One Day in August

by David O'Keefe

  As far back as the opening days of 1942, when Jock Hughes-Hallett pointed to the meeting on January 21 as the conception date for the raid—immediately after John Godfrey announced the change in pinch policy and just weeks after the most successful haul of captured material to date at Lofoten and Vaagso—the distinct odour of a pinch was evident. This need intensified when the Germans introduced the four-rotor naval Enigma to U-boats in the Atlantic Ocean on February 1, and it increased rapidly as the dire effects of the blackout hit home, with merchant shipping losses rising to dangerously high levels with each passing month. Soon this gloomy scenario was made even more threatening by news that some vessels in the Channel and in Norway had also been outfitted with the new machine. In May, word reached Bletchley Park that U-boat headquarters in the Mediterranean had adopted the four-rotor, leading Frank Birch to suggest the need for the same sort of pinch operations as the one currently in planning for Dieppe. In the interim, the creation of the Inter-Services Topographical Department report on Dieppe at the behest of Hughes-Hallett, along with Godfrey’s sudden and personal urging of the Hôtel Moderne and the trawlers in the harbour as targets for Rutter just the day after the failure of Operation Myrmidon, all helped to sell Mountbatten on Dieppe as an “attractive and worthwhile” location for the next Combined Operations raid.

  With the contextual case in hand, the key to determining the seventy-year-old question of intent behind the Dieppe Raid comes down to weighing the relative merits of opportunity and design. In this case, that involves the examination of three particular realms: the detailed military plan for Operation Rutter in June, which, with but a few refinements, was remounted as Operation Jubilee in August; the allocation of resources to carry out the plan; and the inherent redundancy or contingencies built into the plan to get into the trawlers and the Hôtel Moderne.

  Originally, Operation Rutter was planned for June 20, or any of the six days following. However, a dress rehearsal for the raid, known as Yukon I, carried out at the behest of Rear Admiral Tom Baillie-Grohman while Lord Louis Mountbatten was touring the United States just ten days before, revealed crucial defects with the Royal Navy’s performance—and forced a two-week postponement. “The first rehearsal from the naval point of view was a shocker,” wrote Baillie-Grohman. “In a short run in of 6 to 8 miles from a known position, most landing craft failed to land a large number of troops where required, some indeed several miles from their proper beaches.” With close synchronization, shock and surprise the crucial factors for success, the rear admiral realized that even a fifteen-minute delay “could mean a disaster.” He persuaded Mountbatten to postpone the operation to rectify the problems. Rutter would now go in on July 4 at the earliest.

  In the original concept for what Churchill called the “butcher and bolt” raid, Hughes-Hallett afforded a maximum of fifteen hours on shore to accomplish all the many objectives. Even that length of time seemed short, given the huge challenges facing the raiders: dropping airborne forces to silence the coastal gun batteries on the wings and landing two infantry battalions on each side of Dieppe to race and capture the headlands overlooking the harbour and the main beach—all in an hour flat. Following that came the daring frontal attack, with two more infantry battalions landing side by side on the main beach, backed by teams of Canadian combat engineers and two squadrons of Churchill tanks that would storm ashore to capture objectives in the port and beyond, then link up with yet another Canadian infantry battalion driving south from Green Beach to capture the airfield and division headquarters at Arques-la-Bataille, where finally they would form an outer shield to protect the bridgehead from the inevitable German counterattack.

  Just after the landings on the main beach came Ryder’s Cutting Out Force, which, with nearly half the new Royal Marine Commando aboard the Locust, would run the gauntlet into the outer harbour, by then in Canadian hands, and hit the various targets ashore. Twenty minutes later, the rest of the Royal Marines, riding on French chasseurs and a collection of tugs, drifters and anti-aircraft barges known as Eagle ships, would enter the harbour and tow out German barges as “prize” captures—in what Red Ryder later dismissed as a mere “publicity stunt,” and Hughes-Hallett refused to elaborate on, calling it simply a failed attempt to take the enemy defences from behind. Needless to say, because both men penned their memoirs before the release of Ultra, these passages were deliberate attempts at obfuscation, primarily for security purposes. In truth, the role of the Cutting Out Force was as dramatic as any Hollywood representation or, perhaps more to the point, any James Bond novel.

  The delay from the latter part of June to early July forced changes to Operation Rutter because environmental conditions no longer permitted amphibious landings over a two-tide period. Limited now to only one tide, where the landings would take place at the low-water mark and re-embarkation at high water, the raiding force had only six, rather than fifteen, hours to accomplish its objectives, meaning that raid imperatives had to be compressed to only the most urgent and fundamental of all. In this sense, the new time frame spawned a bastardized version of Rutter that few, if any, have heard of—one the planners called Rutter II. In essence, the new plan was a shortened version of the original, with the inland objectives either scrapped or downgraded from “definite” to “contingent.” The “aerodrome and division headquarters will be visited and the local game destroyed, but there is only enough time for a cursory search and quick demolitions.”22 Major General Ham Roberts welcomed the change: he had feared that the original time frame gave the Germans ample opportunity to call in reinforcements and launch a coordinated counterattack designed to hit the raiders when they were most vulnerable—during re-embarkation. “The concentration of all effort over a shorter period ought to produce good chances of a success,” he said.23 That left the units landing on the flanks with only thirty minutes to accomplish their objectives before the frontal assault began.

  Faced with a number of changes, the commanders convened a meeting of the forces involved with the pinch component of the plan—a meeting that has never entered the Dieppe debate until now, yet one that reveals there was much more to the pinch than simply hitching Fleming’s IAU as a caboose to the Dieppe train. On June 28, representatives from the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines, as well as the Calgary Tanks, the Essex Scottish and the Royal Canadian Engineers, met at Roberts’s headquarters. In short order the cast of characters involved with the pinch had grown to a significant portion of the entire raiding force and, perhaps more shockingly, it now directly involved the Canadians on par with the Royal Marines. For decades, the explosive record lay tucked away in a Rutter file in Library and Archives Canada marked “General”; it was likely read by other historians over the years but, lacking the contextual knowledge of what was at stake, they would have discarded it as ancillary or even unnecessary. Similarly, across the Atlantic in the British National Archives, another Dieppe file labelled “Miscellaneous” contained a rare set of operational orders for the Royal Marine Commando that detailed their part in both Rutter and later in Jubilee.

  Now, for the first time in seven decades, the role of Ryder’s Cutting Out Force and the Royal Marine Commando is crystal clear. Their mission, if it had succeeded, would have rivalled St-Nazaire as the stuff of legend.

  For all these intervening years, veterans have wondered why the Dieppe Raid was planned the way it was. Why was so much emphasis placed on the elusive element of surprise that underpinned the entire operation? Why were tanks used in the raid, and, moreover, landed on the main beach as part of a highly controversial and seemingly suicidal frontal assault? Why was the heavy bomber raid on the town cancelled and replaced by carefully synchronized air attacks to hit just as the landing force arrived at the beach? And why was neither a battleship nor a cruiser positioned offshore to support the operation? The answers to all these questions can be found in understanding how Hughes-Hallett and his staff designed the pinch and how, with the help of the force commanders, they built up the detailed
plans to accomplish this vital mission.

  By stitching together the outline plan and the detailed plan along with the record of the June 28 coordinating meeting and the operational orders for the Royal Marine Commando, the plan for the Dieppe Raid unfolds in dramatic form. Broken down into two battle groups, the first, code-named “Tiger Force” after Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Picton-Phillips, contained one company of Royal Marines, including No. 10 Platoon under Lieutenant Peter Huntington-Whiteley, and a demolition team riding on the decks of HMS Locust. The second, code-named “Robert Force,” under Picton-Phillips’s second-in-command, Major Robert “Titch” Houghton, the career Royal Marine who at the age of thirty was considered “the old man” of the Commando, held the remainder of the men, parcelled out in a half-dozen French chasseurs grouped with a pack of tugboats, drifters and Eagle ships.

  After embarkation from various points on the Isle of Wight, where the commandos had completed their advance training, they would rendezvous with the rest of the raiding force off Portsmouth before proceeding across the English Channel through one of two mine-swept lanes. The Locust would arrive off Dieppe in time to take part in the bombardment scheduled for 0515 hours in support of the frontal assault on the main beach. By that time, if everything went according to plan, the Airborne group would have taken out the coastal gun batteries, the South Saskatchewan Regiment would have grabbed the west headland, and the Royal Regiment of Canada would be perched atop Pollet Cliff, with the air and naval bombardment of the main beach about to commence.

  As the frontal assault went in, the Locust would remain on station just off the entrance to the harbour mole. From there, she would lob shells from her four-inch guns at German positions on Red Beach in support of the Essex Scottish, directed by a forward observation officer who had gone ashore with the battalion. Alternatively, if the Royal Regiment landing at Blue Beach failed to reach its objectives on the heights, the Locust would direct the shells towards the German guns on the east headland.

  With the raid now a half hour old, the stakes on the main beach would be high, something Hughes-Hallett and Roberts clearly recognized: “It is vital to the success of the operation as a whole,” the plan noted, “that White and Red Beaches be in our hands with minimal delay.”24 On the Red Beach sector, given the role that the Essex Scottish, the tanks and the engineers would play in combination with Ryder’s Cutting Out Force to effect the pinch, this timing was even more pertinent. Accompanied by C Squadron from the Calgary Tanks, four companies of the Essex Scottish under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Fred Jasperson, a forty-two-year-old lawyer from Windsor, Ontario, were to move forward with the engineers over the beach and the promenade to the boulevard de Verdun before the Germans could gather their senses following the shock of the aerial and naval bombardment.

  Once they reached the boulevard de Verdun, the four infantry companies of Jasperson’s battalion would fan out and infiltrate the town through the tiny streets, with one company capturing the west bank of the inner channel, overlooking the German positions at the base of Pollet Cliff on the opposite side, while the other three made directly for the outer harbour. As this scene unfolded, combat engineers would go to work on the roadblock near the tobacco factory at the junction of the rue Duquesne, the shortest and most direct route into the outer harbour from the main beach. If the task proved impossible in the time allowed, the engineers had orders to clear the roadblocks from any street running east, to allow the tanks to proceed into the harbour to link up with the Essex Scottish. If the Quai Duquesne route proved feasible, however, the tanks would burst into the outer harbour right onto Quai Henri IV, less than two hundred yards from the trawlers on the left near the Gare Maritime, and less than fifty yards from the Hôtel Moderne to the right—both within easy range of their two-pounder cannon and Besa machine guns.

  Once inside the harbour, the tanks and the Essex Scottish had orders to effect the first phase of the pinch operation—to “destroy resistance, capture the trawlers and prevent destruction of their signals books and documents.”25 Nearly a dozen Churchill tanks would provide mobile firepower to bring the trawler crews under a torrent of intense fire and knock out their four-inch guns, which could pose a formidable threat if not neutralized. The same would apply to any German defences in the vicinity of the Hôtel Moderne. As soon as the crews were subdued, one company of the Essex Scottish would storm on board the trawlers to kill or capture the survivors. They had instructions to tie the hands of all prisoners, to prevent them from destroying the code books and other documents. As one company secured the trawlers, the remaining two would knock out any resistance in the area around the Gare Maritime and the Hôtel Moderne; their specific orders were to “capture military and naval headquarters” and to “search for a naval codebook.”26 These orders connect directly to the caveat the planners had earlier placed on that building: no one was to search the premises before he contacted Fleming’s IAU and followed Huntington-Whiteley’s instructions.

  Within the environment of Combined Operations, where boldness and derring-do were prized above strict military convention, the controversial frontal assault now makes perfect sense, despite its immense challenges. First, no other route to the target was as quick or direct—a crucial element in a plan where the raiders had to close with and kill the enemy fast in order to take advantage of the ongoing chaos. Roberts and Hughes-Hallett hoped that their combined force of infantry and tanks, suddenly bursting into the port, would suffice to panic and subdue the German trawler crews—just as the cruisers and destroyers had done in earlier pinch operations against trawlers in the North Atlantic and Norway. Similarly, the planners’ decision not to start the raid with heavy bombing now makes sense. Rubble in the streets would prevent the tanks from reaching the harbour and leave the infantry at the mercy of the trawler guns, just as an errant bomb might sink the ships or uncontrolled fires might destroy the Hôtel Moderne—the two main targets for the mission.

  Once the area was secured and the German trawler crews or the headquarters defence units were killed or captured, the Essex Scottish were ordered to “leave the vessels and remain in observation in a position protected from fire of HMS Locust[,] which will engage the vessels unless it is clear that they are in [Canadian] hands.”27 Leaving little to chance, Hughes-Hallett then called for two more contingencies, or redundancies, to ensure that the pinch came off.

  Regardless of whether the attack on the trawlers succeeded, stalled or failed outright, Commander Red Ryder and the Cutting Out Force would launch their strike thirty minutes after the main assault, after receiving a special signal from the forward observation officer via radio using the code word “trawlers” or from flares fired from any of Jasperson’s companies in the outer harbour.28 A series of green flares rising up in the sky would signify that the trawlers had been captured and German resistance overcome. Red flares would mean that the attack on the trawlers had failed and that the German defences in the harbour were still active.29 These signals were not to denote “stop” or “go”; rather, they would inform Ryder of what to expect when he and his force entered the harbour—whether he would get a hot or a cold reception from the Germans.

  Whatever the colour of the flares, Ryder was to press on with his part of the plan. First, Tiger Force on the Locust, and then twenty minutes later Robert Force on the chasseurs, would move through what they hoped would be a pacified corridor in the inner channel, with the Royal Regiment of Canada on top of the eastern headland and one company of the Essex Scottish in over-watch positions in the town. Only if heavy artillery fire persisted could Ryder hold off—temporarily. But once through the mole and past the outer defences on the jetties and at the base of the northern face of Pollet Cliff, they would be on their own. Orders called for Tiger Force and the Locust to be fully prepared to run the gauntlet of the inner channel, ready to take on any German positions that remained active—rather as Red Ryder had done when he won his VC at St-Nazaire. With orders to swim to their target on shore sh
ould their ship be sunk, this mission was certainly no “publicity stunt.”

  Hoping for the best but planning for the worst, the Royal Marines had trained in Portsmouth harbour for just this scenario. Manning all of the Locust‘s guns—her four-inch guns fore and aft, her anti-aircraft “pom-pom” gun, her 3.7-inch howitzer amidships, and four specially mounted three-inch mortars welded to her upper deck—the Royal Marines were to lie prone on the deck, Bren guns at the ready, to “assist in subduing enemy fire from flanks and in beating off air attacks.”30

  Once inside the port, the plan called for the Locust to make straight for the island, berthing Tiger Force on the Quai du Carénage, with A Company leaping off first to take on any German units in the immediate area then moving on to seize the swing bridges and the lock gates. Following immediately on their heels, Huntington-Whiteley and the rest of No. 10 Platoon—Fleming’s Intelligence Assault Unit—equipped with their own radio set and the code name “Whiteley,” would go directly to their first stop, the Hôtel Moderne.31 Along with the standard complement of Thompson submachine guns, Lee-Enfield rifles, Bren guns and grenades, all the men in the platoon carried extra ammunition in bandoliers slung over their shoulders as well as spare Bren gun magazines and the Hawkins anti-tank grenades they called “sticky bombs.” In addition, they each carried a large haversack filled with explosives, smaller waterproof bags to store captured material, and a small fire extinguisher, in case the Germans attempted to destroy the desired material by fire or an errant shell ignited their target.

  Depending on the situation when the men arrived at the Hôtel Moderne, they would enter a building either controlled by the Essex Scottish, if all went well, or, if not, still in German hands. In the latter case, they would attempt to breach and clear the Hôtel in the quickest possible manner—meaning that they would start at the bottom of the three-storey structure and move methodically through every room, killing or incapacitating all the occupants before they had time to destroy the targeted material. It would be a nasty business, calling for speed and extreme ruthlessness in close-quarter fighting, with their Thompsons, brass knuckles, commando knives or bare hands finishing off the defenders. Then they would go on to the next room and the one after that, until the entire building was secured. Only then could the planned search begin.