Books: Distant Glory

THE GREATEST RAID OF ALL (270 pp.)—C. E. Lucas Phillips—Atlantic-Little, Brown ($4.95).

It began as an air raid—keening sirens, baleful searchlights, great gouts of tracer bullets spewing into the treacherous sky. But few bombs fell. Overhead, the British planes merely circled and then fled. What were those damned English up to?

The nervous Nazi garrison at St. Nazaire got its answer soon enough. In the wake of the hit-and-run bombers that ominous night in March 1942, a motley armada ghosted in across the broad tidal flats of the Loire estuary. Thin-skinned motor launches flicked their white wakes into the glare of hastily lowered searchlights. Ack-ack gunners frantically cranked their weapons toward zero elevation. Shells screamed across the river, and the water ran with fire as fuel tanks were hit.

Still the assault boats streamed toward shore. Kilted commandos, festooned with assorted demolition charges, fanned out across the bulky concrete submarine pens. A refitted American destroyer—the old four-stacker Buchanan—crammed with explosive until it was a vast time bomb, rammed the main gate of Normandie dock, only Atlantic dry dock capable of handling the great German battleship Tirpitz. Of the 611-man assault team, only 442 survived. But St. Nazaire was shattered by blasts that went off at unexpected intervals for the next 2½ days. Normandie dock could not be repaired for the next ten years. The commando raid, said Churchill later, was "a deed of glory intimately involved in high strategy."

In the calm, postwar appraisal of Historian C.E. Lucas Phillips, the great raid remains a deed of glory—the achievement of an improbable military objective by an unbeatable combination of painstaking plans and inspired improvisation. Lucas Phillips reports it all, from the first casual conversations of Lord Louis Mountbatten with his staff to the final, hush-hush training exercise off the Scilly Isles, from the apparently aimless bombing raid on St. Nazaire to the escape attempts of captured British commandos.

But in the end, the thunder of those seaborne demolition charges rings distant in the ear; the armada that sailed from Falmouth is already as quaint and archaic as the fleet that sailed with Drake. For in a world of ballistic missiles, nuclear warheads and intricate, intercontinental guidance systems that are not bothered by such hazards as the River Loire mud flats, the glory of the Greatest Raid seems strangely out of date. Its moving and carefully compiled record belongs on history's bookshelves, a reminder of a non-atomic world when everyone was sure that wars could still be won.