Meanwhile, Captain Donald Roy was leading his kilted Scotsmen past the pump house, across a bridge and on to the submarine basin, where they held off German reinforcements for half an hour. On the way he took out the guns on the roof of the large concrete pump house. The German survivors ran for their lives into the night. Roy’s men took heavy casualties from multibarrel flak guns on the far side of the submarine basin and from the ships inside it. The Germans perceived them as enough of a threat, however, that the crew of one harbor-defense boat, fearing capture, scuttled her.

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Behind Roy’s Scots fighting party, Lieutenant Stuart Chant, already hit in the right arm and left leg, led his demolition team toward his objective, the great dock’s pumping station. Roy’s men had already cleared out the German gunners on the roof of the building. Chant’s party stuck a ‘clam’-a small magnetic charge-on the locked doors, blew them open and plunged into the bowels of the pump house, heading for the machinery 40 feet below. One of Chant’s men, who had already been wounded and could not walk, was left as security at the pump house door.

Sergeant A.H. Dockerill, a one-time choirboy at Ely Cathedral, carried both the wounded man’s 60-pound rucksack of explosives and his own down those long steel stairs. Chant, his hands cut and bleeding, set charges along with his men, about 40 pounds of plastic for each enormous pump, then sent the rest of his men upstairs, keeping only Dockerill with him, ‘in case my wounds should prevent me from firing the charges.’ As he worked, the pump house shook from heavy explosions on its roof, the sounds of Roy blowing up German guns. Once Chant and Dockerill had ignited their fuses, they had 90 seconds to clear the 40-foot stairway to safety. Chant managed to limp up the stairs in time, clinging to the belt of the doughty Dockerill.

Chant had set his charges well. The explosion blew the pump house into concrete rubble and dropped the pump motors down into the crater below. His party finished the job by smashing up whatever was left with sledgehammers and incendiary charges. He then pulled his men back toward the river, heading for the ‘Old Mole,’ a pier that jutted straight out into the Loire directly south of the mouth of the dry dock. Finding their way blocked by a bridge that was swept by German fire, Chant’s men swung hand over hand along the girders beneath the structure, making their way to the other side.

Lieutenant Bob Burtenshaw led his team down the dock near Campbeltown. Wearing Commander Beattie’s naval hat-it is not recorded how he got it-and with his monocle screwed firmly in his eye, he hummed the tune ‘There’ll Always Be An England’ to himself in the midst of the German fire. In the gloom he came upon the survivors of Lieutenant Gerard Brett’s party, who had left their wounded commander under cover and moved to the north caisson of the dock, killing two Germans they met along the way. They had tried without success to blow open the hatch leading inside the huge caisson.

Burtenshaw, who had already been wounded, took command, and the combined teams lowered a dozen 18-pound demo charges down into the water against the face of the caisson. The Germans responded with heavy fire from boats moored in the basin, and Burtenshaw led a small party down the dock wall to try to suppress that fire. Since they had been burdened with heavy loads of explosives, Burtenshaw and his men carried only pistols, but with these puny weapons and help from two Tommy gunners they charged the automatic weapons raking the demolition men at the caisson. The Germans ran, but Burtenshaw, still humming, died on the edge of the dock.

The dock’s south winch house had also been blown up by a team under Lieutenant Christopher Smalley, its motors and huge sheaves blown into scrap iron, although Smalley was killed as he withdrew his men to the remaining motor launches. Lieutenant Corran Purdon’s men sledgehammered open the locked steel door to the northern caisson’s winch house, set their charges and watched as the winch house was torn apart by the explosion.

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