Raiders (26 page)

It was now that his good nature got the better of him and disaster struck.
Orders stipulated that none of the withdrawing vessels were to stop under the German guns to pick up survivors but, spotting two men on a life raft, Wynn didn’t have the heart to roar past them.
The speed of the torpedo boat was its only protection against the mighty coastal guns and, as soon as he slowed, one of them traversed its giant barrel.
Moments later, two 170-mm shells crashed into the boat causing devastation.
Wynn, severely injured, was rescued by his Chief Petty Officer.
Together with the others who survived the massive blasts, they abandoned ship.
As many as two dozen men clung to the one Carley float life raft as it was pulled out to sea by the power of the retreating tide.
When it was later intercepted by a German patrol boat, Wynn was one of only three men still alive.

The three other motor torpedo boats had provided covering fire during the attempted landings and, using their speed to dodge incoming shells, survived the early exchanges of the action.
ML 270 and ML 160 were later hit by shells but managed to patch up the worst of the damage and limp out to sea.
ML 298 under Lieutenant Nock was less fortunate.
Braving the heavy fire of the German defences, Nock took the boat into the Old Mole and the Old Entrance searching for Commandos to evacuate; finding none, he headed back out into the river.
The boat
had been hit several times during the night and a fire on board soon drew the attention of the coastal gun batteries as she sped for the relative sanctuary of the open sea.
When a volley of large-calibre shells crashed on her wooden decks, the result was carnage and destruction.
The few that survived had no choice but to abandon ship and put their lives at the mercy of the tides.

Commander Beattie and Lieutenant Tibbits, the two men who had guided the
Campbeltown
onto the target, were among fifty or so naval personnel and Commandos who had been taken aboard Lieutenant Rodier’s ML 177, many of them carrying severe wounds.
They had almost reached the mouth of the river when they were hit by a shell that killed most on board, including Rodier and Tibbits.
Those who weren’t killed outright died of their wounds in the freezing water.
Beattie and the few other survivors were later rescued by the Germans after several hours in the water.

Commander Ryder, aboard his HQ gun boat MGB 314, was horrified by the grisly spectacle in the harbour.
Bodies of men floated in water, the badly wounded cried out in agony, motor launches exploded and smouldered, oil burned on the surface of the river and fountains of water burst skywards from the shower of shells raining down from the coastal batteries.

‘All this time MGB314 was lying stopped about 100 yards off the Old Entrance,’ wrote Ryder in the Dispatch submitted to the Admiralty two weeks later, ‘and although fired on continually by flak positions and hit many times she was by the Grace of God not set ablaze.
On looking round the harbour, however,
I counted about seven or eight blazing M.L.s and was forced to realise that MGB314 was the only craft left in sight .
.
.
It was clearly impossible for MGB314 to return.
With some thirty to forty men on board and her decks piled with seriously wounded I decided at 0250 that she was in no position to take off the soldiers we had landed.
It was unlikely that MGB314 would survive another five minutes with the fire that was being concentrated in her direction so I left at high speed.’

As she withdrew downriver, the gun boat was caught in the glare of the searchlights and immediately subjected to heavy crossfire from both banks.
In spite of being badly wounded, Able Seaman Bill Savage, the gunlayer manning the forward gun, a quick-firing three-pounder, kept up a vigorous stream of return fire.
Savage, who was completely exposed without an armoured gunshield to protect him, must have known it was only a matter of time before the sheer weight and accuracy of the enemy’s many guns got the better of him.
The citation for his posthumous Victoria Cross stated that it had been awarded ‘in recognition not only of the gallantry and devotion to duty of Able Seaman Savage but also of the valour shown by many others, unnamed, in motor launches, motor gun boats and motor torpedo boats, who gallantly carried out their duty in entirely exposed positions against enemy fire at very close range.’

It was as obvious to Newman as it had been to Ryder that there was going to be no evacuation as planned.
He too could see the blackened hulls of the smouldering motor launches out on the
oil-choked river.
Roughly 100 Commandos, many of them wounded, had slowly congregated, group by group, around the HQ building by the Old Entrance.
With every minute that passed, more German reinforcements poured into the town, pinning the British down with their backs to the river.
The question facing Newman was simple: surrender, or try and fight their way out and head for neutral Spain?
There was only going to be one answer.
Surrender was not covered in the Commando training manual.

The only possible escape route was through the dockyard and the outskirts of the Old Town, over a narrow bridge spanning the southern entrance to the U-boat basin, into the labyrinth of backstreets and alleys and out into the countryside.
The Commandos were running out of ammunition, they were heavily outnumbered and many of them were carrying wounds, but their one advantage was their street-fighting skill.

The men spilt up into five groups of about twenty and moved out in the darkness through the network of warehouses.
Almost immediately, a series of skirmishes broke out and the crack of grenades and rattle of machine-gun fire echoed across the giant submarine basin.
Several men fell in quick succession with wounds too severe for them to continue.
All their comrades could do was inject them with morphia, wish them luck and press on.

The Commandos regrouped at the end of the warehouse complex and paused in the shadows of a building, pondering their next move.
To their right, they could see the bridge, but
to reach it they had to dash across over 100 yards of open ground.
Heavy fire was pouring in their direction from buildings and a machine-gun pillbox on the town side.
But there was no talk of giving up.
As one, eighty men rose from the shadows and burst towards the bridge, firing their weapons.
Writing about the event after the war, Lieutenant Purdon recalled: ‘A hail of enemy fire erupted as we crossed the bridge, projectiles slamming into its girders, bullets whining and ricocheting off them and from the cobbles.
There was a roar of gunfire and the percussion of “potato masher” grenades as we neared the far end.’

The defenders fled at the sight of the stampeding British troops, who immediately split and disappeared into the backstreets of the town centre.
The charge was a heroic gesture of defiance by the Commandos but, for the great majority of them, it was to be their last.
The Germans had surrounded the town and cordoned it off with heavily armed checkpoints while hundreds of other troops carried out an intensive sweep, street by street, house by house.
Some Commandos holed up in homes, cellars and alleyways, while others chose to break out while there was still darkness to cover them.
The close-quarter fighting continued for several hours but, as the sun cast its watery light over the French port, it became obvious that, with ammunition almost expended, any further attempt to flee would end in certain death.

Newman and the other survivors were gradually rounded up and taken up the road to the de-luxe hotel L’Hermitage in La Baule, which had been converted into a temporary hospital and
prisoner camp.
Here they were reunited with other ‘Charioteers’ – soldiers and sailors – who had been plucked from the river or found wounded around the dockyard.
Over three-quarters of the 200 raiders who were captured were carrying at least one wound, some so severe that several men did not survive to make the transfer to the permanent POW camp a few days later.
Only five men succeeded in evading capture.
Helped by French civilians along the route, all of them made it safely into Spain and back to England, rejoined their units and saw further action before the war was out.

Daylight revealed an apocalyptic vision in St Nazaire.
Dead bodies, British and German, were strewn around the dockyard and streets of the town.
Some were floating in the harbour; others lay washed up on the banks of the Loire.
Buildings had been turned to rubble, fires burned and sunken ships and boats sat low in the water, billowing smoke.
On realising the hopelessness of their situation, the Commandos slowly emerged from hiding and gave themselves up throughout the morning and afternoon, but the town remained tense for many days afterwards.
Sporadic bursts of machine-gun fire crackled through the streets as nervous Germans, expecting to find a ‘Tommy’ in every nook and cranny, leapt between doorways and alleys firing at shadows.

The raid had come as a huge shock and it quickly reverberated through the chain of command back to Berlin.
There was open fury among Hitler’s High Command that a small raiding party had managed to infiltrate such a heavily defended and strategically vital centre of German military operations – and wreak so
much devastation.
Some of the locals, meanwhile, thought the long fight through the night heralded the start of their country’s liberation and attacked German soldiers, triggering a brutal crackdown by the authorities.

In general, the Germans treated their British captives with decency, and over the coming days they would bury their enemies with full military honours.
But there were a few instances of cruelty and inhumanity.
Some of the severely wounded were dumped unceremoniously into transports and others were treated harshly by some medical orderlies at L’Hermitage.

As the Commandos were continuing the fight in St Nazaire, the eight of the seventeen ‘little ships’ that had survived the pounding of the coastal gunners were racing to make their rendezvous with
Tynedale
and
Atherstone
.
The destroyers, however, were running late, having encountered a group of enemy torpedo boats, which they saw off after a brief but fierce engagement.
Ryder’s gun boat (MGB 314), which was taking on water having been holed on the starboard, came across the torpedo boat ML 270 as they left the Loire and they both went alongside the destroyers shortly after daybreak to transfer their wounded into the care of the medical teams.
Two other launches (ML 156 and ML 446) had already done the same, having arrived an hour earlier.
Once the rest of the men and the crews were taken aboard the warships, the four smaller vessels were scuttled and the destroyers made smoke to get away from the heavily patrolled coastline as quickly as possible.
Three other launches – ML 160, ML 307 and ML
443 – were several hours ahead of them, having decided to make the most of the darkness and head straight back to England.
They were the only ones of the original eighteen to make it from Falmouth to St Nazaire and back.

The crew and Commandos aboard ML 306, under Lieutenant Henderson, had good reason to believe that they had slipped the German net too.
By 0530, they were some fifty to sixty miles from the mouth of the estuary and making good speed towards the safety of home waters.
The fourteen Commandos aboard, who had not managed to get ashore, were feeling aggrieved at having missed out on the main action when they felt the engine cut and heard the call from the bridge to go to action stations.
Henderson had spotted the phosphorescence from the bow waves of an enemy destroyer squadron.

One of the five, the
Jaguar
, broke away from the others to investigate and, quickly identifying the suspicious vessel as a small British motor launch, Kapitänleutnant Friedrich Paul approached her, expecting her to surrender.
Henderson and the Commandos aboard had no intention whatsoever of capitulating, in spite of the fact their vessel was over ten times lighter, made from wood not steel and one of her two Oerlikon 20-mm guns was jammed.
The only other armaments were two .303-inch Lewis machine guns mounted on the bridge and the assorted small arms of the Commandos, which didn’t amount to a great deal as nine of the men were part of a demolition team and carried nothing more powerful than a Colt pistol.

Jaguar
turned on her searchlight and opened up with all her
light weapons.
A murderous enfilade tore through the British ship from close range, shredding wood and flesh.
The German captain could have sunk the launch at any point with his main armament but he wanted to have it as a prize and, once he had overcome his shock that he had a fight on his hands, he seemed to be enjoying the sport being offered by the spirited Tommies.
A game of cat-and-mouse followed as Henderson tried to outmanoeuvre the destroyer, which was attempting to ram him.
When
Jaguar
, which was faster, managed to make impact, the launch was turning away, but the shunt was powerful enough to catapult several men overboard.
German guns poured fire into the British vessel, knocking out the Oerlikon and inflicting very heavy casualties.
When the crewman manning the Lewis guns was cut down, Sergeant Tom Durrant leapt up to take over the position.