This is the first biography of Captain Robert Ryder V.C., Royal Navy
(1908-1986), one of the greatest naval heroes of the Second World War. Ryder led
the audacious raid on St Nazaire in March 1942 which completely destroyed the
port’s dry dock, depriving the German’s mighty pocket battleships of its use for
the remainder of the war. The raid was one of the most brilliantly-executed
combined operations of the war, much of the credit for which must go to Ryder’s
outstanding planning and courageous leadership. He received one of five Victoria
Crosses awarded for the operation.
Although Ryder’s name will be forever linked with the raid on St
Nazaire, the rest of his war service was no less distinguished. Torpedoed in a
‘Q’ ship in 1940 he was rescued after clinging to a piece of wreckage for four
days. After St Nazaire, he was heavily involved in the planning of combined
operations and took part in the ill-fated raid on Dieppe. On ‘D’ Day he lead
a naval assault party in the first wave of the invasion. For the rest of the war
Ryder commanded a destroyer on the Arctic convoy.
Ryder’s naval career before the war was, as The Times put it on his
death, unorthodox. In 1933-34 he, as captain, and four other young naval
officers sailed the Tal-Mo-Shan, a 54 food ketch, from Hong Kong to
England via the Panama Canal in a voyage lasting exactly a year, an
outstanding achievement. Recently there has been press speculation that the
voyage was a cover for naval espionage in Japanese waters. The Tal-Mo-Shan
herself has now acquired international celebrity as a result of her sail-on part
in the Abba film Mamma Mia. Between 1934 and 1937 Ryder served in the Antarctic
as captain of the Penola, the base ship of the British Graham Lane Expedition.
His formidable navigation and seamanship was largely responsible for the Penola,
which was ill-adapted to polar conditions, surviving her ordeal intact. Ryder
also took part in some of the earliest ocean yacht races, including the second
Fastnet race in 1926.
