Jeremy Clarkson's the Greatest Raid of All - the FULL documentary | North One

A couple of years ago I did a TV show about my father-in-law winning a cross country victory at Arnhem and I've been looking for a sequel ever since, another nugget of incredible heroism against impossible odds. Of course, most war stories are well-known, well-researched and well-celebrated - the Battle of Britain, rock drift, etc. - but one day, while browsing in a second-hand bookstore, I came across with a history that is barely known or celebrated: it is the story of an incredible battle. a battle in which more vcs were won more quickly than any other action in the second world war is a story

full

of ingenuity, courage and genuine courage, I had a lot after reading it, I decided to do a little research and it turned out that, although very few people In the outside world they know something about this extraordinary battle, they certainly do in military circles and call it the

greatest

raid

of all.

In 1941 the Battle of Britain was won, but the Battle of the Atlantic was still raging and we were losing German submarines. they were mocking the convoys bringing supplies from america nine million tons of ships had already sunk and the shipyards in britain simply could not replace them fast enough britain was beginning to starve winston churchill said in his diaries the only thing What really scared me in the war was the danger of the submarine. He said that he was even more anxious about the Battle of the Atlantic than about the Battle of Great Britain, and then in the equation he sailed the Terpits Tirpitz, it was the fastest and most modern battleship of the war.

Although her armor was a foot thick, she could move at 30 knots and with eight 15-inch guns she packed a punch, certainly the Royal Navy had very little in its arsenal to take on a ship of this magnitude and that was a nightmare for the people who worked here in churchill's war rooms each of these points on this map represents a convoy movement if tirpitz reached among them beyond the reach of the royal air force we would almost certainly lose the war it was that simple without However there was a drawback to the size of the Tirpitz, you see, if it were damaged while in the middle of the Atlantic, it couldn't return to Germany for repairs because that would mean limping past Britain, past the RAF, past of our coastal fleet and that would be a death. sentence for her, so she would have to go to a dry dock on the Atlantic coast of France, but there was only one dry dock on the Atlantic coast of France that was big enough to hold a tirpitz ship the size of this one, this one.

The Normandy Dock in Saint Nazaire had been built in the 1930s when France was manufacturing giant ocean liners and now to ensure that the Tirpitz could never have a home on the Atlantic coast it had to be destroyed now, the only way it could be could put this dock out of action is to destroy this gate and that was a problem, it couldn't be done with a naval bombardment because the mouth of the estuary is actually six miles away in that direction, it couldn't be done with a submarine because This entire area was crossed with anti-submarine nets.

It could not be done by land because

north

ern France was in German hands and for two reasons it could not be done from the air: firstly, the bombing of the Second World War was notoriously inaccurate, Only 22 of the bombs fell within five miles of the target, so the chances of being able to hit a point gate from 6,000 feet in the sky were slim at best and would not be the best case because just at side of the dry dock there were 14 The submarine pens were some of the most valuable installations of the German armory and, to protect them, the San Nazaire area was packed with 80 anti-aircraft guns and artillery pieces and in the city itself there were 5,000 soldiers who They destroyed the dock and then used conventional weapons.

It forces the army, the air force, the navy, out of the question, so the job was assigned to a group of men who had actually just been trained. The commandos, the commandos were the brainchild of Churchill, who had seen similar teams operate success

full

y in both the Boer War and the First World War, a small number of highly trained soldiers rushed in, causing a great deal of damage. and then they left before the enemy had time to organize. Churchill liked this, he called it the butcher and bolt approach, so what kind? Of the men were fine, if we go by the popular myth, they were lantern-jawed killing machines that could head-butt their way through the open air, although the reality was quite different.

Gerard Brett in my Richmond was in my 12th commando and had written a book. about the Byzantine era or Byzantine architecture or something, a fellow who had a theology degree from Trinity College Dublin, Corporal Potts Lance had been a don at Oxford or Cambridge, they included a poacher and a TT motorcyclist, so that what they represented was a complete mix. revolution in the concept of a soldier because they were chosen for their individuality, their intelligence, their initiative and no one embodied that spirit better than this man, Mickey Byrne, I have his autobiography here and what a life he had, a privileged upbringing, Winchester Oxford, uh, and then he.

I met Guy Burgess, the guy who became a Soviet spy and they became lovers, uh, Mickey, although he became a Nazi sympathizer. He went to Germany. He met Hitler. He got a signed copy of Mine Kampf and was one of the first people to be shown Dachau. concentration camp met bertrand russell met audrey hepburn met the king and queen even met roosevelt he really was a telegraph obituary writer's wet dream but all things considered he's not the kind of man you'd expect to find in a green beret command by However, by the beginning of the war, Mickey had seen the Nazi threat for what it really was and had found something else that suited his nonconformist streak.

The commandos let the people make their own decisions in the war. Anyone can die and what decides the action. It may be the action of a private soldier who was left to command the change, it was not expressed like that, but the feeling they gave us that each of us could be as important as a brigadier, we were all individuals, you know, discipline was it mattered. Of course, but I wouldn't have said it was absolutely first, the commando forces were made up of volunteers from any of the regular army units and the philosophy of how they carried out their daily activities was a million miles away from that of the conventional army for a time.

At first they didn't bother with barracks or regimental headquarters because the commandos didn't want to waste training time on mundane tasks like cleaning or maintenance, but instead they simply got digging in a nearby town and there was no sergeant major available to tell them. what to do every minute of the day instead of saying parade tomorrow in Weymouth main square, it could be praying tomorrow at 10 o'clock in Dorchester market and finding your own damn way there, you know you didn't get shouted at. There was no yelling or intimidation or anything you have in the regular army, you led by example, so you know, the officer had to do everything you did, if the officers can do it, I can do it if the officers can Unfortunately, even though the top brass of the British Army were a deeply conservative bunch and didn't really like the new command philosophy, the regular army was doing everything they could to get us to disband, they hated us, some of them were a nuisance and because Our standards were so high that we had eliminated the best of the people in the regiments and, in fact, many chief executives refused to allow people to volunteer in this resistance by the regular army, we certainly got Churchill will back up what I have here.

It is a letter that he wrote to the Secretary of State for War and he says that I have heard that the entire position of the commandos has been questioned, they have been told that there will be no more recruitment and that their future is in the crucible. He says that he is very convinced of it. This says that the defeat of France by Germany was achieved by an incredibly small number of highly equipped elite while the dull mass of the German army came behind and then here for all reasons, therefore, we must develop the idea of ​​command in a way pretty clear as in 1941 due to the end japan joined the war and the royal navy had to send a fleet to the far east so there was less to keep the tirpitz at bay plus we were losing the battle of the atlantic we were losing in

north

africa and London was in ruins, so if Churchill's commandos could really destroy San Nazario, it might give the feeling at home that Britain wasn't done everywhere yet, we were almost in retreat and people were getting really negative, so she wanted something that we should succeed in attacking.

The plan to destroy the 1500 ton point gate was codenamed operation chariot and it was certainly audacious for the commandos to commandeer a couple of destroyers from somewhere and take them from Cornwall to western France and now one of these destroyers would be full of explosives. and while the raf distracted the germans with a bombing

raid

on san nazaire, they somehow slipped through the estuary without being seen by anyone with the gun here here here here here here here here and here or anyone with a searchlight here here here and here and then to see what happens next we have to turn to the actual model built to plan the raid: the electronic destroyer with the explosives would ram the point gates here and the commandos would jump right under all the placed weapons.

To protect the submarine pens here, they would run around shooting everything that moved and blowing up everything that didn't, then after the destroyer exploded destroying the lock gate, they would all gather here on this completely unexposed pier and They would return. on the second destroyer that somehow wouldn't have been blown to pieces while hanging around the estuary for a couple of hours waiting for them to finish, then would sail back up the estuary past all the canyons and return home right in the The plan was presented to the War Office by Louis Mountbatten, head of the combined operations unit, and, predictably, met with resistance.

One commander-in-chief was particularly expressive. I remember he started the meeting by saying: Well, Dickie, oh cocky one, if you're prepared to lose all your soft drinks. and all your ships, I suppose they can take on this task which I consider absolutely impossible. I said that it is the fact that it is considered impossible that makes it possible that the Germans will never think that we will try. Mountbatten's enthusiasm certainly didn't rub off. In the RAF you can see here in these tank operation minutes that the powers that be requested a force of approximately one hundred aircraft for the diversionary bombing in three waves, but in the back Vice Marshal Marshal Saunders says I don't agree. agreement. that such a large scale attack is needed, we want about 20 Whitleys, which are bombers that hover overhead and drop a bomb occasionally, and he's backed up by one of his advisors, a guy called Willits, who actually says that Operation Chariot can whistle to his hundred bombers.

He says Bomber Command cannot provide more than 35 aircraft without harming its other commitments. You might have thought the navy would be interested, especially since the operation was designed to neutralize the Turpits, but no, the commander-in-chief here of Plymouth Command writes that the plan entails. the sacrifice of the landing party and endangers two valuable ships for a small chance of success. He actually says that there is a negligible chance here. There's another guy writing here who says I'm hopeless about the outcome of the impact between the destroyer and the floodgates. I think the floodgates will remain partially intact and the destroyer will look silly if that happens.

Much of the proposed plan ultimately fails, although the navy found a ship called HMS Campbelltown, an American destroyer from World War I that was on loan. For the British, she was not ideal for the job, known for her poor low-speed maneuverability and her large turning radius, but these drawbacks did not discourage the commandos. I thought we would get our way, that I would be hurt romantically and a beautiful one. The nurse took care of me in the hospital. I was very young. You were doing all this heavy training and nothing was happening. I'm very frustrated. I think when they finally told us about the model.

I mean, we thought, "Well, damn, this is going to be something we've been doing." I trained so much in the dark blindfolded during the day in all types of demolition that had to do with dock demolition trains and anything, so when we heard that we were going to blow up the dock facilities in San Jose, I guess it was really a feeling of euphoria at At this stage people were saying well, well, what do you think of me? You see, and I said it's going to be a piece of cake, we're going to go in and get sick, not number six, because that reflects the optimistic attitude we have.

We're going to get in there, blow up this damn dock and get out. After all, we had volunteered for the danger and it seemed highly unlikely that it would be impossible and therefore would succeed. As the commandos prepared on the ground, the navy prepared to attack. Campbelltown, the old bathtub would have to pass 80 gun emplacements on its way to the St Nazaire Estuary, so it had to be disguised and they only had 12 days to do the job. In the end they removed two funnels and tilted the other two back so that at first glance it looked a bit like a German destroyer and then there was the problem of turning it into a ticking time bomb.

This job was assigned to a brilliant young naval officer called Lieutenant Nigel Tibbetts. He was a shy, stuttering guy who when his girlfriend announced that she had taken a liking to him responded well, then I guess we'll have to get married, however, although he wasn't desperately confident with women, he was a genius with explosives, one of the best students Dartmouth Naval College had ever seen, but even he faced difficulties with how to turn an entire ship into a bomb. The first problem he had was deciding where on the ship to place the explosives, because see if you can imagine this is the dock door and this is the ship, what's going to happen after it hits?

I mean, will it end here, in which case you'll want the pump in the front or will it lift up, in which case you'll want the pumps in the middle down? I guess in theory it would be possible if the boat was fast enough to go over the gate and end up at the dock. I mean, who knew that day and night Tibbetts struggled with this until he decided on a location. 40 feet away from the stalk, near the keel, he then had to figure out how to activate the explosives. There was no precise timing device back then, so he had to use fuses like this one.

The idea is to tighten the top here. which breaks a glass capsule inside releasing acid which then slowly burns across a strip of wire now when broken it releases a spring which explodes and activates the detonator. This was well underway in 1942, but there were a couple of problems at the beginning. everything was very susceptible to shaking and knocking; For example, you wouldn't want to ram some floodgates at 40 kilometers per hour with one of these on board because it could explode instantly killing everyone; it was also very vague the strength of the acid varied from wick to wick the strength of the cable varied the tension of the spring varied tibbetts couldn't tell in an hour when the bomb might actually explode choosing it was explosive to use however it was quite simple he opted for amatol and to show how big an explosion it produces we have placed a pound of something similar between the front seats of this car three two one that was a pound tibbetts was going to use four and a quarter tons even if the explosives and fuses could be trusted to function properly and even if they could cross into France undetected and up the estuary without being blown to pieces and even if Campbelltown could hit the floodgates exactly right and the commandos could get out and do what they had to do.

They still had the problem of how to get home because the navy would not provide them with a second destroyer. Instead, they were given 16 of these today. This good mile ml is a tourist boat that takes day trippers around Torbay and is certainly better suited to this. was once for operating cart are made of bakelite plywood was a cheap mass-produced boat designed primarily to make the navy look larger than it actually was certainly not particularly good in the open sea tended to roll poorly in a swell that made everyone on board seasick, it wouldn't be so bad if it was only used to bring the soldiers home, but this small fleet would also be used to take half of the commandos to san nazaire, so there would be 15 commandos trapped here. with all their equipment and when they reached the other end they were expected to get out and start fighting immediately, there was not only seasickness to worry about because, while each ship had small arms fore and aft, it had no armor.

Not really, all that stood between the German guns and the men down here were a few planks of wood, and to make matters worse, each ship was equipped with two 500-gallon long-range fuel tanks that were completely exposed on the cover. Campbelltown was a bomb on purpose. These things were bombs by accident, honestly it's hard to think of any boat less suited for the job at hand. The commandos were tough men, good fighters, but they were also chosen for their intelligence, so they must have known that the chances of reaching San Nazaire were small, the chances of getting the job done were microscopic, and the chances of returning home in a short time. wooden boat groaning under the weight of the exposed fuel tanks beyond an alerted enemy were practically non-existent, they should have known that operation car for the vast majority was going to be a one-way ticket we were all told that if we wanted to leave a letter to a family member or loved one we could do it and we would write on the envelope that would be posted in the event of my failure to return and there was a Sergeant Bill Gibson who I knew everyone very well and I remember seeing his face and knowing that he knew that they were going to kill him, my dear father, when you understand this, I will be one of them.

Of the many who have sacrificed their unimportant lives for whatever small ideals we may have, I can only hope that by giving my life, generations to come can somehow remember us and benefit from what we have done at a time like this. I turn to you dad and to God I hope there will soon be peace for all my love for all I will remind you of your beloved son bill somehow I thought it was unfortunate to write your announcement as your parents no my attitude was to return two of uh The men came to me and they said to me: would you take these letters home to our wives if they kill us?

And I said, but wait a minute, I'm coming with you. Oh, they won't kill you. I said they were both murdered. The attackers of San Nazaire were. They are not allowed to reveal details of the operation to their loved ones, but for bomb designer Nigel Tibbetts, recently married and father of a young son, the thought of keeping his wife in the dark was too much, so he told her. and she said afterwards that They both knew that he would not return, so the commandos met here at Falmouth in Cornwall, ready to join Campbell Town and the small boats that were anchored in the bay, Lord Mountbatten gathered them all together and, of course, very unusual way, he said. to them that any man who wanted to resign could leave without a stain on his character, none of them did so At 2 p.m. on March 26, 1942, the navy set sail with 264 commandos and 357 navy personnel to board, that is, a total of 621.

Only 227 men would return. I had enough of the night to read the book I was reading and I focused on reading this book. The thought that crosses your mind is: I hope I can do my part. uh, you know, without giving in to fear, we chatted among ourselves about what we were going to do and we all went through it with our boys, you know, me and my four boys just went through what we were going to do, I certainly thought to my inside, oh my God, I hope I don't show fear in front of my men if I'm scared, tense, I guess it would be the anticipation, yeah, fortunately, I think we were more worried because it was hard because, uh, it's very uh, as you can imagine, it's physically exhausting being dizzy all the time, but we were lucky it was calm. 33 hours later they reached the mouth of the estuary and Campbelltown Lieutenant Commander Captain Sam Beatty told Tibbetts to put the fuses in his After he began crawling across the estuary.

Ideally she would have stayed in the deep water channel, the channel that the Tirpitz would have used, but this would have meant hugging the northern coast right under the noses of the German centuries, so she had to go to the right. through the middle although the water, even at high tide, was only 10 feet deep to reduce the ship's draft, much of the heavy armor and large guns had been removed, so if it ran aground it would be a easy target. I crossed sandbanks a couple of times and crawled a little, but it was so fast that you didn't have time to think, Oh my God, if I'm stranded here I'll be shot to pieces, it's hard to really know what German is. were the gunners doing in this pillbox when the campbelltown was chugging along, I mean, yes, it had been hastily converted to look a bit like a German ship, but it was moving through shallow water, he would have thought that would have alerted them to the fact that something was up, but obviously it wasn't because they didn't open fire and neither did the guns at the next blockhouse or the next, but then things started to go wrong, the RAF had finally agreed to carry out a bombing raid, but the pilots had They were told not to bomb if there were clouds in case they hit French civilians, unfortunately it was cloudy and they hadn't been told what to do, so they just flew around alerting the Germans to the fact that something was above, with their flag guns trained . very easily to the surface of the river along with their searchlights, the Germans now suspected that Heath Robinson's modifications of Campbelltown and the false German flag would not deceive them for long and, sure enough, they were soon challenged by a signal from the shore, but the British had a trick up their sleeve, we found the German code books, the naval code books and the Germans didn't know we had them, so we had the passwords and the counters up to date and we were using them, that's the constellation of German signalman who was signaling asking us who we were and we were, we were showing the correct answers with a friendly force coming for the night, we have a damaged ship or something, you see, and we put them off twice, the Germans opened fire , but each time they were silenced by reassuring signals coming from Campbelltown, this meant that the ships could get closer and closer to the target, although the Germans realized that yes, incredibly, it really was a British raiding party sailing right through from their main gate, they managed to get to this point here, just 2000 yards from the dock gates, which are around the headland, maybe you can see it right over there and all hell broke loose, there was a huge amount of stuff hitting Campbelltown, I mean, it was absolutely shocking. our poor little ml, but campbelltown was the big target, you know, and there was a kind of spotlight glare, the air was full of things hissing and horning and screaming, and each one of them deadly, the main focus of the german gunners was the campbelltown bridge where captain beaty was trying to maintain a constant course shouting direction instructions the champion at the wheel was killed his place was taken by another sailor who was killed almost immediately then a guy called montgomery who was a royal engineer took control and he was standing there thinking what do I do with this when suddenly there was a tap on his shoulder and a voice said I'll take it old man and it was tibbetts the intellectual the brilliant scientist from dartmouth the man who designed the bomb on the bow he found himself at the helm when the destroyer was in its final charge.

I remember a red hot shell passing through the wardroom just above our heads and out, it would not explode if only one shell hit the rudder or the engine or worse. the bomb on the bow the mission would have been over but at this point it wouldn't have mattered because beatty was lined up at the wrong lighthouse so he was heading towards the wrong target at the last minute a searchlight identified the lighthouse there the Green One and Beatty realized He realized his mistake and barked in order, so Tibbetts turned the helm hard to the right to try to avoid the jetty here and then hard to the left again and you'll remember he's on a boat that doesn't handle 22 knots down the road. night under a hail of enemy fire and still managed to skim the jetty there, it's just an extraordinarily brilliant piece of navigation, they turned the old model on its head but they really changed at this point and very soon you'll be able to pick the point gates , there they are, look there, maybe I don't know, there are 500 meters to go, starting it now, the old lady, imagine what it would have been like to have been doing this that night in March 1942, dark reflectors. cannon, machine gun, massive fire coming from that shore, aiming right at it, what's the impact going to be, it's going to be huge, so the ship reared up and placed Tibbett's quadruple bomb right over the door and despitethe firestorm, Beatty turned to his men and said well, we were four minutes late, the navy had done their part of the job brilliantly and now, in the two and a half hours before Campbelltown broke out, the army had to disembark and create havoc.

Yes, the Germans had arranged gun emplacements and yes, they were outnumbered. the British by twenty to one, but that was no problem because the raiding party, remember, were commandos, maybe they were chosen for their intelligence and free thinking, but my God, they were tough, the backbone of their training was marching fast and each commando unit would compete to see who could go the furthest in the shortest time. One group covered 63 miles in 19 hours. Another marched 53 miles from Harlick to the top of Mount Snowdon and then back down again in 17 and a half hours. Remember they did this while carrying 60 pound backpacks.

On their backs, determination is the most important thing, even on fast marches where our big goal was to get the guys to cover 15 miles at full strength in just under three hours, finish in the salt field and shoot and then calmly descend to the top of Ben. nevis it's all part of equipping them mentally to do anything not only was the commando training tough but it was also revolutionary the regular army would stay fit by doing star jumps in physical education equipment the commandos trained on difficult terrain in battle uniform they invented the assault course in In fact, his methods were so advanced that they are still used by elite forces today.

The determination to do things you thought you couldn't do, like on the Tarzan course, on a rope bridge or on death line, and don't forget the champions and commandos. They weren't super men, they were regular guys from all walks of life, but they were well trained to gain the advantage and instead of training with weapons at firing ranges, the commandos practiced in massive live-fire battle drills. , all weapons training was offensive-oriented. action, a small example, the Bren pistol was normally fired from the ground, but why not use it by firing it from the hip? This was an innovation and not only were they revolutionary with weapons, but they also learned things about unarmed combat that no regular soldier had even known about.

I've heard about tackling a guy with your bare hands, knocking him out, ruining his prospects, and pinching his gun and gold watch. It has one, the key element was convincing yourself that you can do anything and that you can only do it in the military sense if you train people to drive them and overcome their inner fears and give them supreme confidence in san nazaire the commando assault group would need all that trust just to get to land we went up on deck and went to the bowers of the ship well, the 12 pounder gun had been hit there were many corpses lying around the place there was a lot of blood on the deck and there was a hole in the deck.

I remember Johnny Proctor lying there with his leg blown off cheering us on when I came up on deck there was a bright flash and a deafening explosion and I felt a blow to my knee that felt like a sledgehammer, it hit me to the side and I fell to the deck and I was lying there and suddenly someone grabbed the tower, the second one stood me up and said: you're right, boy and it was Major Copeland, he said that bumble wrote that on the court don't stay around here, it's decidedly unhealthy. Tibbetts and Gough were there and they were holding their ladders and these two guys were laughing and cursing etc. and I think we probably went down maybe even eight of them. feet down on the mate the next thing was uh Germans said um handy hook and I told you useful hook while Tiger was playing with Jerry the demolition crews were on their way to their targets one of the main targets was this underground bunker because down there and no I'm absolutely sure how I got there, but anyway down there are the pumps we use to empty all the water from the dock stairs.

The job of destroying this place was entrusted to a team of four commandos led by Lieutenant Stuart Chan. In peacetime he had to place the explosives even though on the way to the bomb house he had been wounded in the left leg, right arm and both hands unfortunately the explosives had been pre-equipped in England with very short fuses, so Singing sent his men back to the surface and in relative safety knowing that when he lit the fuses he would only have 90 seconds to climb seven flights of stairs and find your way through this maze of antennas. hallways in total darkness because there was no light down here at the time, while he was pretty badly injured, he's a brave man, the chanter made it and the pump house was gone and meanwhile other teams were having similar successes with the winding houses in both ends of the spring.

I went up to my colonel and saluted him and said, "We've blown up the North Winding House" and he said well done, oh boy, so I told him I'm ready to go back to England now, sir, at half past two in the morning, the surviving commandos. They arrived here where they had met to meet the small boats that would take them home. They were very happy with how things had gone, but the euphoria was short-lived because the scene that greeted them at the estuary was almost entirely horrible. of the wooden mls with their fuel tanks exposed had been blown to pieces according to witnesses the entire estuary was on fire the cats were drowning there were puddles of fuel burning in the water you had to kick with your feet I'm crazy for trying it Steer the raft far from the river of flames and it was absolutely hell there was a kind of black sea you could see some kind of ships sinking and here shops that came from the river and so on um and then, very quickly, the colonel said that it was It was obviously not there was transportation home, so he said, "Okay, we'll fight our way out of the city and split up into small groups and individually cross the Spanish border.

I thought that was a bit of a difficult task." It was a massive 350 miles away, but before they could even leave they would have to fight their way out of San Nazario, so that's 5,000 Germans who at this stage were awake, alert and organized against less than 120 British, half of who were injured. If you are fighting on the street, you should secure any intersections. Tiger Watson turned this corner and came face to face with a German sniper. He ran forward and saw him lean forward. He pulled the trigger on my Thompson submachine gun and, typically, Watson, the magazine was empty.

Unfortunately, sexy. His magazine wasn't empty and his shot broke my arm and bent me over. A group of Germans ran towards him and one of them used the cliché expression to you, the war is over and I thought, well, I still have to escape. In the end, but I don't feel up to it at the time, I knew I was sure they would kill me because there was a guard post, a tower, and I had to get through. The Germans must have seen me and knew I got very far and they did, but they hit me on the back of the arm and legs.

By chance, the stockbroker who had blown up the pump house arrived at this point when a machine gun bullet was fired from the top of the submarine pens. There they took out his knee joint and he could no longer walk, so they captured him too. The commandos realized that they were trapped on an island and that the only way to get off of it and into the city was to cross this bridge that was guarded by what must have seemed like half the German army when they got here, only 80 of them, but they clearly still had some fighting spirit left because they simply formed into a sort of large mass and Captain Roy, charged, now led the assault.

Across the bridge, streams of bullets hitting those beams, bouncing off the road, machine guns, pom-poms, rifles, it was like a very good Fifth of November, only little by little the commando numbers dwindled until the remaining men with Little ammunition was removed to the ground. In Corrin Purden's Town we ended up in a basement, suddenly we heard all these screams outside and then the door burst open and there were Germans standing there with their girl helmets and their guns, looking terribly tense, frankly, if I had been there and I would have laughed, thrown a couple of hand grenades and finished us off, but they didn't, and the colonel with the pipe in his mouth just came up the stairs and said, well, we've done what we came to do.

Do you know that when dawn broke the battle was over? Only five of the landing party would eventually reach Spain and freedom and 222 would escape the horror in the few remaining wooden boats of the approximately 600 men who had When we arrived in France the previous night, 214 had been taken prisoner and 168 had died. and, worse still, it was 7am, three hours after the bomb on the nose of Campbelltown was supposed to have gone off, after we were washed ashore, they put us in the back of the A lorry arrived at the city and we were in this big room and the Germans brought in a sailor, they pulled him out of the river and they put him on the table and they said, "You know, you try to revive him, we try to get the water out." from their lungs and at that moment we were saying to each other, you know the city of camels has not risen, the British could only console themselves that despite the failure at least they had fought like lions, they were putting us behind the Germans.

They were incredible, yes, so they probably couldn't believe that someone would venture to a heavily defended underwater base. Some of the stories of bravery were incredible in the estuary. One of the surviving MLS had come face to face with the most powerful German destroyer, the British gunner, a commando named Sergeant Tom Durhan was asked to surrender on several occasions, but despite being shot 16 times The story does not end there because the captain of the German destroyer was so impressed by Darren's bravery that when he landed he went to the trouble of finding the senior British officer. range and said, "Look, I don't know who was on that gun on that little one." ship, but whoever it was should broadcast your victory and got one of the five awarded as a result of that night's action, so the commandos had fought well, but all they had to show for it was a destroyed pump house and two damaged winding stations. even at 10 a.m. campbelltown had not yet exploded and at that time the ship was packed with german souvenir hunters there was a real possibility that the bomb would be discovered and defused sometime in the morning mickey byrne was driven here right by where campbelltown was embedded in the doors and that required a remarkable performance.

He couldn't seem pleased that he was plagued by Germans. I couldn't look mocking wondering why the bomb hadn't gone off and I couldn't look scared that it might explode at that very moment, blowing it to pieces. Among the prisoners was Captain Sambiti from Campbelltown who is being held in a nearby cabin. I was interrogated by a German who spoke. Very good Englishman discovered that I had been in Cameltown and he was commenting that there was no use in ramming a cassón so hard with a flimsy ship. At that moment there was a roar. The explosion destroyed the door.

Thousands of gallons of water roared, taking with them what was left. of the British ship and the German souvenir hunters found pieces of them on the roof of the submarine pens 400 meters away a German non-commissioned officer ran into the room where we were and said: we are going to shoot them all, we are going to kill them all , we were just so kind of exhausted and everything, we were delighted that the explosion had happened and we just said, please don't scream, keep going. Hitler was so incensed that he later issued his infamous order that in future all captured commandos would be executed as The damage done to the Normandy dock by the spies, not surprisingly, was so severe that it was not repaired until 1947, two years after the war ended.

As a result, Tirpitz was denied a base of operations in the Atlantic and as a result was forced to spend most of the war in a fjord in Norway. It was eventually destroyed by RAF bombers in 1944 and incredibly This powerful battleship, the pride of the German navy, went to the bottom without even a fishing boat having ever sunk in the smoke of giant explosions. The Tirpitz capsizes and sinks. The price for rendering this great ship powerless had been high. british dead around 400 germans and 16 french shot by mistake by ss troops still the attack meant that churchill could tell the british and the world that they were not done yet and it helped france too, one very important thing is what the French Prime Minister told us on our first return to Nazareth.

He said thatyou were the first to give us hope and what about the men, the commandos and the sailors who brought them to this, the

greatest

. While Tommy Durant, the sergeant who engaged a German destroyer, was captured and died of his wounds shortly afterwards, the bomb's designer, Nigel Tibbetts, after steering the Campbelltown towards the dock gate, helped the wounded men to reach a nearby ml and headed home. but his small boat was hit by machine gun fire and as his wife had predicted, he died after being captured. Mickey Byrne was posted to Colditz after the war.

He became a journalist and today lives in Wales, where his hobby is reading poetry. What world! we could have done it. Tiger Watson was sent to Spangenberg Camp after returning home. He graduated as a doctor and ended up in Africa helping leprosy victims. I can't imagine all my senses were so alert. You know, every sense of hearing and sight and your pumping heart will definitely be the most exciting thing in my life. It made you feel like you could withstand the test. I think it was a relief to know that one didn't fall apart. I'm sure today's youth would do it. do the same thing we did, I'm sure they would.

I think in some way or another it's such a strange thing for phlegmatic Brits to do this sort of thing and I could see us doing it again, but I always remember it when I think about this. And it was after the war that I found a quote from Mark Twain that said that courage is recognizing fear. Courage is conquering fear. And that is absolutely true. It couldn't be more true. Yes, you were afraid, but you couldn't afford to be a coward. Today, great moments in military history are marked with imposing monuments and their anniversary honored with much pomp and ceremony, but to find a monument to the greatest raid of all you have to go to a car park in Fullmeth, in Cornwall, It's just a propped up rock. against some railings and looks quite small.

I've always had the feeling that anything that really offers any hope, whether international or national or even individuals, we have an idea of ​​our own and it's impossible, never think about it, try it, good night.