Posted on 03/07/2017 11:07:52 AM PST by Retain Mike
In one of World War II’s most spectacular raids, the Royal Navy and British Commandos virtually ensured that the battleship Tirpitz would never venture into the Atlantic.
As the spring of 1942 approached, the British Admiralty had its hands full with the Battle of the Atlantic, which had been raging for two and a half years. U-boat wolf packs, surface raiders, and warplanes had sent about eight million tons of Allied shipping to the bottom, and the situation was getting worse. Slipping out from their havens in the western French ports of Brest, Lorient, La Pallice, Bordeaux, and Saint-Nazaire, the German submarines were now preying on merchant shipping along the U.S. East Coast while continuing to sink Allied vessels at the rate of almost two a day in the North Atlantic.
Brest and Saint-Nazaire were the most heavily fortified German naval bases on the French Atlantic coast. Ringed with mine and torpedo barriers, antiaircraft guns, coastal batteries, and ship patrols, their U-boat pens were bunkers of reinforced concrete several yards thick. But Saint-Nazaire, situated near the mouth of the Loire River, was much more than a secure refuge for submarines, and its significance haunted the admirals and strategists in Whitehall.
(Excerpt) Read more at usni.org ...
Unbelievable mission. And head shaking when you realize today it would be done with a missile or a B-2 unloading several 2000lb JDAMS at 3am.
The missions they used to only be able to accomplish with people are amazing.
It seems they don't make them like that any more.
When I was a kid I had a book titled The Book of Adventure that had this and many other stories in it.
Don’t know whatever happened to that book.
A fascinating and heroic attack. Very sad that it was to a large extent suicidal. Today we would use remotely-operated or autonomous weapons.
I don’t know about that. There was that guy that Trump honored in his speech last week. The guy died during a raid on compound in somalia.
I can’t help but think that that kind of raid with its reaped treasure trove of data —has to get under the skin of the bad guys.
The part that got my attention were the two commandos who waited out their time on this bomb.
“Suddenly, without warning at 1035, a deafening explosion shook the Saint-Nazaire area as the Cambeltown’s charges detonated, destroying the forward part of the ship and the dry-dock caisson and killing up to 400 Germans still on board and two captured Commando officers who knew that the ship was about to blow up but did not say so.”
The part that got my attention were the two commandos who waited out their time on this bomb.
“Suddenly, without warning at 1035, a deafening explosion shook the Saint-Nazaire area as the Cambeltown’s charges detonated, destroying the forward part of the ship and the dry-dock caisson and killing up to 400 Germans still on board and two captured Commando officers who knew that the ship was about to blow up but did not say so.”
Jeremy Clarkson did a documentary on this raid. You can view it on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXusKM5uX0s
Thanks
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