Biggest Raid

She nosed through the harbor nets in the Loire estuary under a bright dome of anti-aircraft fire that brought into sharp relief the gaunt lines of her ancient U.S. hull. Around her, the motor gunboats and torpedo boats whined and sputtered. Above her. R.A.F. bombers roared and pounded. From the shore two powerful searchlights sought her out, and as the land batteries cut loose with furious cross-fire she belched angrily from her four thin stacks, stepped up her speed to 20 knots. Her 4-in. deck guns were quick to answer the shells that screamed at her from every side. Before her explosive-laden bow piled into the dock gates of St.-Nazaire, she had sunk a Nazi flak* ship, stung many a shore battery with the last broadsides she would ever fire.

She was an old, untidy-looking crate, but she went to her end with a gallantry that insured her fame forever. She was known as "Old Buck" to British tars, officially listed as the H.M.S. Campbeltown. Not long ago, before her transfer to Britain, she had been the 1,090-ton U.S. destroyer Buchanan./-

On her last trip Old Buck was the center of the boldest raid Britain has yet made on the Nazi-held coast of Europe. When a delayed-action fuse finally blasted the five tons of high explosive in her bow and sent her violently to the bottom of St.-Nazaire harbor, she had seen action enough in one night for several nautical lifetimes. There were the demoniacal Commandos ashore, blowing up pumping stations, bridges, buildings. There were the snarling little gunboats wildly blasting away at Nazi pillboxes. There were the frenzied Nazis firing at friend & foe alike. And there were the bombers overhead.

In that nightmare of noise and flame, Old Buck kept her lethal bow shoved tight against her objective, while her crew swarmed ashore to battle its way to the gunboats ready to speed home. Many a Commando was left ashore; few of Old Buck's crew got away. Those who did escape heard, as they swept out of St.-Nazaire, the resonant boom of Old Buck blowing up.

There was no doubt that the raid was costly. Dead were well over a hundred valuable Commando-fighters, sunk (according to German claims) were 13 British motor gunboats and torpedo ships. But the British were well satisfied. On their farthest Commando raid of the war, they had, they were confident, knocked out the only Atlantic port big enough to drydock the battleship Tirpitz, the dock that had once held the once-mighty Normandie, the busiest pen for Nazi subs. The raid was soothing to Britain's invasion boosters, too. To many of them it seemed that the British brass hats were at last realizing the vulnerability of the 100-mile wide Brittany peninsula.

*Small tug or trawler equipped with anti-aircraft guns. /-Named after Captain Franklin Buchanan, founder of Annapolis and first U. S. Naval officer of Commodore Perry's expedition to set foot on Japanese soil.

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