Raiders by Ross Kemp

Author:Ross Kemp [Ross Kemp]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-10-24T16:00:00+00:00

Operation Chariot

27/28 March 1942

IT WAS SHORTLY before midnight when Lieutenant Nigel Tibbits left the bridge of HMS Campbeltown and went below to activate the fuses connected to the huge charge inside the watertight, cement casing built into the forward compartments of the old destroyer. Using long-delay pencil fuses, it was impossible to set an exact time, but the young naval demolition expert had no doubt that within six to ten hours, the four-and-a-half tons of explosive in the form of twenty-four depth charges would tear the ship to shreds – as well as anything else within the vicinity of its huge blast range. Whether her captain up on the bridge, Lieutenant Commander Stephen ‘Sam’ Beattie, would succeed in guiding the ship onto the target was another matter. To do that, over the coming hour, the naval force would have to negotiate six miles of the Loire’s myriad of treacherous shoals and mudflats and survive the pounding barrage of one of the most heavily defended stretches of coast anywhere on the planet.

HMS Campbeltown sat at the centre of the naval force, now in battle formation, steaming at fifteen knots towards the yawning mouth of the Loire estuary, twenty-five miles south of the Brittany peninsula. The gun crews were closed down in their positions, the eighty Commandos of Group Three, who had been kept out of sight below deck throughout the long crossing, put on their steel helmets and collected their weapons and equipment. On Campbeltown’s port and starboard sides, two columns of high-speed motor launches, carrying the Commando assault and demolition troops of Groups One and Two, bounced over the flat surface of the Atlantic. There were twelve of them in total and, though fast, their wooden hulls and the extra fuel they carried on deck made them vulnerable. The convoy was spearheaded by Motor Gun Boat 314, the HQ vessel, containing the two commanders of the raid, Commander Robert Ryder, who was in charge of the naval force, and Lieutenant Colonel Charles Newman, leading the Commandos. Tucked in behind them, on either side, were two torpedo motor launches. Two other torpedo boats provided protection at the rear of the convoy. Twenty miles to the southwest, the crews of destroyers HMS Atherstone and HMS Tynedale who had escorted them from Falmouth waited in the darkness, on high alert for enemy patrols and U-boats.

They were still twelve miles off and no land could be sighted through the misty gloom when Ryder and Newman spotted gun flashes dead ahead to the northeast. A glance at the time told both men that the RAF had arrived over St Nazaire, according to plan. Soon the horizon was ablaze with tracer and searchlights. On all 18 vessels, the nerves of 611 men began to tighten and the banter faded to tense silence as they went to action stations.

As the convoy slid towards the estuary opening, they passed the eerie sight of the wreck of the troopship Lancastria lying on its side, sunk by German bombers two weeks after Dunkirk, with the loss of over 4,000 lives, in Britain’s worst ever maritime disaster.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.