27th and 28th March 1942 – HMS Campbeltown and amphibious commandos transported by the Navy successfully destroyed the heavily defended dry dock at St. Nazaire.
The ship, disguised as a German destroyer and filled with explosives, was sailed six miles up the Loire estuary to ram the docks, lodging in the lock gates. She exploded several hours later, putting St Nazaire docks out of action for the rest of the war and killing senior German officers who had come on board to inspect the ship.
The dock was the only one on the eastern Atlantic seaboard large enough to accommodate Germany’s new battleship the Tirpitz - according to Churchill “the most important naval vessel in the situation today”. Without this facility for repairs, Germany’s largest ships could not attack the Allies vital lifeline from America. The Tirpitz never entered the Atlantic, instead staying safely east of the Channel until she was bombed and capsized by the RAF in a Norwegain fjord in November 1944.
The raid on St Nazaire, codenamed Operation Chariot, was carried out under the command of Mountbatten’s Combined Operations Headquarters located at Anderson Manor, near Poole (possibly where Dick was working - see The Missing Winter and The Small Scale Raiding Force). The raid was first proposed by Britain’s Naval Intelligence Division in late 1941 and included diversionary bombing by the RAF. Although there were heavy losses among the 622 servicemen who took part, it established Churchill’s support for the ‘butcher and bolt’ tactics of the commandos.
Two of the launches attending the Campbeltown were from the Poole boatyards that supplied numerous craft for the war effort.
(From Combined Operations WW2 website and ‘Poole and World War II’ written by Derek Beamish, Harold Bennett and John Hillier and published by Poole Historical Trust in 1980.)
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