Good review of the raid and thus a must for anyone with the slightest interest. ( )

Good book on an obscure topic ( )

Well written and thorough. Author interviewed participants, British and german,, and walks the reader through a very confusing sequence of events. The valor displayed by the commandos was remarkable, this was written close on the heels of the war, I do not know how much new information has surfaced since. ( )

'I've always thought is one of the greatest stories of the war...the way those boys went in, knowing what was coming to them...'
In point of fact, Frederick E. Smith wasn't talking about the St Nazaire raid, but his words sum up my feelings about it.

A few years ago, Jeremy Clarkson presented a documentary on BBC with the same title as this book in which he declared that the raid was all but forgotten. I feel the same now as I felt at the time: that he overstated the case. To those of my generation who grew up on a diet of The Victor and The Warlord and Airfix kits, the Campbeltown and St Nazaire live on; and the other day, I heard that Hollywood was planning a film based on the raid. Nonetheless, Clarkson has a point, St Nazaire is not as well remembered as, say, the Dams Raid.
It certainly should be. It is one of the epic coups de mains in military history. Executed on a shoe-string, with largely unsuitable equipment and not enough of that, a major strategic aim - the destruction of the Normandie dry dock in an effort to neutralize the battleship Tirpitz - was accomplished, in large part, through clever improvisation and extraordinary fighting spirit. It was, too, an almost uniquely British operation; scarcely more than a handful of Dominion fighting men were involved.
With a story such as this, criticism of the book is almost superfluous; only the most inarticulate troglodyte could fail to produce a stirring account. Phillips is certainly much more than this. For instance, one important point is that he remembers that the fighting men are also people and he tells us something about them as he introduces them. He describes both the planning and the execution of the raid and wisely elects to eschew a rigidly chronological account of the action, but deals with the efforts of individual fighting parties and boats in a sensible order. Inevitably, with an account of a chaotic battle there are points at which the reader will lose track of the narrative; there are enough maps and diagrams, though, to guide him through, though those are the points when one regrets the curious omission of an index.
Overall, though, this is a comprehensive and comprehensible account of one in the outstanding actions of the Second World War. ( )