What Was Operation Chariot? The Daring WWII Raid Explained

On the night of March 27-28, 1942, 611 men sailed toward certain death. Their mission: destroy the largest drydock in the world before Germany's most powerful battleship could use it to devastate the Atlantic convoys keeping Britain alive.

Operation Chariot the raid on Saint-Nazaire would become the most decorated single action in World War II history. Yet most people have never heard of it.

The Strategic Crisis: Why Saint-Nazaire Had to Be Destroyed

By early 1942, Britain was losing the Battle of the Atlantic. German U-boats were sinking merchant ships faster than the Allies could replace them, strangling the flow of food, fuel, and ammunition that kept the nation functioning. Churchill later wrote that the U-boat threat was "the only thing that ever really frightened me during the war."

But an even greater danger loomed: the German battleship Tirpitz.

Sister ship to the infamous Bismarck, Tirpitz was the most powerful warship afloat. If she broke into the North Atlantic convoy lanes, she could cripple Britain's supply lifeline in weeks. The Admiralty knew that protecting convoys against both U-boats and a super-battleship would be nearly impossible.

There was only one drydock on the entire Atlantic coast capable of servicing Tirpitz: the massive Normandie Dock at Saint-Nazaire, France. Originally built to accommodate the luxury liner Normandie, this enormous facility represented Germany's only repair option for damaged capital ships operating in the Atlantic.

The solution was brutally simple: destroy the dock, and Tirpitz would be trapped in Norway, unable to risk Atlantic operations without a repair facility.

The Audacious Plan: HMS Campbeltown as a Floating Bomb

The plan conceived by Combined Operations was as brilliant as it was desperate. Take HMS Campbeltown, an obsolete American destroyer transferred to Britain under the Lend-Lease program, and convert her into a floating bomb. Pack her bow with four tons of high explosives sealed behind steel and concrete, disguise her to resemble a German Möwe-class destroyer, and ram her into the dock gates at full speed.

The delayed-action fuses would detonate hours later, when German engineers were examining the wreck destroying both the dock and its critical pumping machinery.

Alongside Campbeltown, seventeen wooden motor launches would carry 268 British Commandos supported by Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand volunteers to land at Saint-Nazaire and destroy secondary targets: pumping stations, lock gates, fuel tanks, and harbor installations.

The expected casualty rate was 60-70 percent. Lord Mountbatten, head of Combined Operations, personally told volunteers they could withdraw without shame. Not a single man did.

The Raid: "Into the Jaws of Death"

Just after midnight on March 28, 1942, the flotilla approached Saint-Nazaire. German searchlights swept the estuary. Shore batteries covered every approach. Six thousand troops garrisoned the port.

Campbeltown flew German colors and her crew signaled false identification codes, buying precious minutes. But at 1:28 AM, the deception collapsed. Every German gun opened fire simultaneously.

What followed was carnage. The wooden motor launches, their fuel tanks exposed on deck, erupted into fireballs under shell and tracer fire. Men burned alive or drowned in the freezing Loire. Yet Campbeltown charged forward through the maelstrom, ramming into the dock gates at 20 knots, her bow crumpling exactly as planned.

Commandos poured ashore into brutal close-quarters fighting. For ninety minutes, they battled through the port complex, placing demolition charges while German reinforcements converged from all directions. By dawn, most were killed or captured. Only a handful escaped.

The Explosion That Changed the War

At noon on March 28 over ten hours after the ramming Campbeltown exploded with devastating force. The blast killed hundreds of German personnel who had been examining the "harmless" wreck, destroyed the dock gates completely, and wrecked the critical pumping machinery.

The Normandie Dock would remain unusable for the rest of the war.

Tirpitz never entered the Atlantic. Denied her only repair facility, she remained bottled up in Norwegian fjords, her strategic potential neutralized. The raid had achieved its objective.

A Legacy of Extraordinary Courage

Operation Chariot resulted in five Victoria Crosses Britain's highest award for valor along with four Distinguished Service Orders and dozens of other decorations. No other single action in World War II produced more awards for gallantry.

Of the 611 men who sailed that night, 169 were killed and 215 captured. Yet their sacrifice altered the course of the Battle of the Atlantic and helped ensure Britain's survival.

Despite its strategic significance and the extraordinary heroism involved, the raid on Saint-Nazaire remains overshadowed by more famous operations like D-Day or the Dambusters. My forthcoming book, Into the Jaws of Death: Operation Chariot and the Raid that Saved Britain, draws on newly declassified British and German archives, along with interviews with surviving participants and French civilians who aided the escapees, to tell the complete story of this remarkable mission.

When Channel 4 broadcast a documentary about Operation Chariot in 2007, it became one of the year's highest-rated history programs and has since accumulated over 7.6 million views on YouTube. The sustained interest proves that audiences recognize the significance of what these 611 men accomplished on that March night in 1942.

They sailed into the jaws of death and changed history.

David C. Forward is the author of "Into the Jaws of Death: Operation Chariot and the Raid that Saved Britain." An award-winning aviation journalist and World War II historian, Forward conducted years of archival research into the Saint-Nazaire raid, including study of recently declassified documents at the Imperial War Museum and British National Archives. Learn more at JawsofDeathBook.com.

Related Topics:

• HMS Campbeltown

• Saint-Nazaire raid

• Lord Louis Mountbatten

• Combined Operations

• German battleship Tirpitz

• Battle of the Atlantic

• British Commandos WWII

• Special operations World War II