Tragedy at Dieppe Read online

  Brooke agreed that some form of raid had to be mounted. At a March 10 Chiefs of Staff meeting—Mountbatten’s first—discussion revolved around “the problem of assistance to Russia by operations in France, either large raid or lodgement. Decided only hope was to try and draw off air force from Russia and that for this purpose raid must be carried out on Calais front.”

  Investigating this possibility fell to Combined Operations Headquarters staff. On March 28, a difficult further meeting saw the chiefs “discussing ways and means of establishing new Western Front,” Brooke wrote. “I had propounded theory that a Western Front... must force withdrawal of force from Russia. That it was impossible with the land force at our disposal to force the Germans to withdraw land forces from Russia, but that we might induce them to withdraw air forces. But to do this a landing must take place within our air umbrella, namely in vicinity of Calais or Boulogne. Mountbatten was still hankering after a landing near Cherbourg, where proper air support is not possible. Finally I think we convinced him sufficiently to make his visit to Chequers that evening safe.”12

  Mountbatten, meanwhile, had been reshaping Combined Operations to his liking. While publicly praising Keyes, Mountbatten quickly got rid of most senior staff. Mountbatten brought in forty-year-old Captain John Hughes-Hallett as his Naval Adviser because of the man’s prior experience in preparing Britain’s defences for a German invasion. Slight of build, sharp-featured, and stylishly dapper, Hughes-Hallett became Mountbatten’s most loyal subordinate and a close friend. “Jock,” as Mountbatten called him, was as brash as his commander but also keenly intelligent, imaginative, and coldly practical.

  Hughes-Hallett was quick to criticize what Combined Operations had achieved. “So far as I can make out the vision of COHQ [Combined Operations Headquarters] during the Keyes ‘Regime’ never went much beyond a bigger and better Zeebrugge-type raid. Moreover the Admiral and many of the older officers at COHQ had great difficulty in grasping the need for close co-ordination between all three Services.” Launched on April 23, 1918, the Zeebrugge raid was intended to deny the key Belgian ports of Zeebrugge and Ostend to use by German submarines and light shipping. Keyes had masterminded the raid. Although largely a failure, the raid yielded a propaganda victory and won Keyes a knighthood. Hughes-Hallett believed this Great War experience led Keyes to focus Combined Operations entirely on “tiny raids, chiefly, I suppose, on account of their stimulating effect on morale. Nevertheless these operations achieved nothing, and a number of very gallant young officers... lost their lives to little avail.”13

  With Mountbatten often away attending to his higher responsibilities, actual operational planning fell to Hughes-Hallett. This was despite his being technically on equal footing with two other advisers representing the army and air force. Brigadier Charles Haydon was the Military Adviser and Group Captain A.H. Willetts the RAF Adviser. Hayden’s purview included the commandos of the Special Service Brigade. Consequently he was “a fairly independent provider of raiding troops.” Willetts, meanwhile, liaised between COHQ and RAF command levels. Hughes-Hallett took responsibility for “making outline plans for raids in consultation with the other advisers and keeping both the Admiralty and the Joint Planning Committee informed of what was in our minds at COHQ.”14

  Mountbatten and Hughes-Hallett inherited a headquarters they thought was “in a somewhat confused state. It was in part an Operations Headquarters responsible for planning and mounting raiding operations... in part a Government Department in miniature concerned with the provision of special craft and special weapons, and it also acted as a training authority for the personnel required for such operations.” These differing agendas were all muddled together, with staff trying to do everything at once. Mountbatten began imposing order on the confusion. He separated “the operational and planning part of the work from the administrative, technical and training side. This separation,” Hughes-Hallett believed, was “of crucial importance, as also was a certain tidying up of the administrative organization by separating training from the maintenance of material, and the procurement of new types of landing craft.”15

  In December 1941, Hughes-Hallett was recovering from jaundice and could only work a few hours each day.16 So he was greatly impressed by how Mountbatten tackled his new command. A good thing, he believed, as COHQ still remained an unwieldy creation that left its head “grossly overloaded with work. Yet [Mountbatten] made an even greater contribution than getting COHQ more soundly organized. His boundless energy and enthusiasm infused a new spirit. In particular the operational planning side knew for the first time that their work was real and earnest: that the raids they were working on would in all probability be carried out.”17

  In early 1942, COHQ was a small outfit, with its offices in a maze-like network of underground rooms below a large modern stone building at 1a Richmond Terrace in Whitehall, London.18 Each of the three advisers had a small staff, Hughes-Hallett’s numbering just two other naval officers. These were Commander David Luce—soon a key planner—and Lieutenant Commander Ackroyd Norman Palliser de Costabadie, who had won a Distinguished Service Cross for evacuating one thousand troops at Dunkirk while commanding the motor gunboat HMS Locust.

  Under Mountbatten, COHQ expanded breathtakingly. He inherited just twenty-three staff, including clerical help. Within a few months, Mountbatten brought the staff up to four hundred and joked that it was “the only lunatic asylum in the world run by its own inmates.”19

  Mountbatten was eager to start raiding. Everyone at COHQ “assumed that the main British effort, at least for the coming six months, would have to be confined to raids—chiefly cross channel— but also against Norway and possibly on the French Atlantic coast.” But who would actually mount these raids? Mountbatten assumed Combined Operations had the “exclusive right to do this work.” Yet General Bernard Paget, Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces, argued what seemed to Hughes-Hallett to be “the extraordinary view that the English South Coast and the French North Coast should be likened to a front line of two armies locked in trench warfare, with the Channel as the no-man’s land between them. From this it was argued that the initiative for mounting raids should rest with the Army Commanders whose areas faced a particular piece of enemy coast. No raids took place under this arrangement, if only because all the specialist craft needed to carry raiding troops came under COHQ, which alone possessed the requisite three-Service Staff to ensure close liaison with the RAF and Naval Commanders-in-Chief.” Not until March 1942 did Paget concede that “all raids,” regardless of location, would be under COHQ’s auspices, and only then because the Chiefs of Staff made it so by a formal directive.20

  To get things going, Hughes-Hallett dusted off Keyes’s plan to raid the town of South Vaagso in Norway. The purpose was to destroy military and economic targets there and on the nearby island of Maloy. On December 27, after three weeks of hurried planning and training, 626 commandos were landed by an amphibious force composed of one heavy cruiser, four destroyers, and two Infantry Assault Ships. The successful raid yielded only relatively light casualties of twenty men killed and fifty-seven wounded. No ships were lost, but three supporting RAF aircraft and their crews failed to return to base.21

  Destruction of a radar station near the village of Bruneval, about twelve miles northeast of Le Havre, came next. A small force of paratroopers dropped near the station on the night of February 27–28. Surprise was complete. The German guards and signallers were overrun and many killed. After blowing up the station, the paratroopers were evacuated off a nearby beach. Only one man was killed, with seven wounded and another seven missing. The mission was deemed a complete success due “not only to the valour of the troops, but once more to careful planning and to the close co-operation of all three Services.”22

  This was the last raid in which Hughes-Hallett could utilize plans developed under Keyes’s tenure, so on January 21, he, Luce, and Lieutenant Commander de Costabadie “sat down to
make tentative proposals for one raid every month” through to the end of August. That the navy should exclusively develop the target list made sense within COHQ’s new culture, for there “was no use suggesting places which could not be reached by the appropriate landing craft or other vessels.”23

  For March, the planners targeted St. Nazaire. Operation Chariot quickly evolved from a simple raid into one designed to destroy the city’s huge dry dock. Situated six miles up the River Loire, the dry dock in St. Nazaire’s shipyard was Europe’s largest—the only one of sufficient size to provide a safe haven for the German battleship Tirpitz. The British Admiralty lived in constant fear that this sister ship to the Bismarck would break out of Trondheim, Norway, where she had taken refuge on January 16, 1942. The 43,900-ton Tirpitz, with main armament of eight 38-centimetre guns mounted in four turrets, was more than capable of wreaking the same kind of havoc Bismarck had done in the spring of 1941 until her sinking on May 27. This was especially possible so long as St. Nazaire’s dry dock offered shelter where she could undergo a major refit after a period at sea. The Admiralty wanted the dry dock destroyed so that Tirpitz could find safety only at German North Sea ports, like Wilhelmshaven or Kiel. Mountbatten and Hughes-Hallett seized the opportunity to stage the biggest raid to date.

  It was a daunting enterprise. St. Nazaire was an industrial town with a population of about fifty thousand. The port was home to a major German submarine base, where a series of massive submarine pens protected the U-boats from aerial bombardment. Nine of these pens were completed and five more were under construction. A large German garrison manned a network of coastal and estuary artillery batteries that made St. Nazaire one of the more heavily defended ports on the European coast.24 To reach it, the raiders must navigate a narrow channel covered for its entire length by one or more of four batteries each containing three long-range guns. Inside the harbour, an interlocked network of strongpoints mounting light machine guns or Bofors anti-aircraft guns could sweep the water with fire.

  The dry dock was huge—1,148 feet long, 54 feet high, and 35 feet thick, with access provided by 167-foot-wide gates. Hughes-Hallett decided the only way to render it unusable was to fill an expendable ship with explosives, ram her into the gates, and then blow her up. Meanwhile, a commando force would destroy the dock’s pumps and power plants. He hoped to deny St. Nazaire’s dry dock not only to Tirpitz but also to U-boats.25

  An aging destroyer, Campbeltown, was selected for sacrifice. Stripped to the bone and with two of four funnels removed so that her night silhouette resembled that of German frigates, Campbeltown was crammed tightly with explosives. “An elaborate system of time fuses was arranged [inside], which made possible the blowing-up of five tons of explosives after allowing first for her impact with the lock and then for her scuttling.”26

  In charge of the naval side of the raid was Commander Robert Edward Dudley “Red” Ryder. Commanding the 268 commandos was Lieutenant Colonel Augustus Charles Newman. Campbeltown was under charge of Lieutenant Commander Stephen Halden Beattie.

  At 1500 hours on March 26, a tiny fleet of fourteen motor launches (MLs) and Campbeltown sailed from Falmouth. Leading the way was a motor gun boat (MGB). In reserve was a motor torpedo boat (MTB) equipped with unproven delayed-action torpedoes. These would be used to breach the dry dock should Campbeltown fail to ram the gate.

  With RAF bombers executing a diversionary raid, the little flotilla successfully entered the channel undiscovered. Fifteen minutes from where they were to begin a final run towards the dry dock, an Aldis lamp ashore flashed a challenge. A signalman on the MGB fired a series of flares known to be a recent German recognition signal. He then flashed the message in German that the fleet had two craft badly damaged by enemy action and requested permission to enter the harbour without delay. The subterfuge bought five minutes’ grace before, suddenly, “every available searchlight concentrated on the estuary, floodlighting the entire Force.” Commander Ryder later wrote, “Each boat, with her silvery white bow and stern wave was clearly visible, with the Campbeltown astern of us rising up above all the others. The glare of a disturbed enemy was on us.”27

  A torrent of fire killed or wounded half the men aboard the MLs, and most of the boats failed to land their commandos. Those who did get ashore were quickly caught in a close-quarters gun battle while trying to carry out their various demolition assignments. The MGB landed Lieutenant Colonel Newman and his headquarters party.

  Pressing through a storm of shell, machine-gun, and Bofors fire that left many of her small crew dead or wounded and her upper deck aflame, Campbeltown slammed into the gates at 0134 hours. Beattie ordered the ship scuttled and abandoned, the surviving crew members descending to the dock via ladders placed against the hull by commandos. Although Beattie was taken prisoner, his handling of Campbeltown garnered a Victoria Cross.

  The MTB’s torpedoes, meanwhile, penetrated the foundations of the lock gate that provided access to the submarine pens. At 0230 hours, Ryder, realizing that there was “nothing we could do to help our gallant soldiers on shore,” ordered the MGB to escape. For twenty-five minutes, dashing ahead at twenty-four knots, the MGB ran a gauntlet of fire. Able Seaman William Alfred Savage defiantly manned the MGB’s badly exposed 2-pound quick-firing gun (nicknamed a pom-pom because of the distinctive sound that original models made when firing) until a last salvo fired by a coastal gun “straddled us in the dark at a range of about four miles.” A shell splinter “struck and killed” Savage. He received a posthumous Victoria Cross that recognized not only his valour but also that “shown by many other unnamed [men] in MLs, [the] MGB, and MTB who gallantly carried out their duty in extremely exposed positions against enemy firing at close range.” Ryder also received a VC, for conducting an escape the citation considered “almost a miracle.”

  Back at St. Nazaire, the commandos became separated into small groups fighting independently. The largest consisted of about fifty men, most of them slightly wounded, under Lieutenant Colonel Newman. Hoping to fight through to open country, the commandos pushed into the heart of the town. Dawn found them fighting up St. Nazaire’s main street while dragging or carrying the wounded. Realizing there was no hope of escape, Newman finally surrendered. The total remaining commando force numbered only 109, and 80 of these were wounded. A further 59 lay dead at the docks or in the town’s streets. No man had more than three rounds of ammunition. Amazingly, five commandos succeeded in escaping to Spain and returned to England. The rest were taken prisoner.

  In the morning, Campbeltown remained wedged into the dry dock. About forty senior officers and many curious German soldiers descended on its wreckage just before it blew up. About 400 Germans were killed, including all the officers. Then, at 1630 hours on March 30, the torpedoes began detonating. This caused a panic among the Germans guarding the area that resulted in their gunning down and killing about 280 French dock workers attempting to flee to safety. Between those killed by the explosions and others shot by their comrades, an estimated 300 to 400 additional Germans died.

  St. Nazaire was deemed a success despite heavy losses to the raiders. Naval losses tallied 34 officers and 151 ratings killed or missing, from a force of 62 officers and 291 ratings.28 A report on the operation concluded that “taking into consideration the extreme vulnerability of the coastal craft [MLs], neither the losses in men nor material can be considered excessive for the results achieved.” The primary result was an important one. Tirpitz would never venture forth from Norwegian waters, her great power rendered impotent for lack of a safe harbour. The raid also “proved that it was possible for a comparatively small force to attack a heavily-defended port under cover of darkness by exploiting to the full the element of surprise.”29

  This was all that Mountbatten, Hughes-Hallett, and their planning staff needed to spur them towards larger, bolder operations. During the late-January planning phase, another French coastal town came into COHQ’s crosshair
s. “For June,” Hughes-Hallett wrote, “we chose Dieppe, as by that time we expected to have sufficient landing craft to lift an entire division.”

  2. For the Sake of Raiding

  A major reason dieppe came to the fore of Combined Operations planning was an agreement by Captain Hughes-Hallett and Commander David Luce to forgo further raids in Norwegian waters. All too often, highly changeable weather and the sheer distance from Britain had resulted in cancellation or lengthy delay in mounting a raid. Mountbatten wanted a year of ambitious raiding—cancellations and delays would not suit. Although the English Channel was equally fickle weather-wise, distances were far shorter, meaning more raiding should be possible.

  With great bustle and little consideration of actual practicalities, Hughes-Hallett, Luce, and Lieutenant Commander de Costabadie had selected their target during whirlwind discussions between January 21 and 23. “We were not so much concerned at this stage with the intrinsic value of objectives of a particular raid, but rather with the feasibility of reaching the place undetected,” Hughes-Hallett wrote.1 The raid on St. Nazaire, for example, had been proposed even before “the special objective against which it was finally directed—the great drydock—had been called to attention.”2 Other ideas seemed fanciful or downright foolish. Fanciful was Operation Blazing, a proposed raid on the most northerly of the Channel Islands—Alderney—by 2,150 men drawn mostly from the British Brigade of Guards supported by a few tanks. Foolish was an idea code-named Imperator. As Churchill described it, Imperator would “land on the Continent a division and armoured units to raid as effectively as possible during two or three days, and then... re-embark as much as possible of the remnant of the force.”3 The raiders were to land at one captured port in Normandy, dash all the way to Paris, and then escape from another port on the coast. Whilst in Paris, they would shoot up the German headquarters at Hôtel de Crillon and rekindle the flame on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe.4 While some preparatory training was begun for Blazing on the Isle of Wight, Imperator remained a pipe dream that “excited serious doubts on high military levels.” Still, both operations were booked into the Combined Operations schedule for 1942—Blazing for May, Imperator for August.5