More World War Two for the day

War History Online has an article about a famous raid:

A little after 0120 on 28 March 1942, searchlights on both sides of the Loire estuary flooded the waterway to reveal a convoy of twelve motor launch boats, a motor gun boat, a motor torpedo boat, and a destroyer which had somehow managed to slip over the sand banks flying German colors and signal-lighting friendly code.
That little delay didn’t last long before the Germans guarding the estuary and the vital Saint Nazaire harbor and Normandie drydock opened up their guns on the approaching British sailors and commandos. At 0128, Lieutenant Commander Stephen Halden Beattie ordered the Royal Navy’s White Ensign raised and kept his command, the destroyer HMS Campbeltown, sailing for her target: ramming the gates of the drydock. Campbeltown drove her weight into the gates, pushing over thirty feet into the dock. A commando group divided into assault, demolition, and protection teams disembarked, cleared the area, and blew up the dock’s water pump and gate machinery at great cost of life.
But their comrades in the two columns of motor launch boats that had come in on the port and starboard sides of the Campbeltown were dying even faster. Most of those boats were burning or exploded on the push down the estuary under fire. Some managed to put their troops ashore, to little better life-expectancy.
All these men knew the importance of the mission, and 169 of the 346 Royal Navy sailors and 264 commandos that participated perished, with a further two hundred taken prisoner. They did, however, destroy the most important harbor in German-occupied France, dealing a monumental blow to Germany and the Kriegsmarine.
The naval facilities at Saint Nazaire, which included a port outside the gates to two basins, submarine pens, and the only dry dock on the Atlantic side of the British naval blockade that could hold ships like the Tirpitz, sister ship of the Bismark, that were crucial to Hitler’s war effort.
Trying to limit civilian casualties, the British had ruled out an air raid to destroy the naval compound, and the Royal Navy didn’t believe they could get their ships within range to bombard it without being detected. Combined Operations Headquarters took on the job and, with a massive joint effort between various branches of the services, managed to put together Operation Chariot, called The Greatest Raid of All Time in the BBC documentary narrated by Jeremy Clarkson.
Commandos and men from the Royal Navy and Royal Engineers comprised the main force of the raid. The Naval Intelligence Division, Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), the War Office’s Military Intelligence, the Royal Navy’s Operational Intelligence, and the Air Ministry’s Air Intelligence all contributed to the operation. Technical journals from before the war detailing aspects of Saint Nazaire were studied in depth.
It was decided that the Campbeltown would be used to ram the dry dock and transport one group of commandos. Two more commando groups were to ride on the two columns of motor launch boats to disembark at the old gates to the Bassin de St. Nazaire, next to the drydock gates. All the groups had separate teams for assault, demolition, and protection, and objectives were set to cripple the harbor and German naval operations.
Campbeltown’s bow was filled with over four tons of high explosives hidden in concrete, timed to blow hours after the raid was over. Only a few of the motor launch boats managed to reach the old gates and put men ashore after the Campbeltown rammed the dock and her group of commandos stormed the facilities. Some of the Campbeltown commandos, including those wounded like Beattie, managed to escape off the back end of the destroyer, when one motor launch boat, ML 177, parked behind it with a full-scale battle ranging around them between the other boats and German guns. ML 177 was later sunk while trying to escape.
The Old Mole and old gates were not secured and, with most of the other boats destroyed or being destroyed, the hundred or so commandos alive on land, led by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Newman, had to escape on foot.
According to Combined Operations: The Official Story of the Commandos, by Louis Mountbatten, Newman had ordered those men to do their best to return to England, to not surrender until they were out of ammo, and to not surrender at all, if they could help it . They fought their way through the town until they were surrounded, and had expended all their ammo, before being captured by German soldiers.
Many more sailors and commandos were captured by the Germans after their boats sank or exploded in the estuary. The motor gun boat and four motor launch boats survived the raid and, along with 228 men, made it safely back to England. Of the commandos who fought through Saint Nazaire, five managed to evade capture and escape to Spain with the help of the French, eventually to Gibraltar and back to England.
Eighty-nine decorations were awarded for Operation Chariot, many posthumously, including five Victoria Crosses and four Croix de Guerre, the highest military honors Britain and France.
From a series of interviews with people (fighters and civilians) to do with World War Two gathered from the Imperial War Museum by Max Arthur, called Forgotten Voices of the Second World War, comes the story of Beattie being interrogated by a German officer. The officer taunted Beattie, claiming the damaged inflicted by the raid would be easy to repair, implying the great loss of life to have been a waste.
This was at noon on the 28th, just hours after the raid. As the officer made his poorly-timed remarks, the charges in the Campbeltown detonated. Some four hundred Germans were killed in the explosion and the damage to the dock took until several years after the end of the war to be repaired. Beattie smiled: “We’re not quite as foolish as you think!”

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