Tragedy at Dieppe Read online

  Eisenhower said “he had racked his mind to discover how we could present Germany with a second front, and that the more he thought it out the more firmly had he been driven to the conclusion that it would be possible to do so only by attacking Western Europe from the British Isles.” McNaughton, who knew that his Canadians would certainly play a major role in any cross-channel operation, agreed that “the war could only be ended by the defeat of Hitler and the only way of doing so was to attack him from the West.” He expressed his certainty “that an offensive would sooner or later have to be launched from the United Kingdom across the narrow seas.” McNaughton added that the Canadian government had affirmed this point only the week before.

  Rather than being in agreement, McNaughton and Eisenhower were talking at cross purposes. Eisenhower thought sooner, McNaughton later. Twenty days after this meeting, Marshall presented an argument to President Roosevelt for an invasion of northern France “as the theatre in which to stage the first great offensive of the United Powers.” His plan envisioned a main operation in spring 1943 with a preceding diversionary attack against the French coast during the summer of 1942. This diversionary assault would only occur if the Soviet situation became desperate or the Germans in Western Europe were “critically weakened.” Even in the absence of this diversion, Marshall wanted the British to establish “a preliminary active front this coming summer” with “constant raiding by small task forces at selected points along the entire coastline held by the enemy.” On April 4, Marshall left for London to argue the American case. Accompanying him was Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s most trusted civilian adviser.11

  Marshall and Hopkins were polar opposites. The general was a tall, robust Virginian, who looked every bit the soldier and spoke his mind with little diplomacy. Hopkins, who suffered from hemochromatosis (excess iron) due to the cancer-necessitated removal of two-thirds of his stomach, was wizened, frail, and required regular blood transfusions. A chain-smoker, he dressed shabbily in clothes always rumpled. But Churchill, who had been won over by his plain-spoken, unassuming manner during an earlier visit in 1941, considered him a friend—not only personally but also of Britain.

  Roosevelt had written Churchill on March 18 to set the tone for these discussions. “I am becoming more and more interested in the establishment of a new front this summer on the European continent... and even though losses will doubtless be great, such losses will be compensated by at least equal German losses and by compelling Germans to divert large forces of all kinds from Russian fronts.”12

  Churchill and his Chiefs of Staff received Marshall and Hopkins in the damp, smoky underground Cabinet War Room on Great George Street, close to Storey’s Gate and St. James Park. The two Americans were quickly assured that the British were agreeable to the 1943 plans. This was merely an expansion of Operation Roundup, which the expected deployment of American troops to England over ensuing months made more feasible. But the American 1942 plans appalled the British. During Arcadia, a 1942 assault that Churchill suggested be code-named Operation Sledgehammer had been proposed. Since then the British had been studying how this might proceed. They saw Sledgehammer as far more modest than the American plan. The British envisioned “a limited-objective attack—something like a large-scale raid—the main purpose of which would be to tempt the German Air Force into a battle of destruction with the Royal Air Force under conditions favourable to the latter.” Because of fighter ranges from England, the only feasible area for this operation was the Pas-de-Calais. Not coincidentally, this was precisely where German coastal defences were strongest.

  Extensive scrutiny of Sledgehammer had disclosed by the beginning of April a string of obstacles. The coastal area selected had flat beaches ill suited to existing British landing craft, and there were too few exit points for vehicles and tanks to quickly and easily move inland. Area ports were also too small to supply the kind of force buildup required to hold a bridgehead against a determined German counterattack. While such an assault might lure the Luftwaffe into the RAF’s gunsights, the problems this area presented were deemed insurmountable. A German counterattack would assuredly overrun the beachhead, resulting in great loss of men and equipment. Based on that grievous assessment, the British chiefs concluded that “establishment of a permanent bridgehead on the Continent would probably be impossible in 1942.”

  Marshall and Hopkins disagreed. The U.S. Joint Planning Staff proposal called for a major land attack across the English Channel that summer. While conceding that British and Canadian forces would have to carry out the initial assault, the Americans could rapidly reinforce the bridgehead with troops rushed to England. Marshall said such an assault could be made between July 15 and August 1. It would be preceded by a fifteen-day air attack that would draw large elements of the Luftwaffe away from the Russian front. The Allies would seek to establish air dominance over the Channel and at least one hundred kilometres inland between Dunkirk and Abbeville. While the air operations were going on, commandos would raid the Dutch, Belgian, and Normandy coastlines. Thirty days after air operations had begun, the major invasion would seize the high ground north of the Rivers Seine and Oise.13

  Several days of often bitter argument ensued, with Marshall pressing the American line against the resistance of Brooke. Like Marshall, Brooke was a Great War veteran; he was also generally regarded as the man most responsible for bringing off the successful evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk in 1940. At one point, Brooke asked Marshall where he thought the soldiers should advance once they were ashore. “Do we go west, south, or east after landing?” To Brooke’s astonishment, Marshall confessed that “he had not begun to think of it.” This prompted Brooke to confide to his diary: “Marshall does not impress me by the ability of his brain... In many respects he is a very dangerous man whilst being a very charming one.”14 For his part, Marshall was equally unimpressed by Brooke’s strategic sense.

  Hopkins cautioned that Americans were demanding that their troops soon see combat. If there was no invasion in Europe, public opinion might well force the American effort to be largely directed against Japan.15

  Ultimately, however, the British held the trump card—it would be their divisions that must carry out any 1942 invasion, and they were unwilling to commit them. On April 14, it was agreed that a 1942 landing in France would only be attempted if the Soviet Union was verging on collapse.16

  With Sledgehammer relegated to the back burner, attention turned to Marshall’s 1943 invasion scheme. This the British embraced enthusiastically, particularly when Marshall promised to deliver a million troops to the United Kingdom in the ensuing year. This proved to be a fateful turning point. Present at this meeting was Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations Command and the man recently placed in charge of planning and conducting all raiding operations against the European coast. When Marshall announced the numbers of men that he could deliver to England, Mountbatten realized that the “whole picture of combined operations against the Continent” was changing. “The plans, which we had been at present evolving, all fell short in one way or another for lack of essential resources. This would be all changed when the great flow of American forces began, and we should be enabled to plan that real return to the Continent, without which we could not hope to bring the war to a successful conclusion.”17

  Mountbatten was also heartened on the evening of April 14 when Marshall strongly advocated “repeated Commando-type raids all along the coast” in order to harass the Germans and give Allied troops experience. Combined Operations—which not only planned raiding operations but also increasingly directly controlled the army, air, and sea forces involved—would have a freer hand to expand the rate and size of its raids. This suited Mountbatten. At that very moment, Combined Operations staff was planning a raid far larger than any previously executed. Its target: the resort community of Dieppe.

  Three days later, Churchill cabled Roosevelt to confirm that raiding would
henceforth be more aggressive and on a larger scale. “The campaign of 1943 is straightforward, and we are starting joint plans and preparations at once. We may however feel compelled to act this year. Your plan visualised this, but put mid-September as the earliest date. Things may easily come to a head before then... Broadly speaking, our agreed programme is a crescendo of activity on the Continent, starting with an ever-increasing air offensive both by night and day and more frequent large-scale raids, in which United States troops will take part.”

  Soon thereafter, Churchill sent Prime Minister Mackenzie King a point-by-point outline of the agreed strategy. “Raiding operations,” Churchill stated, would “be undertaken in 1942 on the largest scale which equipment will permit on a front from North Norway to the Bay of Biscay.” The United Kingdom would serve as the base for “large scale operations in the spring of 1943 to destroy the German forces in Western Europe.” Plans would “take advantage of any opportunity arising to capture in 1942 a bridgehead on the continent for an ‘emergency’ offensive if such should become necessary.”18

  On April 18, the British Chiefs of Staff confirmed the decisions agreed during the meetings with Marshall and Hopkins. A die was cast that would lead in little more than four months to several thousand Canadians meeting disaster on the beaches of Dieppe.

  Part One | The Twisting Path to Dieppe

  1. A Boldly Imaginative Group

  Following the arcadia Conference, Churchill gave Lord Mountbatten “special responsibility... to prepare for the invasion.” The emphasis was to “devise the techniques of amphibious landings and to design and acquire the appurtenances and appliances needed for the invasion. I was to train vast numbers of soldiers, sailors and airmen to work as a single team in Combined Operations.” Mountbatten would work with Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces, General Bernard Paget on “first plans for the return to the continent.”1

  Mountbatten had taken command of Combined Operations on October 27, 1941, receiving immediate promotion from captain to commodore first class. On March 18, 1942, Churchill advanced him to the rank of acting vice-admiral with the title Chief of Combined Operations.2 A couple of weeks earlier, Churchill had also appointed Mountbatten to the British Chiefs of Staff Committee, carrying with it a place in the new Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee.3

  Friends and family knew Mountbatten as “Dickie.” His “pedigree practically drips with royal ermine,” Collier’s Weekly correspondent Quentin Reynolds gushed admiringly. His father had been the German-born Prince Louis of Battenberg, and his mother, Princess Victoria, was the daughter of Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse, and of Princess Alice, the daughter of Queen Victoria. After immigrating to Britain, the family anglicized its name to Mountbatten. In 1922, the young lord married socialite Edwina Ashley, named for her godfather King Edward VII. During the pre-war years, Mountbatten and Edwina cut a glamorous path through the upper strata of British and American society. Reynolds observed that “they graced the late spots in London, they popularized pink champagne at Antibes, they gambled casually at Monte Carlo and often went half way round the world to keep engagements with their very great friend, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.; Fred Astaire and other stage and film stars were their guests, and occasionally they varied the routine by dining with King George and Queen Mary.”4

  Born in 1900, Mountbatten had served in the Great War as a boy seaman and thereafter continued a naval career. In 1939, he held a captaincy and took command of the destroyer HMS Kelly. Reynolds thought Mountbatten looked the part of a hero. He “is tall, with pale-blue eyes and a wide mouth that smiles readily, but which can tighten into a thin, uncompromising, straight line” that Reynolds believed had become “a legend in the Royal Navy and among the people of Britain.”5

  Less enthralled commentators, including some Royal Navy officers, described his war career as “marked by fame, danger and folly in roughly equal amounts, with recklessness as its most significant characteristic.”6 But even his detractors admitted the man’s courage. When a German mine badly damaged Kelly in the English Channel, he nursed it into port after a ninety-hour ordeal. His next command, HMS Javelin, was shortly torpedoed in a Channel fight. Again refusing to abandon ship, Mountbatten got her home and was awarded a Distinguished Service Order. Returning to the helm of Kelly, he participated in the doomed attempt to save Crete. During a fierce melee between British ships and Stuka dive-bombers, a bomb fatally pierced Kelly’s guts. Mountbatten ordered the crew to keep firing all guns, while he clung to the compass standard on the bridge until it was almost too late to abandon ship.7

  To make room for Mountbatten, Churchill had fired the current Combined Operations director, Admiral of the Fleet Roger Keyes. Appointed on July 17, 1940, Keyes was given express instruction to move commando raiding towards larger-scale operations.8 He diligently tried to do so, but fell afoul of constant resistance from both the army and navy to provide men, matériel, and logistical support for what many considered a pointless delivery of costly “pinprick” strikes against the Germans. Keyes was almost seventy. Churchill felt his often irascible nature caused undue friction with both superiors and subordinates. Mountbatten, he believed, had the leadership qualities, initiative, diplomatic skills, and ingenuity to enable Combined Operations to begin launching large-scale raids.

  No sooner had the British escaped France at Dunkirk than they had turned to hit-and-run raids against German targets. Initially, these aimed to simply keep the Germans off balance and show that the Royal Navy could deliver small bands of soldiers anywhere along the European coast with impunity. This “showing of the colours” in desperate times greatly appealed to Churchill. He turned to Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clarke, who had served alongside Arab guerillas during their campaigns in Palestine against the Turks in the Great War. Clarke suggested training small units of soldiers to wage irregular warfare. He called the units commandos, a designation the Boers had given their irregular fighters during the South African War. Churchill, who had been a journalist in South Africa, enthusiastically embraced the term and idea. The press quickly applied the word to the men, and it stuck. Commando units served within the Special Service Brigade, which was in turn controlled by Combined Operations.

  The soldiers had to operate amphibiously, meaning “first and foremost... they must learn to co-operate with the Royal Navy. Schools for this purpose were established in various convenient places on the coast of Great Britain so that the men might become familiar with the ways of life, the customs, the habits and the outlook of sailors.”9

  Commando training was gruelling. “To get in and out of a small boat in all kinds of weather, to swim—if necessary in full equipment with firearms held above the water, to be familiar with all the portable weapons of the soldier from the rifle and the tommy gun to the three-inch mortar and the anti-tank rifle, to be able to carry and use high explosives, to hunt tanks and their crews—here are some of the things that the Commando soldier must learn. To do so, however, is only to be proficient in the use of the tools of his trade of war. He must do more than this; he must master his mind as well as his body and become not only a specially trained soldier but a trained individual soldier. In other words, self-reliance and self-confidence form an integral, a vital part of his mental and moral makeup. To achieve these mutually dependent qualities the men, on entering the depot, are treated as far as possible as individuals. It is not for them to await orders from their officers or their NCO. They must do the sensible, obvious thing just because it is the sensible, obvious thing.”

  Physical training required forced marches over all types of terrain, scaling cliffs, and swimming or improvising bridges over rivers. One commando troop in training “once marched in fighting order 63 miles in 23 hours and 10 minutes, covering the first 33 miles in eight hours dead... Such marches are the rule, not the exception.”10

  These were the men and tasks Mountbatten had inherited in October 1941. When Churchill described his role
as that of an adviser, Mountbatten had asked to return to active duty. “What could you hope to achieve there,” Churchill replied, “except to be sunk in a bigger and more expensive ship next time?” During a private briefing, Churchill told Mountbatten that Combined Operations must start conducting more aggressive and larger raids, the main object being the “re-invasion of France.” It would be up to Combined Operations to determine the bases from which the ultimate invasion would be launched, create training camps for the assault troops, and develop a proper inter-service structure in which the army, navy, and air force could work together seamlessly.

  Although Mountbatten acceded to the task, he sought from Churchill expanded powers and authority. This led to his rapid promotion in rank and position within the Allied command.

  The expansion of Mountbatten’s authority displeased General Alan Brooke. On March 5, 1942, he wrote: “The title of Chief of Combined Operations was... badly chosen, since every operation we were engaged in was a combined one. It was certainly not intended that he should direct combined strategy—his job was to evolve technique, policy and equipment for the employment of three Services in combined operations to effect landings against opposition.”11

  Brooke feared Mountbatten’s close relationship with Churchill might fuel the prime minister’s often unrealistic enthusiasm for raiding and lead to his insistence on an operation beyond the military’s capability. Mountbatten was a regular weekend guest of Churchill’s at Chequers, the prime minister’s official country residence in Buckinghamshire. “Dickie’s visits to Chequers,” Brooke wrote, “were always dangerous moments and there was no knowing what discussions he might be led into and... let us in for.” In March, such discussions inevitably revolved around calls for a second front to relieve pressure on the Russians.