by Mark Zuehlke
From the sidelines, Captain John Hughes-Hallett uneasily watched these efforts to breach seawalls. He thought the army’s ideas were “primitive.” Clearly it was “important that gaps should be blown through which tanks could pass, but the army’s technique for achieving this depended upon the troops manhandling ‘Bangalore Torpedoes’ which would be carried in tank landing craft and lugged ashore up to the seawall. It seemed to me that the soldiers entrusted with this task would be sitting ducks. We therefore urged that some well armoured, but obsolescent heavy tanks should be filled with explosives and driven up the beach to the seawall where the soldiers could jump out and take cover while they were blown up.” This suggestion from the Combined Operations naval planners was dismissed without any real consideration. Hughes-Hallett was left with the impression that Major General Roberts and his staff feared that pressing for special equipment might lead to the raid’s cancellation. Roberts was well aware that this fate befell more combined operation raiding plans than not.27
In truth, the engineers were experimenting with more advanced charges than the simple bangalore torpedo—a long pipe filled with explosive, intended more for clearing a path through barbed wire than for breaching a seawall. The engineers created sixty-pound conical charges that could be set against the wall on small crosses of timber. Three such charges set three feet apart were found capable of creating a 13.6-foot-wide breach—more than adequate for passage of a 9.5-foot-wide Churchill tank. Emplacing such a string of charges and readying them for detonation required two to three minutes’ work by a nine-man team. Several similar techniques were devised using lighter, thirty-three pound explosive loads, two of which were carried by one engineer and then hooked together and hung from the top of the wall before detonation. In all cases, it was assumed that the engineers placing the charges would be protected by covering fire from infantry and tanks. Once the breach was created, it was determined that a tank could get through in about a minute.28
Breaching seawalls was not the only engineering concern. The men had to devise techniques for creating paths through minefields. Two types of “snakes” were designed. The first “consisted of sections of pipe loaded with explosives which, when coupled together, could be pushed as a unit ahead of a tank across a minefield. The subsequent detonation would clear a path through the field.” Lieutenant T.B. Doherty of 11th Field Company devised a variant nicknamed a “sausage.” This entailed rolling plastic explosive into a long sausage charge of either seventy-five or one hundred feet in length. Primers were placed at each end of the charge and within it at distances of twenty feet. The charge was then wrapped in waterproof fabric and threaded through a heavy canvas fire hose. The hose was coiled on a wooden frame fitted with four carrying handles so it could be lugged into position by engineers. Each sausage weighed between 200 and 250 pounds.29
All unit training repeatedly returned to surmounting seawalls. Before the war, Lieutenant Edmondson had been on a gymnastics team. Learning of this, Lieutenant Colonel Cecil Merritt said to him, “You know something about climbing walls and falling on your head.” He pointed to a sixteen-foot seawall. “I want you to teach people how to get up and down these walls.”
“What the hell do I know about getting up and down beach walls?” Edmondson fumed. All he could really teach the men was how to roll and tumble if they had to jump over something. “Why not just use scaling ladders?” Edmondson asked at repeated briefings. “They’re as old as warfare.” Merritt finally told him to shut up and be quiet.30
By early June, Major Norman Ross thought his Camerons “had never been fitter.” They were also adept at getting in and out of the R-Boats (R for “raid”). This early version of the Landing Craft Assault (LCA) had no ramp in front. Instead, the troops jumped over the side. Of plywood construction with armoured bulkheads, the thirty-four-foot boats had very shallow draft and could normally carry about twenty-five men. Twelve men would be under the gunwale, with the rest in the stern. “We were landing on beaches, jumping out into waist deep water, and then running ashore.”31
They also trained aboard Landing Craft Mechanical Mark I (LCM) vessels. First launched in 1920, the LCMs were relatively crude landing craft designed to carry one medium tank, 26.8 tons of cargo, or up to one hundred men. Displacing thirty-five tons, they were forty-five feet long by fourteen feet wide, with a four-foot draft. Crewed by six men, the LCM was powered by two Chrysler hundred-horsepower petrol engines and armed with two .303-calibre Lewis medium machine guns. Each LCM was commanded by a coxswain.
Ottawa-born Norm Bowen held this rank aboard one LCM in a Canadian flotilla. The “big thing,” he recalled, was that “we had to learn to handle these bloody craft. You had a great big solid door in front of you and you are on the deck. How the hell can you see where you are going?... We used to open the hatch and climb up and sit on the top and steer with our feet. Because you had to see over the door or at least the side of it and the only thing you could see at night is the phosphorous from the propeller [of the vessel] ahead of you. It was a damn antiquated thing.” The ramp door at the front was about eight feet high and armoured. The soldiers crammed into the LCM were equally blind, surrounded by sides higher than their heads. This caused problems for Bowen and the other coxswains because inevitably the infantry officer would try to climb up the side to see where they were. “I would tell him to get down. And he’d demand, Who the hell am I to tell him anything? I would have to explain, that on this ship, I am the captain and, ‘If you don’t get down, I’ll have you thrown down.’ ” A humble Canadian sailor, Bowen found this kind of conflict a “bit embarrassing at times.”32
As the training became more advanced, the Camerons were loaded in boats one evening and spent the night circling the island to reach a dawn landing point. They stormed ashore, scaled a cliff, and carried out a simulated attack against headland targets. Attack successful, they then marched back to Wootton Creek. Everyone was looking forward to a hot meal when Lieutenant Colonel Gostling announced an inspection. Gostling carried this out in reverse order, meaning Ross’s ‘A’ Company was last in line. Ross began experiencing a growing sense of “trepidation,” as he heard “rough screams” coming from where Gostling was farther up the line. Eventually the battalion commander reached ‘A’ Company and closely inspected each rifle. “And he couldn’t find anything wrong. I could tell he was mad as hell at that, but he was quiet.” Finally, Gostling found a rifle that failed inspection, “and he started screaming at [the man] and then suddenly walked away.”
All the battalion officers were summoned to a briefing, where Gostling “read the riot act. We’d just come out of salt water, just off an operation, really there had been no time to clean up rifles or anything else... Well, of course, this was ridiculous... But this was the type of commander he was.”
Ross did his best to avoid Gostling thereafter and thought the other company commanders did likewise. The “paradox” in the training that perplexed him, however, was that most of it was at a company level. There were virtually no battalion-scale exercises and nothing at all at brigade or divisional level.33 Ross was unaware of the simple reason for this. Those overseeing the training had realized there was simply insufficient time to train the men on a battalion scale without “sacrificing” other “valuable training” that required individual company tasks. Instead, on June 10, the division would be subjected to a full-dress rehearsal raid on the south English coast in cooperation with the navy and air force assets assigned to Operation Rutter.34
Such was the intensity of training and the sense of urgency surrounding it that the Canadians on the Isle of Wight could not help but sense they were being prepared for something big. And the nature of the training in these first days of June—with its emphasis on amphibious landings and surmounting seawalls—made the whole affair all the more mysterious.35
Meanwhile, on June 5, a meeting of critical import had convened at Combined Operations Headquarters. Neith
er Mountbatten nor Hughes-Hallett attended. Both were then in Washington, sent by Churchill to convince the Americans “once and for all that nothing but harm would come from an attempted major operation in 1942, and that in consequence there was no prospect of such an operation being undertaken.” Although the British had decided any 1942 amphibious cross-channel operation entailing multiple divisions was doomed to fail, the Americans kept advocating its resurrection. Churchill consequently had decided to send Mountbatten, Hughes-Hallett, and some of the St. Nazaire raid veterans to convince the Americans that Sledgehammer must be abandoned.
Mountbatten preceded Hughes-Hallett, flying in General Dwight Eisenhower’s private plane and arriving on June 3. Hughes-Hallett and the other Combined Operations officers departed on June 1 but took a circuitous route, first through neutral Eire, then by flying boat via Newfoundland to Baltimore, and then to the American capital by train.
Churchill believed Mountbatten could charm the Americans out of Operation Sledgehammer, while Hughes-Hallett would be in the background to underscore his arguments with detailed information. Once Sledgehammer was buried, Mountbatten would advocate an invasion later that year of North Africa.
Several long meetings with “senior American staff officers” ensued, during which the two British naval officers explained “the logistics and our reasoning.” These led to a final two- to three-hour meeting with the U.S. Combined Chiefs of Staff wherein Mountbatten argued there were insufficient landing craft for any major cross-channel assault in the summer of 1942. By late 1942 or early 1943, the picture might change, but at this point there were simply too few craft for a major venture. Mountbatten and Hughes-Hallett got the “impression... that we had at length convinced them.”36
In reality, the Combined Chiefs remained unpersuaded that Sledgehammer was a bust. To those staunch proponents of a Second Front Now, such as Colonel Albert Wedemeyer, Mountbatten was a threat. Suddenly thrust into their midst was “an extremely articulate Britisher endeavoring to raise bogies about the hazards of a cross-channel operation.” And to cap their worst fears, Mountbatten left the meeting with the Combined Chiefs to dine with President Roosevelt. For six hours, in a meeting that spilled over into the early hours of the following morning, Mountbatten had Roosevelt’s undivided attention. Mountbatten convincingly argued that a North African invasion offered a sound alternative to Sledgehammer, that ambitious raiding in 1942—including the grand foray against Dieppe—could keep the Germans off balance, and that a cross-channel invasion was likely feasible in 1943. Pressed by Roosevelt, he conceded that Sledgehammer might be resurrected in 1942 if the Germans proved unexpectedly weak or if the Soviet Union needed to be rescued from collapse by a major offensive action on the western front. Mountbatten considered the dinner a stunning success—one that played perfectly to Roosevelt’s weakness for British royalty and his personal affection for Mountbatten.37
Mountbatten told Hughes-Hallett “he felt quite sure that Mr. Roosevelt had at last accepted the British point of view.” Hughes-Hallett departed Washington the next day for London and arrived there on June 9. Mountbatten stayed behind for another couple of days in order to “watch some army exercises.” Upon reaching London, Hughes-Hallett reported to Churchill’s private secretary on the success of the mission. Almost immediately, however, “it turned out that our impressions were quite wrong, and that the Americans remained wholly unconvinced by our arguments. The Prime Minister pulled our legs about this, saying that it was not unusual for Ambassadors to fail in their missions, but they usually knew they had failed.”38
Three days later, Churchill announced to Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Alan Brooke that they would immediately leave for Washington. Roosevelt, he said, “was getting a little off the rails, and some good talks as regards Western Front were required.” On June 17, they set off by air on the two-day flight. They would not return until June 28, but as a result of their journey they felt sure Sledgehammer would finally be buried. And while the buildup of American forces in Great Britain would be assured, equally the first major amphibious operation would be directed on North Africa.39 In the meantime, the British would continue with combined operations raiding.
Churchill and Brooke’s personal intervention won what Mountbatten’s visit had not. They now had time to prepare while the Americans built up strength in Britain, and a shift of focus away from immediate cross-channel operations and towards North Africa promised relief to their embattled forces there. It was uncertain whether the diplomacy of Mountbatten and Hughes-Hallett had achieved anything besides ensuring that both men were absent from preparations for Operation Rutter at a time when momentous decisions were being made.
On June 5, Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery, as commander of the South-East Command, chaired a meeting at Richmond Terrace. Representing Combined Operations was its vice-chief, Major General Charles Haydon. Rear Admiral Baillie-Grohman attended as Naval Force Commander, Major General Roberts as Military Force Commander, and Air Vice-Marshal Leigh-Mallory as Air Force Commander. Everyone had a bevy of staff officers along. For his part, Roberts relied on Lieutenant Colonel Church Mann to explain the military plan, while Lieutenant A.H.L. Butler set out the naval plan and Leigh-Mallory personally spoke for the RAF.
Until now, the Naval and Military Force Commanders had had little opportunity to work with the RAF, so they were anxious to tie things down. Smokescreens were considered vital to conceal the landings, and they wondered if RAF could do this. If not, was Leigh-Mallory open to the navy laying thick smokescreens? Leigh-Mallory, according to the minutes, “pointed out that it was difficult for aircraft to lay smoke accurately on a narrow beach and that in any case the use of smoke would interfere with attack by Cannon Hurricanes [fighters tasked with strafing the beaches].” After some discussion, it was “agreed not to use smoke by aircraft on beaches but to rely on the attack by four squadrons of Cannon Hurricanes to cover the landing.” Some LCTs would be “equipped with mortars and would be prepared to lay their own screens if the situation made this necessary.”
It was quickly agreed that a small naval demonstration somewhere near Boulogne between the hours of 0250 and 0550 on the day of the assault—which was still set for June 20—might “take the enemy’s attention off the [invasion] convoy.” Leigh-Mallory at this point fretted that over the course of the raid, the vessels would be standing off Dieppe and the nearby beaches for about six hours and “subject to attack by German fighters and fighter-bombers,” and it might “not be possible for him to reinforce the two fighter squadrons in the vicinity of Dieppe before the German attack had been launched.” Pondering this, Montgomery stressed “the importance of doing everything possible to increase the Anti-Aircraft defence of ships and vessels to overcome these attacks during the period of occupation.” Montgomery promised “extra Bofors guns” if Combined Operations could provide ships to mount them on. Also agreed was provision of “sufficient ammunition on all ships in view of the high expenditure rate which was to be anticipated.”
Leigh-Mallory then dropped a bombshell. A major premise regarding support for the raid had rested on Dieppe being heavily bombed by RAF Bomber Command the night before.40 Leigh-Mallory now opined that “bombing of the port itself during the night of the assault would not be the most profitable way to use bombers and might only result in putting the enemy on alert.”41 He added that high-level “bombing with very large bombs at night is not accurate enough to expect to destroy prepared positions such as existed at Dieppe.” The only alternative would be to conduct day bombing, which would require “prolonged training” for the bomber crews. With the scheduled assault just fifteen days away, this was not an option. Leigh-Mallory also believed, and Lieutenant Colonel Church Mann agreed, that heavy bombing would cause “a good many fires” and “it would be unlikely that our engineer programme could be carried out; and also of course, a good deal of risk would arise in endeavouring to get the tanks through a bu
rning town.” Everyone worried about the effect on the French population if they were heavily bombed.42
Roberts accepted Leigh-Mallory’s assertion that Bomber Command could not guarantee any degree of accuracy. As land commander, of course, he could insist that the air bombardment was essential to the raid’s chances. He recognized, however, that to do so would likely “see the operation cancelled, which he badly wanted to avoid.” In any event, he later said, “my prime concern was the heavy batteries on the headlands flanking the beaches. If they could be neutralized, there was a good chance of the element of surprise compensating for lack of fire-power. I had reason to believe that the Air Force and the Navy would take care of those guns.”43
To somewhat compensate for the withdrawn air bombardment, Leigh-Mallory proposed to bomb Boulogne with seventy planes as a diversion. Strikes against Luftwaffe airfields at Crécy and Abbeville would also be launched between 0230 and 0400 hours. He figured these strikes would divert the radar defences at Dieppe away from the assault forces coming in from the sea and might “at least for some hours... put out of action” two airfields, “which the enemy would wish to use during the day of operation.”
In the absence of heavy bombing, “cannon fighters should attack the beach defences and the high ground on either side of Dieppe [targeting the heavy batteries causing Roberts’s concern] as the first flight of landing craft were coming in to land. It was also agreed that air action would be taken against German Headquarters in Arques at 0440 [hours].”