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Great and Bold World War II Raids

Khalid Elhassan January 3, 2025 16 min

Raid - Italian frogmen in manned torpedoes launched from submarine near Alexandria Harbor, by Ivan Berryman. World Naval Ships

6. A Plan to Destroy an Enemy’s Naval Shelter

Raid - The St. Nazaire Docks in 1942 — The St. Nazaire Docks in 1942. Wikimedia

Operation Chariot, or the St Nazaire Raid, was a surprise attack launched by British Commandos and the Royal Navy on March 28^th, 1942. Its target was the Normandie dry dock in St Nazaire, on the Atlantic coast of German-occupied France. That dry dock was the only Axis-controlled one on the Atlantic that could accommodate the giant German battleships Bismark and Tirpitz. Its loss would cause severe difficulties to those behemoths if they ever broke into the Atlantic Ocean and suffered damage there. Were that to happen, then rather than return for repairs to a convenient haven on the Atlantic, they would be forced to steam all the way back to Germany. To reach Germany from the Atlantic would require the battleships to run a dangerous gauntlet of British-controlled waters in either the English Channel, or the naval chokepoints of the Greenland-Iceland-UK (GIUK) gap north of Scotland.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.