The tension kicks off within the first minute. It then doesn’t let go until the last. But before we get to the film, a quick paragraph of history…

Dunkirk – the background

On 10 May 1940, German forces launched their attack against France. Their advance was spectacular. By the end of the month, over a third of a million Allied troops were trapped in the French coastal town of Dunkirk, subject to German shells and attacks from the air. It was only a matter of days before the full-blown assault would come. Losses were heavy but by 4 June, the evacuation had brought back to Britain 338,226 British, French and other Allied soldiers. Plus 170 dogs. Soldiers put much store by their mascots.

A triptych

Dunkirk is a very visceral experience. You experience the fear and the vulnerability of the men stranded with little more than their rifles. Usually, whenever we have a film based on a huge event, for example, Titanic, there has to be a romantic subplot in there somewhere. Not so with Dunkirk, and it’s all the better for it. It’s also a very British experience. Although we catch a brief glimpse of a few French and colonial troops, we do not see a single German. The German is the unseen enemy, unseen but still too close for comfort. And when he does appear, hurling in his Messerschmitt towards our brave boys on the beach or on a vessel, the sound is frightening. It’s a film with surprisingly little dialogue. It’s also a war film with surprisingly little blood – there are no close-ups of limbs being ripped off, of men being blown to smithereens or in their death throes. Nolan was certainly chasing the lower age certificate here. Yet he manages to achieve this without diminishing his stranglehold on us.

The film has three distinct viewpoints – which act almost like a triptych. The first is from the ground as we follow a young British Tommy called Tommy, funnily enough. And it is through Tommy, we meet Alex, played by Harry Styles. And let’s be honest here – most of us watching this film will be on tenterhooks looking out for Harry.

The sea plot follows a man in his late fifties, a Mr Dawson who, along with his son and his son’s friend, form part of the civilian armada who, sailing from England, braved the choppy waters of the English Channel to do their bit and help rescue the stranded men.

Lastly, we see it from the air, from the point of view of three, soon to be two, RAF pilots, one named Farrier. And they’re all terribly upper crust, unlike those ruffian army boys, with their fine uniforms and Spitfires. The aerial combat scenes are stunning. Almost eighty years on and the sight of those Spitfires ranging through the air can still stir the heart.

These three points of view represent the three main elements of what constituted Dunkirk so Tommy, Mr Dawson and Farrier are each in their own way an ‘everyman’ for what happened there. We get to learn a little of Mr Dawson’s backstory but we don’t get to know them as characters, as people. Their role here is to tell the bigger story. The only additional subplot that was entirely unnecessary but still effective concerned the friend of Mr Dawson’s son.

The cast is stellar – Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy and Mark Rylance as Mr Dawson to name but a few. And yes, to answer the big question – Harry Styles can just about act.

CGI and Nimrod

As a director, Christopher Nolan is known for eschewing CGI and special effects. Understandable perhaps, noble for sure, but perhaps a bit of CGI here may not have gone amiss. We are told early on that there are some 400,000 men on the beaches of Dunkirk – yet often we see shots of an almost deserted beach. Likewise, with the civilian ships – there were hundreds of them but, watching the film, you get the impression that only about half a dozen had come across. But this is a minor quibble.

The music, by Hans Zimmer, plays its role perfectly – it’s effective, it enhances but it never distracts. It comes to the fore towards the end, naturally, with a strange mash-up of Elgar’s Nimrod Variation, the famous one, the one that stirs the patriotic heart in all Britons. Now, had it been a straight-up Nimrod, people would have decried it as too obvious, too unoriginal. Yet somehow, Zimmer does something to it that is fantastically effective.

Never Surrender 

With our boys finally and safely back in England, we have Churchill’s famous post-Dunkirk speech, the ‘we shall never surrender’ one. But, cleverly, we do not hear it from Churchill’s mouth nor in any way presented in a Churchillian manner, but from the lips of Tommy, who reads it, mumbling, from a newspaper.

I felt a little uncomfortable with the ending – it seemed too upbeat. Alex, the Harry Styles character, fears they will be spat on but despite this caveat the ending felt a little too triumphant. Yes, these 338,226 men had survived but we had failed. Churchill referred to Dunkirk not as a victory but merely a ‘deliverance’. And the French saw it in very negative terms – with the Germans closing in on Paris, they considered the evacuation of Dunkirk not in terms of an heroic rescue, but as a huge betrayal. The British had betrayed them.

On 14 June the swastika was flying from the Arc de Triomphe and on the 22nd, France surrendered to the Germans. Four long years of occupation lay ahead for the French.

I’d been looking forward to this film for a year – and it did not disappoint. But if you want to see it, it’s one of those films for the big screen. Don’t wait for the DVD.

Rupert Colley.

The post Dunkirk – film review first appeared on Rupert Colley.

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On 22 June 1940, Hitler, now the German Führer, got his revenge – it was the turn of the French to surrender, and Hitler made sure that it was done in the most demeaning circumstances possible – in exactly the same carriage and in the same spot as the signing twenty-two years earlier.

The Fall of France

Following the 1914-1918 war, the French had built a defensive 280-mile long fortification, the Maginot Line, all along the Franco-German border as protection against a future German attack. The Battle of France began on 10 May 1940. The Germans rendered the Maginot Line obsolete within a morning by merely skirting around the north of it, through the Ardennes forest. Because of its rugged terrain, the French considered the forest impassable. Reaching the town of Sedan on the French side of the Ardennes on 14 May and brushing aside French resistance, the Germans pushed forward, not towards Paris as expected, but north, towards the English Channel, forcing the French and their British allies further and further back. In 1916, the Germans had failed to take Verdun despite ten months of trench warfare; in May 1940, it took them but a day.

Elsewhere, Hitler’s armies were enjoying victory after victory – the Netherlands capitulated on 15 May, followed two weeks later by the surrender of Belgium. Allied forces, with their backs to the sea in the French coastal town of Dunkirk, were trapped. But the Germans, poised to annihilate the whole British Expeditionary Force, were inexplicably ordered by Hitler to halt outside the town. Between 26 May and 2 June, over 1,000 military and civilian vessels were rescued and brought back to Britain 338,226 Allied soldiers. But not without scenes of panic, broken discipline and soldiers shot by their officers for losing self-control. Meanwhile, Hitler’s generals watched, puzzled and rueing an opportunity missed.

Winston Churchill may have viewed Dunkirk as a ‘deliverance’ but the French considered the British cowards for what they saw as a betrayal at Dunkirk. Hitler too thought little of the British soldier: ‘They can certainly beat their colonial subjects with a whip but on the battlefield, they are miserable cowards’.

The Swastika flies over Paris

The fall of France was dramatic in its speed. German Chief of General Staff, Franz Halder, who had organised the invasion of Poland eight months earlier, warned Hitler of the folly of attacking France. Privately, he believed it to be ‘idiotic and reckless’. In the event, Hitler’s forces entered a largely deserted Paris on 14 June, over two million Parisians having fled south. Soon the swastika flag was flying from the Arc de Triomphe.

On 16 June, the French general, Charles de Gaulle, escaped France to begin his life of exile in London. He was later sentenced to death – in absentia by the French Vichy government.

In Britain, Winston Churchill, appointed prime minister only on 10 May, urged the French to keep on fighting and discussed the possibility of France and Great Britain becoming one unified nation. When French prime minister, Paul Reynaud, put the idea of the union to the French government, now based in Bordeaux, the idea was ridiculed. Marshal Philippe Petain, hero of the 1916 Battle of Verdun, preferred to surrender – to continue the fight would destroy the country and a union with Britain would be akin to a ‘marriage with a corpse’. French general, Maxime Weygand, believed that following the fall of France, the British would soon have ‘its neck wrung like a chicken’ by the Germans.

On 17 June, Reynaud resigned, to be replaced by the 84-year-old Petain, whose first acts were to seek an armistice with the Germans and order Reynaud’s arrest. France had been defeated.

The Forest of Compiègne

On 20 June the Germans had prepared the text for the French-German armistice, with Hitler dictating its preamble. The venue for the signing was to be the forest of Compiègne, where, 22 years before, at the end of the First World War, the Germans had surrendered to the French and signed the armistice of 11 November 1918. Hitler, with a flair for the dramatic, ordered that the signing ceremony should take place in the very same railway carriage that had been used in November 1918, now on display in a Parisian museum. The carriage, once a dining car, which had been transformed into a conference room, split into two by a glass partition, was transported north.

About 200 yards from the carriage stood the Alsace-Lorraine statue (pictured), commemorating the 1918 signing, featuring a fallen German eagle, impaled by the sword of the victorious allies. Now, in June 1940, it was adorned by the Nazi swastika. Nearby, a statue of Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the French commander-in-chief, who had led the negotiations in 1918.

At 3.15 on the afternoon of 21 June, a warm summer’s day, the German delegation arrived and emerged from their Mercedes: Hermann Goering, Rudolph Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Erich Raeder, Alfred Jodl amongst others and, last of all, Hitler, his First World War Iron Cross pinned upon his tunic.

The American journalist and writer, William Shirer, author of the excellent, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, originally published 1959, was a witness to the occasion. Shirer describes the expression on Hitler’s face: ‘grave, solemn, yet brimming with revenge… There was something else, difficult to describe, in his expression, a sort of scornful, inner joy at being present at this great reversal he himself had wrought.’

Hitler and his entourage stopped to read the French inscription of a granite block, which read in capitals, ‘HERE ON THE ELEVENTH OF NOVEMBER 1918 SUCCUMBED THE CRIMINAL PRIDE OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE – VANQUISHED BY THE FREE PEOPLES WHICH IT TRIED TO ENSLAVE.’

The German delegation took their place in the carriage, Hitler pointedly sitting where Foch had sat 22 years before. Then arrived the French delegation, headed by General Charles Huntziger. Shirer noticed that the German guard of honour, ‘snapped to attention for the French as they passed but did not present arms’.

With everyone sitting, Keitel, with a monocle in his eye, read aloud Hitler’s preamble of the armistice, a translator relaying it to the French. At the glass partition, one of Hitler’s henchman, Otto Günsche (who took on the responsibility of burning Hitler’s body following his leader’s suicide on 30 April 1945), kept guard with orders to shoot anyone who ‘should dare to conduct himself in an improper manner towards Hitler’.

Hitler uttered not a word. With the reading of the preamble done, Hitler and most of his entourage made their exit with a Nazi salute, and left to the sound of the German national anthem and the Horst Wessel song (a Nazi favourite composed in memory of a Nazi ‘martyr’) ringing in their ears. The French delegates stood, some with tears in their eyes.

The French sign the Armistice

Keitel and Jodl stayed behind to discuss the details of the armistice with Huntziger (pictured). France was to be split into two – the northern half occupied by the Germans and the southern half run by a French government answerable to the Germans. This government, headed by Petain, was to be based in the spa town of Vichy.

At 18:30, the following day, with the Germans getting impatient, the French were given one hour to sign or face a resumption of hostilities. Huntziger, speaking to General Weygand in Bordeaux, insisted that he should be ordered to sign the armistice and not merely authorized to sign it, thereby removing the responsibility from his shoulders. At 18:50, Huntziger and Keitel duly signed the hateful document.

On hearing the news, Hitler was delighted. Exactly one year later, he would launch the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

Straight afterwards, on Hitler’s orders, the railway carriage and the monument commemorating the 1918 signing were destroyed. The following day, Hitler visited Paris, his only visit, for a whistle-stop tour of sightseeing. On visiting Napoleon’s tomb, he said: ‘That was the greatest and finest moment of my life’. Before departing, he ordered the demolition of two Parisian First World War monuments, including the monument to Edith Cavell, the British nurse shot by the Germans in Brussels in October 1915.

The German occupation of France would last four long years until, in August 1944, two months after the start of the Normandy landings, France was finally liberated.

Rupert Colley.

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Here, below, is a brief resume of the fall of France and the first of Charles de Gaulle’s many broadcasts from the BBC in London.

On 14 June 1940, Hitler’s forces entered Paris, a city largely deserted with over two million Parisians having fled south to escape the Nazi invasion. Soon the swastika flag was flying from the Arc de Triomphe.

Charles de Gaulle

On 15 June, the French general, Charles de Gaulle, was whisked out of France on an aeroplane sent by British prime minister, Winston Churchill, to begin his life of exile in London. At the age of 49, De Gaulle was the youngest and most junior general in the French Army and had only been a government minister for two weeks. Although he had fought at Dunkirk and had met Winston Churchill he was generally unknown. French people certainly hadn’t heard of him and had no idea what he looked like.

In London de Gaulle sought permission to broadcast to France from the studios of the BBC. The British cabinet refused, not wanting to upset the new regime freshly installed in France. Churchill, however, stepped in and granted the Frenchman his wish.

“I speak for France”

And so, on 18 June 1940, Charles de Gaulle was led to Studio 4B in the BBC’s broadcasting House and there met BBC producer, Elizabeth Barker. (Barker was one of the very few women to hold the role of producer. She was later reprimanded for meeting her illustrious French guest while not wearing stockings). In a ‘very deep, resonant voice’, according to Barker, De Gaulle broadcast his declaration, asserting that France was not alone, “La France n’est pas seule!” “The flame of the French resistance,” he cried, “must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished”. (The same day, Church delivered his iconic ‘This was their finest hour’ speech to the House of Commons).

At the time, very few heard the general’s auspicious words. Although, another future French president, Giscard d’Estaing, did hear the broadcast: ‘We heard that a French general would speak and we listened to him with no idea who he was. It had a huge effect on us all. We all understood that the war was not lost… The appeal said the war is not over.’

De Gaulle returned the following day and this unknown Frenchman with his patriotic-sounding name boldly announced, “I, General de Gaulle, a French soldier and military leader, realise that I now speak for France.” That month alone, June 1940, he broadcast eight times.

Surrender

The BBC however had failed to record De Gaulle’s initial speeches and the general insisted on doing them again – for the sake of prosperity. He waited until the French had formally surrendered, which they did on 22 June – in a railway carriage, the same railway carriage 50 miles north-east of Paris that the Germans had surrendered to the French in 1918.

This time, on 22 June, the microphones were on and De Gaulle re-read and recorded the L’Appel du 18 Juin. His words soon spread and became the battle cry of the Free French movement.

The new French government was led by the 84-year-old Marshal Philippe Petain (pictured here on 24 October 1940 shaking hands with Hitler), hero of the 1916 Battle of Verdun.

Petain accepted France’s defeat and immediately his puppet government was enforcing Nazi rule from the spa town of Vichy in central France. One of its first acts was to sentence De Gaulle to death – in absentia. Indeed, on 17 June Petain delivered his own speech in which he said, ‘we are defeated and will accept an armistice’.

In August 1944, after four long years of occupation, Paris was liberated and Charles de Gaulle made a triumphal return to the capital. Paris, he said in a speech on 25 August, had been ‘liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the French armies with the support and the help of all France.’

Click for the full English text of Charles De Gaulle’s ‘Appeal of 18 June’ broadcast. 

Rupert Colley.

Read more about the war in The Clever Teens Guide to World War Two available as an ebook and 80-page paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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Pétain’s popularity improved even further when he limited French offensives to the minimum, claiming he was waiting for ‘the tanks and the Americans’.

Pétain and World War Two

World War Two and on 10 May 1940 Hitler’s troops invaded France. A month later, having swept aside French resistance and dispatched the British forces at Dunkirk, the swastika was flying over the Arc du Triomphe.

France surrenders

On 17 June, the French prime minister, Paul Reynaud, resigned, to be replaced by the 84-year-old Philippe Pétain. Pétain’s first acts were to seek an armistice with the Germans and order Reynaud’s arrest. On 22 June, 50 miles north-east of Paris, the French officially surrendered, the ceremony taking place in the same spot and in the same railway carriage that the Germans had surrendered to the French on 11 November 1918.

Northern France, as dictated by the terms of the surrender, would be occupied by the Germans, whilst southern France, 40 per cent of the country, would remain nominally independent with its own government based in the spa town of Vichy in central France, 200 miles south of Paris. Pétain would be its Head of State. A small corner of south-easternFrance, around Nice, was entrusted to Italian control; Italy having entered the war on the 10 June.

Pétain and Vichy France had the support of much of the nation. The French considered the British evacuation at Dunkirk as nothing less than a betrayal, and many labelled General Charles de Gaulle, who had escaped France to begin his life of exile in London, a traitor. Indeed, he was later sentenced to death – in absentia by the Vichy government.

The end of democracy

On 10 July 1940, the French Chamber of Deputies transferred all its powers to Pétain, dissolving the Third Republic and thus doing away with democracy, the French Parliament and itself. Philippe Pétain, never a fan of democracy, which he regarded as a weak institution, was delighted. Strong, central government was Pétain’s way, and relishing his new role in Vichy’s Hotel du Pac, Pétain immediately set about decreeing swathes of new legislation, much of it anti-Semitic, and becoming the most authoritative French head of state since Napoleon.

Pétain’s Vichy Government was not a fascist regime and Pétain was not a puppet of the Nazis, at least he liked to think so – but the anti-Semitic laws were his own. Right from the start the Vichy Government set out its stall, actively doing the Nazi’s dirty work with little interference: conducting a vicious civil war against the French resistance, implementing numerous anti-Jewish laws, and sending tens of thousands of Jews to the death camps. Within six months, 60,000 non-French citizens had been interned in thirty concentration camps that had sprung up in France with alarming speed and efficiency.

Whilst in Northern France the Germans rounded up the Jews for deportation and death, in the south the French did it for themselves. The Jews however were safe in Italian-controlled south-east France with Mussolini himself ordering the protection of the Jewish population – much to the annoyance of both the Germans and the French. But, following the Italian withdrawal in September 1943, the French authorities moved in and the Jewish population suffered.

Pétain and Hitler

In October 1940, Philippe Pétain met Hitler, and although Pétain resisted Hitler’s demands that France should participate in the attack on Britain, photographs of the two men shaking hands were soon seen across the world – evidence of Vichy’s complicity with the Nazis.

In November 1942, French troops fighting under the Vichy flag fought British and American forces in Morocco but surrendered after only three days. Hitler, viewing their performance as treacherous, responded by occupying the Vichy-controlled part of France. Pétain, whose power, although far-reaching, was always dependent on Hitler’s favour, was now reduced to little more than a figurehead as the Germans took over the practical running of Vichy.

Paris liberated

On 6 June 1944, D-Day, Operation Overlord went into action, the Allied invasion of France. Major-General von Choltitz, Hitler’s commanding officer in Paris, surrendered on 25 August as the French general, Philippe Leclerc, led the Allies into the city. They were ecstatically welcomed and the witch-hunt for known collaborators began immediately. The following day, De Gaulle made his triumphant return to Paris, marching down the Champs-Elysees, declaring Paris ‘liberated by her own people with the help of the armies of France’, a rather fanciful exaggeration of the facts.

For a country that had enthusiastically supported Pétain and the Vichy Government and, in 1940, had labelled De Gaulle a traitor, now, five years on, it seemed every Frenchman had been an active member of the Resistance.

Within a fortnight of Paris’s liberation Pétain and his Vichy colleagues had relocated to the German town of Sigmaringen and from there formed a government-in-exile but any pretence of power or influence which had in practice long since deceased, disappeared entirely.

Death of the fallen hero

On 15 August 1945, Pétain was tried for his collaboration with the Nazis and convicted. The 89-year-old Marshal was sentenced to death by firing squad. De Gaulle however stepped in and taking into account Pétain’s age and his First World War record, commuted Pétain’s death sentence to life imprisonment. Pétain was imprisoned, in relative luxury, on the island of Île d’Yeu, on the Atlantic coast of France. Increasingly frail, he needed constant care. He died on 23 July 1951, aged 95.

Rupert Colley.

Read more about the war in The Clever Teens Guide to World War Two available as an ebook and 80-page paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

The post Henri Philippe Petain – a brief biography first appeared on Rupert Colley.

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On 28 March 1942, 621 men of the Royal Navy and British Commandos attacked the port of Saint-Nazaire in occupied France. The mission has been dubbed ‘the greatest raid of all time.’ It was certainly daring, audacious in the extreme, and terribly dangerous – less than half the men returned alive. Five Victoria Crosses were awarded, two of them posthumously. As the title of this new book on the raid states, the men went Into the Jaws of Death.

Historian, Robert Lyman, has written much about specific aspects of the Second World War, with books about the Cockleshell Heroes, the Siege of Tobruk, Kohima, the Middle East during the war, and a biography on General Bill Slim. Now, Lyman has turned his attention to the Saint-Nazaire raid. Into the Jaws of Death: The True Story of the Legendary Raid on Saint-Nazaire is a detailed book on the raid: the reasons that lay behind it, the preparation, the training, the raid itself and its aftermath.

A Bleak Time

Early 1942, as Lyman reminds us, was a bleak time for the Western Allies during the Second World War – British forces had just surrendered their garrison at Singapore; Britain was losing the Battle of the Atlantic, and wartime austerity was beginning to bite. In Europe, following the fall of France eighteen months earlier, Nazi occupation had been firmly established; and the first deportations of Jews residing in France had just begun.

Britain’s high command was gripped by fear of Germany’s huge battleship, the Tirpitz, a massive ship, a sixth of a mile long. Its sister ship, the Bismarck, had been sunk in May 1941, but the Tirpitz still roamed large. The only dry dock on the French coast capable of accommodating such a ship was to be found at the port of Saint-Nazaire, a town of some 50,000 people. If the Normandie dock, as it was called, the largest dry dock in the world at the time, could be put out of action, then the Tirpitz’s activity in the Atlantic would be severely constrained.

The Plan

Thus, in late February 1942, the British command settled on their objective – to attack Saint-Nazaire. They had only four weeks to devise and execute the plan before the spring tides turned against them. The problem, however, was that the port was heavily defended by the occupying Germans. The idea of an aerial bombardment was immediately rejected because of potential French civilian casualties. The plan they came up with instead was to ram an ‘expendable vessel’ packed with timed explosives into the Normandie dock and destroy it. The vessel they found was an old American destroyer, the HMS Campbeltown, built in 1919 and now obsolete. And so Operation Chariot came into being. The force involved two additional escort destroyers and sixteen smaller ships.

Commandos on board the Campbeltownwould jump off the ship, attack dock installations, pumping stations, and the U-boat pens, plus a nearby power station, bridges, and locks, before meeting up at a spot called Old Mole to re-embark on a number of Motor Launches and head home. Sending a small force against a heavily-defended dock needed the element of surprise.

(Pictured: two of the participating commandos: Corporal Bert Shipton, left, and Sergeant Stanley ‘Dai’ Davis. Shipton was reported missing after the raid and found to have been taken prisoner and transported to a Stalag at Hohenfels in Germany.).

The attack would involve 621 men, a mixture of Royal Navy and commandos. They were to be split into three teams – assault, demotion and protection. The wartime commandos had been established in 1940, conceived, in Lyman’s words, in the ‘midst of failure’ following the loss of the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk. Their task was to carry out small but daring raids against the territories of Nazi-occupied Europe. Raiding was, writes Lyman, a ‘gut reaction to the impotence felt’. But this, the raid on Saint-Nazaire, would be the most daring yet.

In preparation for her final journey, HMS Campbeltown was modified to make her lighter and, by removing two of her four funnels, to make her look more like a German destroyer.

28 March 1942

And so at 2 pm on 26 March, the convoy set off from Falmouth in Cornwall. All but the most senior knew nothing about the mission until they had boarded and were on their way to France. Many suffered from seasickness; others prayed. Two Scots changed out of their trousers and into kilts – if they were to die, they said, they wanted to be properly dressed. This sort of small but fascinating detail is where Lyman’s book comes alive. Despite knowing they were embarking on a suicidal mission, the overall atmosphere was ‘calm, confident and cheerful’.

Just minutes from their target, the Campbeltown was spotted by German searchlights. Warning shots were fired but the ship was able to return a message using German codes, winning them a couple of invaluable minutes before the Germans realized they had been duped. A firefight ensued. Thus, under heavy and sustained fire, the destroyer, packed with 4.5 tons of explosives, picked up speed and still managed to ram the gates of the Normandie dock.

Although the raid came as a complete shock to the Germans, they reacted quickly, pouring troops into the port. Gunfights took place all around the docks and in the streets of the town. As the convoy prepared to retreat, having completed its objectives, a number of men were still unaccounted for. Many had been killed, others were forced into surrendering; five of them managed to slip into the French countryside and eventually made their way all the way down to neutral Spain, and from there, back to England. Most of the smaller ships had been destroyed.

(Pictured, the HMS Campbeltown rammed against the dock gates shortly before exploding).

Meanwhile, German officers inspected HMS Campbeltown smashed up against the dock gates. At noon, on 28 March, the timed explosives detonated causing a huge explosion and further destroying the dock. 360 Germans were killed. The dock remained out of commission for the rest of the war and indeed was not fully operational again for over a decade.

Aftermath

The raid had been a complete success in that all its objectives had been realized. But the cost was heavy: of the 621 commandos and sailors who participated in the raid, only 228 made it back to England; 169 were killed and a further 215 were taken prisoner. There were awards aplenty to acknowledge the sacrifice and astonishing bravery – 89 medals were awarded, including five Victoria Crosses (two posthumously).

The raid, writes Lyman, gave Britons hope at a low point in their history. It was a ‘gutsy plan, requiring luck, bluff and surprise in abundance to come off’; a plan that had a ‘chance of succeeding by virtue of its very audacity’. The raid certainly left the Germans feeling vulnerable – after all, the enemy had managed to penetrate even their stoutest of defences. Seven months later, on 18 October 1942, Hitler issued his infamous ‘Commando Order’. In direct violation of the rules of war, it commanded the immediate execution of any captured commando, even those wearing uniform and attempting to surrender.

And what of the much-feared Tirpitz? As hoped, she never again ventured into Atlantic waters, confining herself to the Norwegian fjords where she was sunk by the RAF on 12 November 1944.

Robert Lyman’s 300-page book is certainly detailed and well-researched. The recruitment and training of the commandos, especially, make for entertaining reading. The raid was relatively small in scale but, as we learn, the amount of planning and attention to detail is astonishing.

The heroes of Saint-Nazaire deserve to be remembered and Robert Lyman has helped ensure that they are.

(Pictured, the Saint-Nazaire Raid memorial in Falmouth, Cornwall).

Rupert Colley.

Into the Jaws of Death: The True Story of the Legendary Raid on Saint-Nazaire by Robert Lyman, published by Quercus, is now available.

The post Into the Jaws of Death: The True Story of the Legendary Raid on Saint-Nazaire – book review first appeared on Rupert Colley.

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‘France will bleed to death’

At the end of 1915, the German commander-in-chief, Erich von Falkenhayn, decided that Germany’s ‘arch enemy’ was not France, but Britain. But to destroy Britain’s will, Germany had first to defeat France. In a ‘Christmas memorandum’ to the German kaiser, Wilhelm II, Falkenhayn proposed an offensive that would compel the French to ‘throw in every man they have. If they do so,’ he continued, ‘the forces of France will bleed to death’. The place to do this, Falkenhayn declared, would be Verdun.

An ancient town, Verdun in northeastern France, was, in 1915, surrounded by a string of sixty interlocked and reinforced forts. On 21 February 1916, the Battle of Verdun began. 1,200 German guns lined over only eight miles pounded the city which, despite intelligence warning of the impending attack, remained poorly defended. Verdun, which held a symbolic tradition among the French, was deemed not so important by the upper echelon of France’s military. Joseph Joffre, the French commander, was slow to respond until the exasperated French prime minister, Aristide Briand, paid a night-time visit. Waking Joffre from his slumber, Briand insisted that he take the situation more seriously: ‘You may not think losing Verdun a defeat – but everyone else will’.

‘They shall not pass’

Galvanised into action, Joffre dispatched his top general, Henri-Philippe Pétain (pictured), to organise a stern defence of the city. Pétain managed to protect the only road leading into the city that remained open to the French. Every day, while under continuous fire, 2,000 lorries made a return trip along the 45-mile Voie Sacrée (‘Sacred Way’) bringing in vital supplies and reinforcements to be fed into the furnace that had become Verdun. Serving under Pétain was General Robert Nivelle who famously promised that the Germans on ne passe pas, ‘they shall not pass’, a quote often attributed to Pétain.

But the French were suffering grievous losses. Joffre demanded that his British counterpart, Sir Douglas Haig, open up the new offensive on the Somme, to the south of Verdun, to take the pressure off his beleaguered men. Haig, concerned that the new recruits to the British Army were not yet battle-ready, offered 15 August 1916 as a start date. Joffre responded angrily that the French army would ‘cease to exist’ by then. Haig brought forward the offer to 1 July.

During June 1916, the attack and counterattack at Verdun continued. On the Eastern Front, the Russians attacked the Austrians, who, in turn, appealed to the Germans for help. Falkenhayn responded by calling a temporary halt at Verdun and transferring men east to aid the Austrians.

The Battle of Verdun wound down, then fizzled out entirely, officially ending on 18 December 1916. The French, under the stewardship of Generals Pétain and Nivelle regained much of what they had lost. After ten months of fighting, the city had been flattened, and the Germans and French, between them, had lost 260,000 men – one death for every 90 seconds of the battle. Men on all sides were bled to death but ultimately, Falkenhayn’s big push achieved nothing.

Rupert Colley.

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