Daring raids of World War Two : heroic land, sea and air attacks

271 Pages·2015·6.92 MB·English

by  Jacobs

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by
Pen & Sword Aviation
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
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Barnsley
South Yorkshire
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Copyright © Peter Jacobs 2015
ISBN: 978 1 78346 333 6
EPUB ISBN: 978 1 47383 863 5
PRC ISBN: 978 1 47383 835 2
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and Patents Act 1988.
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1 Bridges at Maastricht
Chapter 2 Italian Fleet at Taranto
Chapter 3 Attack on the Gneisenau
Chapter 4 Sink the Bismarck
Chapter 5 Litani River
Chapter 6 Raid on Bremen
Chapter 7 Rommel’s Headquarters
Chapter 8 Vaagso
Chapter 9 Postmaster
Chapter 10 Channel Dash
Chapter 11 Bruneval
Chapter 12 St Nazaire
Chapter 13 Boulogne Harbour
Chapter 14 Augsburg
Chapter 15 Barricade
Chapter 16 Hess and Goebbels Gun Batteries at Dieppe
Chapter 17 Reconnaissance of Saint Honorine-des-Pertes
Chapter 18 Barce
Chapter 19 Basalt
Chapter 20 Cockleshell Heroes
Chapter 21 Chindits
Chapter 22 Vemork Heavy Water Plant, Telemark
Chapter 23 Dam Busters
Chapter 24 Midgets Against the Tirpitz
Chapter 25 Reconnaissance of the Normandy Beaches
Chapter 26 Amiens Prison
Chapter 27 Pegasus Bridge
Chapter 28 The Bridge Too Far
Chapter 29 Lake Comacchio
Chapter 30 Midgets Against the Takao and My k
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Bibliography
Acknowledgements
A
book such as this could never be produced without the help of many
people. First and foremost, I would like to thank the staff at the National
Archives in Kew, who continue to maintain an excellent facility and provide an
outstanding service for all members of the public. The same can be said for the
staff at the Imperial War Museum (London, Manchester and Duxford), the RAF
Museum (Hendon and Cosford) and those at the Air Historical Branch (RAF)
based at Northolt. All have provided me with great support over the years.
In addition to these excellent museums and institutions, I was fortunate to
spend a full career as an officer in the Royal Air Force. This gave me privileged
access to service establishments, unit records and squadron diaries. I was also
fortunate to spend my last few years in the Service at the RAF College Cranwell,
which boasts one of the finest libraries in the country, and this gave me access to
a great deal of material. Furthermore, during my career, which spanned five
decades, I was privileged to meet many wartime veterans. Although very few are
still with us today, they always seemed happy to share their personal memories
with me, something I shall never forget. From all of these museums, institutions,
establishments and individuals I have been able to build a wonderful archive of
information, personal accounts and images; the images used in this book have
been credited accordingly.
To include the stories of thirty daring raids under one cover means I can only
provide a short account of each. Many of these stories have been given far more
coverage in other books and so I must pay my own tribute, and give thanks, to
all the authors that have taken the time to tell each tale in much greater depth.
My research naturally took me to a number of published sources, and for the
enthusiast wishing to learn far more about a particular raid I recommend each
and every one of them. The Bibliography provides a fuller list, but amongst the
many excellent books I have read are (to name just a few): Night Raid (the
audacious raid at Bruneval) by Taylor Downing; Operation Suicide (Cockleshell
Heroes) by Robert Lyman; The Dambusters Raid (John Sweetman); The Small
Scale Raiding Force (Brian Lett); Pegasus Bridge (Stephen Ambrose); Arnhem:
A Tragedy of Errors (Peter Harclerode); and Target Tirpitz (Patrick Bishop).
Over the years some of these stories have become immortalized on the big
screen. Great films, such as The Dam Busters, Heroes of Telemark, The
Cockleshell Heroes, Sink the Bismarck and A Bridge Too Far, all inspired me in
my younger years to the point that I just wanted to join the armed forces – and so
I did. Most importantly though, films such as these have meant that the daring
exploits they portrayed will live on for generations to come and so, on behalf of
a most grateful nation, I must thank the film-makers of days gone by. Not only
did they inspire me, but I suspect they have inspired many others over the years.
For a long time I have felt there was a place for a book such as this, as it gives
the reader a good understanding of the courage and bravery demonstrated by
members of the British Armed Forces during the Second World War, whichever
service or theatre they were operating in. And so I would like to thank the team
at Pen & Sword for agreeing to let me tell these stories in one volume, and to
Laura Hirst, in particular, for helping to make it happen. I have always thought
that writing the book is the easy part but turning it into what you see today is
something else.
Last, but by no means least, I would like to pay tribute to all those who took
part in the raids included in this book, many of whom did not live to tell the tale.
Without their courage there would be no stories to tell.
Introduction
A
mongst the titanic strategic battles of the Second World War, countless
daring raids were carried out by British units across all operational
theatres – by land, sea and air. These raids varied in size enormously. Some
involved thousands of men, such as at Dieppe, Arnhem and in the jungle of
Burma, while others were carried out by a handful of men and, in some cases, by
just a couple of individuals. Included in this latter category is a raid carried out
by two men in a canoe on an enemy vessel in the enemy-occupied harbour at
Boulogne, and a mission carried out by two men who, night after night, swam
ashore from a midget submarine to carry out vital reconnaissance of the beaches
that were soon to become centre stage for the Allied invasion of Normandy.
While some raids have since been immortalized in dramatic form on the big
screen and have become household names, such as the legendary Dam Busters,
others, no less daring or dramatic, have disappeared into forgotten archives, only
to be remembered by those who took part. The latter could happen for any
number of reasons. Some took place thousands of miles from Britain or involved
specialist units of which little was known back home at the time, such as the raid
on Barce in North Africa by the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) and a raid
carried out by two midget submarines against Japanese cruisers in the Johore
Straits of Singapore at the very end of the seemingly forgotten war in the Far
East. Some ended in dramatic failure, such as the disastrous reconnaissance of
Saint Honorine-des-Pertes, while others were deliberately not publicized back
home, such as at the Litani River, where a British commando raid on Vichy
forces resulted in French casualties. However, while some raids went largely
unheard of at the time, others were seen as great opportunities to provide the
British public with some much needed good news. The sinking of the mighty
German battleship Bismarck, for example, or the successful commando raid at
Vaagso on the west coast of Norway, both during 1941, was news considered
too good not to tell, and those who took part returned home as heroes.
A pattern of raids emerged as the war progressed. In 1940, when Britain’s
survival was the priority, there were often not the resources, nor the expertise for
that matter, to strike back at the enemy. But the formation of new organizations,
such as the Army Commandos and the Special Operations Executive (SOE),
formed by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to ‘set Europe ablaze’,
introduced new players into the raiding game, who quickly became specialists in
their trade. At that stage of the war it was vital to hit back at the enemy in any
way possible, but some of the early commando raids were hastily planned and,
therefore, resulted in disaster. One commando raid towards the end of 1941, for
example, on what was believed to be General Erwin Rommel’s headquarters in
North Africa, ended in failure and brought an end to what some considered to be
raiding of a rather gung-ho nature. The intelligence on which the raid had been
planned turned out to be hopelessly wrong and it cost the Commandos one of
their finest men.
From the end of 1941 until the Allied invasion of north-west Europe in 1944,
there were many British units capable of taking the war to the enemy in a variety
of ways. In addition to the conventional forces of the Royal Navy, British Army
and the Royal Air Force (RAF), there were many other smaller units operating
within the Services: the Small Scale Raiding Force, the Combined Operations
Pilotage Parties, 101 Troop, the Royal Marines Boom Patrol Detachment and the
Long Range Desert Group to name just a few. The importance of co-ordinating
with other organizations soon became apparent but, even as the war progressed,
this did not always happen as it should. For example, when a small group of
Royal Marines carried out one of the most physically demanding of all raids, by
paddling 60 miles up a river to attack enemy shipping in the Nazi-occupied
French port of Bordeaux, in a story better known as the Cockleshell Heroes, they
did so without the knowledge that the SOE was planning its own raid against the
same port.
Of the many British raids carried out during the Second World War, some
were quite audacious to say the least. Had their stories not be true then some
would struggle to believe them. These include the raid on St Nazaire, often
described as the most daring raid of them all, when a Royal Navy warship was
packed with explosives and rammed at full speed into the dry dock to put it out
of action, and the legendary Bruneval raid; what better way was there to find out
how an enemy radar worked than to capture one, dismantle it and then take the
key components back to Britain for analysis? And then there was the raid carried
out by the SOE to steal three enemy vessels from a neutral Spanish port off the
west coast of Africa, later described as one of the SOE’s classic raids, and so it
goes on.
The significance of all of these missions varied enormously. Some helped gain
a tactical advantage in a bigger overall battle, for example at Lake Comacchio in
Italy, while others gathered important intelligence, such as those carried out
across the Channel by the Small Scale Raiding Force. Some proved a point, such
as the first low-level daylight raid by Lancaster bombers at Augsburg deep into
southern Bavaria, which demonstrated the capability of the RAF’s new four-
engine heavy bomber, while others had repercussions far beyond the locality of
the raid itself, such as the commando raid on the Channel Island of Sark that
resulted in Hitler’s notorious Kommandobefehl, his Commando Order, stating
that all Allied commandos captured by German forces should be killed
immediately, even if in uniform or if attempting to surrender. Even now, some
raids continue to be the subject of great debate as post-war historians argue
whether they were a success or not: one such example is the low-level raid by
RAF Mosquitos on the prison at Amiens. The fact that so much resource was
applied to sinking or neutralizing the mighty German warships – Bismarck,
Tirpitz, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen – shows just how feared these
ships were at the time, particularly by Churchill; had these great warships have
been allowed to roam the Atlantic then the war may have had a very different
outcome. And while contemplating how the Second World War might have
turned out, who knows what the outcome might have been had the raid on the
Vemork hydro-electric plant at Telemark in Norway, and the subsequent sinking
of the Hydro ferry on Lake Tinnsjø, not been successful? Often described as the
SOE’s greatest raid of the war, it prevented the Nazis from acquiring deuterium
oxide, otherwise known as heavy water, which could well have been used in the
production of nuclear weapons – another subject of much post-war debate!
I have picked a selection of thirty raids and reconnaissance missions carried
out on land, by sea and from the air, which I consider to be amongst the most
daring of the Second World War. Rather than cover too many raids of a similar
type, I have included a variety to cover all the Services and the main operational
theatres, ranging from those involving thousands of men to those involving just a
few individuals, to represent all those who fought with such courage in those
parts of the world: from northern Norway to the Channel Islands and to the west