A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  A rehearsal for JUBILEE was slated for early July. Stephenson proposed flying back with Churchill, taking Bill Donovan along. “It would help,” he wrote, “if Donovan might have some of his own men attached to the operation to convey what this is really all about.”

  Roosevelt had just issued the Military Order establishing the Office of Strategic Services. Stephenson’s recommendation was the first routine reference to OSS. In this casual way, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency popped into history. The date of the President’s order, June 13, 1942, coincided with the British discovery of the Cairo leak, which underscored the need to co-ordinate intelligence.

  On July 7, Donovan and Stephenson witnessed the German destruction of a British naval force probing across the Channel in an attempt to feel out the western wall of Fortress Europe. German planes spotted the small fleet before it got underway. The subsequent bombing forced cancellation of the raid. A profound depression descended upon the newly formed Hunting Groups, so named after an order Churchill issued for striking back at the enemy. The leaders met at their informal headquarters in London’s bomb-scarred Richmond Terrace.

  “They felt thwarted,” Donovan reported later. “They were literally hunters, and they thirsted for action. They stood in the bare room of the bomb-blasted house, a youthful elite which had proved itself in battle, eating their hearts out.”

  The Great Deception would have to be built into something bigger than a coastal raid, and the Germans had just demonstrated how ill-equipped the British were to launch any raid at all. The Prime Minister had issued a defiant order after the fall of France and he could not retreat: “Self-contained, thoroughly equipped raiding units . . . with specially trained troops of the hunter class must develop a reign of terror down the enemy coasts.” He had foreseen that these raids would gather experience for the final invasion; and out of his order emerged Combined Operations, with Lord Mountbatten as its chief, charged with the special task of “devising the techniques of amphibious landings and designing and acquiring the appurtenances and appliances.”

  Appurtenances and appliances were being invented in Britain but their mass production would have to be left to the Americans. The Americans were not in the mood to supply arms until they saw evidence of British resolve. In mid-July, the President dispatched both Admiral King and the Army Chief of Staff, George Marshall, to London to fight out the argument for themselves with Churchill. They still insisted upon a cross-Channel invasion of substance. Churchill stalled. Two weeks later, JUBILEE forces began to gather.

  On August 12, Churchill flew to Moscow, where he listened to an extended insult from Stalin about British fighting qualities. Stalin kept his face averted from Churchill, whose own expression darkened. Stalin spoke softly and deliberately. Suddenly Churchill crashed his fist on the table and unleashed on the Soviet leader a five-minute explosion of angry words. “I do not understand what you say,” Stalin interrupted. “But by God, I like your spirit.”

  A message to Stephenson, back in New York, followed: “I think Stalin’s Council of Commissars did not take the news I brought as well as he did. In his heart, so far as he has one, Stalin knows we are right.”

  Churchill had stated that there was nothing wrong with British courage but there was everything wrong about attempting to open the Second Front in France now. A week later, JUBILEE proved him right.

  Sergeant Rose, the chubby-cheeked specialist from the Jewish Agency, had been flown from Camp X to the English county of Sussex, where Canadian troops were supposedly defending that part of the countryside against invaders. In fact, they were preparing for JUBILEE. With Rose came the former FBI agent, Jim Callaghan. Both men had to be inserted into regular army units without arousing any suspicion that they were “funnies.”

  The two radar experts who were to go to Dieppe with them spent the final days studying relief maps and timing each phase of their own task. They carried slips of paper ordering the “beachmasters” to give them absolute priority to commandeer transport. A Canadian Field Security sergeant had been secretly ordered to back up Callaghan. He would act ostensibly as the scientists’ bodyguard. In reality, he was to kill either or both if Callaghan failed to prevent them falling into enemy hands alive.

  A team of Baker Street Irregulars was split up, each member attached to one of the regular Canadian military units. The Irregulars carried in their heads the details of the Gestapo jail where French Resistance leaders were being held. They carried with them new radiophones using a special wave length code-named PHANTOM. Their relay station would be a large new mobile transmitter. All this equipment had been wheedled out of United States Army supplies through Donovan, who, rather than jeopardize the expedition, said it was needed by his own men. In fact, two OSS men went along as observers, attaching themselves temporarily to an American unit—the now famous 1st United States Ranger Battalion, which had been training in the heart of the Scottish highlands. These were the first Rangers to be put through the British Commando battle drill, and from them were selected six officers and forty-four men.

  At 10:00 A.M. on Tuesday, August 18, JUBILEE commanders sent a curt message crackling across southeastern England: “The show is on—Now!” Thousands of men in army camps and embarkation ports from Southampton to Newhaven were galvanized into chaotic action. Six hours later, the last battalions were aboard and the ships sealed. The largest British fleet to sail the Channel since the outbreak of war prepared to leave under cover of darkness. The statistics seemed impressive: 5,000 crack Canadian troops would carry the brunt of the fighting, supported by naval craft and planes handled by 10,000 sailors and airmen. Separate forces of Commandos would strike the coast on either side of the main target: Dieppe.

  But the “invasion fleet” consisted of lightly armed small craft, including four river gunboats and a 700-ton sloop with one four-inch gun. During the night crossing, some of the 237 vessels ran into enemy torpedo boats. When the first troops and tanks hit the beaches early Wednesday morning, the Germans were waiting. Among the Canadians, three out of four were doomed the moment they left the landing barges.

  The first official versions of the raid made it out to be a successful probing action to “unlock the priceless secret to victory” by showing the way back into Fortress Europe. This idea was later expanded into the terse statement: No raid—no invasion, meaning that the massive assault of D day nearly two years later was planned on the basis of JUBILEE, and could not have been planned in any other way. All this was true enough. American service chiefs saw the consequences of inadequate forces and hasty improvisations. The U.S. Rangers who saw the carnage summed up the reasons for failure: “Lack of equipment.”

  A handwritten note dispatched by carrier pigeon from one of the ships underlined the lesson.

  To 1st Canadian Corps

  From HMS Fernie

  Date: 19 August 1942

  Recording opinion now in case of trouble later. Surprise probably lost when naval encounter early A.M. Strength of enemy: seems to have been increased. Basic view of all officers . . . bomber command must provide really heavy support in future combined operations.

  Troops seem to have behaved magnificently—never a trace of panic on radio . . . getting reports of casualties by lamp.

  Sorry we failed. . . .

  Almost all the survivors thought of the Dieppe raid as a failure. The hard decision had been made that they could not be told otherwise—but it had been a tremendous, if extravagant, success.

  Frank Koons, from Iowa, was one who thought it a success. He was the the first American soldier to kill a German in World War II and to earn the British Military Medal for bravery. He went ashore with the fixed bayonets of No. 4 Commando under the chief of the Scottish Clan of Fraser, Lord Lovat, a lanky figure in corduroy slacks and a knitted sweater, his gaunt face (like the rest of his 250 men) smeared with boot blacking. Koons was one of six American Rangers who were dropped in pitch darkness at a point some distance from Dieppe beneath the form
idable Hess Battery of guns perched on high and seemingly unscalable cliffs. A German pillbox opened fire at the withdrawing landing craft, and the Commando went into action with clockwork precision. One group rushed the pillbox with hand grenades. Another hurled grappling irons and raised scaling ladders. The gully at the top of the beach was mined. Lovat led the men through the mine field by lamplight, following signposts planted by the Germans for themselves. A battery of Bangalore torpedo carriers crept across open ground to the Hess Battery perimeter wire and waited for the air strike, which should come within seconds, delivered by Hawker Hurricanes screaming flat over the water from England.

  Koons saw a German sentry emerge from the dimly lit interior of a house. He raised his rifle and fired, and with four other Rangers rushed the house. They fought their way to the roof, and were rewarded with a bird’s-eye view of the battery pits as the early light flooded this peaceful corner of France.

  The Commandos around the battery fixed bayonets. The Hurricanes swept out of the dawn, their cannon and rockets firing, and were gone in seconds. Koons heard the wail of a hunting horn. It was Lovat’s signal for the bayonet charge. They had to cover 250 yards at a run into enemy machine guns firing from behind concrete emplacements. As they leapt through gaps cut in the wire, some fell and the rest plunged on over their bodies. Once through the wire, they were frozen briefly by the sight of a jackbooted German officer stomping on the head of a prostrate and wounded Commando. Then bayonets and knives slashed limbs, bellies, and throats. Only four of the 112 Germans in the big guns’ crews were left alive.

  Other Commandos carried out similar assaults along the coast. Some, like Lovat’s, had the dual purpose of dividing enemy defenses and diverting attention from groups of agents now at work. For them, too, the operation seemed a success.

  Rose and Callaghan reached the big radio-detection station above the harbor, together with the radar scientists and the Canadian Field Security sergeant. By then, Canadian tanks had broken into the streets of Dieppe. “How they got there, God knows,” said Callaghan later. He had been listening on the PHANTOM intelligence net and knew that most of the central assault force was pinned down, dying on the main beach. He carried no arms aside from the pistol for shooting the scientists if they were in danger of being captured alive. He packed, instead, the single very-high-frequency radiophone that linked his group with Baker Street by way of the big American Motorola, then the most advanced mobile radio in existence, aboard a ship standing off the coast.

  “Thanks to the briefings from Watson-Watt, our own objective was like an open book,” said Rose. The inventor of radar had wanted to go on the raid himself. His two substitutes were preceded by two of Callaghan’s colleagues from Camp X. They took the guards by surprise, slitting their throats with knives and thin copper wire. Rose dived for the small hut where he expected to find certain radar controls.

  Meanwhile, one of the scientists scrambled toward the big radar station overlooking the beach. He was Jack Nissenthall, one of Watson-Watt’s young colleagues, temporarily attached to the RAF as a sergeant, selected because he combined the qualities of a good combat soldier and knowledge of what to look for inside an enemy radar station. He was the son of a Jewish tailor who had settled in London after escaping from Poland. With Sergeant Nissenthall were nine sharpshooters of the South Saskatchewan Regiment. Nissenthall’s task was to search for signs of a German equivalent to the British cavity magnetron, the “magic black box” that made radar more flexible. The Canadians’ job was to kill Nissenthall if he, too, seemed in danger of being captured alive.

  Nissenthall found the main defenses of the German radar station impregnable. He was searching for a way inside when the first Hurricane air strikes burst around him. These were timed to cover the work of Rose, blowing up the radar control hut with plastic explosives after removing instruments. The RAF bombing made it unlikely that the Germans would realize their radar had been inspected and robbed of vital equipment.

  Nissenthall picked himself up after the bombing, then cut the land-lines connecting the main radar station with Dieppe. The Germans would now have to send information by radio once they had the radar back in operation. And across the English Channel, monitors would retrieve the signals and other scientists could compare German data with that of British radar. It would give further insight into the progress of enemy research.*

  On the other side of town, men of Special Operations Executive broke into the local jail, which had been converted into a Gestapo interrogation center, and collected the French Resistance leaders. Three Sudeten Germans in Nazi uniforms briefly shook hands with the Baker Street representatives before disappearing into the interior, doubtless relieved that the Irregulars had not found it necessary to shoot them.

  Lord Lovat’s timetable, to which he adhered with cold precision, required him to be back for re-embarkation at 7:30 A.M. With seconds in hand, he surveyed the carnage at Battery Hess. With his Winchester sporting rifle now tucked under one arm, he suggested a laird on a grouse shoot. The big enemy guns had been spiked. Around lay the Commando dead. “Burn ’em,” said Lovat. “Set fire to the lot.” The battery buildings were set alight, and the corpses piled around the blackened guns.

  When they regained the boats, Lovat broke radio silence: “Every one of gun crews finished with the bayonet. Okay by you?”

  A series of air battles began overhead. Under cover of this, and the fighting withdrawal of U.S. Rangers, British Commandos, and Canadian troops, the Baker Street teams escaped to the fast motor-torpedo-boat that would carry them and information on new German radar back to Newhaven. Their biggest achievement was the theft of equipment that would reveal details of enemy coastal radar and lead to countermeasures that would ease the path of Allied bombers into the Third Reich. The recovery of French intelligence chiefs and the insertion of anti-Nazi German agents would have long-term results. Even Canadians who were captured found the means to continue fighting. Among those who later escaped was a French-Canadian, Lucien Dumais. With his fluent French, he worked his way through Occupied France back to London, where he was asked to undertake “service out of this world.” He duly returned to run the SHERIDAN network that helped 307 Allied fliers escape from Nazi hands after being downed in combat.

  It was essential, however, that the Germans should believe JUBILEE had failed. This myth was so scrupulously preserved that even Mountbatten—who had at least defended the raid as a dummy run and the Great Deception—was unaware of all the secret operations it covered. Thirty years later, he met with Canadian survivors and relatives to reassure them that there had been no irresponsible sacrifice of life. Asked about the orders to shoot the scientists, rather than let them be captured, he said: “If I had known of those orders . . . I would immediately have canceled them.” (Here can be briefly glimpsed the tension between regular service chiefs and the Baker Street Irregulars, who could not play by the accepted rules.) The men who carried out the secret missions all vanished, unrewarded, into anonymity. The commanding officer of the South Saskatchewans, Cecil Merritt, received the highest award for valor—the Victoria Cross. He, as a regular service officer, could receive it publicly, but he made it known that he regarded the medal as being for men whose courage could not be acknowledged.

  A confidential briefing of newsmen in London at the conclusion of the raid was accompanied by a warning note: “This must not be quoted as coming from official sources. . . . Certain factors which for obvious reasons could not be previously disclosed are given for your guidance. The Combined Operations raid on Dieppe marks an important step forward in the planned program of our agreed offensive policy. . .”

  The over-all aim of JUBILEE had been, as Churchill later proposed to tell Parliament, “to deceive the enemy.” The Prime Minister’s statement was never made public, because the deception kept on working; by the end of 1942, Hitler held at least thirty-three German divisions along the Atlantic wall to protect primarily the small ports in the Calais-Boulogne area, in
the belief that it was here the British intended to strike again. The statement, finally made to a secret session of Parliament, was conveyed through BSC to the President: “The attack which will be made in due course across the Channel or the North Sea requires an immense degree of preparation, vast numbers of special landing-craft and a great army trained, division by division, in amphibious warfare. . . . It would have been most improvident of us to attempt such an enterprise before all our preparations were ready. . . . A joint communiqué spoke of a Second Front in Europe in 1942 [because] it was of the utmost consequence to Russia that the enemy should believe we were so prepared and so resolved.”

  The injuries sustained by the raiders were analyzed. Out of 4,963 Canadians who fought on the beaches, 3,367 were casualties. Most were hit during landing or re-embarkation. Troops were most likely to be wounded in the lower limbs, then the upper limbs, thorax, neck and head, and, finally, abdomen—in that order.

  These grisly studies led to development of the armor, craft, and techniques finally employed on D day to cut down casualties. JUBILEE proved the need for overwhelming bomber and fire support. New landing craft, the LCT(R)s, were devised to fire 1,080 heavy rockets on a single patch of beach in twenty-six seconds—matching the bombardment that would ensue if eighty naval cruisers shelled simultaneously. The island-hopping campaign through the Pacific by U.S. amphibious forces was based on equipment and lessons arising from the ashes of Dieppe.

  During the raid, more than 1,000 messages were exchanged with radio operators in Occupied France. From these, BSC, in a combined operation with the research and analysis section of OSS, demonstrated that the secret armies of Europe were not yet ready. “The sea of people in which the guerrillas could swim like fish was still missing,” said Stephenson, paraphrasing Mao.