Tragedy at Dieppe Page 9
Merritt hit it off poorly from the first. Lieutenant John Edmondson, ‘D’ Company’s second-in-command, found him “a very autocratic, self-assured young man. He thought he knew how to do it. But I don’t think he understood the prairie temperament... Don’t think there was anything basically wrong with his knowledge, his ability to command or direct... [but] we had a custom in the regiment that we only said, ‘Good morning, sir’ and saluted the [battalion commander] once in the morning and that was it. [Merritt] expected everyone to jump to attention every time he walked in and out... He lacked, in my view, the man management skill to know how to get the best out of them.”
Edmondson’s appointment as ‘D’ Company’s second-in-command had occurred just before Merritt’s arrival. Yet during an administrative meeting, Merritt demanded he explain the loss of several bicycles six months before Edmondson had been posted to the company. After several incidents of similar nature, Edmondson stormed back to ‘D’ Company headquarters and told Major John “Mac” MacTavish, “You can stuff this appointment. I want to go back and command my platoon.” An older officer who had been with the regiment since the outbreak of hostilities, MacTavish was noted for his calm competence. Giving Edmondson his trademark quiet little grin, he said, “Just carry on.” Edmondson sighed and decided to do his best.
Just before the regiment moved to the Isle of Wight, however, there was the “Soup and Tea Incident.” During an exercise, the troops were each given a sandwich to carry with them for lunch. The weather was brutal, bucketing rain and chill temperatures leaving everyone soaked and frozen. So Merritt agreed that the other ranks should return to camp for some hot soup and tea in the mess. Officers, however, were told to remain outdoors and just eat the sandwich. Objections were raised, and Merritt conceded to letting the officers into their mess for some soup and tea. Soup finished, the officers were just pouring tea when Merritt stormed in and gave “everyone hell about what was going on with [the] training. And every officer picked up his cup of tea and walked out. It was just a sort of silent mutiny.” Thereafter, “everybody disappeared as quickly as possible whenever he showed.”30
The other three regiments in the two brigades were spared adapting to new, younger commanders prior to the move to the Isle of Wight. In a more orderly transition, Lieutenant Colonel A.S. Pearson— who had brought the Essex Scottish overseas—handed command to the younger Fred Jasperson. The new lieutenant colonel had been a lawyer in Windsor—the regiment’s hometown. Lieutenant Colonel Ridley “Bob” Labatt, a stockbroker by trade, had commanded the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry since April 2, 1940. He followed in the footsteps of his father, who had led the regiment for almost two years in the Great War. Lieutenant Colonel G. Hedley Basher, meanwhile, had commanded the Royal Regiment of Canada since 1938.
In December 1941, Lieutenant Colonel G.R. Bradbrooke—who had won a Military Cross in the Great War—had been replaced at the Calgary Tank Regiment by Major John Gilby “Johnny” Andrews. Bradbrooke was promoted to brigadier and sent to the Middle East as a military observer. Bradbrooke had been a popular officer and had brought the “Red Deer plough jockeys” overseas. The handover, however, was congenial and seamless. The newly minted lieutenant colonel was thirty-three and had left a bank job to join the regular army in 1930, when he was commissioned as a lieutenant. In November 1936, he was one of five junior officer instructors appointed to the just-opened Canadian Tank School. When the tank school was redesignated in 1938 as the Canadian Armoured Vehicle Training Centre and established at Camp Borden in Ontario, Andrews was promoted to major. He went overseas as the brigade major of the Army Tank Brigade headquarters in June 1941. Many of the Calgarians had gone through the training school under Andrews’s tutelage, and they felt it appropriate to be now commanded by “an officer who had been associated with the ‘Fighting Vehicles’ for the best part of his army career.”31
5. Trial and Error
On may 18, Major General Ham Roberts travelled with 2nd Infantry Division’s headquarters staff by ferry from Southampton to the Isle of Wight and set up operation at Osborne House in the port town of Cowes. The sprawling three-storey Italianate villa overlooked the Solent and had been built as a holiday retreat for Queen Victoria. It was surrounded by 342 acres of meticulously maintained gardens. A yachting resort popular with members of the Royal Family, the Isle of Wight was now a training hub for Combined Operations. The 4th Brigade also arrived on May 18, with 6th Brigade arriving the day following. On the 20th, the Calgary Regiment arrived along with a large contingent of Royal Canadian Engineers.1
Close to Osborne House, Norris Castle became Brigadier William Southam’s 6th Brigade’s headquarters, while the South Saskatchewan Regiment set up tents on the grounds.2 The Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders established a tent encampment at Wootton Creek—a small village of little more than a couple of shops and a pub around which a few houses clustered. Lieutenant Colonel Al Gostling and his senior staff requisitioned one building as a residence and another for the officers’ mess.3 Les Fusiliers Mont-Royal were in Whitefield Wood, just south of the old seaport of Ryde. Lieutenant Colonel Joe Ménard had with him 570 officers and men, leaving the remaining 225 at a rest camp near Portsmouth.4
The 4th Brigade’s quarters were on the island’s western side. The Essex Scottish took over a Billy Butlin Holiday Camp. Quartered at nearby Freshwater, the Royal Regiment of Canada looked out upon the famous Needles rocks and adjacent lighthouse. The large three-storey Jacobean Northcourt Manor in Shorewell, once owned by Lord Byron, was home for the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry.5 Officers and headquarters staff were housed in the manor and the troops under canvas on its fifteen-acre grounds.
To ensure that the tankers were close to their primary training area on the long beach fronting Osborne House, the Calgary Regiment was in another castle at Cowes. Lieutenant C.A. “Stoney” Richardson, the regiment’s quartermaster, could hardly believe the “wonderful accommodation there... It was certainly a great place to stay and we enjoyed every minute of it.”6
Engineers were to play a key role, particularly in the frontal assault on Dieppe. About 350 engineers had been drawn from a number of units. The 7th Field Company contributed the largest sapper element of about 150 men. Another 100 were drawn from 2nd Field Company, about 65 from 11th Field Company, and 25 from 1st Field Park Company. Much smaller details were drawn from 2nd Road Construction Company and the Mechanical Equipment Company. A total of 12 officers commanded the various engineering units.
Overall command rested with Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barnes, appointed senior engineer officer.7 Born in Britain, Barnes had served as a Royal Engineer during the Great War in postings to East Africa, India, and Persia. Discharged in 1919, he immigrated to Canada and joined the militia as an engineering lieutenant in 1927. By 1939, he was a militia lieutenant colonel and retained that rank upon being accepted into the regular army. In order to go overseas, however, he reverted to the rank of major and became second-in-command of 2nd Battalion, Royal Canadian Engineers. He arrived in Britain in September 1940. That December, he was re-promoted to lieutenant colonel and command of the RCE Reinforcement Depot. He remained at this posting until taking command of 2nd Infantry Division’s engineers.8 His second-in-command for Rutter was Major Bert Sucharov, who had been cooling his heels in a reinforcement unit. Sucharov was thirty-three and had graduated with an engineering degree from the University of Manitoba in 1937.9 He was a flamboyant character, sporting a large moustache and arming himself with two pistols in holsters that would do a western gun-fighter proud.10
Other, smaller groups of specialized troops augmented the engineers. Ten officers and 116 men from the Royal Canadian Medical Corps supplemented the brigade and battalion regular medical staffs. Five officers and 120 Toronto Scottish (MG) Regiment personnel, all specially trained to operate and fire belt-fed medium machine guns, were to perform anti-aircraft gunnery roles aboard the various landing craft. Forty men
from the Canadian Provost Corps were there, along with a few soldiers posted from the Service, Ordnance, and Intelligence Corps and “miscellaneous small units and detachments,” plus “a few brave men of the Inter-Allied Commando—mostly native German speakers assigned to specialist intelligence gathering.”
Security was extremely tight. The Isle of Wight had been selected as a Combined Operations training area because it could be sealed off from the outside world. Just twenty-three miles by thirteen miles, the island was also a microcosm of British countryside. Lush meadows sloped to broad beaches or came up abruptly to the edge of sheer chalk cliffs that plunged to the sea. The sandy beaches were ideal for amphibious landing training. No civilians who did not have permanent homes or businesses on the island had been allowed to remain. The population had shrunk from 85,000 before the war to just 10,000.11 In addition to the Canadians, there were about 5,000 sailors, airmen, and assorted groups of various nationalities. Some of these were to join what was being called Simmerforce, while others were there to assist in the training or were awaiting instruction about their future fates.
Once the Canadians arrived, nobody else was allowed on the island unless bearing papers assigning them to Simmerforce. Leaving the island was possible only with personal approval from Roberts, Rear-Admiral Baillie Grohman, or a senior security officer.12 “Officers and men,” noted the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry official historian, “received a series of lectures on security, and a strict unit censorship was put into effect.”13 All communications from the island were closely monitored and censored.14
Baillie-Grohman had established the naval headquarters in Cowes Castle, the former home of the Royal Yacht Squadron. According to naval custom, whereby land-based headquarters are considered “stone frigates,” the castle was renamed HMS Vectis. Baillie-Grohman massed a small fleet of landing craft and larger ships in the Solent, which had been emptied of pleasure boats.15 Present here were the vessels of 1st and 2nd Canadian Landing Craft Flotillas. Each flotilla had a flotilla officer, seven boat officers, twelve coxswains, twenty-four seamen and a dozen stoker drivers—fifty-six men in total. These Canadian sailors were part of an overall commitment of Royal Canadian Navy and Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve personnel to Combined Operations that totalled fifty officers and three hundred ratings.16
Everyone plunged into intensive “preliminary training designed to harden the men and otherwise prepare them for the arduous work ahead.” Infantry tasks included “embarkation and beaching, assault courses, unarmed combat, training in the use of bangalore torpedoes, speed marches,” and much physical exercise.17 South Saskatchewan Regiment’s Lieutenant John Edmondson found it “hard training, physically demanding—route marches, PT, running, climbing up and down walls, up fences. You had a toggle rope to use in emergencies. March five miles in fifty-five minutes and then climb a hundred foot cliff with a seventy-five pound box of ammunition strapped across your back.”18
In the first week, the Royals engaged in “obstacle courses, bayonet fighting, unarmed combat, cliff climbing, firing from the hip, embarking and disembarking from landing craft, demolition practice, and river crossings by breeches buoy [circular lifebuoy attached to a form of zip line].” Despite the elaborate security measures, German observation planes must have taken some note. On the night of May 24, the Royals underwent an air raid by several German planes. Fortunately, the bombing produced no casualties.19
Although consensus among the troops was that they were putting out all they could, those overseeing the training were unimpressed by the first week’s effort. On May 28, a divisional training report noted: “Although the condition of the men is reasonably good, the assault courses and speed marches have shown that there is a great improvement to be made in this direction. In the speed marches units are able to do five miles in 45 mins but took from 1½ hrs to 2 hrs to do the remaining 6 miles. In the Assault courses [troops] were able to complete the course, but were, in many cases, unable to fight or fire effectively when finished.”20
The Sasks had been told that “these commandos would teach us all about combined op training,” Edmondson recalled. “I would say that other than a couple of techniques about how to get over a beach wall and how to get out of an assault craft in nineteen seconds, they didn’t teach us anything. Most of the stuff we were already knowledgeable about ourselves... A lot of the things we did, we developed by trial and error.”
Training-related casualties were always a danger. During one landing exercise, the Sasks piled out of boats on the island’s south coast. As they charged across the beach, an umpire shouted that the men were in the middle of a minefield sown to meet the feared German invasion. Everyone stopped in his tracks, but they were already in its midst. “We were as safe going ahead as coming back, so we went through.” Nobody tripped a mine.21
Each day, the tempo intensified. As soon as the Rileys “mastered the elementary technique of amphibious attack [they] went on to train under more difficult conditions, such as landing under smoke, and to practice... beach consolidation and withdrawal manoeuvres. There was also a series of demonstrations of tank firepower, and training in co-operation with armoured units. At the same time, the Rileys were required to train in speed marches. Day after day the men tramped the roads... in battle order, perfecting their performance until they could meet the required standard of covering 11 miles in two hours with the first five miles covered in 45 minutes. By this time, after more than two years of training, the physical condition of the whole unit was at a peak.”22
The Calgary tankers had brought fifty-eight shiny new Churchills to the island. There were two variants, one mounting a 6-pounder gun and the other a much lighter 2-pounder. Both types had a five-man crew. Secondary armament consisted of two 7.92-millimetre Besa machine guns. The Churchills were heavy, weighing 87,360 pounds, as compared with the later Shermans at 69,700 pounds. They were powered by a Bedford twin 6-cylinder gasoline engine capable of a top speed of 15.5 miles per hour. Armour was relatively thin—102 millimetres at the thickest and only 16 millimetres in some spots.23
Most tank training took place on the long beach in front of Osborne House, which had been much loved by Queen Victoria. Her old bathhouse was regularly pressed into service as a rain shelter. On this great stretch of white sand, the Calgaries practised embarking and disembarking from Landing Craft Tank (LCT). Basically a flat-bottomed barge of just less than 190 feet in length with a drop ramp at the front and a wheelhouse at the back, each LCT could carry six Churchills; it also had a twelve-man crew and light armament of either two single-barrelled Oerlikon 20-millimetre cannons or two single-barrelled Bofors 40-millimetre guns.
“We had never done this with the landing craft before, where the ramps dropped down and we drove off into the water. We did this dozens and dozens of times,” Lieutenant Stoney Richardson wrote. “Our tanks were all waterproofed... We did landings, first of all, with the tanks’ hatches open, then we closed down and disembarked further out. Then we turned around and had to do it all over again at night, loading and unloading at night.”
Every day the tankers tackled a seawall that the engineers had built on the beach. It was “our business... to either crash over the top of it or crash through it and go on and fan out to take the higher ground beyond.” As to the purpose behind surmounting the wall, the tankers, like everyone except the senior Canadian commanders, remained in the dark.
“We did a lot of range practice to train gunners and, of course, we were doing all kinds of experiments with water-proofing. We had some funny things happen with our water-proofing. Some of it was most successful, some was very poorly done until we learned better how to do it. It was all tested in a large pool at the castle. The tanks were water-proofed and then were driven into this swimming pool where there was a ramp. Some tanks were good and there were some that leaked very badly.”24
In addition to repairing the seawall after each day of tanker trainin
g, the engineers learned a multitude of new skills. They learned to make special demolition charges and “suitable carrying packs for the explosives and tools. The performance of the Churchill tank on sand, shingle and mud beaches had to be determined and some type of beach track selected, developed and tested to match the capabilities of the tank... Also convenient means of getting the Churchills over sea-walls, from two to seven feet high, had to be found.”
The engineers realized they were preparing for a “first operation of its type and, for all practical purposes, much work had to be done from scratch. Owing to the limited number of sappers available, every effort had to be made to teach every man all the various types of jobs. It was evident that the engineer parties would be small and would have to operate almost independently. There could be little or no duplication or reinforcement after the assault was launched, so that even a single casualty might put a particular group out of action if the men were not versatile.”
Much emphasis was placed on the engineers being able to get “in and out of landing craft and across various natures of mined and wired beaches with an assortment of vehicles.” It was discovered that chespaling—flexible roll fencing similar to wood slat snow fencing but made with tough split slats of chestnut—could be laid to provide traction for crossing shingle or sand that might otherwise disable tanks. The engineers soon realized that placing the chespaling into position under fire would require the tankers to do it themselves. A device was rigged that enabled the chespaling to be rolled and attached to the tank’s front. The crew inside could then trigger a release that would unfurl the roll out ahead of the tank and then jettison it. This device could also be used to surmount a seawall of up to twenty-eight inches high. For anything higher, the engineers had to construct timber crib ramps.25 During training, engineer Major Bert Sucharov observed that a “well trained squad of 30 men... made the record time of 5 minutes in building [a timber crib ramp] for a 6 [foot] wall... carrying timber from a dump 30 yards away.” Using twelve-foot lengths of timber and railway sleepers, the engineers would hammer together a ramp with steps varying in tread width from one to two feet, which the tank could then ascend to surmount the seawall.26