a coastal fjord. The Tirpitz was the latest addition to Hitler’s fleet and she also happened to be the most powerful warship in the world. A veritable leviathan of 52,600 tons, she was bristling with torpedoes and anti-aircraft guns. If ever she were to be deployed in the North Atlantic, she would be able to wreak havoc on convoys already suffering massive losses from German U-boats.
‘No other target is comparable to it,’ wrote Churchill in a memo circulated to his chiefs of staff on 25 January. ‘The whole strategy of the war turns at this period on this ship.’ As far as he was concerned, ‘the destruction or even crippling of the ship’ was a matter ‘of the highest urgency and importance’. 2 To this end, he called for active cooperation between Bomber Command, the Fleet Air Arm and the Royal Navy’s destroyers, but he was also prepared to consider any scheme that might prevent the Tirpitz from being deployed in the North Atlantic. And that included sabotage.
The Tirpitz herself could not be sabotaged, not even by Gubbins’s Norwegian agents, for she was heavily defended, surrounded by support vessels and too large to be easily sunk with limpet mines. But her greatest strength – her size – was also her most significant weakness for it left her vulnerable and exposed. Every captain knows that a battleship is only as good as the docks in which she is serviced, and the only Atlantic dock large enough to service the Tirpitz was the Normandie Dock at St Nazaire. Admiralty officials had long believed that Hitler would not dare to deploy his greatest battleship in the Atlantic if the Normandie Dock were to become unavailable, for she would have to return to Germany for repairs, and that meant exposing her to unacceptable risk as she made her way up the English Channel. Sabotaging the Normandie Dock now jumped to the top of the agenda and Colin Gubbins was tasked with planning his most daring adventure to date: an amphibious assault on the biggest dry dock in the world.
Targeting this immense dock was one thing, destroying it quite another. The statistics alone suggested it would be an operation of staggering complexity, for it was more than 1,200 feet in length and built of huge blocks of reinforced concrete. An even greater challenge was presented by the giant steel caisson gates situated at each end. Any successful sabotage operation would have to break open these caissons, but they were widely held to be indestructible. Constructed as sectional boxes and locked into deep underground sockets, the gates stood higher than a house and were built of reinforced steel that was fully thirty-five feet thick.
Reconnaissance photos revealed further bad news. St Nazaire was of such importance to the Nazis that it was heavily defended, with gun emplacements, anti-aircraft guns and heavy mortars. Many of these had been installed to protect the dredged channel that led directly to the dock gates. This channel passed within a few metres of the shoreline, exposing any attacker arriving by sea to unacceptable risk.
Gubbins studied all the available diagrams and photos of the Normandie Dock and concluded that it would require a minimum of thirty-eight men and 900 pounds of specially designed explosive to bring about ‘complete destruction of the lock gates’. He also warned that ‘such a large body of men could not enter the dock area without fighting’. 3 An assault on St Nazaire could not be undertaken without the additional support of several hundred professionally trained guerrillas.
It was not entirely clear who might undertake such a suicidal mission. One possibility was to send in Gus March-Phillipps and his team. They were back in London after their West African jaunt and itching for renewed action. In the aftermath of Operation Postmaster, Gubbins had been permitted to expand them into a force of some one hundred men who were henceforth to operate under the name of No. 62 Commando. March-Phillipps certainly had enough of a death wish to have a crack at the Normandie Dock, but Gubbins felt that his team was as yet too small to send into St Nazaire.
A second option was to parachute saboteurs into the port: this, after all, had been brilliantly successful at Pessac. But Pessac had required just eight small limpet mines to wreck its machinery. The destruction of St Nazaire’s caisson gates required so much explosive that it simply wasn’t feasible by air. Gubbins ruled out a parachute drop as logistically impossible and reluctantly concluded that the destruction of Hitler’s biggest dock complex was ‘outside the capabilities’ of Baker Street, at least for the foreseeable future. 4
And there the matter might have rested, had it not been for a brilliant piece of lateral thinking. Gubbins had long argued that the enemy must always be struck in the most vulnerable places, and in late January 1942 the most vulnerable point on the Tirpitz was not on the ship itself, nor even in the Normandie Dock, but inside the head of an up-and-coming naval commander named John Hughes-Hallett. He and a friend, Dick Costobadie, were idly glancing at a nautical map of the French Atlantic coastline when Hughes-Hallett was struck by what could only be described as a eureka moment. And as with Archimedes, so John Hughes-Hallett’s solution to a seemingly insurmountable problem was predicated upon a surfeit of water.
As Hughes-Hallett studied the water depths in the Loire estuary, he realized that there was a significant flaw to the defences of St Nazaire, one that had hitherto been completely overlooked. In springtime, when there was the conjunction of a full moon and a rare flood tide, water levels rose to such a height that a shallow-draught vessel could reach the southern caisson without having to use the dredged channel. This meant that a ship could approach the dock gates without having to run the gauntlet of the coastal defences. For just a few hours each year, the Normandie Dock was tantalizingly exposed.
Captain Hughes-Hallett mentioned his discovery to his friend, Captain Charles Lambe, who in turn talked it over with Lord Mountbatten, the head of Combined Operations. Mountbatten realized that this was an opportunity to be seized. That very afternoon in late January he called together his staff at their headquarters in Richmond Terrace and repeated what Captain Lambe had told him over luncheon. ‘Let’s get out something unconventional,’ he said. 5
The unfolding plan was not just unconventional, but breathtaking in scope and audacity. The attacking force was to be drawn from Mountbatten’s commando units while the explosives and specialist training were to be provided by Gubbins. Unlike most senior army commanders, Mountbatten had a deep respect for Gubbins and was ‘quick to note’ that he offered ‘a unique and apparently inexhaustible source of special arms, explosives and other technical supplies which Combined Operations had neither the funds nor the facilities to manufacture for themselves’. 6
Gubbins set to work with gusto, calling for a meeting with Captain Hughes-Hallett within days of his nautical discovery. A plan rapidly took shape. The idea was to ram the southern caisson at high speed with an old destroyer packed with delayed-action high explosive. It was to be the dirtiest bomb ever devised, one encased in so much steel and concrete that it would explode with devastating force. Mountbatten described it as a ‘terrifying solution’ 7 to a hitherto intractable problem, one that would turn the Normandie Dock into a twisted, mangled wreck.
There was just one potential difficulty. Success would be entirely dependent on the bomb’s detonator and fuse, which would need a delay of at least seven hours to allow the men to fight their way off the ship, sabotage the docks and then escape from St Nazaire.
Gubbins had long recognized the need for a simple but reliable delayed-action fuse. ‘In the conditions under which our men were often working, dark, wet nights, scaling barbed wire and broken glass, it was essential to keep our devices to the simplest, smallest and most fool-proof.’ 8
Millis Jefferis had taken heed of his words and was currently working on his L-Delay, a cunning little fuse that was designed to perform with hitherto unknown accuracy. The L stood for lead: Jefferis had discovered that lead wire crept with absolute regularity under tension. His idea was to use this ‘creep’ to produce a time-delay fuse with accuracy down to the last milli-second. The problem was that the L-Delay was still at the prototype stage and was never going to be ready in time for the spring tide at St Nazaire.
Other delay fuses relied on mechanical clocks, which were extremely vulnerable, or slow-burning mechanisms that were only suitable for very short delays. Neither could be adapted for use in a vessel whose engine vibrations would play havoc with accuracy.
The only option was to rely on the Time Pencil, a fuse that had an alarmingly poor track record. ‘A very dodgy device indeed,’ was the opinion of Stuart Macrae. ‘One had to be very brave to use it.’ Its most striking feature was its simplicity. A spring-loaded striker was held under tension by a piano wire. The wire was surrounded by a fragile glass tube filled with acid. When this tube was broken, the acid began to eat away at the wire. When the wire broke, it released the striker that detonated the explosive.
And herein lay the flaw: no one could predict how long it would take for the wire to break. ‘In very hot weather, a theoretically long delay fuse might go off in a few minutes,’ said Macrae, who tested hundreds of them. ‘In very cold weather, it might not go off at all.’ 9
But there was no alternative. The success or failure of the attack on St Nazaire would be dependent on a highly inaccurate fuse that was little bigger than a pencil. If it went off too early, the commandos would be blown to the heavens, along with their ship. But there was also a chance that it wouldn’t go off at all.
The St Nazaire attack was to be on such a grand scale that it would require the services of more than 600 men, many of them veterans of Gubbins’s Norwegian escapade. But three of them were to shoulder much of the responsibility, for they had vital roles to play in a mission that was to break all the rules of war.
The first of the three was Stephen Beattie, the thirty-four-year-old son of a Hertfordshire parson. Everyone liked Stephen: he had ‘a charming personality, a serene and even temperament, a sound and sensible judgement and a retiring manner’. His friends thought him the very epitome of an English gentleman, ‘tall, slender, black-bearded, blue-eyed’, 10 and he was devoted to his wife, Philippa, and their three small children. He also happened to be a gifted sea captain, one with just enough of the buccaneering spirit for him to jump at the chance of leading a piratical raid on the French coastline.
Beattie had previously commanded the HMS Vivien , guarding the Arctic convoys as they made their perilous crossing of the North Sea. It was said that ‘nothing rattled or ruffled him’, which was just as well, for he was about to take command of a ship with four and a half tons of high explosive packed into her bow. It was his first sea command in which the goal was to cripple his own ship.
Second in importance to the mission’s success was the explosives expert, Nigel Tibbits, a highly gifted naval student ‘with a long, sensitive and intelligent face and a slow, quiet smile’. Just twenty-eight years of age, he had already notched up more qualifications than most acquire in a lifetime. He was a prizeman cadet who had obtained five firsts in his naval exams and won an Ogilvie medal for torpedo gunnery. If fate had not taken him to St Nazaire, he might have been adopted by Millis Jefferis’s team at the Firs, for he was a genius at pure maths, ‘the higher abstractions of which he would discuss with verve and gusto and often with great bursts of laughter’. 11 He had already spent several months working with Charles Goodeve, the oddball scientist who was helping to develop the Hedgehog mortar.
The principal aim of the attack on St Nazaire was to destroy the Normandie Dock’s caisson gate. But there was a recognition that the dirty bomb might not explode. It was therefore decided to land a team of saboteurs whose task was to wreck as much of the winding and pumping machinery as possible. These saboteurs were under the command of twenty-eight-year-old Captain Bill Pritchard, the third member of the unholy trio of leaders. Pritchard was a hard-drinking Welsh mischief-maker with a keen interest in targeted destruction. He, like Gubbins, had long since dismissed aerial bombing as a blunt-edged tool. ‘You make a lot of big holes and create a lot of nuisance, but you don’t stop the dock from working.’ The only way to guarantee the destruction of the pump machinery and winding mechanisms was to ‘send chaps in and place explosives right on the vital parts’. 12
Pritchard looked every inch the saboteur: tall and powerfully built, he had mischievous brown eyes that ‘glinted with humour’ when planning ‘the pranks or rags that he enjoyed’. He was now charged with orchestrating the biggest prank of his life: he had to lead his team ashore and blow all the impeller pumps and hydraulic winches.
Pritchard had the pick of all the best explosive devices so far invented, including firepots, tar babies and ‘sausage-charges’ for cutting gun barrels. But the key explosives were to be limpets and clams, the latter being a miniature version of Clarke’s limpet. It had been developed by Macrae in response to a request for smaller explosive charges. ‘Although the explosive content was only about eight ounces,’ he said, ‘ICI produced some very high speed stuff for us and the design was such that the explosive was almost in contact with the target over a considerable area.’ 13
The commandos selected to undertake the mission were based at Lochailort, close to Arisaig, in the Scottish Highlands. They were told nothing about their goal, although they got some inkling that it was going to be tough when they were sent to be trained by Eric Sykes and William Fairbairn.
They were surprised to be taught by ‘two benevolent square-shaped padres’, but soon learned that their lives would depend on the tricks of these experts. One of the recruits, Lieutenant Corran Purdon, was led down to the cellars at Arisaig House and taught how to kill in the dark, including ‘close-contact shooting in their sandbagged basement range where moving targets suddenly materialized from the gloom’.
Purdon and his comrades learned how to kill with every conceivable weapon, ‘including the Boyes anti-tank rifle, standing, and the two inch mortar from the hip’, weapons that would blow a man apart. The commandos were warned that they risked getting ‘shattered shoulders’ and ‘broken hips’ if such guns were incorrectly fired. 14
They were also reminded that attacking a heavily fortified dockyard in darkness meant that their guns would most likely be of little use, as Fairbairn knew from his experience of busting gangsters in night-time Shanghai. ‘There always comes a point where you have to go over the top and at ’em,’ he said. ‘And when you’re in that close, it’s the best fighter that wins.’ He now taught the commandos close-contact knife-fighting and stressed that confidence was the single most important factor in success. ‘When you’re confident, you instinctively attack. And whatever your opponent’s weight and strength, you can overcome it if you attack. To stay on the defence is fatal.’ 15
The training for St Nazaire was intense and gruelling. Lieutenant Purdon and his fellow trainees ‘splashed through hip-high freezing sea-loch estuaries, forded icy torrents holding boulders to combat the force of the rushing spate, climbed seemingly interminably high mountains and ran down steep scree slopes’. 16 By the third week of March, they were ready for action.
The ship that was to be used to ram the steel caisson was the HMS Campbeltown , a relic of the First World War. She was an American lend-lease vessel that was to have one last opportunity for glory. In order for her to pass over the St Nazaire shoals, she needed to be substantially lightened. To this end, all her heavy gear was cut away, along with her torpedo tubes. Her heavy deck guns were also stripped down and her fuel oil reduced to a minimum.
She even had two of her funnels removed, a modification that was not only done to lighten her. It was hoped that any German sentry seeing her as a dark silhouette from the shore would mistake her for a German destroyer of the Möwe class, especially if she was flying the swastika. Deception and subterfuge were to be important elements of the attack on St Nazaire.
Once her deck had been shielded with armoured sheeting, she was taken for a test-drive by Captain Beattie. She handled like ‘a bitch’, he thought, and would need to be treated accordingly if he was to have any hope of slamming her into the southern caisson of Normandie Dock.
Her final modification was the most important of all. A gigantic bomb was winched deep below decks, where it would wreak maximum damage. The explosive itself weighed four and a half tons, the same as a large lorry, and was enclosed in steel and then encased in cement. When it blew – if it blew – it would cause utter devastation.
Stephen Beattie had overheard a great deal of chatter about the unreliability of the Time Pencil detonators and voiced his fears to Nigel Tibbits, the explosives expert. ‘What happens if we run into heavy fire and the fusing system gets shot up?’ he asked. Tibbits said he hoped that it wouldn’t. ‘Or the chap responsible, that’s you, gets shot up?’ 17 Tibbits shrugged. They were indeed taking an enormous gamble. His own concern was that the force of ramming the ship into the caisson would trigger the fuses and blow them all to an early death. It was a concern shared by his beloved wife, Elmslie. She was filled with anguish about his mission and ‘could not dispel the dread feeling that they would never meet again’. 18
Not until the eve of departure were the officers provided with details of their adventure, which had been given the codename Operation Chariot. Colonel Charles Newman, the operational commander, gave them their briefing. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I know jolly well you have all been wondering what we are up to down here and now I’m going to tell you. You will all be delighted to know that we have been selected for a really lovely job – a saucy job – easily the biggest thing that has been done yet by the commandos. You could say it is the sauciest thing since Drake.’ 19
The Campbeltown set sail from Falmouth at two o’clock in the afternoon on 26 March, accompanied by two naval destroyers, a torpedo boat, a gunboat and twelve motor-launches carrying many of the commandos. The window of opportunity for the attack was extremely slight. It had to occur between midnight and 2 a.m. on the night of 29–30 March, when the full moon and spring tide would theoretically allow the Campbeltown to slip through the shoal-waters of St Nazaire, thereby avoiding the shipping lane close to the shoreline. If the tidal calculations were wrong, she would get stuck in the estuary mud.
Although the officers had been informed of their mission, the commandos themselves were still unsure of their goal. Now that they were at sea and there was no possibility of information being leaked to the enemy, Stephen Beattie gathered them on deck and gave them a briefing. The men were pleased to have been selected, masking their nervousness with laughter and backslapping. ‘They broke into broad grins and returned to their stations with pert little jokes and a quickened pulse.’ 20 They then raised a swastika and took photographs of themselves giving mocking salutes.
Shortly after nightfall on 29 March, the flotilla regrouped for a final rendezvous at sea. The ships were now forty nautical miles from the French coast and it was time to bid farewell to the two naval destroyers. They would remain offshore throughout the night, with the aim of making a rendezvous with the motor-launches on the following morning. In the intervening time, the Campbeltown and her accompanying motor-launches, gunboat and torpedo boat would be without their heavily armed escort.
At exactly eleven o’clock in the evening, Nigel Tibbits clambered down into the gloomy bowels of the ship to where the huge explosive charge was situated. It was stiflingly hot, a factor that could affect the working of the fuses, and the rumbling vibration of the ship’s engines was a further cause for concern.
Tibbits groped his way towards the vast block of concrete and steel that filled much of the bow of the ship. With extreme care he now activated the three eight-hour Time Pencil fuses that were designed to detonate at seven o’clock the following morning. It was the most stressful moment of his life. From the moment he released the acid on to the piano wire, the men aboard the Campbeltown would be sitting on a massive suicide bomb. A single fault in either the acid or the wire would trigger the detonator.
There were countless other dangers to be faced before the Time Pencils were due to detonate, as all the men knew. They were hoping to sneak through the mouth of the Loire in the guise of a German destroyer, but that guise could not hold for ever. At some point they would surely be identified as enemy shipping.
As midnight approached, the Campbeltown reached the point at which the estuary met with the sea. After a further thirty minutes the men on the bridge sighted the half-submerged wreck of the Lancastria , sunk two years earlier during an aerial attack by German junkers. They were now just seven miles from their goal and were entering the dangerous shallows.
As the commandos shivered on deck, they could feel the ship ‘churning and shuddering through the mud’. 21 At one point her keel scoured the bottom of the estuary. But Captain Beattie kept a cool head under pressure and managed to drive her relentlessly through the silt.
It had been a dull night for Korvettenkapitän Lothar Burhenne, commander of the Naval Flak Battalion on the east bank of the Loire estuary. He had spent much of the night with his eyes clamped to his night-vision binoculars, watching English bombers circling in the sky above. Their behaviour was most unusual. They were flying in strange formations and dropping very few bombs. It was almost as if they were there to divert attention.
Shortly after 1 a.m., Burhenne turned his binoculars towards the charcoal-grey estuary. He had to pinch himself, such was his astonishment at what he saw through the light of a dim moon. A flotilla of vessels appeared to be heading in the direction of the docks.
Burhenne snatched at the telephone and fired off this news to the harbour master. He was told not to be so idiotic. He then called his commanding officer, Captain Mecke, and informed him of what he had seen. Mecke’s suspicions had already been aroused by the behaviour of the English bombers overhead. Now, as a precaution, he flashed a warning to all the troops guarding the estuary: Achtung landegefahr! Beware landing. A minute or so later, one of the dockyard searchlights was snapped on to the estuary, illuminating what appeared to be a German destroyer. She was accompanied by a dozen or more smaller vessels.
On board the Campbeltown , Signalman Pike had been anticipating this moment for hours. Now, in this moment of tension, he flashed a message in German: ‘Two damaged ships in company – request permission to proceed in without delay.’ 22 The message caused surprise on shore and deceived the Germans for a further five minutes. But at 1.28 a.m., after a rush of hasty phone calls, the ruse was unravelled. The ships in the estuary were not friend but foe.
Seconds later, a dozen searchlights lit the flotilla and every gun on the shore began blazing fire on the Campbeltown . Quick-firing cannon, machine guns and the coastal batteries unleashed a lethal rain of metal on to her exposed upper decks. If the vessel had been using the dredged channel, she would have been sunk in an instant.
As Captain Beattie cranked the Campbeltown to eighteen knots, a staccato of bullets hit the bridge, puncturing the thin steel. The side of the ship was ‘alive with bursting shells’ 23 that sprayed shrapnel and freezing seawater across the deck. The shells alarmed Tibbits. If a single one landed on the bow of the Campbeltown , it risked detonating her bomb with devastating consequences.
Chief Petty Officer Wellstead clutched at the wheel, desperately trying to steer a course through the glare of searchlights and flying tracer. He ducked and dodged the machine-gun fire, but the fire was so intense that he was eventually hit and killed. His place was taken by the quartermaster, who was trying to catch Captain Beattie’s steering directions when he was also struck by a bullet.
One of the saboteurs, Bob Montgomery, was about to step forward to steer the ship when Nigel Tibbits tapped him on the shoulder. ‘I’ll take it old boy,’ he said.
The Campbeltown was now taking direct hits on all sides. Her funnel and bridge were shot out and machine-gun bullets had penetrated all the way through to the boiler room. At one point there was a terrific explosion on deck, ‘like the noise of someone banging a steel door with a sledgehammer’. A shell had burst next to Stuart Chant, another of the saboteurs, sending shrapnel deep into his flesh. He stretched out his arm in the darkness and was shocked. ‘My leg was wet and sticky and my right arm was spurting blood down into my hand.’ 24
The shellfire was so intense that Captain Beattie was finding it hard to locate his target. The great steel caisson of Normandie Dock was lost in the drifting smoke and even the adjacent Mole was no longer visible. As he peered through the smoke and tracer fire, a German searchlight fell on the Old Mole for a second, giving him the perfect steer. He shouted to Tibbits, telling him to crank the vessel to port. They had 500 yards to go.
Beattie gave the engine a final blast. As she thrust towards twenty knots she began to judder violently. Less than sixty seconds to go. They were on course. The caisson lay directly ahead.
The ship’s bells pealed through the gunfire, a warning for the men to brace themselves. They felt her snag slightly as she dragged the torpedo nets on the sea bottom. And then, at exactly 1.34 a.m., she smashed headlong into the caisson.
Major Copland, one of the commandos, was thrust forward on deck. He had the feeling that Beattie ‘had applied super-powerful brakes to a very small car’. Debris rained backwards from the shattered bow of the vessel, spilling on to the deck. ‘Sparks, dirt and planks seemed to be flying everywhere.’ 25
Captain Beattie dusted himself down, checked his watch and smiled. ‘Well there we are,’ he said in a cool voice. ‘Four minutes late.’ 26
Captain Stephen Beattie’s most urgent task was to examine the damage to the caisson, but this was not easy in the half-light of flares, searchlights and burning petrol. He inched his way forward and was satisfied to discover that he had scored a direct hit. The bow of the Campbeltown had crumpled back some thirty-six feet, leaving her stuck to the caisson in a tangle of shredded metal.
Now, urgently, he ordered the valves to be opened in order to flood the stern of the ship. This would prevent the Germans from towing her off the caisson before she exploded on the following morning. While he was examining the damage, the commandos and saboteurs began leaping ashore and advancing towards their targets through smoke, searchlights and sustained machine-gun fire.
The key goal for Bill Pritchard’s saboteurs was the pump house. This was known to contain four massive impeller pumps situated in a fortified chamber some forty feet below ground. After the caisson itself, the pumps were the single most important target for destruction. Without them, the Normandie Dock could be neither filled nor emptied of water.
Stuart Chant was the nominated leader of the four men assigned to destroy the pumps. In spite of severe wounds caused by the exploding shell, he led his fellow saboteurs through the fire-swept dockyard towards the pump house. The men were weighed down with sixty-pound rucksacks filled with specially designed explosives. They blew the locked steel door with one of Cecil Clarke’s limpets and then clattered down the circular iron staircase in near darkness.
Chant’s wounds were bleeding profusely, yet he hauled himself down into the echoing chamber of the pump house, followed by his little team. Here, deep below ground, the only noise was the distant boom of explosions until one of the saboteurs, Arthur Dockerill, started singing: ‘There’ll be blue birds over the white cliffs of Dover.’ 27 It was a surreal moment, even for Dockerill, but it broke the tension.
The men set their charges in the gloom. Chant and Dockerill then ordered the others back upstairs while they primed the detonators. These were timed to explode within ninety seconds, leaving them precious little time to race back up the spiral stairs. They had just reached safety when 150 pounds of high explosive shattered through the main impeller pumps, an explosion so loud it ‘cracked our ear-drums’. 28 A huge concrete block was tossed through the air, the windows were shattered and the ground juddered violently as the inside of the pump house was ripped apart.
Bill Pritchard and his team were meanwhile destroying the machinery that operated the northern caisson. As they went about their work, the commandos kept up covering fire, shooting at the German gun emplacements. The dock area was by now a vision of hell, lit by ghastly flares of burning oil. Sirens and alarms were overlaid with bursts of tommy-gun fire and the agonized screams of wounded and dying men.
Many of the commandos were still in their motor-launches. Trapped in the flare of German searchlights and unable to get ashore, they were sitting ducks. Half the launches had already been shot to pieces and the water was strewn with gruesome, half-submerged corpses.
The dockyard battle raged until about 3 a.m., when the ferocity of the shoot-out began to abate. Three out of every four men were now dead or injured and the Germans were starting to round up survivors. Escape had proved impossible, for just two launches and the motorized gunboat had survived the onslaught. These were now heading back to the destroyers waiting out at sea.
Scores of wounded had been left behind in the dockyard. Colonel Charles Newman was still in overall command and attempted a break-out with a few of the men. It was no use. The Germans had thrown a cordon around St Nazaire and Newman, like most of the other survivors, was to find himself a prisoner of war.
Survival that night was a question of luck. Stephen Beattie had been conferring with Nigel Tibbits aboard one of the motor-launches when the deck was raked with machine-gun fire. Beattie was unscathed but Tibbits was hit and collapsed into the water. He was never seen again.
Beattie himself was eventually captured as he struggled ashore, wet and naked but still counting the hours until the Campbeltown was set to explode.
As dawn broke above St Nazaire, a scene of utter carnage was revealed to the captured survivors. The ground was strewn with corpses and twisted metal and smoke was drifting listlessly through the chill morning air. Beattie knew that the ship was set to explode at 7 a.m. and passed a tense few hours as a prisoner of war, waiting for the church clock to strike the hour. It eventually rang seven. And then there was silence. Nothing.
Tibbits had warned that there could be a delay of up to two hours. He had also warned that if the bomb hadn’t blown by 9.30 a.m., then the Time Pencils would have been fatally damaged in the collision with the caisson. As the hours passed – first eight, then nine – Beattie feared an even more humiliating outcome: the bomb had been discovered and defused by the Germans.
By 10 a.m. the Campbeltown was awash with German military personnel – naval officers, gunners and submarine commanders, along with scores of soldiers who had taken part in the previous night’s battle. They could be seen clambering below decks, poking their heads into the mess decks, the cabins and even the wheel-house. It was not long before there were 150 men on the upper deck of the ship and many more below.
Beattie continued to count the minutes, but when another hour had passed he reluctantly concluded that the Time Pencils had failed. The bomb was not going to detonate.
He tried to put a brave face on the outcome. The impeller pumps had been destroyed – a reason for optimism – and the dock had been badly damaged. But the caisson was still intact and that, in his eyes, made the mission a failure. Nigel Tibbits had sacrificed his life for nothing.
The final insult came when Beattie was interrogated by a German intelligence officer, who began gloating in English. ‘Your people obviously did not know what a hefty thing that lock-gate is,’ he said. ‘It was really useless trying to smash it with a flimsy destroyer.’
At that very moment, exactly as he spoke those words, St Nazaire was hit by an earthquake of such magnitude that the ground felt as if it were being ripped apart. ‘An explosion of unbelievable violence’, was how it felt to the town’s assistant mayor, Monsieur Grimaud. The Campbeltown ’s funnel was sent spinning into the clear morning air and a forty-foot chunk of steel hull was flung into the gardens of the Santé Maritime. It was as if a giant were playing havoc with a Dinky toy.
Beattie heard the explosion with quiet satisfaction. Cool as ever, he smiled at his interrogator. ‘That, I hope, is proof that we did not underestimate the strength of the gate.’ 29
The impact of the blast was even more devastating than Beattie had dared to hope. As the Campbeltown ripped herself to pieces, the impregnable steel caisson was thrust inwards by the force of the blast, turning it into a 160-ton chunk of flying debris. The collapse of the caisson was followed by a tidal wave of water that smashed into the dry dock, sweeping the mangled remnants of the Campbeltown along with it. The two tankers inside the dock, Schledstadt and Passat , bore the full force of the onrush of water. They were plucked upwards by the deluge and dashed against the wall of the dry dock.
Those who rushed towards the Normandie Dock were greeted by a scene so macabre that it would be for ever imprinted in their brains. The wharves, cranes and storehouses were festooned with human remains, the grisly remnants of the hundreds of German sightseers who were on the vessel when she blew out her bowels. The exact death toll was never discovered: some reckoned it was as high as 400.
Hitler was furious when he learned of the sabotage. He ordered Field Marshal von Rundstedt to conduct an immediate inquiry. Not satisfied with its findings, he ordered General Jodl to undertake a second inquiry. This didn’t satisfy him either. The facts were indeed difficult to accept: the saboteurs and commandos had successfully carried out an operation that even Lord Mountbatten had considered ‘absolutely impossible to undertake’, yet ‘brilliantly achieved’. 30
Winston Churchill was gleeful when he learned of the destruction of the Normandie Dock. A ‘brilliant and heroic exploit’, he said, and called it ‘a deed of glory intimately involved in high strategy’. The men who had taken part won their share of glory. Five Victoria Crosses were awarded, including one for the cool-headed Stephen Beattie. Four men won the Distinguished Service Order and seventeen were awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, including the deceased Nigel Tibbits. But the operation had come at a heavy price: 169 men dead and a further 215 taken prisoner.
The Normandie Dock was to remain a ghostly ruin for the next decade. It was so badly damaged that repair was impossible in wartime. As for the Tirpitz , she didn’t venture into the Atlantic for the rest of the war.
Three years earlier, Gubbins had written that successful sabotage operations required surprise, speed and mobility. He added that the most effective operations were those undertaken in stealth and at night. ‘When the time for action comes,’ he said, ‘act with the greatest boldness and audacity.’ 31
This is exactly what his men had done. It was a textbook guerrilla operation, one that had been lifted straight from the pages of the little pamphlets written by himself and Millis Jefferis.