The losses on that day in August 1942 represented a snapshot of Canadian society. The lasting images were stark and unforgiving: the dead—once husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, managers, janitors, students, fishermen, farm workers and clerks, who had risked their lives in the name of Canada—lay motionless on the pebbled beaches or slumped along the narrow streets of the town, their often mangled bodies used as fodder for German propaganda. Brothers in arms for that campaign, they now rest in the cemetery close by for eternity, bonded and branded by the name “Dieppe.” For those fortunate enough to be taken prisoner, their reward was almost three years of harsh captivity, their hands and feet shackled night and day for the first eighteen months, and a cruel forced death-march in the winter of 1945 over the frozen fields of Poland and Germany. Only after that did the survivors among them reach home.
On September 1, 1944, members of Canada’s Royal Hamilton Light Infantry returned to kneel at the graves of their comrades killed at Dieppe after the port’s liberation from the German occupation. Twenty rows of graves holding more than nine hundred men lost in one morning fill the military cemetery there. (photo credits 1.1)
For many, coming home did not end their Dieppe experience. By then the regiments they had once viewed as family had rebuilt, and they found few there who had shared their particular experience. Unlike so many other veterans, they had no “band-of-brothers” stories to share, of storming the beaches on D-Day, slugging it out in Normandy, progressing through France and Belgium, or delivering the Dutch from the twin evils of starvation and Nazi Germany. Although the Canadian Army fought successfully and heroically through Italy and northwest Europe later in the war, nothing dislodged the Dieppe stigma. A few of the lucky ones managed to move on, reminded of the “shame and the glory” only at chilly Remembrance Day ceremonies, on muggy August anniversaries, or during an occasional night terror. Without proper care for what we now recognize as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), some who could not exorcise the Dieppe demons found temporary solace by lashing out in numerous and at times self-destructive ways instead.
The raid, it should be remembered, was not strictly “Canadian”: conducted under the overall command of Lord Louis Mountbatten’s Combined Operations Headquarters, close to five thousand other Allied soldiers, sailors and airmen, mostly from the United Kingdom, with a smattering of Americans, French, Poles, Belgians and Norwegians, shared the same fateful ordeal in Operation Jubilee. They too were left with lingering frustration about the apparent lack of purpose behind the raid, a vexation captured on the web page of the Juno Beach Centre in Normandy—one of Canada’s military history ambassadors to the world:
“Dieppe was a pathetic failure,” it reads, “a bizarre operation with no chance of success whatsoever and likely to result in a huge number of casualties.”2
The historical struggle that followed has proven almost as nasty and inconclusive as the battle itself, with the finger pointing beginning not long after the sounds of conflict faded. Accusations ranged from incompetent leadership to Machiavellian intent, after those involved with the planning and conduct of the raid offered up what many felt were deeply unsatisfactory excuses for the disastrous results. The central issue remains, as it has for seven decades, the lack of any clear rationale for the raid. That absence has left a legacy not only of sorrow but of suspicion, intrigue, mistrust and even conspiracy. The common denominator—that Canadian men had been sacrificed for no obvious or tangible reason—led to a sentiment of unease that quickly built up steam in historical accounts, in the press and in public discussion.
Attempting to rationalize what has defied rationalization, researchers and commentators over the decades have sought to make sense out of the seemingly nonsensical. Historians have searched valiantly through the Allied planning papers, after-action reports, personal and official correspondence, and other ancillary documents available in the public domain, looking for any scrap of evidence that would lead to discovering the driving force or imperative behind the Dieppe Raid. Although the planning documents revealed a list of desired objectives for the raid, they remained nothing more than a grocery list of targets that offered little clue to what achieving them would actually mean in the end.
Officially, Prime Minister Winston Churchill would maintain that the raid was merely a “reconnaissance in force”—an explanation that Mountbatten and others associated with the planning and implementation of the raid expanded upon. Before long, another standard excuse emerged: the Dieppe Raid was simply to test Hitler’s vaunted Festung Europa (Fortress Europe) and, as such, it was the necessary precursor to future amphibious operations such as the D-Day landings. After that came the “sacrificial” excuses: the Dieppe Raid had been designed by Great Britain specifically to placate its new ally, the beleaguered Soviet Union, by creating the “second front now” that the Russians were demanding, and thereby drawing German air and land forces away from the East and into Western Europe. These excuses never satisfied the soldiers involved and led to a healthy skepticism among professional and amateur historians alike. Soon, fingers began to point, with suggestions that the main players in the Dieppe saga all had something to hide.
They were indeed a motley crew, some highly distinguished, others less so, and the reputations of these men have only added to the furore. Lord Louis Mountbatten, the chief of the Combined Operations Headquarters, is traditionally pegged as the main culprit, not so much for his headquarters’ handling of the planning and conduct of the raid—as “inexperienced enthusiasts”—but more for his personality.3 A vainglorious and ambitious character from royal bloodlines, “Dickie” Mountbatten is traditionally accused of operating far above his ceiling, a man primarily interested in courting the press for favourable headlines designed to put him and his headquarters on the map. But nobody in the chain of command has been spared—all have been painted to varying degrees with the same brush of suspicion and guilt. Were the force commanders who called the shots from the distant bridge of the headquarters ship HMS Calpe, offshore from Dieppe, responsible—Canadian major general John Hamilton “Ham” Roberts and Royal Navy captain John “Jock” Hughes-Hallett? Or were the highest authorities in wartime Britain, the Chiefs of Staff Committee and, ultimately, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, responsible?
It’s a truth of human nature that any void in our understanding tends to force open a Pandora’s box of wild, seductive and intriguing theories. In this case, they span the spectrum from bureaucratic bungling and inflated ambition to treasonous intent; from “raiding for the sake of raiding” to the intentional tipoff of the Germans as an act of betrayal by the French to gain favour with their occupiers. Or perhaps, some surmise, Dieppe was part of a clever game of foxes—an Allied deception to cover the upcoming invasion of North Africa—or, alternatively, an unauthorized action by Mountbatten to win praise and secure his place in history. Some commentators, citing the relative lack of firepower in the raid, for instance, and the overreliance on the element of surprise, coupled with the unprofessional approach to planning and execution, suggest that the entire operation was sacrificial in nature, intended to fail right from the start, to demonstrate the foolhardiness of American and Soviet calls for a second front in 1942.
Some theories are merely silly and irresponsible, such as the urban legend making the rounds in the cafés along Dieppe’s beachfront today that the raid was an “anniversary present” from Winston Churchill to his beloved wife, Clementine, who had summered in that delightful Channel port town in her youth—a favourite seaside holiday spot for English families.
Despite all these efforts to make sense of the Dieppe Raid, however, the mystery has remained intact for seventy years, taunting us with the pain of its legacy.
That was my own experience, almost two decades ago, in 1995, when I called up a recently declassified file in the British National Archives in London. This wartime British Admiralty file, which at first did not appear to have any connection with the Dieppe Raid, contained an appendix t
o an “Ultra Secret” classified report concerning the exploits of a highly secret Intelligence Assault Unit (IAU) that, because of its clandestine activities, was known during the war by a variety of names, most notably No. 10 Platoon, 30 Commando or 30 Assault Unit. Until the release of that file, there had been nothing to confirm the commando unit’s existence, rumoured to be the brainchild of Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve Commander Ian Fleming. Barely a decade later, Fleming would forge another lasting creation—the super-spy James Bond, the most famous, enduring character in espionage literature. The Intelligence Assault Unit was raised and trained with one specific purpose in mind: to steal, or “pinch,” the most sensitive of intelligence materials from the Germans, items needed to break their top secret codes and ciphers, including the Enigma cyphering machine, allowing the Allies to read enemy message traffic and to wage the war effectively.
A single cryptic sentence in this appendix to a wartime Admiralty report on SIGINT (signals intelligence) operations, classified “Ultra Secret,” began my inquiry almost twenty years ago. The report concerns the exploits of the clandestine “30 Assault Unit,” the commando unit created by Ian Fleming. The brief comment in paragraph 4—“As regards captures, the party concerned at DIEPPE did not reach their objective”—raised immediate questions: Why was that unit, highly trained in the capture of German cipher material, especially Enigma-related code books and documents, involved in the Dieppe Raid? What had it been tasked to “capture”? And what was the “objective”? (photo credits 1.2)
It was a short passage in the fourth paragraph that started me on my journey of discovery: “As regards captures, the party concerned at DIEPPE did not reach their objective.” The connection was startling: for the first time here was direct evidence that linked one of the greatest and most closely guarded secrets of the entire Second World War—Enigma—with the deadliest day in Canadian military history. Never before had anything similar appeared in the vast corpus of literature dealing with the Dieppe saga. Something that had remained classified as “Ultra Secret” for over half a century by British intelligence appeared to be lurking beneath the veneer of the traditional interpretations of Dieppe.
In June 1941, British intelligence adopted the term “Ultra” as a security classification for intelligence derived from tapping into enemy communications, most notably their encrypted radio and later teleprinter traffic. Considered prize intelligence—or, as Winston Churchill called it, his “golden eggs”—“Ultra Secret” went above the traditional top-level classification of Most Secret, or, as the Americans referred to it, Top Secret. Logically enough, the term quickly became a security “catch-all” that not only denoted the end product used by Churchill and his commanders to formulate their decisions on the field of battle, but also extended to the technology, processes, policies, operations and even history centred around the secret British code-breaking facility known as Bletchley Park.
Purchased by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or MI6 as it became popularly known) at the outset of the war, this sprawling Victorian estate in Buckinghamshire, just an hour’s drive north of London, was the main site for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), which was responsible for signals intelligence (SIGINT) and code-breaking. By military standards, it was a most unusual place: the requirements of the job called for the utmost in intellectual prowess, which meant recruiting some of the most “beautiful” minds that Great Britain, and later the Allies, could offer. The head of operations, Alastair Denniston, had served in British intelligence during the First World War, and now he recruited “men of the professor type,” as he called them, for the new challenge. Drawn mostly from elite universities such as Oxford or Cambridge, these men and women came from a variety of disciplines—mathematics, the sciences, linguistics, classics, history, to name but a few—literally the best and the brightest of the academic world. In this large mansion, they joined forces with gifted intelligence officers (again British and later Allied) from the navy, the air force and the army to produce something that up to that point no other country in history could boast: a relatively consistent and comprehensive ability to tap into a direct information pipeline to monitor their enemy’s strengths, weaknesses, intentions, capabilities, hopes, fears, desires and dreams. It was an incredible “ace up the sleeve” for a nation at war.
Captain Ridley’s Shooting Party: The brightest minds in England were recruited to serve at Bletchley Park, the sprawling country estate north of London. Here, a group visits the new code-breaking headquarters for the first time in August 1938, soon after it was purchased by the Secret Intelligence Service. Because of the nature of their top-secret work, on this introductory visit they were referred to only as “Captain Ridley’s shooting party.” Anne Hamilton-Grace, aged twenty-seven, described Bletchley in her own secret diary (reproduced by her daughter Elisa Segrave in The Girl from Station X) as “one of the most amazing places of this war” as well as “the most peculiar place, masses of odd-looking civil servants and men with orange shirts and long hair about.” The important work done on the estate would not come to light until many years after the war. (photo credits 1.3)
Although most of the Enigma work at Bletchley Park took place in Huts 4 and 8, this photograph of civilian and service men and women at work in Hut 3 in 1942 gives a sense of the work atmosphere. Anne Hamilton-Grace was one of the girls in Hut 3, first allocated a job as an indexer, then promoted to 4th Naval Duty Officer in Hut 3N. The month before the Dieppe Raid she wrote in her diary: “There was masses to do and I found a whole lot of inaccuracies, which drives me frantic, as it is dangerous now not to be dead right. As every little thing matters enormously …” (photo credits 1.4)
As the importance of their work to the overall war effort increased, so too did the size of Bletchley Park, with numerous numbered “huts” springing up around the grounds which visitors can still see today. These nondescript plywood barracks housed the offices of the naval, air, military and diplomatic sections, which toiled not only to break into, or decrypt, enemy messages intercepted by numerous radio intercept stations located around the British Empire, but then to turn what they intercepted and decrypted into sensible and accurate intelligence to be used by the decision makers to help win the war.
By the end of the Second World War, Sir Harry Hinsley, the official historian of British intelligence, who as a twenty-three-year-old undergraduate in history played an influential role in Bletchley’s Naval Section, concluded that Ultra may not have been the “war winner,” but it was certainly a “war shortener.” By his reckoning, it shaved at least one year, if not two, off the duration of the war, thereby saving millions of lives.4 However, with all its bumps and bruises, the road was not a smooth one. Although victory ultimately prevailed, mistakes were made along the way.
Information is power, and everyone involved in the Ultra Secret process knew it. In all such cases, then as now, it is imperative that the enemy never realize that his supposedly secure communications have been successfully penetrated. For this reason, signals intelligence and code-breaking, or cryptography, must be conducted in the strictest secrecy, or the enemy will catch on and change the codes and ciphers that guard his message traffic.
Because of its vital military importance and potential, Ultra became one of the most cherished and closely guarded secrets of the war, surpassing even the development of the atomic bomb in the postwar era. Ultra required elaborate precautions to maintain its security, given that more than ten thousand people played various roles connected with it by war’s end. Such was the secrecy surrounding the work in Bletchley Park that all those who worked and lived there—from the clerks and young female secretaries to the brilliant code-breaking “boffins”—knew that to talk about their work informally, even to dorm mates or colleagues outside their hut, was treasonous and could result in lifetime imprisonment or even execution. Accordingly, the security surrounding Ultra was to be maintained indefinitely.
As things turned out, the very existence of Ult
ra remained under wraps for over thirty years following the conclusion of the war. In the late 1970s, for reasons that are still unclear today, the British government officially, and some say unwisely, acknowledged Ultra. Even then, it took close to two more decades before the first batches of significant documents were released to the public—a release that began in 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, and continues in piecemeal fashion to this day.
Such was the nature of the recently declassified document I had unearthed in the British National Archives. As I continued to scan the pages of the document, the experience reminded me of a miner discovering his first nugget, wondering if he has indeed tapped into a lucrative vein or simply into “fool’s gold.” Thus began my nearly two-decade historical journey in search of the truth behind Dieppe.
The information contained in the document only increased my natural curiosity. What was the “objective” of this “party”? What role did the objective play in the overall context of the raid? Could it have been a long-concealed reason for the Dieppe Raid? The document offered nothing more direct than that one sentence—“the party concerned at DIEPPE did not reach their objective”—but it struck me immediately as a potential game changer. Included in the document was a general “target list” of items that Commander Ian Fleming’s Intelligence Assault Unit had been asked to pinch in the summer and fall of 1942. Labelled “Most Urgent,” the items on the list all related to the four-rotor Enigma cipher machine that the German navy (Kriegsmarine) had recently introduced to encrypt its messages before they were sent via wireless. Among these items were “specimens of the wheels used on the Enigma machine, particulars of their daily settings for wheels and plugs, code books, and all documents relating to signals and communications,” as well as anything connected with the German signals intelligence effort against British communications. Given my background as a signals intelligence and Ultra historical specialist for the Department of National Defence in Canada, those lists made perfect sense in the context of the times.
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