Tragedy at Dieppe

by Mark Zuehlke

  Labatt shaved and enjoyed a warm soak in the tiled tub before donning his uniform. He found a table set with stiff white linen and silver cutlery. Mouth-watering aromas came from an electric chafing dish. His adjutant, Captain Herb Poag, joined him. The battalion second-in-command, Major Frederick Wilkinson, Poag said, had already breakfasted and was checking the LCMs. “The steward brought in our porridge and large mugs of coffee,” Labatt would later recall. “Then we helped ourselves to bacon, eggs, and kidneys. Hot toast, butter, and marmalade completed the... meal.”

  “Sleep well?” Poag asked. The forty-six-year-old had been a Riley in the Great War until invalided out by wounds, then re-enlisted in 1939, serving as quartermaster and then as adjutant. His steady organizational hand had endeared him to the men. Labatt considered him a trustworthy confidante.

  “Not a wink,” Labatt said. Instead, he had been replaying the events since Glengyle sailed, recalling the happy expressions when the men learned this was the real thing. The “issue of maps and photos, the talk to the officers, the briefing of all ranks, the issue of special equipment—Stens, demolitions charges, grapnels, ladders, smoke, bangalores, and Mae Wests. The ticklish business of arming [No.] 36 grenades in the dark. No casualties, thank God, in spite of a lot of detonators spilled on the steel deck in the stygian blackness.” All this Labatt had taken in stride. The anxiety he could not shed arose from doubts as to the wisdom of mounting the raid so secretively. Certainly his officers knew their “job thoroughly, but [there was] no time to satisfy myself about the men. It seemed fantastic. Units were being launched into an involved operation. The success of which depended on two factors—one, surprise—two, the thorough knowledge by each man of the several operations to be carried out by his sub-unit and his particular job in each. Yet no time had been made available for him to study his task. It should have been.” Breakfast finished, Labatt fetched his fighting kit. “Don’t forget your Mae West,” he reminded Poag. “I won’t. I don’t trust boats and I hate water except in whisky,” the adjutant replied.

  Labatt struggled into his battle kit. “Skeleton web, Colt .45, two extra mags, water bottle, prismatic compass, maps in oiled silk and field message book in left leg pocket; pencils, pen, torch, cigarettes, chocolate, wallet and escape kit in breast pockets. In the haversack, sandwiches, more chocolate and cigarettes, message pads, Sten mags, two No. 36 grenades and 1 smoke canister. Binoculars around the neck, Mae West around the chest, Sten gun in hand and there I was—the 1942 amphibious soldier.”

  Winches rattled as Labatt hurried deckside. The LCMs were already slung out, and the smaller LCAs hung flush to the boat deck for loading. When the winches stopped, the silence seemed total despite “hundreds of soldiers... pouring up from the mess decks to... allotted boat stations... Their silence was uncanny... Everything was at peace, everything seemed to be going according to plan. Perhaps I had been wrong, we would achieve surprise.” Labatt found Captain Donald Stuart McGrath on the bridge, illuminated by the dim glow of the binnacle. A small man with a big beard, McGrath wore a beret, enormous sweater, corduroy trousers tucked into sea boots, and a Mae West. He was from Jamaica and always put Labatt in mind of a pirate.

  “Bloody awful, look,” McGrath said with a grimace and a finger jabbed eastward. Labatt turned, and his “spirits did a nose dive... The darkness was flecked with bright incessant sparkles. Here and there a dull red glow appeared and faded and over all arched the long lazy streaks of tracer.” Probable, McGrath said, that No. 3 Commando was “catching hell” from E-boats. Although worried, Labatt decided the Germans would fixate on the commandos in their R-Boats and “take it for the usual type of commando raid.” So long as they did not come farther west, the E-Boats posed no direct threat to the Royal Regiment’s landing on Blue Beach at Puys. His spirits rose.

  No sense worrying further. Glengyle was ten miles offshore and, facing Dieppe, a good five miles west of the commandos. It was time to start the two-hour run to White Beach. “I’ll have a drink with you tonight,” McGrath called as Labatt left. “Good luck to all of you.”

  Labatt found flotilla leader Lieutenant Commander Lowe standing next to his LCA. “How about landing us on the right beach for a change?” Labatt chuckled. “Ouch,” Lowe replied. “There will be no mistake this time. We know where we are.” Labatt took his spot portside on a bench against the gunwale. To his right, a signaller had a wireless set keyed to 4th Brigade’s net. Poag sat to his left. Captain Denis Whitaker and the protective platoon faced forward in front of the ramp. Aft was the reduced shore battalion headquarters, a small number of signallers, intelligence personnel, and Wilkinson with “a duplicate set up” on a second LCA. If Labatt’s group was lost, Wilkinson should be able to smoothly assume command. Lowe was starboard, standing at the controls. Labatt talked with him over the heads of men sitting low on the centre benches. “I had my fingers on everything going on in the craft and if necessary could take control instantly without climbing about.”

  Gongs rang, “electric motors hummed and we sank smoothly into the night. Waterborne we hung onto the sides until the other craft were lowered. Looking up and towards the bridge, I realized for the first time the immense size of the ship. Lowe was talking quietly into a telephone swung on the end of a line. He finished and the phone disappeared heavenwards. We were to move forward while they lowered the [LCMs] from each side of the ship. We had gone about 300 yards when I heard McGrath’s voice roaring from the bridge. ‘Let go those bloody boats.’ ” A small boat raced up. “That you, Lowe?” a voice called. Lowe acknowledged. “Move off, you are complete,” the voice snapped. A small bell in the engine room rang and the LCA moved off at a steady six knots. “The craft was absolutely silent... For better or for worse we were well and truly launched. Next stop France.”1

  At 0445 hours, five minutes ahead of schedule, R-Boat15 with Major Peter Young’s commando contingent edged ashore fifty yards right of the sharp gully that ran from Yellow Beach II up to the headland. Landing off to the side might keep any Germans manning a machine-gun position in the gully from detecting them.2

  From the R-Boat, Canadian sub-lieutenant David Lewis watched the commandos slide silently over the sides and dash up the shelving beach to crouch against the cliff. With their darkened faces and hands, these first Dieppe raiders to land were virtually invisible despite the rapidly brightening sky. Lewis was to have overseen a beach defence party, but there were too few commandos for Young to leave any behind. Lieutenant Henry Buckee’s small naval crew would remain aboard and linger off the beach as long as possible. As the boat pulled away, the commandos crouched in a tight circle next to the gully for a hurried confab. Then they “vanished up the gully.”3

  The twenty commandos consisted of men from Young’s headquarters troop and Captain John Selwyn’s No. 3 Troop. Lieutenant “Buck” Ruxton was the only other officer. The group was lightly armed. Young carried an American M1 Garand automatic rifle—a gift from the U.S. Rangers. Nine men were armed with Lee-Enfield rifles. Selwyn, Ruxton, and four others had Thompson submachine guns. One carried a Bren. They also had one 2-inch mortar and a 3-inch mortar. The signaller carried a rifle and a No. 18 wireless set.4

  Barbed wire choked the gully. When Young asked Selwyn for a bangalore torpedo, he learned the R-Boat had carried none. Nor did anybody have wire cutters. Irritated by Selwyn’s poor preparations, Young started climbing the left-hand side of the gully, only to lose his balance and topple onto Selwyn. The captain observed that they were achieving nothing and perhaps should just go back to England. Although Young had entertained similar thoughts, Selwyn’s suggesting them was infuriating. Emitting “a sort of surly growl,” he started up the right-hand side of the gully.

  Young found that the Germans had hammered iron stakes into the cliff and wrapped the barbed wire around them to string across the gully. He used the stakes as handholds to climb the cliff but often had to grasp strands of wire, too. The closely
clustered but “fairly blunt” barbs pierced his hands and left shallow cuts. Behind him, driver J. Cunningham, a Royal Army Service Corps trucker turned commando, collected the toggle ropes they’d brought. Each was six feet long, with a loop on one end and a wooden toggle on the other. Cunningham quickly strung these together and threw an end to Young. Unfurling the line as he went, Young carried the rope as he climbed. He made good progress for the first twelve feet. Then the Garand fell off his shoulder, causing him to swing perilously away from the cliff face. “If I fall now, I shall never get up,” Young thought, but managed to maintain a foothold and grasp the wire with one steadying hand. Soon exiting the gulley, he faced a sign announcing in German and French that it was mined. Obviously, ascending the side rather than the centre of the gully had saved his life.

  The rest of the commandos made the climb assisted by the toggle-rope line. At 0510 hours, one of the first to gain the headland reported seeing five R-Boats headed for Yellow I Beach. Young was anxious to get moving, but it took forty-five minutes from touchdown on the beach for everyone to finish the climb. They had abandoned the 3-inch mortar. Even dismantled, it was too heavy and awkward. Somehow the signaller had managed to carry the heavy wireless set up “but could not get in touch with any of our other parties.”5

  It was light now. Young led the way to a small wood at 0530 hours. Noticing that some of the men looked uneasy, Young gave them a short pep talk. “Young soldiers will follow their commanders out of the innocence of their hearts,” Young liked to say. Assuming a confident air, he declared this was a mission worthy of telling their children. “Young was flamboyant,” Gunner Stephen Saggers observed, “but he was a bloke you could have confidence in.”6 In fact, Young was optimistic. With R-Boats sighted closing on Yellow I, he expected reinforcements would soon bolster his small force. And for now he would do what commandos did in adverse situations—get to the objective and cause havoc.

  While Young’s force landed unopposed, the commandos coming into Yellow I at 0510 hours landed in broad daylight and in the sight of Germans looking down from the cliff to the narrow strip of shingle beach. Just nine minutes before, 302nd Division headquarters had sounded Action Stations. Off-duty troops piled out of beds, grabbed weapons, and ran to their assigned positions. But the situation remained murky, the German commanders unsure where attacks were falling and in what strength.

  Aboard one R-Boat, Captain Richard Wills—the senior officer present—thought the small force could still land and assault the coastal battery. But it would clearly be a close-run thing. A small church and large white house on top of the three-hundred-foot cliff served as a marker for the beach and gully that constituted Yellow I. Through binoculars, Sergeant Wally Dungate saw about ten Germans watching from the cliff edge and realized surprise was lost.

  Lieutenant Alexander Fear’s ML346 hovered protectively, its 3-pounder gun and 20-millimetre Oerlikon cannon tracking the Germans. As the five R-Boats touched down and the commandos spilled ashore, the Germans opened up with a single machine gun and rifles. Private Norman Harrison, the first man off, died instantly when a bullet struck him between the eyes. Commandos scrambled raggedly across the loose shale to the shelter of the cliff face.7

  Aboard LCP42, the dying Lieutenant Commander Charles L. Corke still commanded. His other naval personnel were either dead or wounded. A commando had steered the craft in. As the bullet-riddled boat sank, Corke ensured all the wounded were shifted to another R-Boat. Refusing to put anybody at risk moving him, Corke remained aboard as the boat foundered offshore.8 As the other four R-Boats sped seaward, they were passed by another heading towards the beach. After its commandos piled out, the boat was raked by machine-gun fire and sunk just off the beach. The commandos on Yellow Beach I now numbered 117, alive or dead.9 Offshore, Fear had ML346’s guns target the large white house where a machine-gun post seemed to be sited.

  As had been the case at Yellow II, the gully was blocked by large barbed-wire tangles. The commandos had no scaling ladders or bangalore torpedoes. They could only queue behind a couple of men clearing a path with wire cutters. Precious time was lost that allowed a coast patrol from 572nd Infantry Regiment and a few Luftwaffe personnel from the gun battery to reinforce the small picket line.

  When the wire was breached, the commandos quickly gained the heights and the scattered buildings of Petit Berneval. Corporal “Banger” Halls charged towards a machine gun firing from the right, throwing grenades as he dashed forward and silencing it singlehandedly without suffering a scratch. Then he ran to assist Captain Wills, who fell with a grenade fragment in the neck. Losing consciousness, Wills urged Halls “to get on with the battle.” Wills was later taken prisoner.10

  Once the commandos left the cliff edge, ML346 could no longer provide supporting fire. As Lieutenant Fear turned seaward, a vessel suddenly hove into view that he realized was German. Perceiving that the ship mounted two or more guns amidships, he ordered the helmsman to close “at full speed.” As ML346 charged with all guns blazing, Fear realized at the last minute he had mistaken the valves and oil pipes on the deck of a fuel tanker for 105-millimetre guns. In fact, Franz—part of the convoy that had encountered Group 5—was armed with a single 20-millimetre gun. As soon as this gun was knocked out, its crew leapt overboard in fear of being burned to death when the fuel aboard exploded.11 Franz ran aground without igniting, and Fear had a boarding party fetch its ensign as a trophy. ML346 then hovered offshore of Yellow I, hoping to help the commandos evacuate.12

  In Petit Berneval, meanwhile, the commandos were meeting escalating resistance as the coastal battery code-named Goebbels dispatched more troops in small detachments of eight to a dozen men. Fifteen Germans from the nearby radar station also rushed towards the fighting. It was 0600 hours.13

  In the wood, Major Peter Young and his small party had heard the gunfire from Yellow I at 0545 hours. Having no idea what was happening there, Young “decided that our best course was to go into Berneval-le-Grand and try to join the 5 boat-loads who had landed there.” If, however, the battery fired, Young would “attack [it] at once” and alone. The commandos moved along a cart track to a junction with the road running from Berneval to Dieppe. As they gathered in the wheat alongside the road, a French youth peddled past on a bicycle. Captain John Selwyn stopped him. Young asked the strength of Goebbels Battery, which the boy estimated at about two hundred. He then let the boy go, “as he was obviously very frightened and unlikely to betray us.” Young ordered Lieutenant Ruxton to cover the rest of the party with the 2-inch-mortar team as they entered Berneval. Suddenly, six Spitfires streaked overhead, one strafing the battery. After entering the village, two men shinnied up telephone poles and cut the wires running to Dieppe. They filtered cautiously forward, wary of an ambush, until several civilians reported the Germans were all on the village’s other side. Trusting this information, Young double-timed his men for a hundred yards up the main street to the church. As they went, Young counted about ninety civilians. These included three men pushing a wounded woman in a handcart. A civilian fireman wearing a bronze helmet stood next to a burning house. Most of the civilians seemed friendly. They waved before going inside and shutting their doors.

  As the commandos passed the church, they were fired on by a light machine gun. Then two German infantrymen dashed across the road to take cover in a hedge. Lieutenant Ruxton returned their fire with his Thompson submachine gun. A sharp firefight ensued until the light machine gun ceased firing and it appeared the Germans had retreated. Young placed the Bren gunner and a couple of snipers in the church’s steeple, which overlooked the gun battery.

  Taking the other men, Young set out to outflank any German positions guarding the road near the battery by moving through an orchard adjacent to the church. In the orchard, the men discovered an aircraft undercarriage camouflaged to resemble a small gun. “Here we came under a desultory fire from concealed riflemen, whom we could not discover. They fi
red many rounds, but hit nobody and probably could not see us very well.” A light machine gun loosed several bursts towards the commandos, who were unable to pinpoint its location. Carrying on into a cornfield, they attempted to close on the battery, which was firing one gun in an apparent attempt to range in on a target out at sea. Young sensed the gun crew lacked any fire direction from an artillery observer. So much smoke wrapped around the battery that he figured the gunners were firing practically blind. Looking towards Dieppe, Young saw nothing but more smoke obscuring the town. Only fleeting images of an occasional ship proved that the main raiding force had arrived.

  Creeping closer, the commandos situated two of the guns. Approaching from the flank, Selwyn and a few men closed to within two hundred yards of them, while Young’s party brought them under fire from the cornfield. Ruxton engaged with the mortar until Young realized the guns were more dummies and ordered a ceasefire. Leading his group into another field, “we started a hot fire at the smoke and flashes where the guns appeared to be. Groups of riflemen were still firing at us from the edge of the orchards... but they showed a marked tendency to fire over our heads.”

  Suddenly, one coastal gun ponderously fired four rounds directly at the commandos. Small explosions also erupted close by, probably from grenades. One man was nicked in the ear. But the coastal gun’s fire proved pointless—its barrel was unable to depress sufficiently. Instead, each shell lumbered overhead and exploded a mile distant. “Every time the guns fired we gave a volley of small arms at the black and yellow fumes which appeared.” It was about 0745 hours. Although each man had carried approximately a hundred rounds, ammunition was running low, and Young decided they had done all that was possible. He ordered Selwyn to withdraw his men back to the cliff. If LCP15 was still waiting, he should fire three white Verey lights and Young would quickly fall back. Selwyn was to get Lieutenant Buckee’s attention and prepare for embarkation.