The British Special Raid Force command suffered heavy casualties in a raid on the French port of Saint-Nazaire in March 1942. German soldiers invaded through the side of the war dead British NCOs they had swept up and killed.

  The British Special Raid Force command suffered heavy casualties in a raid on the French port of Saint-Nazaire in March 1942. German soldiers invaded through the side of the dead bodies of British NCOs who had been swept away and killed. The surprise raid on the port of Saint-Nazaire resulted in the loss of about 782 commandos, the largest casualty.

　In a sense of crisis and to defend the British home front in the face of successive defeats since the outbreak of the Second World War, the British commando went to the German lines, prepared to die. The commando was a British military unit, organised as a special surprise force, not as a conscript, but as a recruited and volunteered force.

　The Command crossed the English Channel and raided the port of St Nazaire, ramming its destroyers into the sluices of the docks used by the German battleships, rendering the docks unusable. In the Boer War (1899-1902), a 250,000-strong British force was called the Command from a Boer military unit that resisted for almost two years. On the midnight of 23-24 June 1940, 19 days after the formation of the commando force, the first surprise raid was made from Boulogne to Lutzke; on the night of 14 July, a surprise raid was made on the German garrison on Guernsey Island in the English Channel.

　Command's surprise raid on the port of Saint-Nazaire at the mouth of the Loire River in western France was the largest of its kind. It destroyed the German docks at the Great Water Gate on the Atlantic coast of France. Suffering from a lack of beaches to land on, on 26 March 1942 a commando raiding party left the British port of Falmouth; on 28 March the Germans caught the commando by searchlights from both banks of the Loire and opened heavy fire on them. A British destroyer slammed into the sluice. Command dared to land but was hit by machine-gun fire. Command was evacuated to the south shore of St Nazaire harbour under fire. They came under fire at a tochka and a building near the turning bridge. About 20 commandos surrendered in air-raid shelters and were forcibly taken to German headquarters. They were housed by truck in a restaurant in Lahore, about 20 km west of the port of Saint Nazaire. The SS massacred them at close range. Some commands that were able to land from the motor launch suffered heavy casualties and were wiped out.