A Dull Sort of Raid

The moon was up, dawn was a good hour away, the surf was deep. A Navy-borne British Commando eased up to the coast of northern France. From the dunes between Boulogne and Le Touquet, where vacationing Britons used to loll, Nazi searchlights fingered the Channel. But none found the Commando's barges until the last man in shorts, woolen cap and blackened face had waded ashore.

The Commando leader, 29-year-old Major K. R. S. Trevor, sent his men probing for information about Nazi defenses in that likely invasion sector. Commando machine guns and anti-tank guns, brought ashore in parts and quickly assembled, silenced a German pillbox. Rattled Nazis fired at each other. Nazi tracers lanced out toward the barges and naval-escort vessels, waiting offshore. The British spotted two German patrol vessels, sank one and set another blazing. Some members of the Commando kept up a covering fire from the beach; others slashed the German barbed wire, knifed, shot and clubbed German sentries. Farther along the shore, R.A.F. fighter-bombers attacked German searchlights and guns. An hour after landing, Major Trevor withdrew his raiders. A smoke screen hid their going.

The barges, again laden, made off to their mother ships. One of the naval-escort vessels ran aground on a sandspit, survived a curtain of German fire. One of the barges put back toward the shore to look for missing stragglers, found none, then loosed a last burst of Bren-gun fire at the Germans. Dawn was rising when the party turned home to England.

Said the director of Commando operations, Lord Louis Mountbatten, who was cooking up vastly bigger projects in Washington: "A dull sort of raid."

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