Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

by Giles Milton

  Targeting this immense dock was one thing, destroying it quite another. The statistics alone suggested it would be an operation of staggering complexity, for it was more than 1,200 feet in length and built of huge blocks of reinforced concrete. An even greater challenge was presented by the giant steel caisson gates situated at each end. Any successful sabotage operation would have to break open these caissons, but they were widely held to be indestructible. Constructed as sectional boxes and locked into deep underground sockets, the gates stood higher than a house and were built of reinforced steel that was fully thirty-five feet thick.

  Reconnaissance photos revealed further bad news. St Nazaire was of such importance to the Nazis that it was heavily defended, with gun emplacements, anti-aircraft guns and heavy mortars. Many of these had been installed to protect the dredged channel that led directly to the dock gates. This channel passed within a few metres of the shoreline, exposing any attacker arriving by sea to unacceptable risk.

  Gubbins studied all the available diagrams and photos of the Normandie Dock and concluded that it would require a minimum of thirty-eight men and 900 pounds of specially designed explosive to bring about ‘complete destruction of the lock gates’. He also warned that ‘such a large body of men could not enter the dock area without fighting’.3 An assault on St Nazaire could not be undertaken without the additional support of several hundred professionally trained guerrillas.

  It was not entirely clear who might undertake such a suicidal mission. One possibility was to send in Gus March-Phillipps and his team. They were back in London after their West African jaunt and itching for renewed action. In the aftermath of Operation Postmaster, Gubbins had been permitted to expand them into a force of some one hundred men who were henceforth to operate under the name of No. 62 Commando. March-Phillipps certainly had enough of a death wish to have a crack at the Normandie Dock, but Gubbins felt that his team was as yet too small to send into St Nazaire.

  A second option was to parachute saboteurs into the port: this, after all, had been brilliantly successful at Pessac. But Pessac had required just eight small limpet mines to wreck its machinery. The destruction of St Nazaire’s caisson gates required so much explosive that it simply wasn’t feasible by air. Gubbins ruled out a parachute drop as logistically impossible and reluctantly concluded that the destruction of Hitler’s biggest dock complex was ‘outside the capabilities’ of Baker Street, at least for the foreseeable future.4

  And there the matter might have rested, had it not been for a brilliant piece of lateral thinking. Gubbins had long argued that the enemy must always be struck in the most vulnerable places, and in late January 1942 the most vulnerable point on the Tirpitz was not on the ship itself, nor even in the Normandie Dock, but inside the head of an up-and-coming naval commander named John Hughes-Hallett. He and a friend, Dick Costobadie, were idly glancing at a nautical map of the French Atlantic coastline when Hughes-Hallett was struck by what could only be described as a eureka moment. And as with Archimedes, so John Hughes-Hallett’s solution to a seemingly insurmountable problem was predicated upon a surfeit of water.

  As Hughes-Hallett studied the water depths in the Loire estuary, he realized that there was a significant flaw to the defences of St Nazaire, one that had hitherto been completely overlooked. In springtime, when there was the conjunction of a full moon and a rare flood tide, water levels rose to such a height that a shallow-draught vessel could reach the southern caisson without having to use the dredged channel. This meant that a ship could approach the dock gates without having to run the gauntlet of the coastal defences. For just a few hours each year, the Normandie Dock was tantalizingly exposed.

  Captain Hughes-Hallett mentioned his discovery to his friend, Captain Charles Lambe, who in turn talked it over with Lord Mountbatten, the head of Combined Operations. Mountbatten realized that this was an opportunity to be seized. That very afternoon in late January he called together his staff at their headquarters in Richmond Terrace and repeated what Captain Lambe had told him over luncheon. ‘Let’s get out something unconventional,’ he said.5

  The unfolding plan was not just unconventional, but breathtaking in scope and audacity. The attacking force was to be drawn from Mountbatten’s commando units while the explosives and specialist training were to be provided by Gubbins. Unlike most senior army commanders, Mountbatten had a deep respect for Gubbins and was ‘quick to note’ that he offered ‘a unique and apparently inexhaustible source of special arms, explosives and other technical supplies which Combined Operations had neither the funds nor the facilities to manufacture for themselves’.6

  Gubbins set to work with gusto, calling for a meeting with Captain Hughes-Hallett within days of his nautical discovery. A plan rapidly took shape. The idea was to ram the southern caisson at high speed with an old destroyer packed with delayed-action high explosive. It was to be the dirtiest bomb ever devised, one encased in so much steel and concrete that it would explode with devastating force. Mountbatten described it as a ‘terrifying solution’7 to a hitherto intractable problem, one that would turn the Normandie Dock into a twisted, mangled wreck.

  There was just one potential difficulty. Success would be entirely dependent on the bomb’s detonator and fuse, which would need a delay of at least seven hours to allow the men to fight their way off the ship, sabotage the docks and then escape from St Nazaire.

  Gubbins had long recognized the need for a simple but reliable delayed-action fuse. ‘In the conditions under which our men were often working, dark, wet nights, scaling barbed wire and broken glass, it was essential to keep our devices to the simplest, smallest and most fool-proof.’8

  Millis Jefferis had taken heed of his words and was currently working on his L-Delay, a cunning little fuse that was designed to perform with hitherto unknown accuracy. The L stood for lead: Jefferis had discovered that lead wire crept with absolute regularity under tension. His idea was to use this ‘creep’ to produce a time-delay fuse with accuracy down to the last milli-second. The problem was that the L-Delay was still at the prototype stage and was never going to be ready in time for the spring tide at St Nazaire.

  Other delay fuses relied on mechanical clocks, which were extremely vulnerable, or slow-burning mechanisms that were only suitable for very short delays. Neither could be adapted for use in a vessel whose engine vibrations would play havoc with accuracy.

  The only option was to rely on the Time Pencil, a fuse that had an alarmingly poor track record. ‘A very dodgy device indeed,’ was the opinion of Stuart Macrae. ‘One had to be very brave to use it.’ Its most striking feature was its simplicity. A spring-loaded striker was held under tension by a piano wire. The wire was surrounded by a fragile glass tube filled with acid. When this tube was broken, the acid began to eat away at the wire. When the wire broke, it released the striker that detonated the explosive.

  And herein lay the flaw: no one could predict how long it would take for the wire to break. ‘In very hot weather, a theoretically long delay fuse might go off in a few minutes,’ said Macrae, who tested hundreds of them. ‘In very cold weather, it might not go off at all.’9

  But there was no alternative. The success or failure of the attack on St Nazaire would be dependent on a highly inaccurate fuse that was little bigger than a pencil. If it went off too early, the commandos would be blown to the heavens, along with their ship. But there was also a chance that it wouldn’t go off at all.

  * * *

  The St Nazaire attack was to be on such a grand scale that it would require the services of more than 600 men, many of them veterans of Gubbins’s Norwegian escapade. But three of them were to shoulder much of the responsibility, for they had vital roles to play in a mission that was to break all the rules of war.

  The first of the three was Stephen Beattie, the thirty-four-year-old son of a Hertfordshire parson. Everyone liked Stephen: he had ‘a charming personality, a serene and even temperament, a sound and sensible judgement and a retiring manner’. His
friends thought him the very epitome of an English gentleman, ‘tall, slender, black-bearded, blue-eyed’,10 and he was devoted to his wife, Philippa, and their three small children. He also happened to be a gifted sea captain, one with just enough of the buccaneering spirit for him to jump at the chance of leading a piratical raid on the French coastline.

  Beattie had previously commanded the HMS Vivien, guarding the Arctic convoys as they made their perilous crossing of the North Sea. It was said that ‘nothing rattled or ruffled him’, which was just as well, for he was about to take command of a ship with four and a half tons of high explosive packed into her bow. It was his first sea command in which the goal was to cripple his own ship.

  Second in importance to the mission’s success was the explosives expert, Nigel Tibbits, a highly gifted naval student ‘with a long, sensitive and intelligent face and a slow, quiet smile’. Just twenty-eight years of age, he had already notched up more qualifications than most acquire in a lifetime. He was a prizeman cadet who had obtained five firsts in his naval exams and won an Ogilvie medal for torpedo gunnery. If fate had not taken him to St Nazaire, he might have been adopted by Millis Jefferis’s team at the Firs, for he was a genius at pure maths, ‘the higher abstractions of which he would discuss with verve and gusto and often with great bursts of laughter’.11 He had already spent several months working with Charles Goodeve, the oddball scientist who was helping to develop the Hedgehog mortar.

  The principal aim of the attack on St Nazaire was to destroy the Normandie Dock’s caisson gate. But there was a recognition that the dirty bomb might not explode. It was therefore decided to land a team of saboteurs whose task was to wreck as much of the winding and pumping machinery as possible. These saboteurs were under the command of twenty-eight-year-old Captain Bill Pritchard, the third member of the unholy trio of leaders. Pritchard was a hard-drinking Welsh mischief-maker with a keen interest in targeted destruction. He, like Gubbins, had long since dismissed aerial bombing as a blunt-edged tool. ‘You make a lot of big holes and create a lot of nuisance, but you don’t stop the dock from working.’ The only way to guarantee the destruction of the pump machinery and winding mechanisms was to ‘send chaps in and place explosives right on the vital parts’.12

  Pritchard looked every inch the saboteur: tall and powerfully built, he had mischievous brown eyes that ‘glinted with humour’ when planning ‘the pranks or rags that he enjoyed’. He was now charged with orchestrating the biggest prank of his life: he had to lead his team ashore and blow all the impeller pumps and hydraulic winches.

  Pritchard had the pick of all the best explosive devices so far invented, including firepots, tar babies and ‘sausage-charges’ for cutting gun barrels. But the key explosives were to be limpets and clams, the latter being a miniature version of Clarke’s limpet. It had been developed by Macrae in response to a request for smaller explosive charges. ‘Although the explosive content was only about eight ounces,’ he said, ‘ICI produced some very high speed stuff for us and the design was such that the explosive was almost in contact with the target over a considerable area.’13

  The commandos selected to undertake the mission were based at Lochailort, close to Arisaig, in the Scottish Highlands. They were told nothing about their goal, although they got some inkling that it was going to be tough when they were sent to be trained by Eric Sykes and William Fairbairn.

  They were surprised to be taught by ‘two benevolent square-shaped padres’, but soon learned that their lives would depend on the tricks of these experts. One of the recruits, Lieutenant Corran Purdon, was led down to the cellars at Arisaig House and taught how to kill in the dark, including ‘close-contact shooting in their sandbagged basement range where moving targets suddenly materialized from the gloom’.

  Purdon and his comrades learned how to kill with every conceivable weapon, ‘including the Boyes anti-tank rifle, standing, and the two inch mortar from the hip’, weapons that would blow a man apart. The commandos were warned that they risked getting ‘shattered shoulders’ and ‘broken hips’ if such guns were incorrectly fired.14

  They were also reminded that attacking a heavily fortified dockyard in darkness meant that their guns would most likely be of little use, as Fairbairn knew from his experience of busting gangsters in night-time Shanghai. ‘There always comes a point where you have to go over the top and at ’em,’ he said. ‘And when you’re in that close, it’s the best fighter that wins.’ He now taught the commandos close-contact knife-fighting and stressed that confidence was the single most important factor in success. ‘When you’re confident, you instinctively attack. And whatever your opponent’s weight and strength, you can overcome it if you attack. To stay on the defence is fatal.’15

  The training for St Nazaire was intense and gruelling. Lieutenant Purdon and his fellow trainees ‘splashed through hip-high freezing sea-loch estuaries, forded icy torrents holding boulders to combat the force of the rushing spate, climbed seemingly interminably high mountains and ran down steep scree slopes’.16 By the third week of March, they were ready for action.

  The ship that was to be used to ram the steel caisson was the HMS Campbeltown, a relic of the First World War. She was an American lend-lease vessel that was to have one last opportunity for glory. In order for her to pass over the St Nazaire shoals, she needed to be substantially lightened. To this end, all her heavy gear was cut away, along with her torpedo tubes. Her heavy deck guns were also stripped down and her fuel oil reduced to a minimum.

  She even had two of her funnels removed, a modification that was not only done to lighten her. It was hoped that any German sentry seeing her as a dark silhouette from the shore would mistake her for a German destroyer of the Möwe class, especially if she was flying the swastika. Deception and subterfuge were to be important elements of the attack on St Nazaire.

  Once her deck had been shielded with armoured sheeting, she was taken for a test-drive by Captain Beattie. She handled like ‘a bitch’, he thought, and would need to be treated accordingly if he was to have any hope of slamming her into the southern caisson of Normandie Dock.

  Her final modification was the most important of all. A gigantic bomb was winched deep below decks, where it would wreak maximum damage. The explosive itself weighed four and a half tons, the same as a large lorry, and was enclosed in steel and then encased in cement. When it blew – if it blew – it would cause utter devastation.

  Stephen Beattie had overheard a great deal of chatter about the unreliability of the Time Pencil detonators and voiced his fears to Nigel Tibbits, the explosives expert. ‘What happens if we run into heavy fire and the fusing system gets shot up?’ he asked. Tibbits said he hoped that it wouldn’t. ‘Or the chap responsible, that’s you, gets shot up?’17 Tibbits shrugged. They were indeed taking an enormous gamble. His own concern was that the force of ramming the ship into the caisson would trigger the fuses and blow them all to an early death. It was a concern shared by his beloved wife, Elmslie. She was filled with anguish about his mission and ‘could not dispel the dread feeling that they would never meet again’.18

  Not until the eve of departure were the officers provided with details of their adventure, which had been given the codename Operation Chariot. Colonel Charles Newman, the operational commander, gave them their briefing. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I know jolly well you have all been wondering what we are up to down here and now I’m going to tell you. You will all be delighted to know that we have been selected for a really lovely job – a saucy job – easily the biggest thing that has been done yet by the commandos. You could say it is the sauciest thing since Drake.’19

  * * *

  The Campbeltown set sail from Falmouth at two o’clock in the afternoon on 26 March, accompanied by two naval destroyers, a torpedo boat, a gunboat and twelve motor-launches carrying many of the commandos. The window of opportunity for the attack was extremely slight. It had to occur between midnight and 2 a.m. on the night of 29–30 March, when the full moon and sp
ring tide would theoretically allow the Campbeltown to slip through the shoal-waters of St Nazaire, thereby avoiding the shipping lane close to the shoreline. If the tidal calculations were wrong, she would get stuck in the estuary mud.

  Although the officers had been informed of their mission, the commandos themselves were still unsure of their goal. Now that they were at sea and there was no possibility of information being leaked to the enemy, Stephen Beattie gathered them on deck and gave them a briefing. The men were pleased to have been selected, masking their nervousness with laughter and backslapping. ‘They broke into broad grins and returned to their stations with pert little jokes and a quickened pulse.’20 They then raised a swastika and took photographs of themselves giving mocking salutes.

  Shortly after nightfall on 29 March, the flotilla regrouped for a final rendezvous at sea. The ships were now forty nautical miles from the French coast and it was time to bid farewell to the two naval destroyers. They would remain offshore throughout the night, with the aim of making a rendezvous with the motor-launches on the following morning. In the intervening time, the Campbeltown and her accompanying motor-launches, gunboat and torpedo boat would be without their heavily armed escort.

  At exactly eleven o’clock in the evening, Nigel Tibbits clambered down into the gloomy bowels of the ship to where the huge explosive charge was situated. It was stiflingly hot, a factor that could affect the working of the fuses, and the rumbling vibration of the ship’s engines was a further cause for concern.