Photo Credit: Smoke billows from bomb strikes against the submarine pens at St. This photo was taken from a U. An early U. Compared to the thousand-plane raids that went deep into Germany later in World War II, the January 3, , bomber mission from England to the coast of German-occupied France was small and spanned only a modest distance.
It introduced new tactics from a leader who later made his mark by innovating aerial warfare. Yet Colonel Curtis E. Nazaire ended up being mostly a debacle that appears to have had a high cost for achieving little. The purpose was to bomb the German submarine pens at St. Nazaire, which were dispatching the U-boats that were wreaking havoc in the Atlantic. The Germans had U-boat pens at Lorient, La Rochelle, and Toulon in France and at Trondheim in Norway, and they were all difficult, heavily shielded targets for the new technique of massed daylight bombing, but none was more a challenge than the mammoth bunker base at St.
Construction was only being finished then, and the pens might have been more vulnerable than they were later. Squadron Leader Michael Curphey, an RAF intelligence analyst, said in an interview for this article that his bosses concluded the U-boat pens were too heavily reinforced by concrete to be neutralized by bombing. Allied leaders believed, however, that they could hamper the U-boat campaign by bombing torpedo and optics facilities that were above ground.
We had plenty of experience with bombing by then and had chosen to do most of ours by night. The optimism felt by those early American bomber crews and their leaders may have been misplaced. After all, they lacked experience and were yet to learn the value, indeed the necessity, of fighter escort.
Still, when LeMay, commander of the th Bombardment Group, who hung his hat at Chelveston in Northhamptonshire, led the attack on St.
