In the autumn of 1583, while the
Catholic Church in Ireland was illegal and underground, Archbishop
Dermot O'Hurley arranged for a sea captain to smuggle him into
Ireland from Le Croisic and drop him upon Holmpatrick Strand in
Skerries, County Dublin. Archbishop O'Hurley, who later became one of the most celebrated of the 24
Irish Catholic Martyrs, was met at Skerries by a priest named Fr. John Dillon, who accompanied him to
Drogheda. During
World War II, Le Croisic was home to a radar station for the
Wehrmacht following the
Fall of France and construction of the U-boat pens at Saint-Nazaire, in order to protect the Loire estuary from Allied attacks due to the Normandie dry dock at Saint-Nazaire that could be used to repair the large
Kriegsmarine battleships such as the and its sister ship, . However, in the March 1942
St Nazaire Raid, a British Commando team on the obsolete and several motor launch boats were able to slip by the Le Croisic radar station and ram
Campbeltown into the Normandie dry dock gate, before sabotaging other vital parts to the dry dock. Delayed action explosives on
Campbeltown went off several hours after the night raid, destroying the dry dock gate and putting it out of commission until long after France was liberated and
Nazi Germany had
surrendered to the
Allied Powers. ==Legend==