The British rammed a bomb-packed destroyer into a French dock, let the Germans swarm the wreck for a full day, then blew it sky-high.
By 1942, the giant German battleship Tirpitz was lurking in Norway, and the British feared that if she ever broke out into the Atlantic she could slaughter the convoys keeping Britain fed and armed. There was only one dry dock on the entire occupied Atlantic coast big enough to repair her if she was damaged: the Normandie dock at St Nazaire, France.
The British plan was to destroy that single dock, reasoning that Tirpitz would never risk the open ocean if a hit left her with nowhere to be fixed. The solution was Operation Chariot: sail an obsolete destroyer packed with explosives straight into the dock gates and blow them apart.
That destroyer was HMS Campbeltown, a former US Navy ship handed to Britain. Over ten days her crew stripped her down, cut two of her four funnels at an angle to mimic a German destroyer's silhouette, and packed her bow with 4.5 tons of high explosive set in concrete on a delayed timer.
On the night of 27-28 March 1942, Campbeltown and a flotilla of small wooden motor launches carrying commandos crept up the heavily defended Loire estuary flying a German flag as a ruse. German searchlights caught the convoy at 01:22 and demanded identification; the British stalled with a captured German signal code before finally raising the White Ensign and running for the docks under a hail of gunfire.
At 01:34, three minutes behind schedule, Lieutenant Commander Stephen Beattie rammed Campbeltown 33 feet onto the dock gates at full speed, wedging her firmly in place. Commandos then poured ashore to demolish pumping stations and dock machinery by hand while the little motor launches carrying them were torn apart by German coastal guns.
The Germans spent the next day swarming over the beached wreck, oblivious to what she really was. The hidden charges detonated at noon, hours later than planned, killing around 360 people including 40 German officers and civilians who had been touring the ship, and utterly wrecking the dock — it stayed out of action for the rest of the war.
The raid produced five Victoria Crosses in a single night. Beattie earned his for the ramming; Commander Robert Ryder for directing the whole operation under fire; Able Seaman William Savage for manning an exposed gun until a German shell killed him on the withdrawal; Lieutenant Colonel Charles Newman for organizing the commandos' fighting withdrawal ashore; and Sergeant Thomas Durrant, who kept firing his machine gun at a German warship at point-blank range even after being wounded and asked to surrender, dying of his wounds soon after.
Of the 612 men who took part, only 228 made it back to England. 169 were killed and 215 were captured; five commandos even escaped overland through occupied France into neutral Spain. The Normandie dock was never repaired for German use, and the Tirpitz never sailed to the Atlantic — the raid earned the nickname 'the Greatest Raid of All' in British military history.