On board the Calpe, Ham Roberts, Tom Baillie-Grohman and Air Commodore Adrian Cole, the air liaison officer (who came from the Royal Australian Air Force), would work from the bridge and from the wardroom to ensure the safe arrival, landing and then re-embarkation of the raiding force. Meanwhile, Trafford Leigh-Mallory would monitor the air battle from his headquarters in Uxbridge, a specially constructed bunker on the Hillingdon estate west of London, with Dickie Mountbatten and Harry Crerar as his special guests for the show. On the coast, in Portsmouth, deep inside his Fort Southwick command bunker, Admiral Sir William James would give the order to go, or if necessary to scrub the mission, and once it was under way he would monitor naval operations and relay current intelligence to the raiding forces.
In any high-risk operation, redundancy and contingency planning are key, so Mountbatten arranged for an alternative set of “backup” commanders under the control of Brigadier Churchill Mann, Ham Roberts’s chief of staff, to be on board and work from Fernie in case Calpe succumbed to enemy fire or any other unforeseen event. Mountbatten, with full technocratic zeal, equipped both command ships, bristling with antennae, with nearly four times the normal allotment of transmitters and receivers, thereby linking the force commanders with the aircraft above, the vessels at sea and the troops ashore.
Once at the mid-Channel rendezvous point, the ships would form up into at least a dozen smaller assault groups. Together, they would follow British minesweepers on a predetermined course through a German minefield and head towards the four landing beaches in and around Dieppe—code-named Blue, Green, White and Red.
In the skies above, the air plan called for the largest and most sophisticated display of aerial warfare seen on the western front since the desperate days of the Battle of Britain two years earlier, when a vastly outnumbered RAF fought Hitler’s Luftwaffe to a standstill. More than eight hundred aircraft, mostly fighters drawn from seventy-four squadrons, would maintain revolving air patrols over the landing zones throughout the morning. Most of them would come from British squadrons, with a smattering of Canadian, American, Czech, Polish, Belgian and Free French as well. Their job on the day was complex: to provide close air support for the troops on the ground, to locate German reinforcements and prevent them from reaching the port area by land or sea, to lay smokescreens to obscure the view of the German defenders, and to compose an impenetrable “air umbrella” above Dieppe to fend off Luftwaffe aircraft attempting to strike the vulnerable ships below.
According to the air plan, just after midnight on the day of the raid, ground crews that had been working all day and evening would rush to top up fuel tanks, conduct weapons checks and load cannon shells for the Hurricane, Typhoon and Spitfire fighters or to rack sticks of 250- and 500-pound high-explosive bombs and smoke shells onto Blenheim and Boston bombers. Soon after, the firing of engines would shake the dew from cowlings as pilots adjusted flaps, goggles and throat microphones, making a quick check of the maps taped to their upper thighs while throttling up for takeoff. Once aloft, the planes would form up for about thirty minutes before setting course for their targets along the French coast and above Dieppe, less than half an hour away. Meanwhile, a battalion of the British 1st Airborne Brigade, including some veterans of the Bruneval raid, would squeeze into Wellington bombers or pack tightly into towed gliders for their journey to the landing zones on either side of Dieppe, carefully skirting the raiding force below to maintain surprise.
At exactly 0415 hours, all the various preparations would come together. As long as weather conditions co-operated, the paratroopers and glider-borne infantry would float to earth onto predetermined landing zones and launch their assaults on both the Hess and Goebbels coastal batteries at the same moment that two Canadian infantry battalions exploded onto the beaches of Puys and Pourville—Blue Beach and Green Beach.
The battalion landing on Green Beach would come from the South Saskatchewan Regiment, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Cecil Merritt—who would go on to earn the Victoria Cross for his heroic actions on August 19. His “prairie men,” drawn mostly from the Estevan, Weyburn, Regina and Moose Jaw areas, would land near the eight-foot-wide river Scie that snaked through Pourville into the English Channel. Here, Merritt’s force would move fast to create a semicircular bridgehead stretching from the hills on both sides of the river valley to the western headland at Dieppe, and as deep inland as “la ferme des Quatre Vents” (Four Winds Farm)—a German stronghold. According to the plan, part of the battalion would move up the slope leading from the beach and take the western headland, knocking out German bunkers and a lone radar station en route, while the remaining men held the bridgehead.24 Once there, they would ferret out defenders on the clifftop positions and neutralize any fire from the Norman castle perched atop the Dieppe skyline, while the others mopped up in Pourville and the hills west of the town, and captured the fortified farm.
One hour later—at the same time as the frontal assault was beginning on the main beach—the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders of Canada, a Winnipeg regiment, would land and push through this bridgehead to a rendezvous point with one squadron of the Calgary Tanks, which would by then have climbed up from the main beach. In unison, the infantry and the tanks would move roughly three miles inland to capture St-Aubin airfield and provide a shield to fend off any German counterattacks trying to reach Dieppe proper. With this protection in place, the raiding forces in the harbour area would enjoy the maximum opportunity to wreak havoc in the port and other targeted areas before retiring into the harbour area themselves to re-embark.
On Blue Beach in the tiny seaside town of Puys, nearly five hundred men of the Royal Regiment of Canada would land in pre-dawn darkness under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Doug Catto, followed by a company of the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) from Montreal. Their job was crucial to the success of the entire plan, for they had to overrun the entrenched German defenders, seize the clifftops above, and then move fast on foot over nearly a mile of German-occupied territory to their objective—a German gun battery, code-named Bismarck, on Pollet Cliff, able to shell the harbour mole.
The raid was essentially a race against time. Once the first shot had been fired, the clock would start ticking for both the airborne and infantry units: they had only sixty minutes to reach their targets and achieve their objectives before the frontal assault over the main beach began. Should they fail outright or suffer delay, the troops and tanks bound for the main beach would face murderous fire as soon as the ramp doors dropped and the first boot hit the beach. With little or no cover, they would advance into a horseshoe-shaped cauldron of withering German fire.
For the main-beach landings, the Rutter planners divided the zone into two interconnecting sectors, code-named Red Beach and White Beach—with the tobacco factory at the intersection of the Quai Duquesne and the boulevard de Verdun as the dividing line. There, more than a thousand Canadian infantrymen from two battalions, the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry and the Essex Scottish, supported by teams of Canadian combat engineers and two squadrons from the Calgary Tanks (thirty-six tanks from B and C squadrons), would storm ashore, race up the beach, scale the seawall, cross the promenade, and penetrate the town and port before the bewildered Germans could recover from the shock and awe of the initial attacks.
For the exposed men of the infantry and engineers, once they had touched down on the rocky beach, there was little tangible cover until they reached the boulevard de Verdun and the shadow of its hotels and restaurants and the towering smokestacks of the tobacco factory. To cross this deadly three-hundred-yard expanse, they had to work in close concert with their tanks, moving in leapfrog fashion. First, the tanks would lay down covering fire from their main guns and hull machine guns while the engineers and infantry scrambled to cut gaps in the barbed wire at the seawall with wire cutters or blow through them with long snakelike sticks of TNT known as Bangalore torpedoes. Depending on the course of the tide, the seawall could form a barrier standing anywher
e from two to ten feet in height. But the engineers were prepared for whatever conditions they encountered: they would lay belts of chestnut palings across a low-rise tide or use timber crib ramps as needed to allow the tanks to get up and over the wall to the promenade beyond.
Once over this formidable obstacle, the tanks would creep forward with guns blazing in an attempt to kill or suppress any German defenders on the beach or in the buildings or pillboxes ahead. Following them in close order, the surviving infantry and engineers would dash through any remaining belts of wire protecting German slit trenches and machine-gun pits on the promenade, killing or capturing the defenders before they reached the buildings on the boulevard de Verdun.
In the White Beach sector, where the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry and B Squadron from the Calgary Tanks would land, there was one additional hurdle to overcome before they reached the old gates leading to their objectives in the town and the fields beyond: the once-crowded Dieppe casino (the centrepiece, some allege, for Fleming’s Casino Royale). It was quite possible that the men would have to clear the structure in a bloodcurdling hand-to-hand fight. Once the casino was either cleared or bypassed, however, the four rifle companies would infiltrate the town and fan out, linking up with the South Saskatchewan Regiment on the west headland and at Quatre Vents farm, as well as the Essex Scottish coming in off Red Beach.
In the Red Beach sector, which ran from the tobacco factory to the quay lining the west side of the harbour mole, there was no such obstacle or cover for either the Essex Scottish or the engineers once they landed. Their job was to advance into the town and port accompanied by eighteen Churchill tanks from the Calgary Tank Regiment’s C Squadron. Should everything come together, they would quickly breach the seawall, cross the promenade and make it to the boulevard de Verdun in relatively good order. Then the four Essex Scottish companies would penetrate the town on foot via a series of tiny streets and approach the outer harbour, while the engineers cleared a route for the tanks by destroying the concrete anti-tank obstacles near the tobacco factory or, if that route remained blocked, on the streets farther to the east.
With the assault wave ashore, the brigade headquarters of the 4th and the 6th Canadian Infantry Brigade—led respectively by Brigadier Sherwood Lett, a Rhodes Scholar lawyer from Vancouver, and Brigadier William Southam, president and CEO of Southam Press, working directly under Ham Roberts and monitoring the battle from wireless sets aboard their landing craft offshore—would move in and establish their headquarters near the tobacco factory. Their job was to control the general flow of the battle on land and to oversee the search and demolition plans as well. Given the intricate nature of the operation, Mountbatten issued explicit written orders for each brigade headquarters to bring a set of the detailed operational instructions ashore, into what he expected would be a relatively secure area by the time they landed.
If everything unfolded according to plan, the force commanders had two cards left to play once the bridgehead was secured. The first was the “floating reserve,” containing a battalion of infantry from the Fusiliers Mont-Royal from Montreal under Lieutenant Colonel Dollard Ménard and roughly thirty Churchill tanks from the remaining squadron of the Calgary Tanks waiting offshore for their cue to join the fray. The FMR and the tanks would land over the main beach at Ham Roberts’s discretion and create an inner defensive shield within the town, forming a buffer for the assault troops to fall back on during re-embarkation at the end of the raid. If anything had gone awry in the previous phases of the plan, this floating reserve could be used anywhere in support, whether that meant reinforcing a breakthrough or bolstering a wavering part of the line.
The second card—and the one critical to the raid’s “pinch” objective—was Red Ryder’s Cutting Out Force, whose stated mission seems ripped from the pages of a C.S. Forester novel.
The role of the Cutting Out Force has been the most misunderstood aspect of the entire Dieppe operation, and it is also the most revealing. In some historical accounts, Ryder’s force is just another part of the floating reserve—ignored by Dieppe chroniclers who have understandably, given what was known until recently, focused on the dramatic events of the raid itself rather than on what was supposed to have happened if all went according to plan. As things turned out, the commitment of Ryder’s group to reinforce the Canadian infantry on the main beach has obscured the Cutting Out Force’s real purpose, just as do the carefully crafted portions of Ryder’s unpublished memoirs. But as his biographer would later point out, Ryder was a “model of self-censorship.”25
According to what Ryder recorded for posterity, his job was “to train a special body of artificers, stokers and mechanics etc. as well as a marine detachment to act as a covering force” that would swoop into Dieppe harbour, once safely in Allied hands, and snatch German barges to tow them back to England as “prize” captures.26 Although the mission “opened up exciting possibilities,” he did not have faith in their ability to operate the “complicated bridges and locks” while “possibly under fire” and preferred to sink the barges instead. Given the spirit of the times, Ryder felt strongly that the job was “worth trying” and that “the Royal Navy should be ready to take on anything.”27 This explanation makes no sense at all: wasting the talents of one of the few Royal Navy commanders with significant operational experience—and a recently minted VC winner as well—in an attack on an enemy-held port for a mere “publicity stunt” was by any measure a gross misallocation of preciously scarce resources.28
But for the very few in the know, the Cutting Out Force led by Captain Red Ryder had, in fact, a very different duty to perform that day.
* By June 29, Leigh-Mallory was worrying that his pilots, locked into the intricate Combined Operations plan for Dieppe, lacked the operational freedom they needed. He wrote to Air Vice-Marshal Sir William Sholto Douglas, his superior, that his No. 11 Group could expect to lose “60 to 70 pilots, and 120 aircraft.” The next day Douglas shot back: “Thank you for your letter of 29th June, about the casualties you anticipate you may suffer during Operation ‘Rutter.’ I do not know however quite what you expect me to do about it. I certainly do not propose to call the operation off. If I may say so, I think that you are worrying too much about these possible casualties. Unfortunately, one cannot often win a battle without considerable casualties, however much one would like to do so.” Leigh-Mallory proved to be remarkably prescient: in the final tally for Dieppe, 70 pilots were killed or missing, and 106 aircraft were shot down. (Sholto Douglas to Leigh-Mallory, 30 June 1942, TNA AIR 16/760; Trafford Leigh-Mallory, “Air Operations at Dieppe: An After-Action Report,” Canadian Military History 12, no. 4 (2003) : app. C.)
ELEVEN
DIEPPE BY DESIGN
Thanks to their geographical position, it is the British who were responsible for the capture of most of the German material which has been important for communications intelligence in the German War. They, in the Mediterranean and off the coasts of France and Norway, have been fighting close to shore … It is actions of this character … which produce the richest hauls. Knowing this, the British have spared no effort in developing techniques that will enable them to make the most of their chances for pinching.
—UNITED STATES NAVY, ULTRA SECRET REPORT ON
BRITISH PROCEDURES FOR CAPTURING
AND EXPLOITING ENEMY NAVAL DOCUMENTS, 1944
As planning for Operation Rutter unfolded, Ian Fleming was totally engaged in establishing the naval Intelligence Assault Unit he had proposed to his boss, Admiral John Godfrey—the new group specifically dedicated to pinching the critical naval intelligence materials that Bletchley Park urgently needed. It was a daunting task to create an unusual unit of this kind, and the major challenge at this stage was to get around the numerous administrative obstacles that blocked its way in Whitehall. Working in the best traditions of Blinker Hall, Fleming and Godfrey pushed hard to obtain official sanction for their Assault Unit, even as Combined Operations Headquarters feverishly embarked
on the detailed planning for Rutter. Putting Fleming “on point” for the job, Godfrey gave high praise to his talents: “For such a novel enterprise,” he said, “it is essential to have an officer with drive and imagination of the highest order.” It needed “rapid transit,” and Fleming was just the man to steer the new unit through government departments, dodging the red tape to ensure it got into action—fast.1
Fleming’s initial idea had been to have his IAU make its debut in Operation Sledgehammer, set for that autumn, with the German naval headquarters in Cherbourg as its first target. There, Godfrey explained, “naval cyphers held by the authorities of the port concerned” would top the list of materials to be pinched by the new unit, whose job would then be to ensure “that it reached the reception committee at a specified rendezvous with the least possible delay.”2 By mid-May, however, with Operation Sledgehammer on the verge of cancellation and the four-rotor crisis gaining momentum day by day, Fleming suggested moving the Assault Unit’s debut forward by four months so it could take part in the embryonic Operation Rutter.3
One Day in August Page 26