Saturday, March 28, 1942. The St. Nazaire Raid

On this day in 1942 the British conducted the large and risky raid on the Normandie Dry Dock at the port of St. Nazaire.  The raid involved ramming the HMS Campbeltown, an obsolete destroyer packed with explosives, into the dry dock.  It worked, and it took the dry dock out of operation for the rest of the war.

Areal photograph of Normandie Dry Dock with Campbletown inside dry dock.  The dry dock had been for the modern French passenger liner Normandie which had been lost in an accidental fire only recently while being converted to a troop transport in the United States.

The raid was sizable and involved air, sea and land elements of the British forces, resulting in British dead and 215 becoming prisoners of war.  Surprisingly, the Germans lost 360 dead, if civilian casualties at the dock are also included, in part because explosives on the Campbletown were time delayed and did not go off until noon.  At that time a party of 40 German officers and civilians were on board the Campbletown examining it.

The USS Buchanan in 1936.

The HMS Campbletown had originally been the USS Buchanan.  Decommissioned before World War Two, she was transferred to the British as part of the Destroyers For Bases program. She'd been built in 1918.

The British sank the SS Galilea in the Ionian Sea in a submarine strike.  The ship was an Italian hospital ship, but it was being used as a troops transport carrying Alpini to Italy so that they could be reassigned to the Eastern Front.  The ship also carried other Italian troops and some Greek POWs.  981 people went down with the ship.

The British struck Lubeck Germany with landmines, incendiary canisters and high explosives.  The raid resulted in damage to 62% of the cities buildings and destroyed its cathedral.