Raiders (25 page)

Using his loud-hailer, Ryder ordered Rodier to go to the
Campbeltown
and take off as many of the wounded Commandos and crew as he could.
At the same time, ML 262 under Lieutenant Burt, one of the launches that had overshot the Old Entrance, arrived on the scene.
The Commandos she carried were jumping onto the quay when the southern winding shed, a stone’s throw across the water, exploded with an ear-shattering blast.
It was heartening for the others to know that at least some demolition
parties had managed to get off the water and reach their target.
Moments later, the five-man party responsible for laying the charge – Lieutenant Smalley’s from the
Campbeltown
group – ran down the quay.
ML 262, which had just re-embarked a separate party, took them aboard.
As they headed out, they came under heavy fire again and suffered a number of casualties, including Smalley who was killed outright.
The launch was damaged too but Burt managed to escape downstream.

ML 267 under Lieutenant Beart, carrying a reserve of fourteen Commandos, had turned back to make a second attempt at the Old Entrance but, under heavy fire, burst into flames as she tried to land her men.
Jumping overboard to escape the flames, nineteen crew and Commandos died in the water, most of them machine-gunned in the burning oil.
The lucky ones were drowned.
Ryder witnessed the horrific fate suffered by so many from his starboard column as his gun boat raced down to the Old Mole to assess Group One’s progress there.
In his report, he wrote: ‘On leaving the Old Entrance, however, I could see that matters had fared badly there.
The approaches were floodlit by searchlights from all directions and a deadly fire was being poured on the M.L.s still gallantly attempting to go alongside.’

While the Commandos in the motor launches battled the devastating enemy fire to try and get ashore, their colleagues on the
Campbeltown
, many of them already carrying wounds, were pouring over the sides of the stricken destroyer.
They too were feeling the full force of the enemy guns that continued to spray the ship from both sides of the river.
As they did so, Commander
Beattie immediately set about arranging the withdrawal of his crew and the wounded before scuttling his ship.
The plan was to send the destroyer to the bottom so that if the charge failed to detonate, the entrance to the dock would remain blocked to the
Tirpitz
for up to a year.

The two assault groups were the first into the fray but their exit was impeded by the number of wounded men lying in the blood-spattered gangways and well-deck.
There was no option but to drag some of them out of the way in order to get the attack under way.
Urged on by Newman’s 2iC, Major Copland, the men of 2 Commando hurried through the smoke, flames and raking fire to clamber down the hanging ladders to the dock.
Lieutenant Roderick’s party descended by the starboard side of the bow and quickly silenced a gun emplacement, strafing the gunners with their
Tommy guns and disabling the gun with a small explosive.
Working in small groups, covering each other in fire-and-move advances, Roderick’s men used a shower of grenades to destroy their second target, a 3.7-cm flak gun that had been hammering the
Campbeltown
from its position on a nearby roof.

A third gun they were to target had already been silenced by the Navy’s guns and, their tasks complete, Roderick’s men set up a blocking position to thwart a German counterattack.
In the space of those few, frenetic minutes, four of his men had fallen.
The other assault party, led by Captain Roy, destroyed a gun position that had been hastily abandoned at the sight of the Commandos streaming along the dockside, firing Brens and Tommy guns from their hips.
The emplacement was put out of action and Roy took up position, as per their orders, at the Old Entrance bridge, which they were to hold until all the demolition squads had withdrawn to the evacuation point on the Old Mole.

The first demolition team from the
Campbeltown
into action, led by Lieutenant Chant, had reached their target before the immediate area had been cleared of enemy guns.
Chant and one of his sergeants, Chamberlain, were carrying severe wounds sustained in the run up the river.
Struggling to walk, Chant had taken injuries to his leg, arm and hands, while Chamberlain had been hit in the shoulder and had to ask one of his ‘buddies’ to carry his heavy haversack laden with explosives.
Their task was to destroy the pumping house, next to the
Campbeltown
, which would render the dock tidal and prevent the
Tirpitz
and all other large warships from using it for a great many months.
It was considered the most important of all the demolition assignments.

Having blown the door to the pump house, Chamberlain, who was weakening by the minute, was left to guard the entrance while Chant and three sergeants disappeared below.
Each carrying 60 pounds of explosives on their backs, they descended the labyrinth of stairs into the bowels of the echoing chamber as quickly as the darkness and Chant’s wounds allowed them.
Working in the gloom by the light of their torches, it was now that their intensive training back at Southampton’s King George V dock paid off.
The layout of the machinery was just as they had been led to expect and, one by one, each of the four peeled off to their assigned positions and quickly set about laying their
charges.
As they finished, Chant was starting to fade and one of his men had to help him climb back to the top as the slow fuses burnt down behind them.
Shortly after they had taken cover, the pump house exploded in an enormous roar that reverberated across the dockyard.
Adding the finishing touch to their demolition work, the group lit the oil pouring out of the structure and withdrew over Roy’s bridge, hurrying to the Old Mole ready to re-embark.

The final group of Commandos off the
Campbeltown
, and the largest, had been handed the most hazardous of the demolition tasks.
They were to destroy the northern lock gate and its winding shed.
To reach their target, however, they had to run the gauntlet of heavy German fire for 300 yards along the eastern, or left-hand side of the Normandie dock.
The group was split into two parties: the first, four NCOs under Lieutenant Purdon, was to blow the winding machinery.
The second, eight NCOs under Lieutenant Brett, was to attack the lock gate.
Their numbers were boosted by the addition of a reserve demolition group under Lieutenant Burtinshaw.
Lieutenant Etches, who was in overall charge of the group, was forced to stay behind having suffered serious shrapnel wounds to both legs and an arm shortly before the
Campbeltown
made impact with the southern gate.
Two men of five in a heavily armed protection squad had also been incapacitated and remained on board.

Stepping over the dead, the dying and the wounded to get to the ladders at the forward end of the besieged destroyer, Purdon, Brett and Burtinshaw led their men down the sides and into the
thick of the battle.
They advanced to their target in short bounds, taking cover from the beams of the searchlights and the raking crossfire as and when they could.
The heaviest fire was emanating from a German position midway along the dock and it was clear there could be no further progress until it was neutralised.
Drilled to perfection by months of training, the three-man protection squad went into action.
While one drew the fire, the other two crept forward and lobbed in grenades, killing all inside.

The two demolition squads had infiltrated deeper into the heart of enemy territory than any other and they soon found themselves under intense fire from a number of positions, including the heavier-calibre guns of the ships moored inside the giant basin to their left.
Brett was injured early on and Burtinshaw and six others were killed as the casualty toll mounted rapidly.
But, undaunted, the others continued with their tasks.
With no officers left standing in the group, Sergeant Carr took control and, having abandoned plans to lay explosives inside the structure, he set about detonating the underwater explosives that had been lowered over the side.
Moments later, a muffled boom was followed by the sight of giant fountains of water shooting into the air and pouring through the holed structure into the dry dock.
Leaving their dead comrades where they lay, the survivors, each one suffering at least one wound, staggered back through the tumult of gunfire towards the bridge held by Roy’s small, heavily reduced assault party.
As they disappeared into the night, Purdon and his men lit the fuses on their charges on the machinery inside the winding shed, echoing those set off by
Lieutenant Smalley a short time earlier at the southern end.

With battle raging in all parts of the dockyard, Lieutenant Colonel Newman and his seven men waited anxiously at the HQ they had established in a building at the Old Entrance close to the bridge held by Roy.
His protection party had perished on the water but he was soon joined by the only full Commando party to have made it ashore – from Rodier’s ML 177.
He deployed the group, commanded by Troop Sergeant Major Haines, as the HQ’s makeshift protection party, doing his forlorn best to exercise some sort of control over the chaotic scenes around him.

Five hundred yards to the south of Newman’s HQ, the six launches of the port column of the raiding force were attempting to land the Commandos of Group One on the Old Mole.
The fate they suffered under the German guns was every bit as horrifying as that of their comrades from Group Two at the Old Entrance; the courage of their efforts to get ashore was as awe-inspiring as it was hopeless.

As the first of the six, ML 447, under Lieutenant Platt, had already absorbed significant punishment as it closed on the heavily defended stone jetty.
Two machine-gun positions on the Mole raked the vessel, and casualties lay strewn upon her deck as Platt tried to bring her alongside the steps.
Captain Birney’s fifteen-strong assault party had already been reduced to roughly half its strength when an artillery shell scored a direct hit and flames engulfed the ship.
Platt gave the order to abandon ship, but though a few managed to scramble ashore and some were picked
up by one of the torpedo boats, most were drowned or gunned to death in the water.

As at the Old Entrance a few hundred yards to the north, only one of the six launches managed to get their men ashore.
Once Birney’s assault party had been wiped out, there was no chance of the rest overcoming the German defenders behind the walls of the jetty, who outnumbered and outgunned them.
ML 457, under Lieutenant Collier, the second in the column, somehow survived the relentless German enfilade from above and managed to disembark one demolition team under Lieutenant Walton, the protection party under Second Lieutenant Watson and a small demolition control party under Captain Pritchard.
The fifteen men who made it into the dockyard amounted to 18 per cent of the total number of Commandos scheduled to land at the Old Mole.

With next to no support, their fate was sealed the moment they began to scramble up the greasy stone slipway towards the German gunfire that was intensifying by the minute.
But they pressed on nevertheless, trying to ignore the harrowing screams of their friends and comrades from ML 447 in the water below.
As the small groups of men made a dash for their targets, more Germans arrived to strengthen the defences at the Old Mole, extinguishing, once and for all, any hope that the troops ashore could be evacuated from there as planned.
As the Germans tossed grenades over the walls onto the landing points below, the weight of fire raining down was so great and the scene so chaotic that the remaining four motor launches were forced to withdraw back
into the middle of the river.
So it was that of the twelve troop-carrying vessels, only one from each column had succeeded in putting their men ashore.

Moments after the last of his Commandos had clambered ashore, Collier’s motor launch (ML 457) burst into flames.
Lieutenant Burt in ML 262 rushed in to help but both were shattered by enemy fire.
There were few survivors.
Within minutes, the parties that had managed to land at the Old Mole were also in disarray as they battled in vain to carry out their orders.
Lieutenant Walton lost his life trying to blow up the bridge connecting the Old Town to the centre of St Nazaire in an attempt to block German reinforcements.
Captain Pritchard died of a deep wound to the stomach, almost certainly at the point of a German bayonet as he rounded the corner of a building.
Lieutenant Watson’s team were beaten back by ferocious German defence and fought their way through the dock installations to Newman’s HQ at the Old Entrance.

To his mounting frustration, Lieutenant Wynn, commanding the motor torpedo boat MTB 74, had been forced to watch the battle unfolding on the dockside, unable to contribute anything more telling than some covering fire for the rest of the force.
Commander Ryder had held him back to torpedo the
Campbeltown
if her scuttling charges had failed to detonate, but once the old destroyer was lying safely on the bottom and stuck fast on the lock gate, Wynn was handed his chance to play his part in the action.
Speeding towards the Old Entrance, Wynn unleashed two torpedoes at the lock gates leading to the U-boat basin.
Both hit the target and, with their time-delay fuses activated, sank to the river bed.
He returned to the
Campbeltown
and embarked as many wounded men as he could accommodate before making his escape towards the mouth of the estuary.