One Day in August

by David O'Keefe

  While the main landing unfolded, an additional infantry battalion would land at Pourville and, with help from some of the tanks that had landed on the main beach, push southwest to capture the Luftwaffe airfield on the outskirts of Dieppe and the German army headquarters located in Arques-la-Bataille. An interesting feature of this plan, one worthy of Horatio Hornblower, called for a Cutting Out Force of Royal Navy vessels, with commandos riding on their decks, to storm into the port in the best “privateering” tradition and snatch as many German barges as they could to take back to England as “prizes.” As one critic later wrote, this was “a classic example of a planning officer dreaming up a task for the lack of finding anything better since there was no possibility of these craft being of any use to the British.”5 Or so it seemed.

  Operation Rutter, as the plan was code-named, would be a race against time. Unlike an invasion attempt, where assaulting forces storm ashore to capture and hold ground, build up their strength and expand the bridgehead, then break out into enemy-held territory—as happened in Normandy in 1944—the Dieppe Raid from the start was planned as a one-day “return ticket” or “butcher and bolt” raid designed to last no more than seventeen hours. That meant the raiders had to cross the English Channel undetected to maintain surprise, get ashore and quickly overwhelm the defenders, seize their objectives, wreak havoc in the port area, and withdraw under cover of darkness before substantial German reinforcements could arrive to obliterate them.

  At this point, although the planning process clearly laid down the two options available when it came to method, nothing specifically revealed the exact goal for the raid. Obviously, the objective involved the capture of the port, even by frontal assault if necessary. But what was so important about gaining the port in the first place, let alone in such a direct and perhaps costly way?

  Technically, Jock Hughes-Hallett was correct when he said that Dieppe had “no particular military significance.” Bound by the provisions of the Official Secrets Act, he chose his words carefully while penning his unpublished memoirs, “Before I Forget,” long before the secret of Ultra was released to the public. Much of the truth behind his account of Dieppe has been left in the shadows, replaced by convenient excuses, omissions or redirections of sensitive issues that make no mention of any pinch, captured documents, or special operations that were planned to obtain these materials. When he employed the term “military” in this context, the shrewd naval officer was using it in its proper sense. For most laymen, the word is synonymous with all branches of the armed services. Within the confines of the defence establishment, however, it was, and still is, applied only to issues involving the army or air force, and never the navy, which always used the term “naval.” In this case, although Dieppe may not have offered Hughes-Hallett and his planning team a tantalizing “military” target, it certainly loomed large for “naval” concerns.

  By the first week of February 1942, the NID and the Naval Section at Bletchley knew that Admiral Karl Dönitz’s U-boats operating in the Atlantic had begun to use the four-rotor Enigma machine to encrypt their top-secret messages. As frightening and potentially cataclysmic as this development certainly was, a more disturbing prospect had appeared just weeks before, when Bletchley learned that a small number of German destroyers bound for operations in Norwegian waters had been outfitted with the machine as well. So far as the NID could tell, these destroyers had yet to begin operations with the new machine, and the extent of its use seemed limited, but the potential implications were clear. Godfrey went into overdrive to monitor the situation and actively pursue remedies, one of which involved Fleming’s proposed Intelligence Assault Unit.

  First, however, Godfrey had to locate the right target—one that would house the desired material for the pinch but not be so obvious as a heavily defended submarine base or an isolated U-boat or trawler at sea. As Godfrey had already laid out in January in his new pinch policy, port headquarters, naval wireless stations and other shore-based facilities were prime targets; the fluid nature of naval warfare meant that all these sites, regardless of location, had to possess the latest cipher machines and materials in order to maintain a link in the elaborate Kriegsmarine net. In April, when the Naval Section discovered that “some ships in the [English] channel were provided with the new machine,” the information simply confirmed Godfrey and Fleming’s suspicion that the Channel offered a lucrative environment, just as it had earlier when they planned Operation Ruthless. The small resort town of Dieppe, which was well within the reach of RAF air cover, offered a potential pinch gold mine. 6

  Until the recent release of classified Ultra Secret documents that reveal the importance of the codebooks and encrypting sheets that were contained in trawlers like these stationed in Dieppe harbour, the significance of their capture, detailed in the original raid plans, made little sense. Rather, it seemed to paint a picture of gross incompetence on the part of the planners. (photo credits 9.6)

  By early April, the combined efforts of the Operational Intelligence Centre in London and the Naval Section at Bletchley had firmly established through Ultra, TINA, aerial photographs and agent reports that Dieppe regularly handled a collection of vessels that most likely carried the desperately needed materials.7 Armed trawlers, E-boats, R-boats, MTBs, destroyers, patrol boats, and auxiliary craft that engaged in coastal convoy escort, mine laying, dredging of accesses to ports and anti-submarine missions all at various times called Dieppe home. Among this collection of vessels—especially the trawlers—they could find material for the naval Enigma as well as the cribs that were ideal backdoor cheats: RHV, short signals, E-bars, Z-bars, weather and dockyard ciphers, a Kriegsmarine general cipher, and books containing naval nomenclature. Although there was no guarantee that these vessels would be in the harbour on the morning of an attack, the odds were definitely in the raiders’ favour that at least some of them would be berthed along the quays in the outer harbour, and probably with only skeleton crews to defend them. If not, Godfrey had another—fail-safe—plan.

  Because of its geographical location, Dieppe had to be prepared to handle communications with all types of craft at a moment’s notice, as had occurred in February when the Prinz Eugen had joined with the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in a mad “Channel dash” from Brest to the German home waters. With Dieppe forming a key link in the Kriegsmarine signals chain in France, Godfrey suspected that the port would house the latest cipher equipment and material. Given the fact that the port also served as a naval supply base for this part of the Channel, the German navy in Dieppe would have to maintain code books and cipher materials not only for the current period but for months into the future, ready for eventual issue. With the recent distribution of the four-rotor to surface vessels operating in the area, the odds were extremely high that the British could find the four-rotor material there. In short, Dieppe was, in modern parlance, a “target-rich environment.”

  And so, on April 6, less than twenty-four hours after the abandonment of Operation Myrmidon and its failure to pinch material at Bayonne, the possible location of a German naval headquarters in Dieppe suddenly appeared as an urgent addendum to the report of Godfrey’s ISTD. It included a “New Objectives List,” and was joined later by a request from the NID for the capture of various types of craft in the harbour. The pinch was very much in the forefront before the operational planning actually began and Mountbatten’s headquarters officially adopted Dieppe as its next target.8

  Two days later, in a move that clearly indicates great urgency, Godfrey, or perhaps more likely Fleming working on his behalf, challenged an intelligence report about a small hotel called the Moderne, apparently located at 21 rue Vauquelin on the corner with the Quai Duquesne, overlooking the inner harbour. Usually these matters were left to lower-ranking officers to deal with, so the personal interest of these top men in the target search, let alone the challenge to the veracity of the report, indicates the vital importance of this target. For Godfrey and Fleming, the detailed descr
iption of the hotel cast doubt on whether a structure as small as the Moderne was indeed used by the Kriegsmarine, which traditionally preferred seaside villas and other grandiose buildings:

  This hotel is situated on the RUE VAUQUELIN on the corner of the street nearest the harbour. The hotel is almost certainly on the north side of the street but a possibility exists that it is on the south side. The full address is 21, RUE VAUQUELIN.

  The hotel is a small one consisting of a restaurant with a few rooms upstairs. The main entrance is on the quay and is in the centre of the building. This leads into the Restaurant. To the north of this is a second entrance leading upstairs. It is believed that there is a third entrance on the RUE VAUQUELIN. The quay at this point is arcaded so that the entrances open onto the Arcade.

  Since this hotel is so small, it does not seem likely that it is being used as Headquarters and considerable doubt is therefore thrown on the original report. Special enquiries are being made and it is hoped to give further information shortly.9

  There are no indications in the documents as to what inquiries were made, and I was unable to uncover any paper trail to establish exactly what changed their minds, but six weeks later, in the second week of June, neither Fleming nor Godfrey had further concerns. Without any explanation, there is a simple note in the file to say that the Hôtel Moderne “is now considered by NID to be Naval Headquarters.”10

  From a historical perspective, whether the hotel actually housed a German naval headquarters or some other naval facility is still open to debate, but the point is of secondary importance to this story; what is crucial is what the planners thought at the time. Although they did not know it, the first location at 21 rue Vauquelin was incorrect: it housed the Hôtel Les Arcades, which had been there from the turn of the century and, in 1942, still hosted German soldiers and sailors and the occasional civilian to lunch or dinner in its lobby restaurant. That ruled it out as a functioning naval headquarters.*

  The secondary target, located across the street, was in fact the Hôtel Moderne; it fit the physical description that the NID originally balked at, but no record has surfaced to show what was happening there during the occupation. Some photographs from the wartime period clearly show one naval headquarters facility on the boulevard de Verdun located in an old school not far from the casino, while others show a similar facility near the end of Quai Henri IV, where it meets the inner channel. Although existing German documents do not reveal a specific location in the port, a preliminary report drawn up by the German naval commander in the Channel area provides a list of the German naval formations on duty in the town. They include close to 360 men in total, with 152 attached to the “harbour commandant’s headquarters,” 44 with an “Army signals transmission station,” 11 with a “naval signals station,” 4 with a teletype detachment, 4 with a “wireless deception sender,” 44 with the “6th Flotilla Base unit,” and roughly 100 with the “port protection flotilla.”11 In the same file, another report makes mention of a special security unit tasked with destroying vital objectives such as pumping stations and lock gates, but, even more important, classified signals material located in the port should they be faced with capture.

  Although this information does not confirm that the Hôtel Moderne was the correct target, it certainly shows that British intelligence was in the ballpark and that at least one site containing the desired material did exist somewhere in the tiny confines of the outer harbour, well within reach of any raider landing over the eastern half of the main beach or storming into the port to land along one of the quays.12

  Exact location aside, the significance resides in the personal involvement of Godfrey and Fleming: their nitpicking leaves little doubt of the importance and nature of the target. No other objective received so much attention. It also shows that the NID took an overriding interest in locating a rich source of pinch material—a factor that was in play right from the beginning of the planning process for the raid, even before Mountbatten, the chiefs of staff and Churchill approved the mission.13

  More significant still, the evidence reveals a new and potentially game-changing aspect of the raid that has never before been raised, let alone considered, in the Dieppe story—a saga of critical importance to Canada’s role in the Second World War.

  Brought to light here for the first time in the history of the Dieppe Raid, this is a detailed report on the Hôtel Moderne, located in the harbour at 21 rue Vauquelin, which Naval Intelligence suspected housed the German Naval HQ. Godfrey first questioned the suitability of this facility to house the Headquarters they were trying to find, but by June 12, six weeks later, Naval Intelligence was convinced, and the hotel along with the trawlers became the target for Fleming’s IAU. Along with the trawlers, the Hôtel Moderne, which no longer exists, has become the centrepiece of the Dieppe discussion. (photo credits 9.7)

  On April 14, just over a week after the aborted Operation Myrmidon failed as a pinch mission, Jock Hughes-Hallett, the head of Mountbatten’s target search committee, convened the first recorded meeting to discuss a raid under the code name Rutter at Dieppe.

  Brigadier Charles Haydon, the vice chief of Combined Operations and the man who had not only commanded the military force but organized the army commandos during the Lofoten pinch raids, presided that day. Hughes-Hallett opened the meeting with a brief pitch about Dieppe as a prospective target, and the group readily agreed that it seemed “attractive and worthwhile,” an idea definitely worth pursuing.14 Over the next five days, the planning syndicate laid out a set of objectives, with the capture of the invasion (or landing) barges and a series of German army headquarters in and around the town topping the list. Conspicuous by its absence was the Hôtel Moderne—probably because of its unconfirmed status as a German naval headquarters at that time.15 The dicey frontal assault option was also agreed upon, with the proviso that the raid be preceded by a heavy air bombardment and that the two batteries east and west of Dieppe be taken out before the landing by airborne troops. On hearing that condition, Hughes-Hallett remarked, “Though … hazardous, it was perfectly feasible so far as the Navy was concerned.”16

  On April 25, Lord Louis Mountbatten chaired his first meeting on Operation Rutter, at Combined Operations Headquarters on Richmond Terrace in Whitehall. There the planning group adopted the outline plan and confirmed the method of direct assault.17 At first Mountbatten was taken aback by the prospect of this daring frontal raid, but he quickly came on side once the arguments were laid out before him. With surprise and shock essential for success, the planners argued, it made no sense to land tanks far out on the flanks where, even under good conditions, they would need considerable time to reach the port. Each group would first have to cross a small river, and if the Germans reacted quickly and destroyed the bridges, the tanks would be delayed even more. Moreover, the latest intelligence assessment of Dieppe’s defences indicated that only 1,400 low-category troops held the town and that reinforcements would be slow to arrive, bringing the total at most to 2,500 men in the first four hours after the attack.18 Mountbatten was assured that the bombing would be of “maximum intensity,” delivered in a combination of high- and low-altitude attacks to confuse and disorient the defenders—first by heavy bombers hitting the general area, followed quickly by low-level runs with fighter bombers that would strike specific beach targets during the landings. Suitably impressed, Mountbatten signed off on the outline plan for Operation Rutter, allowing it to proceed to the Chiefs of Staff Committee for their approval.

  By the time the outline plan reached the chiefs of staff for their consideration on May 10, the target and the objective list had grown substantially. Now, in addition to the earlier goals, German E-boats and motor launches had joined the list, along with food stores, the town hall, the post office, the railway marshalling yards, the beachfront casino, and the coastguard station on the cliff at Puys, as well as the capture of prisoners and of secret documents from the divisional headquarters. The stakes were growing.

 
When the chiefs of staff actually met to discuss the proposed operation three days later, Mountbatten sought permission to move ahead with the outline plan so he could provide the various force commanders, who had yet to be appointed although they had already been named, with some guidelines to help them shape their detailed planning. At this point, the outline plan for Rutter envisioned it taking place over two tidal periods lasting roughly seventeen hours, giving the raiding force the maximum time on target before it had to withdraw. The date was set for the night of June 20–21 or any day thereafter up to June 26. It would be the largest raiding force yet put to sea. From the naval perspective alone, Jock Hughes-Hallett’s plan called for a 250-ship armada that included six Royal Navy destroyers, seven infantry assault ships, twenty-four tank landing craft, fifty R-crafts for transporting troops to shore, and a collection of motor gunboats, torpedo boats and motor launches, including HMS Locust—a flat-bottomed river gunboat formerly captained by Dick de Costobadie. This ship would carry the newly formed Royal Marine Commando, including Ian Fleming’s Intelligence Assault Unit, into battle.19