Volume Twelve - Pre-Victorian to the Present Day - further aspects - A History of Penarth Dock by Roy Thorne . . .

Churchill wrote to the Chiefs of Staff on 25th January 1942 : "No other target is comparable. The whole strategy of the war turns at this period on this comparable ship", so it was decided to try and blast the Normandie dry dock out of existence.

A conventional force could not do the operation because St. Nazaire could only be approached by crossing mud banks, and so small ships would have to be used with a small force of highly trained determined men.

The plan was that St. Nazaire dock should be attacked head on by a single destroyer packed with explosives placed at the point of impact and fired by time fuses. From the shattered destroyer and launches men would land and blow up all the lock gates leading to the submarine pens.

The timed explosives on the "Campbeltown", the chosen destroyer, would explode later. The men for this operation needed not only to be highly trained and disciplined soldiers, but also trained in a knowledge of docks and explosives. The man picked to be the tutor of the volunteer for "training on dockyard destruction" from 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9 and 12 commandos was Capt. I. H. Pritchard, a Territorial officer of the Royal Engineers.

Bill Pritchard was the son of Captain W. E. Pritchard, Dock Master at Cardiff. The son, Bill, had served an apprenticeship of five years with the Great Western Railway. The docks of South Wales were under the railway company's control.

In September 1939 Captain W. H. Pritchard had gone to France with the British Expeditionary Force and had been awarded the Military Cross for demolishing a bridge whilst under fire during the withdrawal to Dunkirk. After the evacuation Pritchard went to Aldershot as an instructor, and there he met another officer who became his close friend, named Montgomery.

Whilst home on leave Cardiff Docks were bombed and Pritchard realised that although bombing caused damage it could not stop the dock working and that what was needed to render a dock useless was to place the correct explosives on the vital parts.

The two friends initially worked on a plan to destroy our own docks in the event of invasion. Montgomery had been at St. Nazaire and by a remarkable coincidence one of the dock plans they ware given to study were those of St. Nazaire.