If the proposed naval force was indeed impressive, the turnout in the skies in support of the operation was stellar. With more than 800 aircraft taking part, including 150 heavy bombers, eight squadrons of low-level attack aircraft, and more than 500 fighters providing an air umbrella above, it promised to be the greatest display of air power since the Battle of Britain.
As for the military contribution, the plan required almost a full infantry division—roughly four thousand men. There was also a battalion of tanks containing three squadrons of the latest Churchill tanks, supported by a battalion of about five hundred airborne troops that included paratroop and glider forces.
The executive responsibility for launching, postponing or cancelling the raid came under the Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth, Admiral Sir William James, one of Blinker Hall’s veterans from Room 40 in the Admiralty. He would be responsible for giving the order to commence the operation. But once the forces left the harbours in southern England, they would be in the hands of the naval force commander, who would shepherd them across the Channel to their landing sites and deliver them to shore. From there, the military commander would take over once they landed and until they re-embarked for their return to England at the raid’s end. The air force commander would conduct the air battle throughout from his base at home.
Officially, Operation Rutter steamed ahead without a clearly specified goal: following direct orders from Churchill, the minutes of the meetings could not include anything that was classified as Ultra Secret.20 It is this ambiguity has led to many misconceptions over the years—for example, that the raid was launched to placate calls by Stalin and the Americans for a second front; or that the objective was to prove the strategic impossibility of a second front at the time; or that the raid was put on simply to draw the Luftwaffe into a battle of attrition. But none of these goals are credible as the main reason or the driving force for the raid, as a brief review of the other operations planned for the months ahead reveals.
Operation Sledgehammer, scheduled for the fall, would placate calls for a limited second front and also serve to draw German land and air forces from the eastern front; when the British chiefs of staff nixed the idea in the spring, replacing it with Operation Gymnast—the invasion of North Africa, later known as Operation Torch—even Stalin, Britain’s most demanding critic, was satisfied with that relocated second front.21 In addition, the Royal Air Force firmly believed that Operation Imperator, the proposed landing of two to four divisions on both sides of Boulogne, designed specifically to entice the Luftwaffe into a potentially fierce battle lasting from two to four weeks, went much further towards achieving this goal than Operation Rutter’s seventeen-hour duration.22 On that same note, the RAF also began to consider using feints and fake raids, such as Operation Coleman, to draw the Luftwaffe out over the Channel rather than risk the commitment of land forces ashore to achieve that objective.23
Most important, the intelligence blackout and the failure of Operations Chariot and Myrmidon to produce the materials Bletchley needed strip away any notion of the Dieppe Raid being organized strictly for the sake of raiding or designed specifically to fail. In fact, just one day after the Dieppe Raid, Frank Birch at Bletchley’s Naval Section called for “a special operation or cutting out expedition” to be launched against ships in the harbour and German shore facilities at Derna in Libya, in Marsa Matruh in Egypt or on the island of Crete.24
Meanwhile, at home, both Godfrey and Mountbatten knew that if Combined Operations Headquarters, supported by the NID, could pull off a pinch at this darkest of times and end the silence brought on by the four-rotor Enigma, that feat would also enhance their own reputations and deliver “political currency” far exceeding its weight in gold within the closed Whitehall establishment—and, of course, with Ultra’s number one consumer, Churchill.
The evidence from the early planning in April and May 1942 points to Operation Rutter being a unique stand-alone mission of an intentionally ambiguous nature, which, because of its limited size, scope and duration, could not achieve, let alone replace, the strategic objectives called for in the other operations. Why, then, was it planned and approved, particularly without a hint of opposition from the chiefs of staff? The elements of surprise and shock, the novel use of tanks, and the capture of the port, the airfield and various German headquarters were considered essential features right from the start. But only if we bring those points together within the context of the evidence now emerging—the vital role of intelligence in the war effort, the critical importance of pinch raids to the cryptographic efforts, the urgent need to solve the four-rotor Enigma blackout, the preferred form for pinch raids and the desire to conduct them ashore—does the Dieppe Raid start to make sense.
Although Lord Louis Mountbatten and Jock Hughes-Hallett would cry foul after the actual Dieppe Raid, Operation Jubilee, on August 19, 1942, they, just like Churchill and the chiefs of staff, expressed no hesitation at all in the lead-up to the same plan in Operation Rutter in the spring. Even the obdurate Alan Brooke—the newly promoted Chief of the Imperial General Staff who kept Churchill’s penchant for wildcat operations in check and, while applauding Mountbatten’s enthusiasm, dismissed his martial ability—voiced nothing but support throughout the planning process. In fact, Brooke had in pre-war days spent his summers in Dieppe and, after hearing about the proposed raid for the first time, noted emotionally in his diary: “Little did I ever think in my journeys of Newhaven–Dieppe that I should have been planning as I was this morning!”25 It was only after the disastrous results that these men attempted to distance themselves from the fallout. At any point during the planning process, they had the opportunity and the obligation to shut the whole project down or to force a fundamental change if they felt they should. Yet they saw merit in this risky direct assault—even though, without inside knowledge, it seemed to make no sense at all.
* While on location filming Dieppe Uncovered for History Television, my filmmaking partner, producer/director Wayne Abbott, and I spent a day talking to some of the local inhabitants, including Karine and Mathieu Leducq, the present owners of Les Arcades hotel, which is still there. As Mathieu pointed out to us, with photographic evidence in hand, his hotel had been in the same location for over fifty years before the raid. He confirmed that there used to be a hotel/restaurant called Le Moderne across the street in the alternative target location, until approximately 1973. Wayne and I then checked in a phone book from 1939 in the local Dieppe archives, and it confirmed Mathieu’s story, although we could not discover what became of the hotel during the occupation. We did, however, have with us an account from the diary of Georges Guibon, a Dieppe resident, who chronicled his experiences wandering through the town on the morning of the raid. Quite incidentally, he mentions the death of the owner of Les Arcades—a man by the name of Verel—who, after being hit by a stray bullet from Pollet Cliff, crawled into the tiny elevator and died. This account was confirmed by Mathieu, who then called the archives and had them produce a copy of Verel’s death certificate. It was witnessed by one of his waitresses, meaning that his hotel and restaurant were in operation on the day of the raid. Obviously, then, the Hôtel Les Arcades did not host a German headquarters.
TEN
ALL THE KING’S MEN
We just wanted to get at them.
—PRIVATE RON BEAL TO DAVID O’KEEFE
Since the fall of France in 1940, Canadian Army divisions had been idling their time in camps along England’s Sussex coast. Originally they had the important task of standing guard against the threat of a German invasion, but by the spring of 1942 it was clear that Hitler’s focus and forces had moved east, to the Soviet Union. Restless in this role, the men had begun to show the first signs of sagging morale the year before, when the repetitive training and pointless defensive exercises started to take their toll. Unproven in battle in this new war, the Canadians in their own estimation had a great legacy from the Great War to uphold.
By the end of the Firs
t World War, the Canadian Corps was renowned as the “Shock Army of the British Empire,” ready, willing and able to take on the toughest, dirtiest and costliest jobs. Stunning victories at Vimy, Hill 70 and Amiens, to name but a few, had all made significant contributions to the Allied war effort. This new generation of Canadian soldiers now demanded a chance to have their own crack at the enemy.1 “We just wanted to get at them,” Private Ron Beal of Toronto’s Royal Regiment of Canada told me—a simple but common refrain among the nearly fifty thousand Canadian troops cooling their heels in England while other Commonwealth nations engaged Axis forces around the globe. That February, with no signs of battle on the horizon, the crusty and uncompromising technocrat General Andrew McNaughton, the senior Canadian Army commander in England, began to agitate for action.
To alleviate the growing tension among the soldiers, the Canadian units had for over half a year been engaged in commando-like training for small-scale amphibious operations, hoping at least to participate in a series of hit-and-run raids along the French and Norwegian coasts. Up to this point, the Spitsbergen raid in Norway in August 1941, which had included some five hundred Canadian soldiers, had been the highlight, along with limited involvement in a few other pinprick attacks. That left the vast majority of the Canadian officers and men without any experience in large-scale operations of any kind. At home, Canadians were getting as restless for real action as the soldiers waiting around in England. Fearing, somewhat naively, that the war would be over before the Canadians could take part in any substantial fighting, Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King added his voice to his general’s complaints. Suddenly, from early 1942 onward, the pressure from Canadian authorities to engage in active operations increased dramatically.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant General Harry Crerar, General McNaughton’s highly ambitious subordinate, was pulling out all the stops to get the Canadians into action. Ready, if necessary, to use his personal relationship with his old friend and First World War compatriot General Sir Alan Brooke, Crerar got the nod from McNaughton to approach General Sir Bernard Paget at GHQ Home Forces, as well as the chiefs of staff. In a move that one historian has called a clear case of “misplaced nationalism,”2 the crafty and determined Crerar managed to obtain full support from Paget’s headquarters and, eventually, from General Brooke and the chiefs of staff. That left the Canadian high command, unknowingly at first, muscling in on the embryonic Operation Rutter—thereby hitching itself to the Combined Operations train bound for Dieppe.3
The Canadians, however, were not Louis Mountbatten’s first choice to take part in the Dieppe Raid, nor had he seriously considered them for the operation until the political realities of coalition warfare forced his hand. His original preference was his favourite, the Royal Marine Division, the infantry arm of the Royal Navy. “I was anxious to use troops that had amphibious knowledge,” he wrote years later, “and had some actual active services experience. There were enough of the Royal Marines and certainly in the Commandos to qualify them for such a description.”4 But the chiefs of staff saw no reason to keep the Royal Marines around as a division-sized unit; it was only the decision to break them down into commando-sized units that saved this storied branch of the armed services. At that point, Mountbatten still held out the hope that they would be the preferred commando unit to handle pinch operations in his expanding empire, particularly at Dieppe.
“I remember going on and on at Brookie [Alan Brooke],” he wrote years later, “and asking not to have to take the Canadians. However he said that Crerar was absolutely adamant that they should be used and that the P.M. was prepared to accept them. I was thus overridden.”5 His reluctance likely stemmed in part from the starring role he had in mind for his Royal Marines, but also—and perhaps this was more important—from the secret pinch imperative in Operation Rutter. In a carefully crafted, vague recollection of events penned years before the public revelation of Ultra, Mountbatten stated:
Brookie spoke to me personally about the desire of the Canadians to be brought into a raiding operation as soon as possible. My recollection is that I protested strongly because Dieppe was such a large scale and uncertain operation. We were still trying to find out things and even if successful in all our aims there would be nothing much to show for it to the outside world and we were bound to have heavy casualties.6
Certainly, Mountbatten’s professed regard for Canadian casualties, or any casualties in this context, is strictly designed to distance himself from the disastrous results, just as the vague mention of “trying to find out things” is a euphemistic cover for the pinch.
Although Mountbatten likely didn’t know it at the time, Canada was an emerging SIGINT partner. A handful of Canadians, including Prime Minister Mackenzie King, the Canadian Chief of the Naval Staff, Vice Admiral Percy Nelles, and his Director of Naval Intelligence, Commander Herbert Little, were aware of Ultra, with the latter two actively using the intelligence supplied by the Naval Section at Bletchley Park to help fight the convoy battle in the Atlantic. Both were all too aware of the terrible problems being caused by the current blackout but most likely knew nothing about the pinch. In addition, the Canadians had made inroads of their own into cryptography with the establishment of the Examination Unit in Ottawa and a network of intercept stations across the country, which were providing intelligence to assist in both the European and Pacific theatres of the war. Perhaps more important, Churchill’s British Security Co-ordination, a covert organization established in May 1940 by the British Secret Intelligence Service (or MI6, as it was coming to be called at the time) for intelligence and propaganda purposes in the Americas, was run from its Rockefeller Center offices in New York City by William Stephenson, a Canadian multi-millionaire industrialist who, by the end of the war, would be a close friend of Ian Fleming. Stephenson handled the main relay station for Ultra traffic in North America, code-named Hydra and located at a Top Secret base in Whitby, Ontario, known famously as Camp X.
Although members of the Canadian high command in England were not yet fully “indoctrinated” into or apprised of Ultra (with the exception of Lieutenant General Kenneth Stuart, the Chief of the Canadian General Staff), there was nothing to prevent them from being partially let in on the secret. But in the carefully stovepiped world of intelligence and the military, which operated on a “need to know” basis, all they were told was the main objective for the raid, its general significance to the war effort and the fact that it was worth risking everything to obtain. In other words, they had generally the same limited information as the men in Ian Fleming’s Intelligence Assault Unit.
At that time, cultural and nationalist lines between Canada and Great Britain were much more blurred than they are today, so it is not surprising that the British high command viewed Canada’s contribution to the war as part of the Empire or Commonwealth effort. In their thinking, Canadian troops were to play their role as part of the imperial team, not as a stand-alone national force like the United States Army. The Canadian servicemen stationed in Sussex were thus under the Home Forces command of the British general Sir Bernard Paget, who was responsible for all military contributions to operations in the Channel area. Once persuaded by Crerar, it was easy for Paget to acquiesce to Canadian demands for action, even in an operation like Rutter with an Ultra Secret core.
On April 27, just two days after Mountbatten had signed off on the outline plan for Operation Rutter, Lieutenant General Bernard Law Montgomery, who under Paget commanded the South-Eastern Army, called Harry Crerar to a meeting at his headquarters. Monty, as he was fondly called, was about to head off to North Africa—and legendary fame as the hero of El Alamein. Never one to suffer fools gladly or deviate from his precise approach to military professionalism, he told the eager Canadian commander that a raid on an unidentified port was in the offing and asked whether the Canadians wanted to be part of the operation.
“You bet,” came the reply.
And with this quick utterance, the fate of thousands
of Canadians was sealed.7
Now began the internal battle for command. The mixture of military and naval minds, talents and temperaments was what Combined Operations was all about, with all three services putting aside their partisan differences for the common good under the overall leadership of Dickie Mountbatten—or so the theory went. Through late April, the three armed services had been selecting the men they wanted to nominate as force commanders for Operation Rutter, although the appointments would not be made official until after the chiefs of staff had met on May 13. The raid, like other combined operations, would come under joint command, meaning that, on the day, each of the force commanders from the land, sea and air elements would have his own job to do, but there was no single head responsible for overall planning or execution. The RAF put forward Air Vice-Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, who, as commander of No. 11 Group from Fighter Command, was responsible for the air defence of southern England, including London. The Royal Navy chose Rear Admiral Tom Baillie-Grohman, who was currently on active duty in the Mediterranean and would join the triumvirate after their first meeting in June. For the land force commander, General Paget’s headquarters selected Major General Hamilton “Ham” Roberts, the commander of the Second Canadian Infantry Division.
The fifty-year-old Trafford Leigh-Mallory came from the Cheshire countryside and had studied history at Magdalene College, Cambridge, before becoming a barrister in the years leading up to the First World War. He had survived two gruelling years of front-line fighting in the trenches as an infantryman, including the first poison-gas attack in history at the second battle of Ypres, before transferring to the Royal Flying Corps, where he won the Distinguished Service Order for commanding aerial reconnaissance squadrons. In the interwar years it was his older brother, the celebrated mountaineer George Mallory, who stole the headlines as he attempted to become the first man to reach the summit of Mount Everest, only to disappear on her slopes in 1924 not far from the peak.8 By the time the Battle of Britain began in the skies over England in the summer of 1940, Trafford Leigh-Mallory had risen to command No. 12 Group, which defended central England, with fifteen squadrons containing nearly two hundred Spitfire and Hurricane fighters under his command. He then moved on to No. 11 Group, which had already borne the brunt of the fighting on the south coast of England. Leigh-Mallory was as aggressive as he was ambitious, pioneering the “Big Wing” theory of air warfare in the RAF: he advocated decisive battles with the Germans, using large groups of fighters in a pack, rather than the piecemeal, hit-and-run attacks currently employed. He wanted to try out this strategy in the skies over Dieppe.
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