![]() ![]() You can see the obvious wider drama both of Frank delegating, or offering, this apparent suicide mission to his kid brother! ![]() We don't have a definite letter or order signifying whose idea it originally was, but it seems reasonable to assume that the Zeebrugge Raid’s principal planner Admiral Roger Keyes - an old submariner - and his staff officer and explosives expert Frank Sandford - Richard Sandford's older brother - probably pushed it through. I've spoken in the book about various previous historical attempts to physically block an enemy's harbour, but as far as I'm aware there was no precedent for using a submarine as a sort of floating time bomb in the way they did. The submarine component of the raid was a novel and obviously supremely dangerous idea. Lieutenant Richard Sandford visible on the conning tower of the sub C3 (left) and the portion of the Mole that was blown up with a makeshift bridge constructed later (right image: Charles Keyes) He was awarded the Victoria Cross shortly after. Remarkably, he was successful and almost came away unscathed but for what he called a ‘few minor scrapes’, or more accurately two bullet wounds to the leg. He did this by manually steering a submarine full of explosives into it, before lighting a three-minute fuse and then rowing away as fast as possible with his crew. ![]() Shortly before the Mole was stormed, my great-uncle Richard Sandford destroyed a viaduct leading to the harbour in order to deny reinforcements from coming to the defender’s aid. In all, it seems fair to say it was a triumph of individual initiative and collective fighting spirit, rather than one of meticulous groundwork and advance planning. The available technology, too, was pretty basic: the Zeebrugge raiders had a few rather murky aerial-reconnaissance photos, but of course nothing in the way of computer or satellite images, nor any form of GPS with which to position Vindictive (the ship they stormed from) at the correct spot on the Mole. One of the incredible things about the operation was the lack of any real specific training or preparation focused on the actual objectives: no one ever thought to rehearse landing men from a badly-moored, rocking ship onto a high - and defended - stone wall in the dead of night, and some of the subsequent conditions they encountered came as a rude shock as a result. There was a certain amount of what was essentially just street brawling in the subsequent skirmishes on the Mole – there are plenty of documented instances of men punching and kicking one another, and at least one marine favoured a sort of martial-arts approach to the raid! Despite the cover image depiction, the raid actually took place at night, as can be seen here in ‘Vindictive alongside the Mole’ by Charles Dixon (image: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London) A 3D map of the operation, with the attack on the Mole visible in the bottom half of the picture (image from ‘The Blocking of Zeebrugge’ by Stephen Prince © Osprey Publishing, part of Bloomsbury Publishing) ![]() This was a dangerous enough mission as it was, but the soldiers who stormed the Mole were very poorly equipped: the lucky ones had the spectacularly heavy Lewis Gun, but many of the attackers who charged at the enemy machine guns were armed with nothing but a cutlass. In order to get the block ships into the correct position, marines were to storm the ‘Mole’, or seawall, and neutralise the German defenders stationed there to prevent them attacking the arriving British ships. ![]()
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