In March 1942 a fleet of wooden motor launches and an ancient destroyer carrying 611 men, most of them commandos, slipped out of Falmouth Harbor into the English Channel. They were bound for the Loire estuary, a thin track of water between two coasts bristling with German guns. They feigned the formation of a mine-laying operation, and even before they reached their destination they encountered two German patrol boats, a French fishing fleet, and a German submarine. This was the beginning of the greatest raid of all, one of the most daring enterprises of World War II. The commandos’ job was to blow up the largest dry dock in the world - Normandie Dock at St. Nazaire Harbor. It was vitally important because it was the only dock which could accommodate the Tirpitz, the biggest battleship in the German fleet and the greatest single threat to Allied shipping since the sinking of the Bismarck. The plan was to ram the old destroyer, filled with delayed action explosives, into the dock gates and then to disembark the commandos to blow up the dock machinery. This work is only partly an account of the actual attack. It is also the remarkable tale of the painstaking preparation necessary for such an operation. -- From the book jacket.

What the Frenchmen saw -- The black hour -- A plot is hatched -- Robert Ryder -- "A true soldier appeareth" -- The leaders meet -- The destroyers -- The gathering of the forces -- "The sauciest job since Drake" -- The enemy -- To sea -- Into the jaws -- Campbeltown's attack -- The dock smashers -- The river battle -- The dockyard battle -- Not the six hundred -- Havoc -- The captive and the free.