Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - *PREVIEW* The St. Nazaire Raid

Episode Date: January 1, 2025

This is a preview, listen to the full episode on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/119074069?pr=true

Hey everyone, what you're about to listen to is a preview of a bonus episode that is available on our Patreon. If you like this clip, you can grab the whole episode, as well as years of other bonus content, at www.patreon.com slash lions led by donkeys. The Campbell town was sent to Davenport to get worked on, and it gets a massive facelift so it could pass for a German destroyer. The interior is completely gutted to save weight so the destroyer can pass over the sandy estuary, but it also has armor bolted on to the front and the sides so that crew might be able to survive the shooting gallery they'd be sailing through and possibly shoot back. I like the fact that the proud Royal Navy tradition of doing drag shows extends to the boats themselves.

Hell yeah. I love those pictures of them, of like a British gun crew in dresses firing cannons. The shit rules. Their drag show got interrupted by an enemy attack. So they're on like an anti aircraft cannon fucking just like firing like drum. Yeah. I'm just saying that that's a plot device in Blackadder Goes Forth that is absolutely very much true. Happens to the best of us. Oh, small side note here, Nate.

Another member of the French Resistance, Charles Aznavour, famous French crooner. Yeah, wow. In the French pantheon. Also Armenian. He was like 14 at the time. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of wild. It's like you have, you know, like famous French Armenian author.

You have one of the most famous modernist poets in the English and French language and also playwrights. You also have in the opposite of the French resistance, like so fascist that he was hiding out in a castle at the end of the war. Another very famous French author, Louis-Ferrand Ancelin, who would be very fun to do an episode about except for all the anti-Semitism, which isn't ironic at all. Yeah, that's not the fun part though. The fun part is like when you become anti-woke left so hard that you wind up in a castle with

Marshal Patton at the end of the war. That is like an island in the middle of the confluence of a bunch of European rivers. I may be exaggerating a bit. That's some lines of an onky shit right there. Now, one of the things that was important for the Campbell town was scuttling charges. So, if you remember our episode on Zeebrugge, when you sail the ramming boat in, you have to sink it in place so it can't be moved, right? So, the scuttling charges would stick it in the estuary, making it impossible to move. However, the main explosive, the time delayed one that would hypothetically render the dry docks useless, was a collection of 24 depth charges stacked in the rear of the ship with 400 pounds per depth charge of explosives. It's thousands of pounds of explosives.

I love this concept that you effectively take the naval, the military, the seagoing equivalent of the Oscar Meyer Wiener mobile block traffic, but it turned the engine off, but then you also do 9-11 with it. Or at a bare minimum, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. You know what I mean? A second hot dog has hit the mountain. We take this boat, that's a huge piece of shit. We dress it up to look fancy in German. We basically put it in boat drag. We get it in the door, get it

past the doorman. It then basically blocks the, blocks the exits. And then it's like, oh yeah. And by the way, now it's going to fucking nail bomb everyone in here. This is like, this is basically if they had given DMT to the bottom minehoff. Give a DMT to the bottom minehoff group and give them the world's most explosive Oscar buyer, Weider mobile. I don't know if they would appreciate the pie add to sausage culture as true Germanic heritage or they would be like, this is just American imperialism and Bush watt decadence. This is cultural imperialism of my car.

Exactly. It's like, yeah, yeah. You know, soon like the German working class appreciate sausages, but making an entire car out of sausages, That's bushwad All this is done in ten days and the ship was put under the command of lieutenant commander Stephen Beatty with the Campbell town as the bomb additional Royal Navy support would be given in the form of two other destroyers But they would remain at sea Protecting the flotilla. There's also motor gun boats

So these were effectively, for lack of a better term, up gunned versions of a wooden kit built launch boat with like motors. It's a kit built motor boat that they slapped auto cannons, machine guns, and in some cases, torpedoes on. You know, I often make jokes about like, yeah, you know what? I'm going to resolve my problems with this gun that I bought off Tmoo. But this is basically like 1940s Tmoo build a boat that you get in old timey Royal Mail. And then you assemble it and you put a gun on it. So yeah, it absolutely is a technical.

Yeah, I count this as a technical. The same kind of boats would also be transporting hundreds of the commandos and there'd be 18 of these launch boats in total. That brings us to the commandos who'd be carrying out the raid. And by nature, commandos all had to be volunteers, specifically volunteers for the commandos. They could have been conscripted, but they had to volunteer to be a commando because by definition their job was always conceptualized as an elaborate suicide mission even before this raid. They'd be drawn from the purpose-built British commandos, most notably from the number two commandos that had been formed in 1940 for the sole purpose of carrying out coastal

raids against the Nazis. Originally number two was under the command of Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, which that name is familiar, it's because he got that position due to his experience in commando operations, and by that I mean he was the commander of the bug-fuck-insane Zee Brugge raid of World War I. But since then, it had fallen to Lieutenant Colonel Charles Newman, a guy from Essex who had spent the vast majority of his time working part-time for the Territorial Army. And for people who are unaware, the Territorial Army or the TA is the British Army's Army Reserve, part-time soldiers. He remained there until World War II and the regular British Army found

themselves desperately short of officers and they asked for people in the TA to move over. He volunteered to be seconded over to the Essex regiment before again being seconded over to the commandos and being put in command. You know what's wild to me is yeah, it's sort of like we're going to recruit our detachment of suicide soldiers, you know, ultra commandos from basically dad's army. Yeah, yeah. I was kind of surprised by that too.

Like the commander was a part timer until two years before. My great grandfather actually would have been, cause he was in the TA in World War II. He was a British army veteran who had been right after World War I and then like spent 20 odd years in like India and the British Palestine mandate. And I think he was at that point. Yeah. Like, like, you know, doing this sort of thing. So I, you know, shouts out to, to, to great grandpa townley for, for not, for not going and getting, getting, getting exploded in a, yeah, exactly. Like the drag show that kills you. The world's most kinetic drag show. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. The drag show master and commander, you know, got to go. Oceans

are now serving. I do need to point out before anybody gets mad at me, a lot of TA units did fight in World War II. I know, I know. I'm exaggerating. Yeah, I am too. A lot of TA soldiers fought very bravely in World War II. I know, I know. I'm exaggerating. Yeah, I am too. A lot of TA soldiers fought very bravely in World War II. It's just very interesting that one would end up in charge of the commandos. The commando group of 200 men would be broken up into three groups.

One would ride into the raid on the Campbell town and the other two on the motor launch boats. One group under the command of Captain Hodgson would be tasked with hitting the lighthouse. And this area called the Old Mole, it's kind of like a bridge that leads out to the lighthouse. The Old Mole. It was a bridge that went out to the lighthouse. And he was also tasked with surrounding and destroying the anti-aircraft batteries in that area. Once that was done, they were to advance into town and begin wrecking shit like generators, bridges, and locks, and gears, and things like that.

Oh, I'm sorry. You know, I realized the old mole had me weirded out, but no, it's actually, it's like a breaker. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's mole in French. Yeah, okay. Yeah, you can walk, it kind of acts as a bridge to go out to the lighthouse depending on the tide and securing the old bowl or the consider like a peer maybe. I don't know. Um, was considered one of the most important jobs because that would be the route that the Raiders would use for evacuation. Roger that. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, okay. This all makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. I, I wouldn't, I don't know. I'm sorry. I got, I got really, no, Joe, I'm really sorry. I don't mean to distract you

in the sense that like, I got really confused because I was like, because you could imagine the Brits calling something the old mole for a very different reason. You have to secure the weird mole on the side of some guy's neck. Yeah, exactly. You have to, you, you, you, you, you have, you have to enter through this portal into the Brian Jakes red wall universe. But then I realized I'm like, but yeah, but the Brian Jakes Redwall universe. But then I realized, I'm like, but yeah, but the actual terrain here is in France. I was like, I think I've seen the word mall before, but it's got the, it's got the, the, the circumflex on the O. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. I'm being annoying, but I also like, just for clarity.

I will say Redwall would be a lot more interesting with belt fed Michigan. Yeah. Yeah. The old, the old mole is the name of a pub, you know, three miles from a state run care home in the 1970s, Britain. It's also name checked in an inquiry that doesn't buck in actually. Oh no. Conclusion.