The Greatest Commando Raid of All Time

In the small hours of the morning on March 28, 1942, German forces defending the French port of St. Nazaire looked out into the Loire Estuary and witnessed an alarming sight: a destroyer speeding at full steam towards the harbour, followed by a small flotilla of motor launches. While the vessel looked like a German destroyer and had presented the proper clearance codes, at that moment she suddenly lowered her German naval ensign and raised the white ensign of the Royal Navy. Then, she turned sharply and rammed her bows into the gates of the harbour's massive dry dock with a terrific crash. Moments later, the destroyer and the accompanying launches began disgorging a small army of 300 British Army Commandos, who swarmed across the harbour bent on wreaking havoc. Less than 12 hours later, more than 500 men lay dead, St. Nazaire was in flames, and one of the greatest threats to the British war effort had been all but eliminated. This is the story of Operation Chariot, the most audacious special forces operation of the Second World War. On June 4, 1940, the last troops of the British Expeditionary Force were evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk. Its strength severely depleted and most of its weapons and equipment still in France, the BEF was ill-equipped to repel the coming German invasion of the British Isles. Only the might of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force now stood between Britain and total Nazi domination. Yet Prime Minister Winston Churchill still believed the Army had a role to play in the months ahead, and just two days after the Dunkirk evacuation wrote to his Chief Military Assistant, General Hastings Ismay, that: “Enterprises must be prepared, with specially-trained troops of the hunter class, who can develop a reign of terror down these coasts, first of all on the “butcher and bolt” policy…” These special troops, initially dubbed the Special Service Brigade, soon became known as the “commandos”, after the quick-moving, hard-hitting squads of Dutch Boer settlers who had given British forces such trouble during the South African War of 1899-1902. Drawn from various units of the regular Territorial Army, these men, all volunteers, were put through a gruelling training regimen of physical fitness, marksmanship, hand-to-hand combat, stealth, amphibious and parachute landing, and demolitions in order to weed out all but the toughest and most capable warriors. The first iteration of the Special Service Brigade, commanded by Brigadier Joseph Haydon, comprised four battalions or “Commandos” of 450 men each; by the end of the war, the organization had expanded to 12 Commandos comprising nearly 25,000 men. This is an abridged version of a video on our channel TodayIFoundOut which you can check out and subscribe to here:    / @todayifoundout