Abstract
When Churchill had to prevent Nazi Germany’s biggest warship from participating in the Battle of the Atlantic, he decided to not fight the battleship head-on, but to destroy the only dry dock capable of maintaining the ship. For this purpose, an assault force of several hundred British Commandos planned and executed a daring raid in St. Nazaire, France. They planned to use an obsolete destroyer, pack it with explosives, and ram the dock at high speed. They succeeded and indeed destroyed the dock. However, the success came at a tremendous cost in Allied lives, with more than half of the assault force either killed or captured. The chapter analyzes the general situation, the people involved (including Lord Mountbatten, the main leader responsible), the planning process, and the result of the battle, attempting to derive meaningful leadership lessons. The raid was an overall success. Nevertheless, the lessons its losses afford in hindsight are valuable and should not be forgotten. As it turns out, the most important lessons are timeless, too: thinking is to be visionary, plans must be simple, and their execution needs purposeful participants.
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Notes
- 1.
This evaluation was endorsed by the Butt Report, a specialized Royal Air Force research publication on the precision of aerial bombardment (Webster and Frankland 1961).
- 2.
Excerpt from the European Patent Office, GB 508956: “Speed governors. MOUNTBATTEN, LORD L. Jan. 6, 1938, Nos. 388, 389 and 27104. … In a system for maintaining a warship in a fixed position relatively to another ship, an instrument is provided which determines the co-ordinates in the direction of the course being steered, and at right angles thereto of the ship’s displacement from its correct position with respect to the other ship and is associated with means for transmitting the values of the coordinates for effecting a controlled variation of the ship’s speed and/or course.” (EPO 2018).
- 3.
Blaber referred to operational security and ongoing cases in The Hague and did not reveal if the said war criminal had indeed been apprehended with the aid of a gorilla costume. However that may be, the story bears out the same lesson.
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Wegmann, R.M., Newett, J.L. (2020). When Complexity Costs Lives: Secondary Goals and Compartmentalized Information in the Second World War’s Greatest Raid. In: Gutmann, M. (eds) Historians on Leadership and Strategy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26090-3_5
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