by Tim Saunders
Sergeant Dungate recounted that ‘there were masses of Germans. There must have been hundreds of them, all with their bicycles stacked up along the road.’ A series of reports confirming the first German success of the day climbed their chain of command, and according to C-in-C West’s war diary, von Rundstedt received the news at 1020 hours. However, it was not until he reached Newhaven at about midnight that Lieutenant Colonel Durnford-Slatter discovered that a party of his men under his Second-in-Command had landed at Yellow II and that they had ‘an altogether more interesting time ashore in France.’
Yellow II Beach
What was it that made Batterie 2/770 or the Goebbels Battery so special that the commandos would make such determined efforts to continue with their mission? The enemy battery at Berneval le Grand consisted of three 170mm and four 105mm guns, along with anti-aircraft and ground defences manned by more than 120 German gunners and infantry. The 170mm guns were some of the heaviest in this sector of the coast. With a range of almost twenty miles, these guns could cover all the approaches to Dieppe. Even the 105mm guns had a range of almost ten miles and were capable of engaging the stationary Landing Ships Infantry as they disembarked troops into assault craft. If not neutralised, the two types of gun together represented a real and considerable danger to both the Jubilee naval and landing forces
As the two GHQ Phantom signallers and their HF set were aboard one of the LCPs dispersed by the action at sea, there was no one to pass messages back to RAF Uxbridge, where Air Marshal Leigh-Mallory and Lord Mountbatten waited for information. They had to assume that the raid had failed; and it was only later that Durnford-Slater’s message ‘Force dispersed’ was relayed to them via HMS Calpe, confirming the worst. However, they had not counted on the determination of the commandos.
At the same time that the five craft were heading for Yellow Beach I, a lone LCP was heading for the coast under the command of Lieutenant Buckee of the Royal Navy Reserve and Major Peter Young. They
‘. . . conferred together after the encounter with the convoy, and decided, in spite of this misfortune, to persevere and do their utmost to carry out their task. Accordingly, LCP(L) 15 went into Yellow II Beach, and the party landed without opposition…’
This single landing craft carried just eighteen commandos - three officers and fifteen men – and landed.
A sketch map taken from the Combined Operations HQ report showing No. 3 Commando’s operations from Yellow Beach II.
Having decided to continue with the mission, Lieutenant Buckee piloted LCP 15 into the beach five minutes before zero hour. In almost full darkness, with a feat of navigation, he landed Major Young and his seventeen men, undetected by the enemy, within fifty yards of the exit from the narrow Yellow Beach II. The exit via a steep path up a gully was predictably blocked with coils of dannert wire piled ten feet high, and the gully beyond was laced with some particularly vicious-looking barbed wire, pinned to the cliff by stout stakes. Without any means of blowing their way through or cutting the wire, it was going to be a case of forcing and picking their way through. From their small collection of weapons, the group were forced to leave their 3-inch mortar and its four bombs at the base of the cliff. This left them armed with ‘one Garand rifle, nine Service rifles [Mark III .303-inch Lee-Enfields], one Bren, six Tommy guns, three pistols [and] one 2-inch mortar with six bombs. . . ’
One of the three French 170mm guns pressed into German service at the Gobbels Battery.
The COHQ report records that:
‘The gully was climbed by making use of the German wire as a rope and the iron stakes which secured it as a ladder. A rope made by driver J. Cunningham Royal Army Service Corps, out of joined toggle ropes, proved useful at one difficult point.’
Major Young, who admitted he was not a good climber, commented that scaling the cliff was ‘rather an ordeal,’ and that if faced with attempting it a second time he would have ‘reconsidered.’ But after some twenty minutes, the small force assembled on the cliff top, cut and bleeding, with uniforms torn. While waiting for the last man to scale the cliff, with the benefit of daylight, Major Young scanned the sea with his binoculars, and was reassured to spot ML 346 and its small gaggle of craft heading for Yellow I. Confident that the original plan was still viable, he later remarked:
‘Some of the soldiers did not look particularly pleased at the turn of events, so I gave them a pep talk . . . telling them that it would be something to tell their children about.’
Confidence restored by Peter Young’s inspiring personality, they moved inland to the commando rendezvous (RV). The COHQ report recorded:
‘... on reaching the cliffs, the party moved inland a short distance and took cover in a wood. There, Major Young divided them into three groups, and himself went forward with his runners to reconnoitre. It was decided to make for the village of Berneval in an effort to join with the rest of the Commandos.’
However, before Young and his group had gone far, the massive guns of Batterie 2/770 opened fire on the vulnerable ships lying off Dieppe.
When the commandos reached the Berneval-Dieppe Road, they grabbed a petrified French boy from his bicycle. The frightened lad was on his way to find a doctor to treat his mother, who had been wounded by an RAF bomb that missed its target on the battery, and he confirmed its location and over-estimated its garrison at 200 men. Moving along the road to Berneval, the commandos took the precaution of scaling a telegraph pole and cutting the telephone wires to Dieppe.
Major Young’s group reached the edge of the village, just as six Hurribombers from 175 Squadron pitched their 250-pound bombs into the battery. The doubling commandos were greeted by ‘about twenty inhabitants, who showed great friendliness, particularly the boys and young men, one of whom pointed out the exact position of the Battery.’ Moving more slowly north up the main Berneval-le-Grand street, the commandos passed the local Sappers-Pompier putting out a fire caused by Allied bombing in a house, while the French boy’s wounded mother was evacuated in a wheel-barrow. In spite of this, the French people were not resentful. However, Major Young and his group came under Spandau fire from the church tower, which sending flakes of stone, whining around their ears, as wildly-aimed enemy fire struck the buildings above them. With covering fire from Private Anderson’s only weapon, a pistol, the group went to ground. Two officers armed with Thompson sub-machine guns returned fire. Neither of these weapons had a realistic chance of hitting the enemy at the range in question, but return fire kept the heads of the Wehrmacht coastal infantry down until the 2-inch mortar and its six rounds of high explosive could be brought into action against the church tower. As an area weapon, a light mortar would not normally be the weapon of choice for such a target, but it was all they had available. With skill or luck the commandos, having fired several rounds, knocked-out the Spandau with a direct hit by an HE bomb. The COHQ report states:
‘An attempt was then made to climb the belfry, from the top of which it would have been possible to snipe the Battery effectively with the Bren gun. There were no stairs, however, or other means of climbing to the top, and this plan was perforce abandoned. Major Young then made his way through an orchard, passing a dummy AA gun, into cornfields; here desultory sniping fire was opened on our men.’
The view across the valley from Yellow II Beach towards Berneval-le-Grande showing to route taked by the commandos up to the Dieppe - Berneval Road
Plumes of water amongst the Allied ships, thrown up by heavy shell fire shortly after dawn on 19 August 1944
The rebuilt church at Berneval and the area where the commandos come under fire
All this time, the battery, probably with only a single gun in action, was engaging the landing ships off Dieppe ‘at a very slow rate’ of fire. It is estimated that ‘the number of rounds got off was not more than twenty.’ The reason that only a single gun was firing is not known, but we can speculate that the RAF bombing had knocked out or damaged the guns or otherwise neutralised some of the gun crews. Whateve
r the reason, it could surely only be a matter of time before more guns came into action. Although the remainder of No 3 Commando, who had been seen heading for Yellow I, had failed to arrive, Major Young recalls that his group’s rapid advance into the village, and a ‘dose of enemy fire’, had restored his men’s morale:
‘They had now got their blood up and quite recovered their spirits. They were beginning to enjoy themselves . . . There seemed to me to be no future in advancing against a hidden enemy, and it occurred to me that we might be better off in the cornfields . . . In the Army, you are told that two bricks will stop a bullet. I announced that nine feet of corn would stop a bullet. Fortunately, my soldiers believed this, or appeared to. We ran into the cornfield and opened a fairly heavy fire on the battery, but not rapid because I hadn’t got much ammunition.’
Reconciled to the fact that they were on their own, the commandos worked their way forward to within two hundred yards of the battery and, at nearly 0630 hours, they opened fire on the German gunners. Deliberately dispersed, Major Young’s small command did their best to simulate a larger force, by firing and crawling back out of sight before dashing to a new fire position. As a result of their small-arms fire, the German gunners were prevented from serving their guns, as they would have had to stand up in their open concrete gun positions.
At this stage, commandos were thwarted in their attempt to close right up to the battery when ML 346, waiting off Yellow Beach, opened fire on Goebbels Battery with her diminutive 3-pounder gun. Although the high-explosive content was relatively small, the friendly shell splinters also kept the commandos back at a respectful distance.
Air photograph of the Yellow Beaches and Berneval areas dated 17 August 1942
Eventually the German gunners traversed one of the 170mm guns inland, and the commandos saw the gun being depressed to engage them. When the gun fired, it was apparent that it could not depress sufficiently to engage Major Young’s commandos, and the shell passed overhead to explode about a mile inland. Fire was returned by shooting into the gun’s ‘black and yellow fumes,’ which drove the gunners to cover; thereafter, until 0730 hours, they kept the enemy gunners’ heads down. However, with little ammunition, with German reinforcements no doubt on the way, and with such a small force under his command, Major Young sent Captain Selwyn ‘back to form a bridge-head on the beach, with orders to fire three white Verey lights if an LCP was available for evacuation. These were presently seen to burst in the sky.’
Air photography and the resulting intelligence overprints had a long way to go before they reached the standards of those issued to D Day troops.
It was not to be a headlong dash to the beach: that would be an invitation to be overwhelmed by the Germans, who had to be keep at a respectful distance, while the commandos ‘leapfrogged’ back to the beach from fire position to fire position. As they approached the cliff, Lieutenant Ruxton, Trooper About and Major Young gave covering fire with the Bren gun, while the remainder made their way through the wire. On reaching the gully down to the beach, Lance Corporal White, a commando volunteer from the Devon Regiment, stepped on a mine; but despite his terrible wound, he recovered the 3-inch mortar that had been abandoned on the beach, and successfully fired all four available rounds at the battery. This, in the finest traditions of his regiment and the commando spirit, he did under his own initiative.
The Army Commandos fought under their own parent regiments cap badge
At 0737 hours, Lieutenant Bukee very bravely ordered his coxswain to take LCP(L) 15 into Yellow I Beach, under the heavy covering fire provided by ML 346, who kept the Germans on the cliff top at bay. This fire enabled the now-vulnerable commandos to struggle into the sea, taking the wounded Lance Corporal White with them. Lieutenant Ruxton, with his Bren gun resting on top of his Mae West lifejacket, Trooper About and Major Young were the last three men to reach the landing craft at about 0810 hours. According to the ship’s log, at 0820 hours, LCP(L) 15 was ‘withdrawing under the cover of smoke and returning to England, being unsuccessfully attacked by a Ju 88 at 1045 hours.’
Major Young and the eighteen commandos on this single craft were the only ones among No. 3 Commando who landed on Yellow Beach I and II who reached the UK, less Lance Corporal Sinclair. They rejoined the remainder of Lieutenant Colonel Durnford-Slater’s No. 3 Commando at Newhaven. The men left at Yellow Beach I, mostly wounded, became prisoners of war.
R Craft heading north back to England.
The COHQ report summarised the operations at Yellow Beach:
‘So much for the attempt to capture and destroy the “Goebbels” Battery to the east of Dieppe. It was not crowned with success, but there is no doubt that the sniping tactics employed by Major Young and his men greatly interfered with the handling of the battery for upwards of an hour and a half, during the critical period of the landing.’
To the success of the commandos must be added a reminder that the six Hurribombers of 175 Squadron probably also played a significant part in neutralizing the Goebbels or Batterie 2/770 on the morning of 19 August 1942.
Major Peter Young (centre) and some of his men celebrate their success with navy rum during the passage home.
Soldiers of 3 Commando pose for photographs on the quay side at Newhaven on the morning of 20 August 1942.
CHAPTER FIVE
OPERATION CAULDRON
‘Commandos - Churchill’s rats who kill by night.’
Signal 1942
The second of the major coastal batteries that the commandos attacked during the preliminary operations lay five miles west of the port. Code-named Hess by the British, it lay about a thousand yards inland from the cliffs, near the village of Varengeville, and it was capable of covering the sea approaches to Dieppe. COHQ described the battery as ‘together with Goebbels, constituting the most important part of the defence of Dieppe.’ This was to be the objective of Lieutenant Colonel The Lord Lovat’s No. 4 Commando. Their mission was to destroy the guns before they could come into action against the Canadians, who would be disembarking at dawn from the landing ships into their assault craft.
Hess Battery, commanded by Hauptmann Scholer, was in fact the Wehrmacht 813 Batterie, consisting of six 150mm guns designed prewar specifically for coastal defence. It was sited to engage shipping off Dieppe at a range of 8,600 yards, which was well within the battery’s maximum range of seventeen miles. Intelligence translated the battery’s orders captured during the raid: one specific task read, ‘On receipt of the order “Sperrfeuer Dieppe” six rounds per gun are to be fired.’ This single fire mission of thirty-six rounds would be the foretaste of things to come once the battery ranged on Allied shipping.
In February 1942, work had begun on improving the battery position, and by August, each of the six guns was positioned in an open concrete gun pit and mounted on a platform that enabled engagements to be carried out over a full 360 degrees. Five of the guns were in single line, while the sixth was located some distance from the main battery. The Germans had put considerable resources into the air and ground defence of the battery, but despite this, at the time of the raid the Kriegsmarine were pressing for the battery to be relocated to a less vulnerable position within the defended perimeter of Dieppe. At the battery, the commandos were to face a dual-purpose 20mm anti-tank/anti-aircraft gun and a further two 20mm anti-aircraft guns, one of which was mounted in a ten-metre-high flak tower immediately behind the main gun position. The battery observation post manned by Kriegsmarine coastal gunnery specialists was in a cliff-top lighthouse between the two beaches that No. 4 Commando was to use for landing.
Construction of a gun pit for a 150mm coastal on the Atlantic Wall. Note the use of slave labour from eastern Europe.
Three of the Hesse Battery’s guns, photographed in their concrete gun pits.
The ground defences consisted of nine half-section posts, each of four or five men under a junior NCO, based on light machine gun. Covering relatively open fields of fire out to 200 to 300 yards, two of these
positions were of concrete construction, while the remainder were placed in ordinary revetted field defences. Altogether, the commandos were told that they could expect to encounter up to five hundred Kriegsmarine gunners and marine infantry: the garrison numbered somewhat over a hundred men. 813 Batterie was surrounded by a double barbed-wire fence and it was expected that the gap between the two fences would be sown with anti-personnel mines.