One Day in August

by David O'Keefe

  On the night of July 4, when it seemed that the Tirpitz was at sea and on her way to intercept the convoy, Pound issued the highly controversial order for the convoy to scatter and for the merchant ships to try to reach the Soviet ports on their own. The result was a slaughter of catastrophic proportions; in Churchill’s understated words, it was “one of the most melancholy of naval episodes in the whole of the war.”22 Only eleven of the thirty-four ships that left Iceland on June 27 managed to reach the Soviet Union by July 8, with the rest picked off one by one by aircraft and U-boats. More than 130,000 of the original 200,000 tons of valuable cargo was lost, along with the lives of 120 merchant sailors.

  For seventy years, Pound’s fateful decision appeared rash and defied explanation. Part of the criticism stemmed from the lack of crucial evidence linking the four-rotor crisis to the convoy’s demise. Right from the start of the operation, Pound had made it clear that he would not risk his precious battleships in the confines of the Channel either to support the Dieppe operation or to engage in battle with the Tirpitz, except on terms most favourable to the British. In German strategy, the Tirpitz and the high seas fleet were not crucial for the nation’s survival in the same way that the Royal Navy and its ships were for Great Britain. Germany had no overseas empire or trade lines to protect, and so it had turned east to Russia to solve its lack of resources.

  So long as Pound had the ability to read almost every move by the Kriegsmarine in Norway and its adjacent waters, he maintained a fragile threshold of confidence—until Harry Hinsley, working overtime at the Naval Section on overnight shift, discovered an ominous and disturbing wireless traffic pattern. Early on the morning of July 4, twenty hours before Pound made his decision, news broke that the Tirpitz might be readying to go to sea. But then, suddenly, all traffic relating to her movements defied every attempt at decryption. Whether her target was the convoy or not remained a mystery, but given the circumstances and without the usual means for confirmation, Pound decided that it most likely was. Within a few hours, his worst fears were confirmed when Hinsley concluded that “special settings” called Neptune, using “specially cyphered traffic” between the German Admiralty and the commander-in-chief of the fleet on Tirpitz, had gone into effect using the four-rotor machine.23 Stymied, all Bletchley Park could do was warn the Admiralty that, from this point onward, this traffic was “undecodable” and “confirms the conjecture that a special cypher is now in force.”24

  For Pound, the hard evidence stared him directly in the face, showing that the dearth of intelligence about the Tirpitz was not a temporary difficulty, to be remedied quickly by other means or by further cryptographic action by the boffins at Bletchley, but a permanent condition. Whether this information prompted him to make his decision to scatter the PQ-17 convoy or whether it simply reinforced in dramatic fashion his preconceived desire to do so remains open for debate. What it does show, however, is that, from an intelligence perspective, the four-rotor crisis was not abating, but rather escalating at an alarming rate.

  There is nothing in the Dieppe story more controversial than the allegations brought against Lord Louis Mountbatten long after the war that suggest he circumvented the proper chain of command to remount Operation Rutter after its cancellation in early July 1942. Historian Brian Villa rightly points out in his seminal 1989 work Unauthorized Action that no trace of a signed operational order for the remount has ever come to light—and so it continues to be.25 However, Villa and the other Dieppe historians who attempted to tackle this issue were stymied by the lack of access to key documents that remained classified when they were penning their works. With the recent releases that reveal the pinch imperative driving the raid, Mountbatten’s seemingly spurious claim that he “received special instructions from the Chiefs of Staff that only certain individuals were to be informed of the intention to re-mount the operation” can no longer be easily dismissed.26

  On July 8, after a series of postponements due to the inclement weather and much to everyone’s disappointment, Admiral James, Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth, issued the order to cancel Operation Rutter. Just over a week later, on July 16, a month shy of the Dieppe Raid’s new incarnation as Operation Jubilee on August 19, Mountbatten and Major General Ham Roberts paid a visit to the headquarters of General Andrew McNaughton, the Canadian Army commander, to gain his support for the venture, something McNaughton mysteriously referred to at the time as “Operation J______.”27 During the course of this discussion, Mountbatten revealed that only a select few knew of the remount.* Dickie Mountbatten had managed to use the cancellation to replace the less than enthusiastic Admiral Tom Baillie-Grohman as the naval force commander for the operation with none other than his own favourite, Jock Hughes-Hallett—who from the start was a driving force behind the Dieppe Raid. There is no mention of either John Godfrey or Ian Fleming in the report.28

  However, a recently released, previously unpublished history of the NID, with the security classification Ultra Secret, shows that John Godfrey and, by extension, Ian Fleming were part of this tight group and certainly knew about these clandestine plans to remount.29 In the opinion of the unnamed author of this history, the silence surrounding the remount was but “an example of [the] extravagant security” for the whole operation.30 At a routine daily meeting of the NID on August 14, a request from Mountbatten’s headquarters for an intelligence work-up for Operation Jubilee crossed the desk of one of Godfrey’s staff officers. He had never heard of Jubilee, let alone been informed of the nature of the operation, the date or the target, but he soon discovered that Godfrey had been “told verbally of Jubilee” and indeed had “some vague knowledge of it, but NID had been denied all official knowledge of the plan.”31 Why would Mountbatten invoke such extraordinary measures to indicate that the Dieppe Raid was an improper or unauthorized action? Part of the answer may lie in Mountbatten’s love of the double bluff and his paranoia about rampant security leaks and spies crawling out of the woodwork—particularly on the Isle of Wight.

  Just before the St-Nazaire operation back in March, Mountbatten had informed the Chiefs of Staff Committee that, if the raid did not come off on the date planned, he would remount it as soon as conditions permitted: the Germans would never expect a raid on the same place once the cat was out of the bag. Seen in this light, Dieppe was in no way unique as a double bluff; rather, it formed part of Mountbatten’s standard cloak-and-dagger playbook. His actions during the remount period show that Jubilee retained much more continuity with Rutter than has previously been believed.

  First, Mountbatten did not dismiss his force commanders and their staffs following the “cancellation” of Operation Rutter, with the exception of the prickly Rear Admiral Tom Baillie-Grohman, and put them on alert for an eventual remount. There is no better confirmation than the fact that on the night of August 18, just as Jubilee got under way, General Andrew McNaughton sent a cable to the Department of National Defence headquarters in Ottawa referencing his earlier message of July 9—the day after Rutter was cancelled—a copy of which has yet to be found. In the cable, he informs Lieutenant General Kenneth Stuart, Chief of the General Staff (Canada), that the “special matter of which I advised you [is] now under way.”32 Clearly, the remount was preordained; the date it would happen remained the only question.

  Whether it was Operation Rutter or Operation Jubilee, to pull off a pinch raid on this grand scale required an overriding element of surprise. Every aspect of the plan was cloaked in the tightest secrecy, leading in turn to Mountbatten’s extraordinary security measures. By mid-1942—certainly after the successful St-Nazaire Raid—the Germans were expecting raids along the French coast, particularly over the summer period at the tail end of the “raiding season,” when environmental conditions lent themselves readily to amphibious operations. The Germans launched a programme to strengthen their coastal defences in the west and maintained regular high alerts during times when tidal and wind conditions permitted landings. Although strategically the Allies co
uld not surprise the Germans, there was nothing to prevent them from trying to achieve tactical surprise by confusing them as to where exactly they would land and when. If the planners and the force commanders played their cards right, and secrecy was maintained in almost hermetic fashion, there was no reason, certainly in Mountbatten’s mind, why they couldn’t pull off a successful raid.

  What Mountbatten counted on above all was that German intelligence would discard or downgrade Dieppe as a potential target: remounting a raid on the same target after its cancellation was hardly a textbook operation of war and something only a fool would try. Relying on the conventional to blind his enemy to the unconventional, Mountbatten hoped to use the naval and air diversions off Boulogne, which Baillie-Grohman and Leigh-Mallory had promised, to distract the Germans while the raiding force struck out undetected across the Channel in the darkness for Dieppe.

  The ace up Mountbatten’s sleeve in the weeks before Operation Jubilee, and on the day itself, was Ultra. Shore facilities and local traffic in the Channel area, although in some cases equipped with the four-rotor Enigma machine in preparation for its eventual introduction, were still using the three-rotor while distribution of the new machine and its materials continued. Bletchley Park could therefore still read the message traffic in the area, so Mountbatten and his staff could monitor German actions, inactions and reactions on land, on the sea and in the air to ensure that surprise was being maintained. Arguably, Mountbatten’s whole concept of the double bluff might never have made it off the drawing board without Ultra; otherwise it was just too risky. Through these means Godfrey, along with the planners and the force commanders, kept tabs on any signs of movements or developments by the enemy in the weeks and days leading up to the raid and, of course, on that day in August as well. Ultra could reveal movements of aircraft, infantry, artillery, E-boats and even U-boats into the area, as well as any buildup of special equipment, extra stores, ammunition or defensive works that might interfere with the projected raid. And they knew, of course, that German convoys routinely ran up and down the French coast almost every night.

  To ensure that this crucial raid got off the ground as planned in mid-August, Mountbatten removed all non-essential elements that might attract the attention of German intelligence or, in a bureaucratic sense, tie up planning and lead to compromise or cancellation.33 Knowing that COHQ was somewhat resented by the other service ministries, and even by members of the chiefs of staff, Mountbatten desperately wanted to prove its value. He feared that the potential for friction and for ultimate cancellation increased exponentially with the number of people who knew about the plan. To avoid any possibility of butting heads with an obstinate bureaucratic enemy, he replaced the airborne element in Rutter with two veteran commando units from the Lofoten and Vaagso raids, which would strike by sea against the coastal batteries on the outer flanks of Dieppe. By so doing, he not only removed the need for near-perfect weather conditions, required for delicate airborne operations, but avoided the perils of bargaining for assets not directly under his control. This change in plan also helped to maintain the vital element of surprise, by eliminating waves of troop-carrying aircraft that would light up German radar and ground defences. In addition, it gave Mountbatten wider “pinch” coverage: these two units were experienced in scrounging for anything that looked promising, and with the coastal batteries under Kriegsmarine control, there was always the possibility that they too could strike gold.*

  Yet another threat Mountbatten had to consider were the daily runs, weather permitting, of German reconnaissance aircraft over the south coast of England. These flights had discovered the Rutter forces marshalling for the raid in early July, leading to the subsequent German air raid that hit two of the ships. Now, instead of concentrating the strike force in a few select ports as before, Mountbatten spread it out among many ports throughout southern England. He even disguised the troopships as coastal convoy vessels, given that they had to embark in daylight to make their rendezvous in mid-Channel, and eliminated any vessels that did not usually ply the Channel. He did not mind that the Royal Navy refused to risk its battleships and cruisers in the close confines of the Channel: their sudden presence would only raise an alert along the German-held coast of France and provoke a major response from the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine.

  The same restrictions applied for the tugs, drifters and Eagle ships originally assigned to Ryder’s Cutting Out Force to tow the captured barges out of the port during Rutter. Normally the tugs and drifters were occupied with duties other than raiding, so their inclusion in any task force would alert German intelligence to the impending action. So Mountbatten stripped them too from Jubilee. Similarly, the main role of the Eagle ships was anti-aircraft protection in the Thames Estuary, and any move from their usual operating area was bound to draw German interest. Mountbatten knew that if he left them in place during Operation Jubilee, they would create a false sense of “business as usual.” To replace the extra firepower these ships would have provided, HMS Alresford, a lumbering First World War–vintage minesweeper, joined the French chasseurs in Robert Force for the Dieppe Raid.

  The corollary effect of Mountbatten’s changes was to underscore the primary role of the pinch in Jubilee. No longer were the Royal Marines concerned with towing back the mass collection of German barges as a publicity stunt, as had been called for in Rutter. For Jubilee, this was abandoned, and the Royal Marines were tasked with capturing them now only as a contingency, and told either to “hot wire” the vessels and sail them back to England on their own if the situation presented itself or sink them as Ryder had originally suggested. In addition, the planned attack on the airfield and on German army headquarters was changed from definite to contingent. In short, the only significant objective from Rutter that remained firm for Jubilee was the pinch operation to be carried out by part of the Canadian raiding force and the entire Royal Marine Commando, with Fleming’s IAU in the starring role.

  “A visit to the Ogre in his den” was how Winston Churchill’s wife, Clementine, described her husband’s visit to Moscow on August 12, 1942, for the first face-to-face meeting between the British prime minister and the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin.34 Long known for his anti-Communist stance, Churchill had been forced, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union a year earlier, to embrace “Uncle Joe” as an ally of convenience and necessity in the fight against Nazi Germany. The urgent trip stemmed from Stalin’s overt displeasure over two pressing items that appeared to threaten the fragile alliance. The first was the failure of the Allies to establish a second front in the west, a distraction designed to force the Germans at the height of their current summer offensive to shave off much-needed land and air forces in the east to fight in the west, and so alleviate pressure on the Soviet Union. The second was the suspension, following the PQ-17 disaster, of the vital convoys to Russia.

  Much has been made of the second-front issue, but in fact it was not Stalin’s major concern that August, despite his initial disappointment over the cancellation of Operation Sledgehammer (the landing of troops in Brest or on the Cherbourg peninsula) for the fall of 1942 and the postponement of any Allied invasion of Europe until at least 1943. Although he had stated “most emphatically” in his cable to Churchill the previous month “that the Soviet Government cannot tolerate the second front in Europe being postponed until 1943,” by the time Churchill arrived, other elements had come into play. The official minutes of the meeting describe Stalin’s view as “glum” when he was told about the decision to postpone the European second front, but documents that remained classified until 2013 from the files of Alexander Cadogan, the British undersecretary of state, paint a very different version of events. Cadogan reported to his boss, Lord Halifax, that Stalin’s tone had changed from the urgency and outrage expressed in his July cable and in the official minutes to something far more conciliatory.

  According to Cadogan, after Churchill had spent some time “explaining the impossibility of invading France
this year,” Stalin never once so much as hinted that “Well, if you can’t do more than that, I don’t know how much longer we can stand the strain.” Cadogan acknowledged that he was relieved and surprised when Stalin repeated several times that he was “astounded at the spirit and determination of his [Russian] people. He didn’t know them[;] he had never dreamt that they could show such unity or resolution.”35 Indeed, the Soviet leader had come to the realization that, despite his urgings and American promises, logistically it was not feasible to launch a second front in Europe in 1942. North Africa was, however, a different story. When Churchill mentioned this proposed invasion, the Soviet leader lit up in a way the delegation had not anticipated. Operation Torch “seemed to have caught Stalin’s fancy,” Cadogan wrote. The Soviet leader stunned all those in attendance by nodding his approval and stating, “May God prosper this enterprise.”36

  But the suspension of the Arctic convoys carrying much-needed supplies to Russia remained a hot topic of dispute. Stalin’s July cable had clearly voiced his displeasure at this most crucial moment. He wrote:

  According to our naval experts, the arguments of British naval experts on the necessity of stopping delivery of war supplies to the northern harbours of the U.S.S.R. are untenable. They are convinced that, given goodwill and readiness to honour obligations, steady deliveries could be effected with heavy loss to the Germans … Of course, I do not think steady deliveries to northern Soviet ports are possible without risk or loss. But then no major task can be carried out in wartime without risk or losses … I never imagined that the British Government would deny us delivery of war materials precisely now, when the Soviet Union is badly in need of them in view of the grave situation on the Soviet-German front.37