Tragedy at Dieppe Read online

  Happening upon Canadian navy reservist Sub-Lieutenant Johnny O’Rourke’s LCA as it headed towards Dieppe’s beaches, McClintock shouted, “Follow me,” and guided him away.42 He next encountered Lieutenant Jack Koyl. “I was ordered by the Boat Pool Officer to follow him. We turned about and proceeded seaward at full speed under cover of smoke screen. We were led in the direction of the Main Convoy, waited in company with four LCAs from HMS Princess Astrid until 1230 when we were ordered to sail for England.”43 It was never determined how many landing craft McClintock’s miscalculations denied the withdrawal, consigning many troops to being left behind.

  22. Very Heartbreaking

  At 1100 hours, the Essex Scottish and scattered elements of the Fusiliers on Red Beach remained pinned against the seawall or behind stranded tanks on the beach. The intensely accurate fire made it almost impossible to organize resistance. Any movement drew immediate fire. After losing a foot to a mortar round, Essex Scottish lieutenant Douglas Green had “continued to hobble on, leading his platoon until... a second bomb finished him.” ‘D’ Company’s Major John Willis carried on despite such severe chest, arm, and head wounds that Lieutenant Colonel Fred Jasperson thought it “seemed humanly impossible to do so.” Seeing a man wounded in the open, Willis suffered a last, fatal wound trying to drag him to cover.1

  On White Beach, the situation was slightly better because the Rileys controlled the casino and a couple of trenches alongside. They were supported by Fusiliers concentrated around the casino. Under the western cliff, a growing number of Fusiliers were trapped, their numbers increasing as men moved there in a futile search for a better refuge.

  Captain Tony Hill’s band of Rileys and engineers had abandoned the cinema inside the town after a two-hour standoff. While in the cinema, Company Sergeant Major Jack Stewart had been perplexed that civilians seemed oblivious to the shooting around them. One woman had nonchalantly left home, strolled to a bakery, purchased a baguette, and then walked home again. Despite German bullets whickering through the theatre, an old male caretaker calmly swept the floors. Just before 1000 hours, Private Archie Liss had reported German infantry closing from several directions. With Stewart and Liss providing covering fire, the group withdrew to the casino, suffering one man wounded en route.

  Stewart was surprised by how strong a position the casino had become. Probably 150 men, including some wounded, were there. He counted thirty-five Bren guns and saw lots of ammunition for them. Captain Denis Whitaker seemed in charge. He had cut off his rank badges to avoid the special attention snipers gave officers. Captain Hill helped gather the wounded in the building’s northeast corner. A sheltered area, it provided a good launching point for a run to the promised boats.2

  Stewart, Hill, and Major Harold Lazier organized a Bren gun covering party for the withdrawal. Each gunner would have a loader ready to ram home fresh magazines. While they shot up German positions, the rest of the troops would help the wounded to the boats and embark. The gunners would fall back, maintaining a steady rate of fire, and be last off.3

  Most of the Calgary tanks on the promenade had abandoned their search for exits into the town and were standing close to the casino. Lieutenant Ed Bennett in Bellicose discovered that despite his burns, he could see “by lifting up my [left] eyelid.” Upon learning the withdrawal was coming, Major Allan Glenn ordered all tanks able to move onto the beach to provide covering fire for the infantry’s evacuation. Bennett drove close to LCT3, stranded broadside on the beach, and came to a stop facing the western headland. Moments later, a shell shattered the right track, immobilizing his tank. One after the other, the tanks all suffered similar fates, mostly due to the chert breaking tracks. Bellicose happened to be “in a good position to turn our six-pounder turret gun on the high buildings on the cliff. We had pretty well expended our small arms ammunition on the esplanade but we still had some large gun ammunition. I’m very proud of Bill Stannard with his marksmanship with the six-pounder gun because one of the buildings on the cliff had a tower on it and there was machine-gun fire coming from the Germans in that tower. I recall seeing the whole side of the tower where the fire was coming from just crumble. It was a perfect hit. That was the highlight of our shooting on the beach but we continued to fire the gun until... the ammunition was expended.”4

  Because of the severity of Lieutenant Colonel Joe Ménard’s wounds, Major Paul Savoy had taken charge of the Fusiliers at the casino. He was trying to contact brigade headquarters by wireless “to get a smoke screen and 3-inch mortar protection on the beach” when a bullet pierced his chest. “I heard him scream,” Regimental Sergeant Major R. Levesque recorded, “and I turned... to see what had happened to him when he was hit a second time in the face by what seemed to be a piece of shrapnel. Part of his face was blown off. He fell on his back and did not move again. I spoke to him but I received no answer.”5

  The signallers were unable to contact brigade or Calpe. There had, in fact, been virtually no wireless link between the Fusiliers and higher command since the battalion landed. Only two signals were logged by Calpe as possibly from the Fusiliers. The first, at 0845, reported “Joe in severe difficulties, must be taken off or will be wiped out.” Another message at 0908 declared, “Joe is surrounded.” Both were dismissed as bogus. Repeated signals from Calpe for any word of the Fusiliers resulted in no news. “The fact is that each group on the beach could report only upon events in its immediate vicinity and could throw very little light on the situation at large.”6

  For the Fusiliers pinned under the western cliff, conditions had by about 1030 become desperate. There were about two hundred of them, many wounded. Lieutenant Antoine Masson had just readied a small party to try getting over the seawall when Captain Sarto Marchand and several Fusiliers “appeared from the west with their hands up, followed by a German officer and some German soldiers with a machinegun. Evidently the Germans had come down to the beach by some track to the west... of where the [Fusiliers] had landed.” Marchand told Masson that “further resistance was impossible,” and the lieutenant surrendered his men. The prisoners were marched west along the beach and up a steep track onto the headland.7

  Captain Charles Hector Alleyne, the Fusiliers’ medical officer, and the chief stretcher-bearer, Company Sergeant Major W. Gagne, were driven by machine-gun fire on hands and knees towards some rocks promising scant cover. Alleyne “asked me how many [stretcher-bearers] he still had with him. As I was telling him there was only the two of us, he was hit by a bullet on the right side of the chest. He lay still on his stomach... I took his pulse. He was dead. I left him there and crawled forward on the beach.”8

  The medical plan for casualty care had unravelled. All personnel from No. 11 Field Ambulance had been aboard the last two flights of LCTs carrying tanks of the Calgary Tank Regiment and so had never landed. This was the case also for the tank regiment’s medical team. The Essex Scottish and Riley medical officers did get ashore with their small teams. Unable to establish a normal regimental aid post, they clustered casualties along the seawall and provided rudimentary first aid. Gathering the wounded, the stretcher-bearers suffered heavy losses.9 “I found that stretchers in a raid such as this were useless and a dangerous risk to the life of those attempting to use them,” Riley stretcher-bearer Sergeant F.B. Volterman reported.10

  Royal Navy lieutenant Peter Ross managed to improve the situation for some wounded on White Beach. Gathering a small group of Canadian engineers, he led them across the fire-swept beach to collect wounded. These were taken to LCT3, “whose steel sides offered more protection than the open.” Two stretcher-bearers there dressed wounds. Ross organized water-carrying parties to draw fresh water in pails from the LCT’s water tank for distribution. He also located the boat’s first-aid stores, which contained a supply of morphine and bandages. By 1100 hours, about fifty wounded sheltered in the LCT. Believing withdrawal was imminent, Ross “made all preparations necessary, but no craft appeare
d.”11

  Rileys’ Private Alf Collingdon was inside LCT3. “I thought at first that land crabs or some other creatures were moving the stones. Then I realized that it was shell fragments or bullets from the high cliffs.” The Germans hammered the LCT and nearby beach mercilessly until Collingdon fashioned a Red Cross flag by ripping the Royal Navy ensign’s Cross of St. George off and tying it to the blank white side of a landing craft marker. “There was no more heavy stuff near us after that, only the odd sniper, and every minute or two he’d fire into the ramp just to let us know that we were to stay in the craft with the wounded.”12

  The Rileys had first established their RAP in a slight depression, where work had to be done lying prone. Padre John Foote, a powerful, burly man, who was also a clarinetist in the regimental band, “time and again left this shelter to inject morphine, give first-aid and carry wounded personnel from the open beach to the [RAP]. On these occasions, with utter disregard for his personal safety... Foote exposed himself to an inferno of fire and saved many lives by his gallant action. During the action, as the tide went out, the [RAP] was moved to the shelter of a stranded landing craft [LCT5]... Foote continued tirelessly and courageously to carry wounded men from the exposed beach to the cover of the landing craft. He also removed wounded from inside the landing craft when ammunition had been set on fire by enemy shells,” his Victoria Cross citation stated.13 “The padre and medical officer [Captain Wesley Clare] did very heroic work under heavy enemy fire,” stretcher-bearer Private H. Partington reported.14 Similarly tenacious in his duty was Corporal Al Comfort. Despite being shot in both legs shortly after the landing and since suffering two chest wounds, Comfort “still managed to take care of the wounded. He refused to be looked after himself, but insisted on having as many wounded as possible brought somewhere near so he could attend them,” Private Al Oldfield recalled.15

  LCT5 was a forlorn refuge. She had “a gaping hole amidships from a direct hit. Her bow was a sieve, her anti-aircraft guns... loosely pointed skyward. Black smoke curled from within her and drifted, low and lazily, westward along the beach,” the battalion’s official history reported. “Exploding ammunition sputtered and ricocheted from the bulwarks.”16

  On the defensive, with the number of wounded rapidly increasing, ever-more officers and men turned from fighting to providing care. ‘A’ Company’s second-in-command, Captain George Donald Skerritt, arrived as LCT5 caught fire when the shells aboard began exploding. He organized the movement of wounded from inside the craft to the shelter of its lee side. “Large dressings were in great demand,” Private J. McQuade remembered. “Most of the men had given their own issue to the cause.” Skerritt stripped off shirt, trousers, and boots and tore the clothing into strips for tourniquets. Then Skerritt and Clare “administered morphine to the bad cases.”17

  At Pourville, the South Saskatchewan Regiment and Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders saw the noose tightening around them. They had to get away soon or lose the chance. Lieutenant John Edmondson had about twenty Sasks and Camerons split into two groups holding the village’s eastern flank. One group guarded the road intersection at the base of the headland, while Edmondson and ten men held the second storey of the pub next to the bridge. Edmondson’s group was amply equipped, with a 3-inch mortar, a couple of Boys anti-tank rifles, several Bren guns, and a few rifles.18

  Everyone had ditched the Stens. Lieutenant Leonard Dickin spoke for many when he declared, “Sten guns are no damn good. I did not see one, and I have not heard of one, that fired more than a mag and then jammed. One spot of sand and they stop.” The battalion’s intelligence officer, Dickin, thought Lieutenant Colonel Cecil Merritt’s withdrawal plan was good. They held Pourville and the beach “by using a small scattered force in front, heavy with Brens, and the main force about 100 yards back ready to counterattack. At 1100 hours we start back to the beaches by fire and movement.” The covering force was intended to be composed of Sasks, with the Camerons being first to evacuate Green Beach.19 Although the plan was sound, communication problems wrecked it.

  The two battalions were badly intermixed. Camerons’ Captain John Runcie figured a large proportion of his battalion’s ‘C’ and ‘D’ Companies, along with part of battalion headquarters, comprised at least half of the covering party.20 Often men tossed together by chance realized the Germans had to be kept at bay and fought them from the cover of buildings or orchards. Although the Germans were pressing, they did so warily, seemingly content to just close as the Canadians gave ground. There was no determined attempt to overrun Green Beach.

  Merritt allowed Major Jim McRae to see to details while he carried the fight to the Germans. The Saskatchewan headquarters had moved so many times that by 1100 hours, some officers no longer knew its location. Edmondson was one of them; he felt that he and his men fought alone. With ammunition for the Boys guns and 3-inch mortar exhausted and Bren ammunition running low, they kept shooting at machine-gun and mortar positions on the headland and also at German infantry riding bicycles in from Quatre Vents Farm. “We managed to knock a few off their bicycles, forcing the others to ground and slowing their advance.”

  The Germans retaliated with machine-gun and mortar fire “that fell directly on top of the pub” sheltering Edmondson’s group. “But we had run downstairs after firing. When there was a lull in their fire... we ran upstairs and fired bursts at them again which brought down more German bombardment, but we had sprinted downstairs again. The upper floor of the inn was steadily disintegrating.” Edmondson realized he had seen no sign of anyone withdrawing over the seawall for about twenty minutes. Were he and his men left behind? He sent a runner to find battalion headquarters for news. When the man failed to return, Edmondson sent a second, who also never reappeared. Nobody volunteered to go after that, because it meant crossing the fire-swept bridge.21

  Lieutenant J. Stiles, meanwhile, had been standing next to Merritt near the western headland when sniper fire suddenly increased. Merritt told Stiles to get the wounded gathered behind the seawall closer to the cover of the cliff. While Stiles turned to this task, Merritt grabbed a Bren gun and headed up the slope alone. “He must have got the sniper,” Stiles wrote, “because the firing stopped. He was the life and soul of the attack and showed the utmost courage and personal disregard of danger. He sure had guts.”22

  No sooner did Merritt return than the Germans set up two machine-gun positions on the hill behind the large white hotel on Pourville’s eastern flank.23 Merritt gathered Major Claude Orme, Lieutenant Ross MacIlveen, and three Bren gunners. The six men charged up the slope and eliminated the positions.24

  Major Norman Ross oversaw the Camerons preparing to evacuate. Rather than taking cover behind the seawall, he concentrated the men in and around the buildings facing the esplanade. He considered this time “the worst part of the raid, waiting for the boats to come in... being shot at with rifle, M.G. and mortars.”25

  The covering parties were gradually withdrawing—steadily narrowing the perimeter. There was no panic. The tide was out, exposing a long stretch of sand. Scattered across it were LCAs and R-Boats wrecked during the landing. A couple wallowed in shallow water. Ross realized that when the boats came, a long run across about two hundred yards of exposed ground would be necessary.26

  Aboard Calpe, Captain John Hughes-Hallett sent a coded signal at 1022 hours to all the destroyers, LCFs, SGBs, MGBs, and MLs that had acted as guides for the LCAs earlier, “ordering them to form a line of bearing parallel to the... coast between [Puys] and Pourville.” They would follow the landing craft in while the smaller support vessels went ahead to lay a smokescreen. Despite Commander H.V.P. McClintock’s premature withdrawal of some landing craft, those organized by boat pool assistant commander Lieutenant J.H. Dathan were well positioned to evacuate troops off Green Beach. As these LCAs headed in, the supporting ships fired over their heads. “The wind carried the smoke screen ahead of the Landing Craft flotillas,” Hugh
es-Hallett recorded, “which consequently came under little fire until they were close inshore.” Calpe had taken position on the extreme western flank of Green Beach to serve as a boundary marker. “Although this beach was hidden by smoke the high ground to the west of it was visible above the smoke screen and the ship came under heavy... fire before she stopped.”27 The destroyers and other supporting ships found it impossible to identify specific targets through the smoke. But without the smoke, the LCAs would never reach the beaches.28

  Six LCAs of Prince Leopold’s flotilla bound for Red Beach steered too far westward and landed at Green Beach. As planned, four LCAs from Invicta also approached this beach.29 At 1104 hours, they emerged out of the covering smoke.

  Major Ross sent men towards the boats. “As soon as the troops began to cross the beach, a very heavy crossfire from machineguns and musketry came down upon it,” Major Andy Law reported. “There was also mortar fire and shellfire.”30

  Private J.L. Bridge and other Camerons passed through a gap blown in the seawall. He saw two LCAs approaching. “The beach was being swept by machine-gun fire and shells were falling all round. We split into two groups... I went to the right. As we arrived at the [LCA] we saw it had been abandoned... It was a shambles. I turned toward the other boat and saw two shells hit near the other group. We ran for that [LCA] and climbed aboard over the side. It wouldn’t move so some of us climbed out and began to pull it off the beach. Shells were dropping and we could hear bullets striking the [LCA]. After considerable time we managed to get it off the beach. Some of the men assisting were killed... The boat was riddled and was not going to float very long. The sailors started it out to sea and I hung on the side... After going a short way the boat stopped and began to settle. I realized I was going to have to swim for it... Took off my equipment, boots and gaiters. As she started going down I pushed off and watched. I saw a few men get out, not as many as there were in it. The others must have been dead because there was lots of time to leave... before it went down.” Rescued by another LCA, Bridge was transferred to a destroyer.31