The Legendary Commando Raid At St. Nazaire | The Greatest Raid Of All Time | Timeline

Hello everyone and welcome to this

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line documentary. My name is Dan Snow and I want to tell you about the story. HitTV. It's like Netflix for history. Hundreds of exclusive documentaries and interviews with the best historians in the world. We have an exclusive offer available. Timeline fans, if you go to History Hit TV, you can follow the information below this video or just Google History Hit TV and use the code Timeline. You'll get a special introductory offer, go and check it out in the mean

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, enjoy this video a couple of years ago I did a TV show about my father-in-law who won a Victoria Cross in Arnhem and since then I've been looking for a sequel, another nugget of Incredible heroism in the face of impossible odds, of course, most of them.

War stories are well known, well documented and well celebrated, the Battle of Britain, rocks shifting etc., but one day while browsing in a second hand bookstore I came across a story that is barely known. or celebrate: it is the story of an incredible battle. battle where more SCVs were obtained more quickly than any other action in World War II 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 world Outside knows nothing about this extraordinary battle, they certainly know it in military circles and call it the

greatest

foreign

raid

of all. 1941 the Battle of Britain was won, but the Battle of the Atlantic was still in full swing and we were losing German U-boats. making a mockery among the convoys bringing supplies from the United States nine million tons of ships had already sunk Britain's shipyards simply could not replace it fast enough Britain was beginning to starve Winston Churchill said in his Diaries the only one that really scared me in the war was the U-Boat Peril said he was even more looking forward to the Battle of the Atlantic than the Battle of Britain and then into the equation the terpits sailed This modern battleship in the war even though The harama was a foot thick, could advance at 30 knots and with eight 15-inch guns it packed a big 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 at Churchill. War Rooms, each of these points on this map represents the movement of a convoy. If the terpits got into each other beyond the reach of the Royal Air Force, we would almost certainly lose the war. It was that simple. However, there was a drawback to the size of the terpitzer. suffer damage while in the middle of the Atlantic, she couldn't return to Germany for repairs because that would mean limping through Britain, passing the RAF through our Coastal Fleet and that would be a death sentence for her, so she had to go to a dike 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 terpit ship the size of this one, this is the Normandy Dog at Saint Nazare.

She was 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, she had to be destroyed. Now the only way to put this dock out of commission 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 networks, it could not be done by land because the north of France was in German hands and for two reasons it could not be done from the air: firstly, the bombings of World War II were notoriously inaccurate, only 22 percent of the bombs fell within five miles of the foreign target. in the best of cases, and it would not be the best of cases, because right next to the dry dock there were 14 pens for submarines, these were some of the most precious facilities of the German Armory and, to protect them, the area of ​​San Nazare bristled. with 80 anti-aircraft guns and artillery pieces and in the city itself there were 5,000 soldiers destroying the dock and then using conventional forces, the Army, the Air Force and the Navy were ruled out, so the job was given to a group of men that they actually had The newly formed Commandos The Commandos were the brainchild of Churchill, who had seen similar teams operate successfully in both the Boer War and the First World War.

A small number of highly trained soldiers would quickly cause a large amount of damage and then leave before the enemy had time to organize. Churchill liked this, he called it the Butcher and Run approach, so what kind of men were they? Well, if popular myth is anything to go by, they were lantern-jawed killing machines that could head-butt their way through. through oak doors, although the reality was quite different Gerard Brett in my Richmond was in my 12 Commando and he had written a book on the Byzantine era or Byzantine architecture or something like that. A fellow who gained a Divinity degree from Trinity College Dublin Lance corporate Potts. had been inactive at Oxford or Cambridge, they included a poacher and a TT motorcyclist, so the mitzvah what they represented was a complete 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 at Winchester Oxford and then he met Guy Burgess, the guy who became a Soviet spy and they became lovers. Mickey, although he became a Nazi sympathizer, went to Germany and met. Hitler was given a signed copy of Mein Kampf and was one of the first people to be shown Dachau, the concentration camp, he met Bertrand Russell, he met Audrey Hepburn, he met the king and queen, he even met Roosevelt, he really was a writer of telegraphic obituaries. A dream, but all things considered, he was not the kind of man one would expect to find wearing a

commando

green beret at the start of the war.

However, Mickey had seen the Nazi threat for what it really was and had found something else that suited the Maverick streak of him. The

commando

s were allowed to decide in the war Anyone Anyone can die and what decides the action perhaps the action of a soldier Sergio is allowed to come to the trench it was not said like that but they gave us the feeling that each of us could be as important as a brigadier. We were all individuals. You know discipline does matter, of course, but I wouldn't have said it came 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 very different from that of the conventional military.

For starters, 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. Instead, they just got a dig in a nearby town and there was no sergeant. available to tell them what to do every minute of the day instead of saying parade tomorrow in Weymouth main square, it could be pray tomorrow at 10 o'clock. in these um in Dorchester market and you find your own damn there, you know you didn't get yelled at, there wasn't any of this yelling or bullying or anything that you got in the regular army, you led by example, so you know the The officer had to do everything you did if the officers can do it I can do it if the officers can do it unfortunately, although the top brass of the British Army were a deeply conservative bunch and didn't really like the Command's new philosophy, the regular . one of us who were doing the best tickets was suspended, they hated us, some of them we were a nuisance and because our standards were so high we had weeded out the best of the regiments and in fact many CEOs refused.

Allowing people to volunteer this resistance by the regular army certainly supported Churchill. What I have here 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 commands is being questioned. He has been told that there will be no more recruitment and that his future is in the Melting Pot. He says that he is very convinced of this. He says that Germany's defeat of France was achieved by an incredibly small number of highly equipped Elite, while the dull mass of the German army advanced. behind and then here for all reasons therefore we must develop the idea of ​​Command quite clearly as 1941 drew to a close, Japan joined the war and the Royal Navy had to send a fleet to the Far East , so there was even less to keep the terpits in Bay, what's more, we were losing the Atlantic battle we were losing in North Africa and London was in ruins, so with Churchill's commandos they were really able to crush Saint Nazer, could give the feeling at home that Britain was not yet finished almost everywhere. they were retreating and people were getting really negative and so you wanted something that was a successful aggression.

The plan to destroy the 1,500-ton point gate was codenamed Operation Chariot and it was certainly audacious for the commandos to seize a couple of destroyers from somewhere. and take them from Cornwall to western France and now one of these destroyers would be packed with explosives and while the RAF distracted the Germans with a bombing

raid

on St Nazare, they would somehow sneak up to the estuary without being seen by anyone at the gun . emplacements here here here here here here here and here or by 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 that the Destroyer with the explosives would ram.

The Gates points here and the Commandos jumped up and right under all the weapons placed to protect the submarine pens here they ran around shooting anything that moved and blowing up everything that didn't, after the Destroyer exploded destroying the gate. lock they would all gather here at this completely unexposed jetty and return to the second destroyer which somehow wouldn't have been blown to pieces while it was hanging around in the estuary for a couple of hours waiting for them. To finish, she would sail back down the estuary, pass all the canyons, and return home. The plan was presented to the War Office by Louis Mountbatten, head of the combined operations unit, and, predictably, met with resistance.

However, one commander-in-chief was particularly vocal. We started the meeting by saying, "Well, take it if you are willing to lose all your soft drinks and all your boats. I suppose you can take on this task, which I or God is absolutely impossible. I said that it is the fact that it is considered impossible that which makes it possible that the germs will never think we'll try. Matt Batten's enthusiasm certainly didn't rub off on the RAF. You can see here in these minutes of Operation Chariot that the powers that be requested a force of about a hundred aircraft for the diversion. bombardment, eh, in three waves, but in the rear Vice Marshal Sornby says I don't agree that such a large scale of attack is needed, we want about 20 whitlies which are bombers that hover overhead dropping the occasional bomb and he's backed by one of his advisors, this guy is called Willits, who actually says that Operation Chariot can whistle his hundred bombers in.

He says that bomber command can't provide more than 35 planes without hurting their other commitments. You would have thought that the Navy would be interested, especially since the operation was designed to neutralize the terpits but no, the commander in chief here of the Plymouth command writes uh, the plan involves the sacrifice of the landing party and endangers two ships valuable for a small chance of success. It actually says insignificant channels here, there's another guy writing here. Who says I'm not hopeful about the outcome of the impact between the destroyer and the locks? I think the locks will remain partially intact and the Destroyer will look silly if that happens.

Much of the proposed plan eventually fails, although the Navy did. find a ship, it was called HMS Campbelltown, an American destroyer from World War I that was on loan to the British. It was not ideal for the job, it was known for its poor low-speed maneuverability and large turning circle, but these drawbacks did not dampen the spirits of the Commandos. I thought we would get our way, that I would be romantically hurt by a beautiful nurse who He would take care of me in the hospital. I was very young, you were doing all this heavy training and I didn'tnothing was happening, so I got very frustrated, so I think when we were finally told about the model, I mean, we thought, well, this is going to be something that we had been trained on so much in the dark blindfolded during the day in all forms of demolition that had to do with Doc demolition trains and anything, so when we heard that we were going to blow up the docking stations in San Jose.

I guess really, it was a feeling of euphoria right now. People were like, "Well, what do you think?" and I said, "It's going to be a piece of cake." A noxic was going to enter there, not number six because that reflected the optimistic attitude, we were going to enter there, he would show the dock and we would leave; After all, we had volunteered for the danger and it seemed like a long shot that it was impossible and therefore would succeed. As the commandos prepared on the ground, the Navy prepared to attack the town of Campbell, the old bathtub.

It would have to pass through 80 gun emplacements on its way to the San Nazare 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 backwards so that it could be seen at a glance. It looked a bit like a German destroyer and then there was the problem of turning it into a time bomb. This job was entrusted to a A young and brilliant naval officer called Lieutenant Nigel Tibbetts, he was a shy and stammering guy who, when his girlfriend announced to him that she was She had grown fond of him and replied, "Well, then I." I guess we'll have to get married, though, while he wasn't hopelessly confident with women, he was a genius with explosives, one of the top students at 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, if you can imagine, this is the dock door and this is the ship. What will happen after she hits. I mean, will it end here? in which case you want the pump in the front or it's going to lift up, in which case you want the pumps in the middle down. I suppose, in theory, it would be possible if the boat was fast enough to actually go over the gate and end up at the dock. I mean, who knew, day and night, Tibbetts struggled with this until he settled on a spot 40 feet behind the stalk, near the keel, and then he had to figure it out. how to set off explosives back then there was no precise timing device, so he had to use fuses like this.

The idea is to squeeze the top here which breaks a glass capsule inside releasing acid which then slowly burns through a strip of wire. Now when it breaks it releases a spring which explodes and activates the detonator and this It was very advanced in 1942, but there were a couple of problems, firstly, it was very susceptible to jolts and bumps that, for example, you wouldn't want to ram. some floodgates at 25 miles per hour with one of these on board because it could explode instantly killing everyone. He was also very lazy. The strength of the acid varied from one fuse to another.

The strength of the cable varied. Spring tension varied at Tibbetts. He couldn't tell within an hour when the bomb might go off. The use of a foreign explosive was quite simple. He opted for amatol and to show how big of a blast it produces, we placed a pound of something similar between the front seats. Of this car, which weighed one pound, Tibbetts was going to use four and a quarter tons, even if he could be trusted that the explosives and fuses worked properly and even if they could cross into France undetected and go up the estuary without burning. to Smithereens and even if Campbelltown could hit the lock gates exactly correctly and the commandos could go out and do what they needed to do, they still had the problem of how to get home again because the Navy would not provide them with a second destroyer.

Instead, today they were given 16 of these. This Fair mile ml is a tourist boat that takes day trippers around Torbay and is certainly better suited to this than ever for cart operation. They made a great lightweight plywood. She was a cheap mass production ship primarily designed. To make the Armada look bigger than it really was, God forbid everyone who sailed in it certainly wasn't particularly good at the open sea, it tended to roll badly in a swell that made everyone on board seasick, isn't it? so bad if it were. It was only used to bring the soldiers home, but this small fleet would also be used to bring half of the commandos to San Lazer, so there would be 15 commandos trapped here with all their equipment and when they reached the other end.

You were expected to get out and start fighting right away, it wasn't just seasickness that you had to worry about because while each ship had small cannons on the stern and bow, it didn't have any armor, that wasn't really all that stood in the way. between the German guns and the men down here. There were a few wooden planks and to make matters worse, each boat was equipped with two 500 gallon long range fuel tanks that were completely exposed on the deck. Campbelltown was a bomb on purpose. These things were bombs by accident. Honestly, it's hard to think about. of any ship less suited to 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 José were small and the chances of making the job.

They were microscopic and the chances of them returning home in a wooden boat groaning under the weight of exposed fuel tanks past an alerted enemy were practically non-existent; They should have known that Operation Chariot for the vast majority was going to be a one-way street. On the ticket, we were all told that if we wanted to leave a letter for the next king or his loved ones, we could do so and write on the envelope that it would be sent in case it couldn't be returned to Gibson, who knew them all very well. Well, in fact, I remember seeing his face and knowing that he knew they were going to kill him, my dear father, when you receive this I will be one of the many who have sacrificed their unimportant lives for the little ideals we may have.

I only hope that by giving my life, future generations can somehow remember us and benefit from what we have done at this time. I turn to You, dad and to God, I hope there will soon be peace for everyone, my love. everyone, I will remember you, your beloved son, bill, in some way, I am an associate, I am lucky to write your last letters, your parents, no, my attitude was: I am going back, two men came to me and said: would you take these letters to our wives? yes they killed us and I said but wait a minute I'm coming with you oh you won't be careful like that they were both killed the Sun as their Raiders were not allowed to reveal details of the operation to their loved ones but For bomb designer Nigel Tibbetts, newly 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 he wouldn't come back, so as the commandos met here in Falmouth, in Cornwall, ready to join Campbelltown and the small boats that were anchored in the bay.

Lord Mountbatten called them all together and, very unusually, told them that any man who wanted to resign could leave without a stain on his character. None of them did so. At 2pm on 26 March 1942 the Armada set sail. With 264 commandos and 357 Navy personnel on board, that is, a total of 621 men, only 227 returned to read a book that I was reading and I concentrated on reading this book and the thought that crosses your mind is : I hope I can do my part, you know, without giving in to fear. We talk to each other about what we're going to do and we all go through it with our guys, you know?

Me and my four guys just went through what we were going to do. I certainly thought, My God, I hope I don't show fear in front of my men if I do it. I'm scared, Kent started to be a thing, uh, anticipation, yeah, fortunately, I think we were more worried because it was difficult because it's very, as you can imagine, physically exhausting to be dizzy all the time, but we were lucky that it was calm 33 hours later. He reached the mouth of the estuary and Campbelltown's Lieutenant Commander Captain Sam Beatty ordered Tibbetts to set the fuses of his bomb and then began to creep up the estuary.

Ideally he would have stuck to the deep water channel, the channel where the tirpitz would be found. would have used, but this would have meant hugging the north coast right under the noses of the German centuries, so he had to go right down the middle even though the water, even at high tide, was only 10 feet deep to reduce the draft of the ship to a large extent. The heavy armor and big weapons had been removed, so if she was grounded like a sitting duck, we crossed sandbanks a couple of times and dragged her around a bit, but it was so fast we didn't have time to think.

My God, if I'm marooned here I'll be shot to pieces, it's hard to really know what the German gunners were doing in this blockhouse when Campbelltown passed by, I mean, yes, she had hastily converted to look a bit like a German. The ship, but was moving through shallow water, he would have thought that would have alerted them to the fact that something was happening, but obviously it didn't because they didn't open fire, nor did the weapons in the next pillbox or the one after that, but then things started to go wrong, the RAF finally agreed to carry out a bombing raid, but the pilots were told not to bomb if there were clouds in case they hit French civilians, unfortunately it was cloudy and they hadn't been.

They were told what to do instead, so they simply flew around alerting the Germans to the fact that something was happening, their flag guns very easily directed towards the surface of the river and their searchlights, with the Germans now suspicious of the modifications. of Robinson in Campbelltown and the false German flag. would not fool them for long and sure enough they were soon challenged by a signal from the coast, but the British had a trick up their sleeve. We found the German code books. Naval code books and the Germans didn't know we had them. and so we had the updated passwords, the Council signals and we were using them, that's the constellation of the German signaler that was sending signals asking who we were and we were, we were returning the correct answers, there was a friendly Force that was coming for us.

The night we had a damaged ship or something, you see, and stopping them twice, the Germans opened fire, but each time they were silenced by reassuring signals coming from the town of Campbell, which meant that the ships could get closer each time. more to the objective. Finally, although the Germans realized that yes, incredibly, it really was a British raiding party sailing right through their main gate and they managed to reach this point here, just 2000 yards from the point. The gates, which are right around the promontory, you might be able to see. There and all hell broke loose, there was a lot of stuff hitting Campbelltown.

I mean, we're absolutely beating our poor little windmills, but Campbelltown is the big target, you know, and there was a sort of screeching spotlight glare when everyone. In Lethal, the main focus of the German gunners was Campbelltown Bridge, where Captain BT was attempting to maintain a constant course by shouting direction instructions. The guy he was driving died. His place was taken by another road who died almost immediately. So a guy named Montgomery, who was a real engineer, took control and 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 Egghead, the brilliant Dartmouth scientist, the man who designed the bomb on the bow, found himself behind the wheel while the Destroyer was on its final charge.

I remember a red-hot shell passing through the guard room just above our heads and out. would explode if only one shell hit the rudder or the engine would worsen the bomb in the bow the mission would have been over but at this point it wouldn't have mattered because BT was lined up at the wrong lighthouse so he was heading towards the wrong target at the last minute, A searchlight illuminated the lighthouse there, the green one, and BT realized his mistake and shouted an order, so Tibbetts turned the wheel hard to the right to try to avoid the pier here and then hard to the left again. time and You'll remember that it's on a boat that can't handle 22 knots at night under a hail of enemy fire, and yet it managed to be legit, there's just an extraordinarily shiny piece of roof that surrounded the old model. but it's really changing at this point and pretty soon you can make out the dark doors, there they are, look, there they are, maybe I don't know,500 meters to go, really getting it going now, the old girl I liked to have been doing. this on that night in March 1942 Dart searchlights cannon machine gun massive fire coming from that bank pointing directly at it how will the impact be enormous it rose putting the four ton Typix bomb right on the door and despite the storm of fire Beatty turned to his man 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 exploded, the Army had to get ashore and create havoc.

Yes, the Germans had fixed the gun emplacements and Yes, they outnumbered the British 20 to 1. But that was not a problem because the assault group remembers that they were commandos. They may have been chosen for their intelligence and free thinking, but my goodness, they were tough, the backbone of their training was fast marching and every command. The 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 Harlech to the top of Mount Snowden 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 15 miles with all their strength in just under three hours, finish, we're in the salt field and shooting and then calmly climbing to the top of Ben Nevis is 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 in shape by doing star jumps with the physical education equipment the Commandos trained in hostile terrain. dressed in battle, they invented the assault course, in fact their methods were so advanced that they are still used by elite forces today, a determination to do things you thought you couldn't do, like in Tarzan's course in a rope bridge or on the death line and Don't forget that the champions and commanders were not super men, they were ordinary guys in all walks of life, but they were well trained to gain the advantage and, instead of Arms training with rifles, Ranger commandos practiced in massive live-fire battle drills.

All weapons training was geared towards offensive action. A small example of Brendan normally shooting on the ground, but why not use him shooting from the hip? This was an innovation and not only were they revolutionary with weapons, but they also learned things about unarmed combat. No normal soldier had ever heard of tackling a guy with your bare hands, punching his mouth, ruining his outlook, and pinching his gun and arm. Gold watch too, if you have one, the key element was convincing yourself that they should do anything and that can only be done in the military sense if you train people to push them and overcome their inner fears and give them supreme confidence, please come back. in San José, the Commando assault group would need all that confidence just to reach land.

We went up on deck and went to the bow of the ship where the 12 pounder had been hit. There were many corpses lying around. blood on the cover and there was a hole in the cover. I remember Johnny Proctor lying there with his leg blown off cheering us on when I came up on deck there was a bright flush and a deafening explosion and I felt a blow on my knee that felt like a sledgehammer and it hit me with a saw and I fell to the deck and I was laying there. there and suddenly someone walked up to The Rook second he pulled me in the face and said you're right boy and it was Major Copeland, he said Don't wait any longer, it's decidedly unhealthy.

Tibbetts and Golf were there and they were holding their ladders and these two guys were laughing and cursing and stuff, and I think we probably fell eight feet toward the door the next time. The thing was uh yeah and they said um uh handy hook and I told you handy hook while Tiger was having a second set 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 down 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 chant chant a peacetime stock destroyer had to plant 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-installed 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 have only 90 seconds to climb seven flights of stairs and find his way through this labyrinth of walkways. aerial in total darkness because there was no light down here then while I was pretty seriously injured.

He is a brave man. Serendipity did it and the pump house was gone and while other teams were having similar successes with the winding houses at both ends of the dock, I walked over to my core and said hello. and he said that, we have blown up the winding house of the north and he said well done, oh boy, so I said now I am ready to return to England, sir, at half past two in the morning, the surviving commandos came here where They had to pay the rent. The small boats that would take them home were very happy with how things had gone, but the Elation was short-lived because the scene that greeted them in the Estuary was truly horrible, almost all wooden MLSs with their fuel tanks exposed. had been blown to pieces according to the Witnesses the entire estuary was on fire the cats were drowning there were puddles of burning fuel in the water you had to kick with your feet I'm crazy for trying to move the raft away from the river from the flames it was an Inferno episode there a kind of black sea you could see a kind of ships sinking and here River and so on um and then very quickly the colonel said it was obvious that there was no transportation home so um he said well we will fight our way out of the city and We will divide into small groups and individually cross the Spanish border.

I thought it was a difficult task. Spain was 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 time were awake, alert and organized against less than 120 British, half of whom were wounded. If you are fighting on the street, you should secure any Crossing Watson tigers. I turned this corner and came face to face with a German sniper. I ran forward and saw him lean forward, press the trigger of my Thompson submachine gun and as is typical Watson, the magazine was empty, sick, sick, unfortunately his magazine was not empty and his shot broke my arm and left me jaw dropped by a positive statement.

The Germans ran towards him and one of them used the cliché expression for you, the war is over and I thought, well, I still have to, you know, escape eventually, but I don't feel up to it right now. foreigner because there was a guard post, a tower and I had to pass it, the Germans must have seen me and I knew they were far away and they did, but they hit me on the back of the arm and on the leg, and the stockbroker who had blown up the pump house. I reached this point when a machine gun bullet fired from the top of the submarine pens tore off his knee joint.

He couldn't walk anymore, so they captured him too. The commandos noticed. that they were trapped on an island and the only way to get off it and into the city was across this bridge that was guarded by what must have seemed like half the German army; When they arrived here, there were only 80 of them left, but they clearly still had some fighting spirit left because they simply formed into a sort of large mass and charged. Captain Ryan now led the assault across the bridge. Streams of bullets hitting the beams bouncing off the road. Machine guns, pom-poms, rifles, it was like a Damn Good, the Fifth of November, but little by little the commando numbers were reduced until the remaining men with little ammunition hid in the city.

Corin Perden 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 the girls with Scuttle helmets and their weapons looking terribly tense, frankly if I had been there I would have 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, you know, that foreigner broke , the battle was over, only five members of The Landing party would eventually reach Spain and freedom and 222 would escape the horror on the few remaining wooden ships.

Of the approximately 600 men who had arrived in France the night before, 214 had been taken prisoner and 168 were dead and, worse still, it was 7 in the morning, three hours later. 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 truck that was driving into town and we were in this big room and the Germans brought in a sailor that they caught in a river and we put him on the table and said, you know, you try to revive him, we try to get him out. the water from his lungs and at that moment we were saying to each other, you know Campbelltown has shot up, the British could only console.

They themselves, despite the failure, had at least fought like lions, they were patias in the back, the Germans were incredible, yes, so yes, I mean, they probably couldn't believe it, that someone would venture into a submarine base heavily defended by some of Bravery's stories were incredible in the Estuary, one of the MLS survivors had come face to face with a much more powerful German destroyer, the British gunner, a commando named Sergeant Tom Darren was asked to surrender on several occasions, but even though he had been shot 16 times and continued shooting until blood loss overcame him and he fainted, but 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 took the trouble. to find the senior British officer and said look, I don't know who was on that gun on that little ship, but whoever it was should get your Victoria Cross and he got one of the five awarded as a result of that night's action , so The Commandos had put up a good fight, but all they had to show for it was a destroyed pump house and two damaged winding stations.

Even at 10 a.m., the Campbelltown had not yet exploded, and by this time the ship was packed with German souvenir hunters. possibility of the bomb being discovered and released at some point in the morning Mickey Byrne was driven here just by where Campbelltown was embedded in the gates and that required a remarkable performance, he couldn't seem happy that it was full of Germans he couldn't seem curious wondering why the bomb had not exploded and could not seem afraid that it would explode at that precise moment blowing it to pieces among the prisoners was captain sambiti of the campbelltown who was being held in a nearby But I was interrogated by a German who spoke English very well and he discovered that I had been at Campbelltown and commented to me that it was not worth ramming a strong kassoon in that way, but the flimsy ship at that time there was one last burst that sank.

The door roared with thousands of gallons of water as it took what was left of the British ship with it, and 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. we were lying saying we could shoot them all we were going to kill them all you see we were so exhausted and everything else we were delighted with the care explosion and we just said please don't scream just keep going. Hitler became so enraged that he later issued his infamous order that in the future all captured commandos would be executed as spies.

Small Wonder's damage to the Normandy dock was so extensive that it was not repaired until 1947, two years after the war ended. As a result, Turpits was denied a base of operations in the Atlantic and, as a result, she was forced to spend most of the war in a fjord in Norway. She was eventually destroyed by RAF bombers in 1944 and, incredibly, this powerful battleship is the pride of the German Navy. She went to the bottom without ever having sunk, not even what a fishing boat sings, the price for leaving this great boat powerless had beenbeen high 168 British dead around 400 Germans and 16 French shot by mistake by SS troops yet the attack meant Churchill could say The British and the world were not over yet and that also helped in France.

Something very important is what the French Prime Minister told us on our first return to Saint Nazareth, he said that you were the first who gave us hope and what about the man. the commandos and the sailors who led them on this the largest raid of all the foreigners. The sergeant who engaged a German destroyer was captured and died from his wounds shortly afterwards. Bomb designer Nigel Tibbetts after steering Campbelltown into the points gate. He helped the wounded men onto 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 is alive today. in Wales, where his hobby is reading poetry, what a world we could have made. Tiger Watson was sent to the Spangenberg camp after returning home, qualified as a doctor, and ended up in Africa helping leprosy victims. I can't imagine all my senses are like that. Alert, you know all the senses of hearing and sight and your heart pumping well, it will undoubtedly become 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.

It won't fall apart. I'm sure today's use would do the same thing we did. I'm sure they would. I think in some ways 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 when I think about this and it was after the war that I met a dating guy, Mark Twain, who said that courage is recognizing fear, courage is conquering fear and it's absolutely true, no could be more true, yes, you. You were afraid, but you couldn't afford to be well Nowadays, the great moments in military history are marked with imposing monuments and their anniversary is 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 Falmouth in Cornwall it's just a rock leaning against some railings and looks quite small.

Foreigner had the feeling that anything that really offers any hope, whether international or national or even individuals, has an idea of ​​its own and it is impossible to ever think so, try it, good night.