The Against-All-Odds WW2 Commando Raid You've Never Heard Of | Greatest Raid Of All | Timeline

Hi everybody and welcome to this documentary on Timeline. My name's Dan Snow and I want to tell you about History Hit TV. It's like the Netflix for history. Hundreds of exclusive documentaries and interviews with the world's best historians. We've got an exclusive offer available to fans of Timeline. If you go to History Hit TV you can either follow the information below this video or just google History Hit TV and use the code Timeline you get a special introductory offer. Go and check it out. In the meantime enjoy this video. A couple of years ago I made a TV programme about my father-in-law who won a Victoria Cross at Arnhem and since then I've been on the hunt for a follow-up. Another nugget of incredible heroism in the face of impossible odds. Of course most war stories are well known, well documented and well celebrated. The Battle of Britain, Rourke's Drift and so on. But one day while trolling through a second-hand bookshop I came across a story that's hardly known or celebrated at all. It's the story of an amazing battle. A battle where more VCs were earned more quickly than any other action in the Second World War. It's a story full of ingenuity, pluck and genuine courage. It had the lot. Having read it I decided to do some digging and it turned out that while very few people in the outside world know anything about this extraordinary battle they certainly do in military circles and they 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 U-boats were running amok among the convoys bringing supplies from America. Nine million tons of shipping had already been sunk and the shipyards in Britain simply couldn't replace it fast enough. Britain was beginning to starve. Winston Churchill said in his diaries the only thing that truly frightened me in the war was the U-boat peril. Said he was even more anxious about the Battle of the Atlantic than he was about the Battle of Britain and then into the equation sailed the Tirpitz. Tirpitz was the fastest and most modern battleship in the war. Even though her armour was a foot thick she could thunder along at 30 knots and with eight 15-inch guns she packed a huge 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 dots on this map represents a convoy movement. If Tirpitz got among them beyond the range of the Royal Air Force we would almost certainly lose the war. It was that simple. There was however a drawback to Tirpitz's size. You see if she were to be damaged while out in the middle of the Atlantic she couldn't very well go back to Germany for repairs because that would mean limping past Britain, past the RAF, past our coastal fleet and that would be a death sentence for her. So she'd 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 handle a ship of Tirpitz's size. This one. This is the Normandy dock in Saint-Nazaire. It had been built in the 30s when France was making giant ocean liners and now to make sure the Tirpitz could never have a home on the Atlantic seaboard it had to be destroyed. Now the only way that you 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 whole area was crisscrossed with anti-submarine nets. Couldn't be done over land because northern France was in German hands and for two reasons it couldn't be done from the air either. Firstly, Second World War bombing raids were notoriously inaccurate. Only 22 percent of bombs landed within five miles of the target. So the chances of being able to hit a dock gate from 6,000 feet in the sky were slim at the best of times and it wouldn't be the best of times because right next door to the dry dock were 14 U-boat pens. These were some of the most precious facilities in the German armory and to protect them the Saint-Nazaire area bristled with 80 anti-aircraft guns and artillery pieces and in the town itself there were 5,000 troops. Destroying the dock then using conventional forces, the army, the air force, the navy, out of the question. So the job was given to a group of men who really had only just been put together. The Commandos. The Commandos were the brainchild of Churchill who'd seen similar outfits operate successfully in both the Boer War and the First World War. A small number of highly trained soldiers would get in fast, do a huge amount of damage and then get out before the enemy had time to get organised. Churchill liked this. He called it the butcher and bolt approach. So what kind of men were they? Well if popular myth is anything to go by they were lantern-jawed killing machines who could headbutt their way through oak doors. The reality though was rather different. Gerard Brett in my regiment was in my Commando, 12th Commando and he'd written a book on the Byzantine age or Byzantine architecture or something. One fellow who got a divinity degree from Trinity College Dublin. Lance Corporal Potts had been a don at either Oxford or Cambridge. They included a poacher, a TT, motorcycle rider, so a mitzvah. What they represented was a complete revolution in the concept of soldiering because they were chosen for their individuality, their intelligence, their initiative and nobody embodied that ethos more than this man, Mickey Byrne. I've got his autobiography here and what a life. He had a privileged upbringing, Winchester, Oxford and then he met Guy Burgess, the chap who went on to become a Soviet spy and they became lovers. Mickey though became a Nazi sympathiser, went to Germany, met Hitler, got a signed copy of Mein Kampf and was one of the very first people to be shown around Dachau, the concentration camp. He knew Bertrand Russell, he knew Audrey Hepburn, he knew the King and Queen, he even met Roosevelt. He really was a telegraph obituary writer's wet dream. But all things considered, not the sort of man you'd expect to find in a commando's green beret. By the start of the war however, Mickey had seen the Nazi threat for what it really was and had found something else to suit his maverick streak, the commandos. People were left to make up their own minds. In war, anybody, everybody may be killed and what decides the action may be the action of a private soldier who's left to command a trench. It wasn't put like that but the feeling we were given that every single one of us might be as important as a brigadier. We were all individuals, you know. Discipline did matter, 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 went about their daily business was a million miles from that of the conventional military. For a start, they didn't bother with barracks or regimental headquarters because the commandos didn't want to waste training time on mundane chores such as cleaning or maintenance. Instead, they simply got digs in a nearby town and there was no sergeant major on hand to tell them what to do every minute of the day. Instead of saying parade tomorrow on the main square in Weymouth, it might be parade tomorrow at 10 o'clock in the marketplace at Dorchester and find your own bloody way there, you know. You weren't shouted at, there wasn't shouting or bullying or anything that you got in the regular army. You led by example, so, you know, the officer had to do everything that you did. If the officers can do it, I can do it. If the officers can do it. Unfortunately, though, the British army top brass were a deeply conservative bunch and they really didn't like the new commando philosophy. The regular army were doing their best to get us disbanded. They hated us, some of them. We were a nuisance. And because our standards were so high, we creamed off the best of the people in the regiments and, in fact, a lot of COs refused to allow people to volunteer. This resistance by the regular army certainly got Churchill's back up. What I have here is a letter he wrote to the Secretary of State for war and he says, I hear that the whole position of the commandos is being questioned. They've been told no more recruiting and that their future is in the melting pot. Says he feels very strongly about this. Says the defeat of France by Germany was accomplished by an incredibly small number of highly equipped elite while the dull mass of the German army came on behind. And then here, for every reason, therefore, we must develop the commando idea. Pretty clear cut. 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 hold the Tirpitz at bay. What's more, we were losing the Battle of the Atlantic. We were losing in North Africa and London was in ruins. So if Churchill's commandos really could smash up San Nazare, it might give a sense back home that Britain wasn't finished just yet. Everywhere, almost, we were on retreat and people were really becoming negative and Churchill wanted something which would be a successful aggression. The plan to destroy the 1500 ton dock gate was codenamed Operation Chariot and it was certainly bold. The commandos would get hold of a couple of destroyers from somewhere and sail them from Cornwall over to Western France. Now one of these destroyers would be filled with explosives and while the RAF distracted the Germans with a bombing raid over San Nazare, they would somehow sneak it up the estuary without being seen by anyone in the gun emplacements here, 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. The destroyer with the explosives in it would ram the dock gates here and the commandos would jump off and right underneath all the guns positioned to protect the U-boat pens here, they'd run around shooting anything that moved and blowing up anything that didn't. Then after the destroyer exploded, destroying the lock gate, they'd all meet here at this not at all exposed jetty and get back on 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. It would then sail back down the estuary, past all the guns and go home. Right. The plan was presented to the War Office by Louis Mountbatten, head of the Combined Operations Unit, and unsurprisingly it met resistance. One commander-in-chief was particularly vocal. I remember he started the meeting by saying, well Dickie old cock, if you're prepared to lose all your soldiers and all your ships, I suppose you can take on this task which I regard as absolutely impossible. I said, it's the fact that it is regarded as impossible which makes it possible. The Germans will never think we'll attempt it. Mountbatten's enthusiasm certainly didn't rub off on the RAF. You can see here in these Operation Chariot minutes that the powers that be requested a force of about 100 aircraft for the diversionary bombing raid in three waves. But on the back, Vice Marshal Sornby says, I don't agree that such a heavy scale of attack is needed. We want about 20 Whitleys, which are bombers, hanging around overhead dropping an occasional bomb. And he's backed up by one of his advisors, this chap called Willetts, who really says that Operation Chariot can whistle for their 100 bombers. He says Bomber Command can provide no more than 35 aircraft without prejudicing their other commitments. You might have thought the Navy would be keen, especially since the operation was designed to neutralise the Tirpitz. But no. The commander-in- chief here from Plymouth Command writes, the plan entails the sacrifice of the landing party and endangers two valuable ships for a small chance of success. He actually says negligible chance here. There's another guy writing here who says, I'm not hopeful as regards the result of the impact between the destroyer and the lock gates. I think the lock gates will remain partially intact and the destroyer will look silly. If that happens, much of the proposed plan fails. Eventually though, the Navy did find one boat. It was called HMS Campbeltown, a clapped out American World War One destroyer that was on loan to the British. She was not ideal for the job known for her poor slow speed manoeuvrability and her large turning circle. But these drawbacks didn't dampen the spirits of the commandos. I thought we would get away with it, that I would be wounded romantically and a beautiful nurse would look after me in hospital. I was very young. You're doing all this heavy training and nothing's happening, so very frustrating. So I think when we were finally briefed on the model, I mean, we thought, well, this is going to be something. We had been trained both in the dark, blindfolded in the day, in every form of demolition to do with dock demolitions, trains and anything. So when we heard that we were going to blow up the dock installations at St. Nazaire, I suppose really it was a feeling of elation. At this stage, people were saying, well, what do you think? And I said, it's going to be a piece of cake. We're going to go in there and knock them for six because that reflected the optimistic attitude. We were going to go in there, blow up this bloody dock and we'll be out. We had volunteered, after all, for danger and it did seem an off chance that it was impossible and therefore it would succeed. As the commandos prepared on land, the navy set about the Campbell town. The old tub would have to sneak past 80 gun emplacements on its way up the St. Nazaire estuary, so it had to be disguised and they only had 12 days to do the work. In the end, they removed two funnels and sloped the other two backwards, so 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 given to a brilliant young naval officer called Lieutenant Nigel Tibbetts. He was a shy chap with a stammer who, when his girlfriend announced that she'd become fond of him, replied, well then I suppose we shall have to get married. However, while he was not desperately confident with women, he was a whiz with explosives. One of the best students the Dartmouth Naval College had ever seen. But even he faced difficulties with how you turn a whole ship into a bomb. The first problem he had was deciding where in the ship to place the explosives. Because you see, if you can imagine this is the gate to the dock and this is the ship, what's going to happen after it hits? I mean, is it just going to end up here, in which case you want the bomb in the front? Or is it going to rear up, in which case you want the bomb sort of in the middle toward the bottom? I suppose theoretically it would be possible if the ship were going fast enough for it to actually ride right over the top of the gate and end up in the dock itself. I mean, who knew? Day and night, Tibbets struggled with this until he decided on a spot 40 feet back from the prow low down next to the keel. Then he had to work out how to set the explosives off. Back then there was no accurate timing device, so he had to use fuses like this. The idea is that you squeeze the top part here, which breaks a glass capsule on the inside, releasing acid that then slowly burns through a strip of wire. Now when that snaps, it releases a spring which boings out, setting off the detonator. Now this was very advanced in 1942, but there were a couple of problems. First of all, it was very susceptible to jolts and shock. You wouldn't, for instance, want to ram some lock gates at 25 miles an hour with one of these on board because it might go off instantly, killing everyone. It was also very vague. The strength of the acid varied from fuse to fuse, the strength of the wire varied, the tension of the spring varied. Tibbets couldn't say to within an hour when the bomb might actually go off. Choosing what explosive to use, however, was fairly straightforward. He went for Amatol, and to show how big a bang that produces, we've placed a pound of something similar between the front seats of this car. That was a pound. Tibbets was going to use four and a quarter tonnes. Still, even if the explosives and the fuses could be trusted to work properly, and even if they could get across to France without being detected and up the estuary without being blown to smithereens, and even if the Campbeltown could hit the lock gates exactly right and the commandos could get off and do whatever it is they had to do, they still had a problem. How do they get home again? Because the navy wouldn't provide a second destroyer, they were instead given 16 of these. Today, this fair mile MLA is a tourist boat taking trippers around Torbay, and certainly it's better suited to this than it ever was for Operation Chariot. They're made of bakelite bonded plywood. It was a cheap, mass-production boat designed primarily to make the navy look bigger than it really was. It certainly wasn't particularly good in the open sea. It tended to roll badly in a swell, which made everyone on board queasy. It's not so bad if it was only used to bring the soldiers home, but this little fleet would also be used to get half the commandos out to San Nazare as well. So there'd be 15 commandos wedged down here with all their kit, and when they got to the other end, they'd be expected to get out and start fighting immediately. There wasn't only seasickness to worry about, because while each ship had small guns fore and aft, it didn't have any armour. No, 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 boat was fitted with two 500-gallon long-range fuel tanks, which were completely exposed on the deck. Campbelltown was a bomb on purpose. These things, they were bombs by accident. Honestly, it's hard to think of any vessel less well-suited to the job in hand. The commandos were hard men, good fighters, but they'd been picked for their intelligence as well, so they must have known that the chances of getting to San Nazare were small, the chances of doing the job were microscopic, and the chances of them getting home again on a wooden boat, groaning under the weight of exposed fuel tanks, past an alerted enemy, were virtually non-existent. They must have known that Operation Chariot, for the vast majority, was going to be a one-way ticket. We were all of us told if we wanted to leave a letter for our next of kin, my loved ones, you could do so, and you wrote on the envelope to be posted in the event of having to return. And there was one, Sergeant Bill Gibson, who I knew them all very well indeed, and I remember seeing his face, and I knew he knew he was going to be killed. My dearest Dad, by the time you get this, I shall be one of the many who have sacrificed their unimportant lives for what little ideals we may have. I can only hope that by laying down my life, the generations to come might in some way remember us, and benefit by what we've done. At a time like this, I turn to you, Dad, and God. I hope there will be peace for everyone soon. My love to everyone. I'll remember you. Your loving son, Bill. Somehow I thought, it's unlucky to write your last letters, your parents. No, my attitude was, I'm coming back. Two of men came to me and said, would you take these letters home to our wives, if we're killed? And I said, but wait a minute, I'm going with you. Oh, you won't be killed, I said. They were both killed. The St Nazaire Raiders weren't allowed to reveal details of the operation to their loved ones. But for the bomb designer Nigel Tibbetts, recently married and the 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 they both sort of knew he wouldn't be coming back. So as the commandos gathered here in Falmouth and Cornwall, ready to join the Campbell Town and the little boats that were anchored out there in the bay, Lord Mountbatten gathered them all together and very unusually, he said to them that any man who wanted to step down could walk away without a stain on his character. Not one of them did. 2pm on the 26th of March 1942, the armada set sail with 264 commandos and 357 navy personnel on board. That's a total of 621 men. Only 227 would come back. I had just enough light to read a book that I was reading and I just concentrated on reading this book. The thought that crosses your mind is I hope I'm going to be able to do my part, you know, without being overcome by fear. We chatted to each other about what we're going to do and I, we all went through it with our blokes, you know, I and my four guys just went through what we were going to do. I certainly thought to myself, my God, I hope I'm not going to show fear in front of my men if I'm frightened. Tense, I suppose, would be a thing. Anticipation, yes. Fortunately, I think we were more worried about it being rough because it's very, as you can imagine, physically exhausting to be seasick all the time. But we were lucky it was calm. 33 hours later, they arrived at the mouth of the estuary and the captain of the Campbell Town, Lieutenant Commander Sam Beattie, instructed Tibbetts to set the fuses on his bomb. He then began to creep up the estuary. Ideally, he'd have stuck to the deep water channel, the channel the Tirpitz would have used. But this would have meant hugging the northern shore right under the noses of the German sentries. So he had to go right down the middle, despite the fact that the water, even at high tide, was just 10 feet deep. To reduce the ship's draft, much of the heavy armour and the big guns had been removed. So if she did become grounded, she'd be a sitting duck. We did go across sandbanks a couple of times and dragged a bit going over, but it was so quick that you hadn't got time to think, good God, if I'm marooned here, I'd be shot to pieces. It's hard to know really what the German gunners in this pillbox were doing when the Campbell Town chugged by. I mean, yes, she'd been hurriedly converted to look a bit like a German ship, but she was trundling right down the shallows. You'd have thought that would have alerted them to the fact something was up, but obviously it didn't, because they didn't open fire. And nor did the guns at the next pillbox, or the one after that. But then things started to go wrong. The RAF had finally agreed to stage a bombing raid, but the pilots had been told not to bomb if there was cloud cover in case they hit French civilians. Unfortunately, it was cloudy and they hadn't been told what to do instead. So they just flew around, alerting the Germans to the fact that something was up. Their flak guns turned very easily down onto the surface of the river, plus their searchlights. With the Germans now suspicious, the Campbell Town's Heath Robinson modifications and fake German flag wouldn't fool them for long. And sure enough, they were soon challenged by a signal from the shore. But the British had a trick up their sleeves. We found the German code books, naval code books, and the Germans didn't know we had them. And so we had the up-to-date passwords, counter signs, and we were using them. Much to the consternation of the German signalman who was flashing signals, asking who we were. And we were flashing back the right answers. We're a friendly force coming in for the night. We've got a damaged ship or something like this, you see, and putting them off. Twice the Germans opened fire, but each time they were silenced by reassuring signals coming from the Campbell Town. This meant the ships could get nearer and nearer to the target. Eventually, though, the Germans realised that, yes, unbelievably, it really was a British raiding party sailing right through their front door. They managed to get to this point here, just 2,000 yards from the dock gates, which are kind of just round the headland. Maybe you can see it just over there. And all hell broke loose. There was an awful lot of stuff hitting Campbell Town. I mean, it was absolutely hitting our poor little MLs, but Campbell Town being the big target, you know, and there was a sort of glare of searchlights. The air was filled with things that whistled, hummed, and shrieked, and every one of them lethal. The main focus for the German gunners was the bridge of the Campbell Town, where the captain, Beattie, was trying to keep a steady course by calling out steering directions. The chap at the wheel was killed. His place was taken by another raider, who was killed almost immediately. So then a chap called Montgomery, who was a Royal Engineer, took over, 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 Tebbets, the egghead, the brilliant scientist from Dartmouth, the man who designed the bomb in the bow, found himself at the wheel as the destroyer was on its final charge. I remember a red-hot shell passing through the wardroom, just over our heads, and going on out, didn't explode. If just one shell hit the rudder or the engine, or worse, the bomb in the bow, the mission would be over. But at this point, it wouldn't have mattered, because Beattie was lined up on the wrong lighthouse. So he was heading for the wrong target. At the last minute, a searchlight picked out the lighthouse over there, the green one, and Beattie realized his mistake. He barked out an order. So Tebbets swung the wheel hard to the right to try and miss the jetty here, and then hard to the left again. And you've got to remember, he's in a ship that doesn't handle, doing 22 knots at night, under a hail of enemy fire, and yet he managed to just graze the jetty there. It's just an extraordinarily brilliant piece of seamanship. They came around the old model, but really shifting at this point. And pretty soon, you can pick out the dock gates. There they are, look. There they are. Maybe, I don't know, 500 meters to go. Really cranking it up now, the old girl. Imagine what it would have been like to have been doing this on that night in March 1942. Dark, searchlights, cannon, machine gun, massive fire coming from that bank. Aiming straight for that. What's the impact going to be like? It's going to be huge. The ship reared up, putting Tebbets' four-ton bomb right over the gate. And despite the firestorm, Beattie turned to his men and said, well, there we are. Four minutes late. The Navy had done its part of the job brilliantly. And now in the two and a half hours before Campbeltown blew, the army had to get ashore and create havoc. Yes, the Germans had fixed gun emplacements, and yes, they outnumbered the British by 20 to one. But that was no problem, because the raiding party, remember, were commandos. They may have been picked for their intelligence and free thinking, but my God, they were tough. The backbone of their training was speed marching, and each commando unit would compete to see who could go the furthest in the shortest time. One group went 63 miles in 19 hours. Another marched 53 miles from Harlech to the top of Mount Snowdon and then down again in 17 and a half hours. And remember, they did this while carrying 60-pound packs on their backs. Determination is the most important thing, even on speed marches, where our great aim was to get the chaps to 15 miles in full kit in just under three hours, finish up on the salt course and firing, and then leisurely go up to the top of Ben Nevis. There's all parts of mentally equipping them to do anything. Not only was commando training tough, but it was also revolutionary. The regular army would stay fit by doing star jumps in PE kit. The commandos trained in harsh terrain in battle dress. They invented the assault course. In fact, their methods were so advanced, they're still used by elite forces today. The determination, doing things which you thought you couldn't possibly do, like on the Tarzan course, on a rope bridge, or the death slide. And don't forget, the chaps and commandos weren't super men. They were ordinary chaps, from all walks of life, but they were trained well, trained to get the edge. And instead of doing weapons training on rifle rangers, commandos practiced in massive mock battles with live fire. All the weapon training was geared to offensive action. A little example, the Bren gun was normally fired on the ground, but why not use it firing it from the hip? This was an innovation. And they weren't just revolutionary with guns either. They also learned unarmed combat, stuff no regular soldier had ever even heard of. How to tackle a bloke with your bare hands. Knock him out, spoil his prospects and pinch his weapon. And his gold watch too, if he's got one. The key element was getting themselves to convince themselves that you do anything. And you can only do that in the military sense, if you train people to urge them on and overcome their inner fears and give them supreme confidence. Back in Saint-Nazaire, the commando raiding party would need all that confidence just to get ashore. We went up on deck and we went to the bows of the ship where the 12 pounder had been hit. 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 brilliant flash and a ear shattering explosion and I felt a blow on my knee which felt like a sledgehammer and it knocked my knee on one side and I fell to the deck. And I was lying there and suddenly somebody grasped the rucksack and pulled me on my feet and said, you're all right lad, and it was Major Copeland. He said, bamboo lad at port side, don't hang about here, it's decidedly unhealthy. Tibbetts and Goff were there and they were holding the scaling ladders and these two chaps were laughing and swearing and so on and I think we probably dropped maybe even eight feet down onto the dock. The next thing was Germans and they said, and I said, to you. While Tiger was having a set-to with Jerry, the demolition teams were on their way to their targets. One of the main targets was this underground bunker because down there, and I'm not absolutely certain how I actually get down there, but anyway down there are the pumps that were used for emptying all the water out of the dock. Stairs. The job of smashing this place up was given to a team of four commandos led by Lieutenant Stuart Chant. Chant, a stockbreaker in peacetime, had to place the explosives even though on the way to the pump house he'd been wounded in the left leg, the right arm and both hands. Unfortunately the explosives had been pre-rigged in England with very short fuses. So Chant sent his men back up to the surface in relative safety, knowing that when he lit the fuses he'd have just 90 seconds to climb seven flights of stairs and find his way through this maze of aerial walkways in the pitch black, because there was no light down here then, while pretty badly wounded. He was a brave man. Chant made it. The pumping house was gone, and meanwhile other teams were having similar successes with the winding houses at both ends of the dock. I went up to my colonel and saluted him and said sir we've blown up the northern winding house and he said well done old boy. So I said I'm now ready to go back to England sir. At half past two in the morning the surviving commandos came here where they'd arranged to meet the small boats that would take them home. They were pleased as punch with the way things had gone, but the elation was short-lived because the scene that greeted them out in the estuary was truly horrific. Almost all of the wooden MLs with their exposed fuel tanks had been blown to smithereens. According to witnesses the whole estuary was on fire. Chaps were drowning, there were pools of burning fuel on the water, you had to kick with your feet like mad to try and steer the raft away from the flames, and it was an absolute inferno. There was a sort of sea of black, you could see sort of sinking boats and hear shouts coming from the river and so on. And then very quickly the colonel said it was obvious that there was no transport home, so he said right we'll fight our way out of the town and we'll split up into small groups and make our way severally across the Spanish border. I thought that's a bit of a tall order. Spain was a daunting 350 miles away, but even before they could set off they'd have to fight their way out of San Nazare itself. So that's 5,000 Germans who by this stage were awake, alert and organised against fewer than 120 Brits, half of whom were wounded. If you're street fighting you must secure any crossing. Tiger Watson came round this corner, found himself face to face with a German sniper. Ran forward, saw him lean forward, pressed the trigger of my Thompson submachine gun and typically Watson, the magazine was empty. Unfortunately his magazine wasn't empty and his shot broke my arm and bowled me over. A party of Germans ran up to him and one of them actually used the cliched expression, for you, the war is over. And I thought well I shall have to escape eventually, but I don't feel quite up to it at the moment. I knew, I was almost certain I'd be killed because there was a watch point, a tower, and I had to go past it. The Germans must have seen me and I knew they'd fire and they did, but they hit me in the back and the arm and the leg. Chance, the stockbroker who'd blown up the pumping house, made it to this point when a He was no longer able to walk so he was captured as well. The commandos realised that they were trapped on an island and that the only way off it and into the town was across this bridge which was guarded by what must have seemed like half the German army. By the time they got here there were only 80 of them left but plainly they still had some fighting spirit left because they just formed themselves into a sort of great big mass and charged. Captain Roy had now led the assault across the bridge, streams of bullets hitting those girders, ricocheting off the roadway, machine guns, pom-poms, rifles, it was like a damn good November the 5th, only more so. Bit by bit the commando numbers were whittled down until the remaining men low on ammo went to ground in the town. Corin Purden ended up in a cellar. We suddenly heard all this shouting outside and then the door burst open and there were Germans standing there with their cold scuttle helmets and their weapons looking terribly tense. Frankly if I'd been there I'd have chucked a couple of hand grenades down and finished us off but they didn't and the colonel who had his pipe in his mouth just sort walked up the steps and said well we've we've done what we came to do and you know that's that. As dawn broke the battle was pretty much over. Just five of the landing party would eventually make it to Spain in freedom and 222 would escape the horror on the few remaining wooden boats. Of the 600 or so men who'd come to France the previous evening 214 had been taken prisoner. And 168 were dead. And worse still it was now 7am three hours after the bomb in Campbelltown's nose was supposed to have gone off. After we were washed ashore we were put in the back of the lorry driven into the town and we were in this this big room and they the Germans brought in a sailor they fished out of the river and put him on the table and said you know you try and revive him we we tried to get the water out of his lungs and by this time we were saying to one another you know the Campbelltown hasn't gone up. The British could only console themselves that despite the failure they had at least fought like lions. They were patting us on the back there the Germans were amazing yeah so yeah I mean they probably couldn't believe it that that anybody would venture up into a submarine base heavily defended. Some of the stories of bravery were incredible out in the estuary one of the surviving MLs had gone head to head with a much more powerful German destroyer. The British gunner a commando called Sergeant Tom Durran was asked to surrender on a number of occasions but even though he'd been shot 16 times he kept on firing until he was overcome by the loss of blood and passed out. But the story doesn't end there because the captain of the German destroyer was so impressed by Durran's bravery that when he landed he took the trouble to find the most 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 victory across and he got it. One of five awarded as a result of the action that night. So the commandos had fought well but all they had to show for it was a destroyed pumping house and two damaged winding stations. Even at 10am the Campbell town still hadn't exploded and by this stage the ship was crawling with German souvenir hunters. There was a real possibility the bomb might be discovered and defused. At one point in the morning Mickey Byrne was marched along here right past where the Campbell town was embedded in the gates and that called for a remarkable piece of acting. He couldn't look pleased that it was crawling with Germans, he couldn't look quizzical wondering why the bomb hadn't gone off and nor could he look afraid that it might go off at that precise moment blowing him to pieces. Among the prisoners was the Campbell town's captain Sambiti who was being held in a nearby hut. I was interrogated by a German who spoke very good English. He discovered that I'd been in Campbell town and he was remarking that it was no good ramming a stout cassoon like that with a flimsy ship. At that moment there was a bang. The gate, thousands of gallons of water roared in taking what remained of the British ship with it and the German souvenir hunters, they found bits of them on the roof of the U-boat pens 400 yards away. A German petty officer rushed into the room where we were lying saying we're going to shoot you all, we're going to kill you all. We just were so sort of exhausted and everything else that we were delighted that the explosion had occurred and just said please don't shout, just get on with it. Hitler was so incensed that he later issued his infamous order that in future all captured commandos would be executed as spies. Small wonder, damage to the Normandy dock was so comprehensive that it was not repaired until 1947, two years after the war was over. As a result Tirpitz was denied a home base in the Atlantic and as a result of that she was forced to spend most of the war in a fjord in Norway. She was finally destroyed by RAF bombers in 1944 and incredibly this mighty battleship, the pride of the German navy, went to the bottom having never sunk so much as a fishing boat. In the smoke of giant explosions the Tirpitz capsizes and sinks. The price for rendering this great ship impotent had been high. 168 British dead, around 400 Germans and 16 French shot by mistake by SS troops. Still the attack did mean that Churchill could say to the British and the world we're not done yet and it helped in France as well. One very important thing is what the French Prime Minister said to us on our first return to Saint-Nazaire. He said you were the first who gave us hope. And what of the men, the commandos and the sailors who brought them on this, the greatest raid of all? Well Tommy Durrant, the sergeant who took on a German destroyer, was captured and died of his wounds shortly afterwards. The bomb designer Nigel Tibbetts, after he'd steered the Campbelltown into the dock gate, helped wounded men onto a ML and headed for home. But his little boat was hit by machine gun fire and as his wife had predicted he was killed. After being captured, Mickey Byrne was sent to Calditz. After the war he became a journalist and today he lives in Wales where his hobby is reading poetry. What a world we've made. Tiger Watson was sent to the Spangenberg camp. After coming home he qualified as a doctor and ended up in Africa helping victims of leprosy. I can't imagine all my senses being so alert, you know, every sense of hearing and looking and your heart pumping. It certainly will be the most exciting thing of my life. It made you feel that you could stand up to the test. I think that was a relief to know that one didn't fall apart. I'm sure the youth of today would do the same as we did. I'm sure they would. I think that somehow or other it's such a strange thing that phlegmatic British do this sort of thing and I could see us doing it again. But I'm always reminded when I think about this and it was after the war I came across a quotation by Mark Twain who said that courage is recognising fear, courage is conquering fear. And it's absolutely true, couldn't be truer. Yes you were afraid but you couldn't afford to be a coward. Today the great moments of military history are marked with imposing monuments and their anniversary is honoured with much pomp and ceremony. But to find a memorial to the greatest raid of all you have to go to a car park in Falmouth in Cornwall. It's just a rock propped up against some railings and it seems rather small. I've always had the feeling that anything that really offers some hope, whether it's international or national or even individual, it's an idea of your own and it's impossible. Never think so, try it. Good night.