British Commandos had already distinguished themselves in similar raids from Africa to Norway’s Lofoten Islands. The Lofoten strike of April 1941 was enormously successful. The raid netted 11 ships sunk, 800,000 gallons of vital oil burned, 216 Germans and 60 Norwegian quislings taken prisoner and enlisted more than 300 Norwegian volunteers for the forces of Free Norway. The British suffered only one man wounded.

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While most of the commandos’ early raids were successful and all had caused the Axis casualties, embarrassment and anxiety, St. Nazaire would be a much tougher proposition than anything they had previously attempted. If the offensive succeeded-and that was nowhere close to certain-it would be the most audacious raid of the war. The commandos would go in during the last week of March, for only then would they have both a full moon and a flood tide between midnight and 0200 hours.

British resources were slim. Some of the commandos were to travel on a fleet of 15 motor launches (MLs), 112-foot-long unarmored mahogany boats carrying terribly vulnerable auxiliary gas tanks on deck and packing only a dual-mount Oerlikon 20mm cannon and a pair of World War I-vintage Lewis machine guns. Four of these frail craft carried torpedoes as well. The MLs did have two advantages: They could do 18 knots, and they drew very little water. Coming into the Loire estuary on a spring tide, they could operate across the shallows and around the mud flats, outside the heavily defended main ship channel.

A little more firepower was provided by a single mahogany-skinned motor gunboat (MGB). The MGB carried a 2-pounder Vickers anti-aircraft gun, a couple of twin-mount .50-caliber machine guns and a semiautomatic 2-pounder gun. She would be the headquarters boat, and would lead the raiders into the Loire, for she carried both radar and an echo sounder.

And last, there was Motor Torpedo Boat 74 (MTB-74), modified so that her torpedo tubes, designed to rest amidships, had been moved forward, almost to her bow, on the thesis that she could thus pitch her torpedoes over an anti-torpedo net. Her torpedoes had been modified to incorporate a delay, so that they would explode after lying for a while on the bottom. Her function was to torpedo the southern caisson if the main weapon failed to work. MTB-74 was a cranky boat that had trouble maintaining any speed between dead-slow and a flat-out 40 knots. She was to be towed into action, much to the disgust of her skipper, Sub-Lt. Micky Wynn, one of the many daring eccentrics (’mad as a hatter,’ according to one senior officer) who found a wartime home with the Royal Navy.

But none of those vessels could provide the main punch, the knockout blow that would put the dry dock out of action for keeps. There would be no second chance. Commandos would land to destroy the great sliding caissons and the winch houses and pumping station, but even that might not take the dock out of the war permanently. Something more was needed, and that something turned out to be HMS Campbeltown. An old 314-foot, four-stack destroyer, Campbeltown, alias USS Buchanan, was one of 50 obsolete destroyers transferred to the Royal Navy in return for granting the United States base privileges in British Caribbean possessions.

In preparation for the raid, Campbeltown was sent to Royal Navy facilities at Devonport for a facelift. The nine-day reconstruction left the destroyer looking a little like one of Germany’s heavy-duty Möwe-class warships, a sort of cross between a small destroyer and large torpedo boat. The shipwrights in Devonport stripped the old destroyer of as much weight as possible, for she would have to negotiate the shallows of the Loire, where even at flood tide there was barely 10 feet of water. All of Campbeltown’s torpedo tubes and depth-charge equipment was removed, along with two of her funnels, most of her masts and all of her deck guns but one. The remaining two stacks were cut down, and shipwrights added thin armor around the bridge. They also installed four strips of plating, 18 inches high, from bridge to stern, to give a little cover to the commando landing parties. In addition, she got eight 20mm Oerlikons, and her single 12-pounder gun was moved from her stern to her forecastle.

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