Encyclopedia
The
Dieppe Raid, also known as
The Battle of Dieppe or
Operation Jubilee, during
World War II, was an
Allied attack on the
German-occupied port of
Dieppe, Seine-Maritime on the Northern coast of
France on August 19, 1942. Over 6,000
infantrymen, predominantly
Canadian, were supported by large
British naval and
air contingents. Intended to seize and hold a major port for a short period, both to prove it was possible and to gather intelligence from prisoners and captured materials while assessing the German responses, the raid was also intended to use air power to draw the
Luftwaffe into a large, planned encounter.
The raid was generally considered to be an unmitigated tactical disaster, with no major objectives accomplished. 4,384 of the 6,086 men who made it ashore were either killed, wounded, or captured. The
RAF and
RCAF failed to lure the
Luftwaffe into open battle, and lost 119 planes, whilst the
Royal Navy suffered 555 casualties. The catastrophe at Dieppe may have later influenced Allied preparations for
Operation Torch and
D-Day.
Plan
The origins of the raid are rather unusual. Various raids had been planned, but the Dieppe raid was brought into reality only by the desires of the new Chief of Combined Operations,
Louis Mountbatten. One of Mountbatten's principal assistants, Captain John Hughes-Hallett, served as Naval Commander of the raid. The actual raid was undertaken
without the approval of the Combined Chiefs of Staff and many elements in the planning suffered from the unofficial nature of the raid.
The previous Chief of Combined Operations, Roger Keyes, who had commanded the famous raid on
Zeebrugge in 1918, had been ordered to organize raids on occupied Europe. He was replaced by Mountbatten in 1941, through the direct intervention of
Winston Churchill, and a number of raids took place – notably on Vaagso,
Bruneval, and the larger attack on
St Nazaire. Detractors of Mountbatten have contended that all the raids prior to Dieppe were originated under the leadership of Keyes.
Operation Rutter
The 1942 raid on Dieppe was initially planned for July and code-named
Operation Rutter. The aim was relatively straightforward: to seize and hold a major port for a short period, firstly to see if it was possible, also to gather intelligence from prisoners and captured materials and to examine the German responses. The nature of combined operations would also allow the Air Force to draw the
Luftwaffe into a large, planned encounter and the use of Canadian troops would, it was hoped, satisfy the Canadian commanders following the long inactivity of Canadian forces in England. Churchill grew more supportive as the
defeats in northern Africa incited a wave of press and parliamentary criticism.
Rutter was approved in May 1942. It consisted of a main attack onto the Dieppe town beach, two flanking attacks by
paratroops, a thousand sorties by Allied air forces and a naval bombardment. The Canadian 2nd Division would lead the attack, elements advancing as far as Arques. The operation was scaled down, especially the RAF bombing support as destruction of the town was not desired, but the troops boarded their ships on 5 July. The weather became much worse while the ships were still in harbour and on 7 July the operation was cancelled.
Operation Jubilee
Almost all concerned believed that a raid on Dieppe was now out of the question; however, though
Montgomery wanted it cancelled indefinitely, Mountbatten did not. He began reorganising the raid from 11 July as
Operation Jubilee. Despite not receiving Combined Chiefs of Staff authorisation, Mountbatten instructed his staff to proceed in late July. This lack of top-level go-ahead resulted in certain dislocations in the planning. For example, the failure to inform the Joint Intelligence Committee or the Inter-Service Security Board meant none of the intelligence agencies was involved, so no current information was added.
It was later suggested detailed information was communicated to the Germans by their agents in Britain and by Eduard Hempel in
Ireland. Post-war examination of German and British intelligence records has failed to substantiate this; while it did find British intelligence lacking in its assessment of Dieppe, particularly its defences. No comprehensive security measures were considered for the troops involved after the original
Operation Rutter was cancelled.
Order of battle
Operation Jubilee still relied on the
2nd Canadian Infantry Division under Major General J. H. Roberts to attack Dieppe, Puys and Pourville, while the paratroop assault on the flank gun batteries was replaced by an amphibious assault by
Commandos. No.4 Commando to attack Varengeville and Quiberville to the west and No.3 Commando to attack Berneval to the east. 50 Men of the new
US Rangers were interspersed among the Commandos, and a small composite special section from SSRF, SOE,
SIS and No.10 Commando conducted limited intelligence. Ground support was provided by thirty of the new
Churchill tanks, delivered using the new
LCTs.
Dieppe was quite weakly defended in terms of numbers. The 571st Regiment, however, had a diminished amount of manpower. Spread out thinly along the beaches of Dieppe and the neighboring towns, were the 571st’s mere total of 1500 soldiers. In respect of
machine guns, mortars and
artillery it was adequately protected with a concentration on the main approach, , and with a reserve at the rear. They were stationed not only in the towns themselves, but also between the towns in open areas and highlands that overlook the beaches. A garrison of only 150 men, for example, defended the beaches at Dieppe, while a smaller garrison of 50 men defended the beaches at Puits. Lacking in terms of infantry capacity, the Germans would focus on setting up extensive defense perimeters throughout the area. Elements of the 571st defended the
radar station near Pourville and the battery over the Scie at Varengeville. To the west the 570th Infantry Regiment manned a battery at Berneval.
Air Forces
The massive Allied air support for the operation amounted to about 70 squadrons, with the overwhelming majority coming from RAF Fighter Command, including 48 squadrons of
Spitfires including all three famed Eagle Squadrons. The opposing
Luftwaffe forces were:
Jagdgeschwader 2 and 26, comprised of 200 fighters, mostly the new
Focke-Wulf 190s and about 100 bombers from
Kampfgeschwader 2 , KG45 and KG77, mostly Dornier 217s. On paper at least, the Allies would have a manifold numerical advantage.
Attack
Almost 252 ships left various ports on the night of 18 August and as they approached the French coast early on the 19th, things began to go wrong.
Left Flank, Yellow Beaches: No. 3 Commando
The ships carrying No. 3 Commando, approaching to the east, and due to the
ad hoc nature of the operation not warned of its known schedule, ran into a German
convoy. German
S-boats
torpedoed some of the LCTs; coastal defences were alerted and 80% of the attacking force was destroyed. Only a handful of the scattered Allied craft landed and from these only 18 Commandos reached and engaged their target. Unable to destroy any of the guns, they were able to snipe on gun crews and prevent them firing on the main assault.
Right Flank, Orange Beaches: No. 4 Commando
No. 4 Commando landed in force and destroyed their targets, providing the only success of the operation. Most of No. 4 safely returned to England. This portion of the raid was considered a model for future commando raids.
Lord Lovat became famous as an officer here on Orange Beach.
Canadian main assault
The Canadians in the centre suffered greatly, at least in part due to the inexperience of Roberts, who unwisely committed the reserve force to the main beaches. Poor small unit leadership has also been blamed for failures once men went ashore.
The landing at Puys by the Royal Regiment of Canada was delayed and the potential advantages of surprise and darkness were lost. The well-placed German forces held the Canadians that did land on the beach with little difficulty. 225 men were killed, 264 surrendered and 33 made it back to England. The beach was defended by just 60 Germans, who at no time felt the need to reinforce their position. Several platoons of the
Black Watch were also employed at Blue Beach; some of their casualties were suffered in a
grenade-priming accident on the transport ships during the channel crossing.
On the other side of the town at Pourville the
South Saskatchewan Regiment and the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders of Canada made it ashore with few losses. The Saskatchewan advance on Dieppe was soon halted while the Camerons were halted just short of their objective. Both regiments suffered more as they withdrew; the bravery of the landing craft crew allowed 341 men to embark but increasing pressure meant that the rest were left to surrender. Another 141 had died.
The main attack was at three points: the 14th Canadian Army Tank Regiment in the middle with the Essex Scottish to the east and
The Royal Hamilton Light Infantry to the west. Attacking thirty minutes after the flanking assaults and onto a steep pebble beach all the groups were met with intense fire. The eastern assault was held at the beach. The western assault gained a hold in a shore-front casino but few soldiers made it across the road and they were soon held. The tanks arrived a little late to discover their landing point was difficult. Twenty-nine tanks disembarked but only fifteen managed to climb the beach and cross the sea-wall onto the esplanade under unrelenting fire. However, they were completely stopped by
anti-tank blocks, were immobilized, or returned to the beach. The
engineers whose job it was to clear such obstacles were unable to do so because of heavy fire which the tanks could not suppress. Back on the beach, the tanks provided fire support, as best they could, and covered the retreat.
The supporting
naval bombardment was supplied by
destroyers, which did not have sufficient weight of broadside or range to destroy the German strongpoints without themselves coming under heavy fire. They were also not able to communicate directly with those on the shore to make their bombardment effective.
The debacle was compounded when, acting on fragmentary messages, the reserve were committed to the Dieppe beach at around 07.00. The 584 men of Les Fusiliers Mont-Royal took fire all the way to the beach and on it. Only 125 made it back to England. The other part of the reserve comprised 369 men of 40 Commando Royal Marines, ', who were ordered to White Beach. The first of their craft landed under withering machine gun fire and their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph "Tiger" Phillips, donned white gloves to
semaphore away the following craft, being hit and killed in the process. All but one saw the signal and complied, though several craft were already hit. None ashore achieved more than a matter of yards.
At 10:50 a general order to retreat was issued.
Aftermath
Heavy losses
Casualty figures vary: according to one source, of 6,090 men, 1,027 were killed and 2,340 captured. The Official History of the Canadian Army: Six Years of War gives the figures of 907 Canadians being killed while about 2,210 Canadians out of the 4,963 that were sent made it back to England . The total number of fatal and non-fatal casualties, some of whom were evacuated off the beach, is given as 3,367. Overhead the Allied air forces lost 119 aircraft while the
Luftwaffe lost just 46.
The German losses amounted to 311 killed and 280 missing soldiers.
POW policies
It transpired that a senior Canadian officer, Brigadier William Southam, had brought ashore his copy of the assault plan, which was a secret document. Though he attempted to bury it under the pebbles at the time of the surrender, Southam's action was spotted and the plan retrieved by the Germans. The plan contained orders to shackle prisoners. In addition there were reports of German POWs’ bodies washing ashore with their hands tied. When this was brought to
Hitler's attention he ordered the shackling of Canadian prisoners, which led to a reciprocating order by Churchill for German prisoners in Canada. Both orders quickly lost momentum in prison camps till being abandoned after intercession by the
Swiss. It is however, believed to have contributed to Hitler's decision to issue his Commando Order later that year.
Second front
There have been various attempts to re-evaluate the raid against larger objectives. Picknet, Prince & Prior describe the raid's origins arising from fundamental disagreements between the Allies over strategy.
Russia was demanding a second front be opened immediately, to relieve the pressure on them of German attack. They suspected the West of being quite happy to see the
Communists and
Nazis destroy each other.
Roosevelt in reality was eager to accommodate Stalin, and also motivated by domestic politics. Left-wingers were following the Soviet line, former anti-war Isolationists were asking pointedly why
Japan was not to be dealt with first, and the Press were impatient for action either way. Without consulting his other ally he therefore promised to
Molotov during meetings in Washington May/June 1942, that he was prepared to hazard up to 120,000 men that year to help relieve pressure on the Russian front .
Churchill was aghast. While he fully appreciated the need to keep Russia in the war and America focused on the
European theatre, and therefore saw the political logic for a show of force, understandably he balked at a full-scale strategic commitment uncertain of success. One
Gallipoli in a lifetime was quite enough. Playing for time, he agreed to countersign their Washington Communique promising a second front in 1942, on the understanding it was to be "misinformation". The raid became the British response to this American and Russian
fait accompli, a counterpart, unasked for "compromise". No evidence has ever come to light to support the dark rumours the operation was deliberately sabotaged. Nevertheless its failure had a desirable effect for the British on American overconfidence. One example of this retrospective justification was the presence by 1943 of 33 divisions on the
Atlantic Wall.
Lessons learned
Some have argued that the hard lessons learned at Dieppe in 1942 were put to good use later in the war. The amphibious assaults at
North Africa were only 3 months away. The more successful
Normandy landings would occur later in 1944. Others still maintain amphibious assaults had already been developed in a modern sense as early as
Gallipoli, and the lessons allegedly learned at Dieppe would have been made in subsequent operations such as
Operation HUSKY or the landings at
Salerno and
Anzio.
Regardless, due to experience at Dieppe, the British developed a whole range of specialist armoured vehicles to allow their engineers to perform many if not all of their tasks under armour. These vehicles were used to great effect in the British and Canadian landing in Normandy in 1944. There were also huge improvements made in shore-to-sea communications, and many more and bigger ships available for ship-to-shore bombardment support.
Trivia
- Fifty US Rangers went ashore at various locations in order to gain battle experience, suffering the first American land casualties of the war in Europe.
- 20 men of No. 3 Troop No. 10 Commando participated in the raid. The various troops of No. 10 Commando were generally known by their country of origin, be it Free French , Dutch , Belgian , Norwegian
...
,
Polish , or
Yugoslavian . No. 3 was also known as X-Troop because it was composed of
German speaking
Jewish refugees from the continent. It was not until long after the war the origin of the men in this troop was made known.
- Three Victoria Crosses were awarded for the operation, one British and two Canadian .
- The 2nd Canadian Infantry Division liberated Dieppe and held a victory parade shortly afterwards, in the first week of September 1944. The German garrison had fled as the division approached.
- Major General J.H. "Ham" Roberts, the commander of the 2nd Division, was not relieved right after Dieppe, and in fact commanded the division for several more months. In early 1943 he was transferred to command of reinforcement units in the United Kingdom. While some, including Roberts himself, feel he was made a scapegoat for Dieppe, historian Jack Granatstein in his book The Generals insists Roberts was simply not up to commanding a division and the cause of his dismissal was failure to perform adequately on Exercise SPARTAN, well after Dieppe. Roberts had served in the First World War as an artillery officer, and won the Military Cross in the summer of 1940 as a lieutenant colonel for saving the guns of his regiment from abandonment in France during the evacuation of the Second BEF.
- Seven Free-French ships joined the naval component.
- There were at least 69 RAF squadrons committed. This included British , Canadian , Polish , Czech , Norwegian , Belgian , French , and New Zealand squadrons. B-17s of 340th, 341st, 342nd, and 414th squadrons of the USAAF 97th Bombardment Group were also tasked.
- Foreign Ministry translator Paul Schmidt was tasked with the questioning of the captured Allied soldiers.
- Air losses consisted of 64 Spitfires , 20 Hurricane fighter bombers, 6 Boston bombers and 10 Mustang Mk1 Army Co-operation aircraft . Lufwaffe losses were 23 FW-190 fighters, and 25 Dornier Do-217.
See also
Films
Television docudrama, 1993. Critical of Mountbatten and another planner,
General Montgomery, and based on Brian Loring-Villa's book, listed below. Discussion of the film and the raid . The film is an accurate portrayal of life for the common soldier of the Canadian Army in England. A low budget means only the attack on Blue Beach is depicted; however, the focus of the film is divided between the grand strategic aims of the high command, the operational aims of the division staff, and the personal lives of the soldiers.
Documentary. Rebuttal to the above.
Dieppe, Bell Canada television commercial depicts a modern-day Canadian traveler calling his grandfather at home in Canada from France. When the grandfather inquires about Paris, the traveler reports that he is actually in Dieppe, and called to offer his thanks.
Popular culture
The song "Nautical Disaster" by the Canadian rock band
The Tragically Hip from their 1994 album
Day for Night uses what is believed to be imagery of the Dieppe raid as a metaphor for a difficult or failing relationship between the singer and his counterpart, a woman named Susan. Singer Gord Downie describes a dream about a battle "off the coast of France." Details which bear resemblance to the Dieppe raid are the location, the casualty count, and the description of a panicked evacuation. There were however, noticeable errors in the song. The lyrics also claim that 4,000 men died in the water, while in truth, there were a little over 1,000 troops killed. Secondly, the singer points it out in the lyrics as an afternoon, this is wrong since the raid took place in the morning.
The song "Dieppe", by French-Canadian folk-rock band speaks indirectly of the sacrifice of war and the proud, combative and fatally stubborn French-Canadian attitude of the time, as well as the disagreement between the Allied forces command. The lyrics of longest song on the album , "Dieppe", are in French, and never include any direct name references. Only concepts are explored. The lyrics are written by singer Rudy Caya.
References
- Robertson, Terrence. The Shame and the Glory: Dieppe, Toronto: McLelland & Stewart, 1967. ISBN 0-7710-7542-1
- Villa, Brian L. Unauthorized Action: Mountbatten and the Dieppe Raid, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. ISBN 0-19-540804-7
- Whitaker, Denis and Shelagh. Dieppe: Tragedy To Triumph, Whitby, ON.: McGraw-Hill Ryerson Trade, 1993. ISBN 0-07-551641-1
While dozens of books have been written on the subject, the three titles above are generally considered the best. The first contains a great deal of first person detail; the second is a detailed and very scholarly look at high level planning almost exclusively, and the last is a mixture of both first person account and scholarly history. Villa's book offers up tantalizing theories on deliberate leaks of information to the Germans, and attempts to prove the thesis that Admiral Mountbatten mounted the raid without approval from above. Whitaker's book attempts to prove that valuable lessons were learned at Dieppe and may be forgiven for some measure of bias due to his personal involvement in the historical action. Robertson's book is the most even-handed but suffers from being written before many files were available to researchers, especially those relating to Ultra.
Further reading
- Ford, Ken. Dieppe 1942, Prelude to D-Day; Osprey Campaign Series #127, Osprey Publishing, 2003. Primer, with good 3-dimensional artwork of the battle area.
- Leasor, Stephen. Green Beach . Covers the actions of an RAF radar expert assigned to capture German radar equipment, and the men assigned to guard him - and kill him if it seemed he might fall into enemy hands.
- Mordal, Jacques Dieppe: The Dawn of Decision 288pp ISBN 0-450-05004-1 Decent, but not detailed, overview of the planning, mounting and execution of the Raid.
- Neillands, Robin. The Dieppe Raid: The Story of the Disastrous 1942 Mission , ISBN 1-84513-116-9, A recent overview by a British Historian
- Reynolds, Quentin. Dress Rehearsal: The Story of Dieppe . Story of the Dieppe Raid by a journalist; obviously written under wartime constraints. Author admits it is not a "profound dissertation".
- Stacey, Col C.P. drafted an early report which can be found at http://www.forces.gc.ca/dhh/downloads/cmhq/cmhq083.pdf
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