The Royal Navy had a long established tradition of pursuing enemy vessels that had eluded them at sea back to their home ports, sending in fire ships to force fleets from their anchorages, or scuttling ships in harbour entrances in order to blockade them. These methods were further enhanced by forays mounted into enemy held territory using combined naval and assault forces: developments which foreshadowed the formation of Combined Operations and the Commandos during the Second World War.
The raid on Saint-Nazaire of the 28th March , which has since been written into the annals of naval history as The Greatest Raid , remains the pinnacle of those earlier achievements. The target of this audacious raid, codenamed Operation Chariot , was the huge dry dock at Saint-Nazaire in the west of France. This modern purpose-built facility, constructed for the great passenger liner SS Normandie which had been built at Saint-Nazaire , was one of the largest dry docks in the world.
The port provided direct access to the principal shipping routes of the North and South Atlantic, and so was of great importance to the German navy, which was otherwise confined to bases and shipyards on the Baltic, with the difficulties that entailed. From July onwards Brest, Lorient and St Nazaire allowed the Germans to operate in the western approaches to the British Isles, sparing them the crossing of the Pas de Calais or the patrolled waters to the north of Scotland or Iceland on each foray.
Already home to flotillas of U-boats housed in reinforced concrete pens, the facility also held out the prospect of a safe haven for the large German battleship Tirpitz. Had she to have slipped her secure anchorage in a Norwegian fjord , to wreck havoc amongst the vital allied supply routes in the North Atlantic, it would have become imperative for the Royal Navy to hunt her down and sink her, as they had done her sister ship Bismarck the previous spring.
Tirpitz was the largest of four great battleships built for the Kriegsmarine , all of them constructed in the period leading up to the Second World War. The ships, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Bismark and her sister ship Tirpitz , enjoyed superior armour and firepower to any Royal Navy ship at that time, having violated a treaty agreement on the maximum displacement of capital ships to achieve this.
