| At 350 metres long, fifty metres wide, and a full 16 metres deep the Forme-Ecluse Louis-Joubert, named after the President of St Nazaire Chamber of Commerce, was specially constructed to house the 80,000-ton ‘Normandie’ which had been built in the Penhoët shipyard and launched in 1932. It was the primary means of access from the River Loire to the man-made inner basin of the port.The Normandie Dock was capable of being used either as a dry or wet dock, its ends were capped by giant hollow gates or ‘caissons’, each nine metres wide, which could be wound into ‘cambers’ on the dock’s west side by machinery, contained in |
Dock Gates (The Caisson)
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‘winding huts’ situated at the end of each camber. On the west side of the lock, the impressive pumping- house, by means of which the lock could be either drained or filled - a process which took all of fourteen hours.
The Tirpitz, sister ship to the Bismarck, at this time continued to pose a real threat to British sea-power, just like the Bismarck had done. Would the Tirpitz try to link up with other German ships in Brest, as the lynchpin of a German Atlantic Fleet?
As long as the Tirpitz lurked in the fjords of Norway little could be done to prevent her dominating the North Sea, but strenuous efforts could be made to bar her from the wider oceans.It was the Tirpitz herself who held the key to such an embargo, for there were only a handful of dry docks worldwide that were large enough to accommodate her huge bulk, and only one that could be accessed directly from the Atlantic.The Bismarck has been making for this shelter, of St Nazaire and the Normandie Dock, when she had been caught and sunk. Destroy this great dock and, should the Tirpitz be damaged in battle on the high seas, she would be forced to return to Germany for repairs, running the gauntlet of British Forces. Destroy the Normandie Dock (Forme-Ecluse Louis-Joubert), in the French Atlantic port of St Nazaire and this might be enough to persuade Germany not to set the Tirpitz free.
The Tirpitz the sister ship of the Bizmarck (IWM HU35755)
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