One Day in August

by David O'Keefe

  As the British knew, this grumbling was not just political bluster but an expression of the extreme fragility of the Soviet war economy. Although much has been written about the inferior types of tanks and aircraft manufactured in the United Kingdom for delivery to the Soviet Union, these armaments did in fact play a crucial role in the fighting: most of the cargo that was delivered went right into action once it was unloaded from the boats. The Soviets would eventually develop their own prosperous industrial capabilities and thrive, in part thanks to American Lend-Lease deliveries later in the war, but the year 1942 proved to be a most vulnerable point for the Soviet Union. Its industrial centre had been based in its western regions, and in the summer and fall of 1941 Stalin had taken the unorthodox step of closing all the factories that lay in the path of the German onslaught and moving them thousands of miles to safety behind the Ural Mountains. This transfer necessitated a complete retooling of Soviet industry, with considerable downtime—right at the worst possible moment.

  In these strained circumstances, the arms deliveries from Great Britain were desperately needed to plug the gaps and buy time for the Soviet factories to start producing again. But over and above that, certain machine tools that had been lost to the Germans had to be replaced. There was no point in building a factory in a safe location if the highly specialized machine tools, castings, or vital resources (oil, rubber, aluminum alloy, special steels and aviation fuel) needed to produce and employ weapons of war and other industrial machinery were lacking.38 And therein lay the true value of the British convoys: a good measure of their cargo was not simply the denigrated tanks and aircraft, but the vital industrial resources needed for the core infrastructure of the Soviet war effort.39

  Meanwhile, at home, Winston Churchill was also under great pressure. He had just undergone his second no-confidence vote in six months, easily defeating the motion as he had earlier in the year, yet the clock seemed to be ticking against him as the coalition war leader. Calls from the vocal left-wing minority for a “second front now” could for the present be taken in stride, but the cavalier way in which the merchant seamen in the PQ-17 had been sent to their icy graves raised doubts among the industrial labourers who saw the fruits of their heavy work plummet to the bottom of the ocean.

  However, the ever-cautious Admiralty was not willing to risk its fleet and re-establish the convoys that August during the four-rotor blackout, when they had no way to follow the movements of the Tirpitz and other German vessels. Until the blackout ended or environmental conditions changed to permit rerouting of the convoys to the northern Soviet ports over a less risky, even if still vulnerable, course, the Admiralty remained reluctant to change its decision.

  When Churchill in 1950 was reviewing this turbulent period while writing his memoirs of the war, he deliberately tried to distance himself from the disastrous Dieppe Raid, which was about to start as he bade farewell to Stalin for the trip home from Moscow. In a pointed witticism attributed to him years later, Churchill reportedly said, “History will be kind to me—as I intend to write it.” And to whitewash his place in history, and to a lesser extent preserve security, he feigned ignorance over the remount of Rutter as Operation Jubilee at Dieppe. Perhaps preoccupied with his own legacy, the calculating prime minister began the process of appearing to know nothing within four months of the mission. Just before Christmas 1942, he queried Pug Ismay, his chief of staff, about the raid: “Although for many reasons everyone was concerned to make this business look as good as possible,” he wrote, “the time has now come when I must be informed more precisely about the military plans.” Ismay replied that Great Britain’s star commander Bernard Law Montgomery, by then the beloved hero of the victory over Rommel at El Alamein, had approved the overall military plan for the Dieppe Raid. Stymied, Churchill then dropped the matter after Mountbatten defiantly suggested that, if pressed, he would demand an official inquiry.

  Victory in 1945 did nothing to quell the raw emotion and stigma associated with Dieppe. By then Mountbatten had become the obvious villain, and Churchill attempted to place the responsibility for the remount squarely on his shoulders. Reaching out to Pug Ismay once again, perhaps in an effort to suggest he toe the party line, Churchill demanded to know who had made “the decision to revive the attack after it had been abandoned and Montgomery had cleared out.”40 Churchill wrote:

  What we say about this is a matter for subsequent consideration, but we must at least know ourselves what the facts were—namely: did the Chiefs of Staff, or the Defence Committee or the War Cabinet ever consider the matter of the revival of the operation (a) when I was in England, (b) when I was out of England, or was it all pushed through by Dickie Mountbatten on his own without reference to higher authority?41

  Knowing full well the details of the raid, including the pinch portion, Pug Ismay must surely have suspected what Churchill was up to and what he wanted from him. Apologizing “for being so inadequate about the Dieppe Raid,” he did not take the bait but reminded Churchill that, “in the vital interests of secrecy, nothing was put on paper,” thereby confirming Mountbatten’s claim.42 Then he fired the deciding salvo, telling the now former prime minister that he “must have approved the operation in principle,” given that he requested urgent information about the remount before he departed from Moscow.43 This exchange apparently ended the matter because, in the Dieppe passage in his memoirs, Churchill dutifully, if reluctantly, admitted: “I personally went through the plans with the CIGS, Admiral Mountbatten and the Naval Force Commander J. Hughes-Hallett. It was clear that no substantial change between Jubilee and Rutter was suggested, beyond substituting commandos to silence the flank coastal batteries in place of air-borne troops.”44 This affirmation came after the fact, but confirmation appears in a series of messages exchanged between Churchill and Pug Ismay at the end of the Moscow trip.

  On August 15, following a contentious round of discussions concerning the suspension of the Arctic convoys, Churchill wired Ismay, asking, “What is position about renewal of Rutter?”45 Clearly the prime minister, the highest authority in the land, had knowledge of the raid and had given permission to remount it, even if not through the normal channels. Ismay’s reply the following day confirms that Churchill was aware not only of the remount but of the Ultra Secret objective behind the raid. He informed the anxious PM, with veiled details attached, that “Jubilee, which is renewed Rutter in all essential features, is due to be carried out at first light August 18th. If weather unfavourable 18th August, operation can be launched any subsequent day up to 24th August inclusive.”46After a one-day delay caused by inclement conditions, Ismay cabled Churchill just after his plane touched down in Cairo on the return leg of his Russian journey: “Weather sufficiently good—Jubilee has started.”47

  * Although widely known as Intrepid after the war, Stephenson was never referred to by that name during the war. His official code name was the less than dramatic 48000.

  * This inner circle included General Sir Alan Brooke, Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal and Admiral Sir Dudley Pound from the Chiefs of Staff Committee; General Hastings Ismay, their liaison to Churchill; Generals Bernard Paget and Bernard Law Montgomery, and their Canadian subordinates Andrew McNaughton, Harry Crerar, and Ham Roberts along with his senior staff officers; Air Vice-Marshal Sir William Sholto Douglas and Air Vice-Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory from the RAF; and, among Mountbatten’s own staff, Captain Jock Hughes-Hallett, assisted by Marquis “Bobby” de Casa Maury, his intelligence officer.

  * Another example of the extravagant security was the fact that each of these units was given its own mission with its own code name, and neither one seems to have known that it was taking part in a larger operation called Jubilee aimed at Dieppe. No. 3 Commando’s operation was code-named Flodden, while No. 4 Commando’s was Cauldron.

  THIRTEEN

  THE CROSSING

  Britannia needs her privateers

  Each time she goes to war

  Death to all her ene
mies

  Though prizes matter more

  —MARK KNOPFLER, “PRIVATEERING”

  Late on the afternoon of August 18, a two-car convoy pulled up to Trafalgar Gate, the main access to His Majesty’s Naval Base Portsmouth. Commander Ian Fleming, dressed in a navy peacoat, demanded directions from a confused guard to the precise location of the British Hunt-class destroyer HMS Fernie, berthed somewhere near Lord Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory. Officially listed as an “observer” for the raid, Fleming, accompanied by several American officers, attachés from the U.S. embassy in London, had come to oversee the operational combat debut of his fledgling Intelligence Assault Unit.1 The most prominent of his visitors, U.S. Army brigadier general Lucian K. Truscott Jr. and Marine Corps colonel Franklin A. Hart, who, as part of Mountbatten’s staff, had taken part in the planning for Dieppe, had now come to study British amphibious techniques and to witness firsthand the combat debut of fifty members of the newly created U.S. Army Rangers.2*

  As Fleming’s entourage entered Portsmouth dockyard, the scene they witnessed resembled that in many other ports along the south coast of England. All around them, ships were making final preparations for the raid under a cover plan designed to disguise it as yet one more tedious training exercise. To maintain this “business as usual” appearance and prevent any dockyard speculation stemming from a sudden surge in activity, ammunition and special equipment essential for the mission had been smuggled on board over several nights, and all extra rations had been cancelled. The guard’s strange reaction to Fleming’s request for directions confirmed that Louis Mountbatten’s extreme and almost obsessive attention to secrecy and security had worked. In the days leading up to the raid, Ultra had revealed nothing to suggest that the Germans had caught on to the remount. With Captain Jock Hughes-Hallett about to sneak the largest raiding force in history across seventy miles of the English Channel, everything appeared to be going their way.

  After Fleming and the Americans had presented their credentials to the guard, they soon found the Fernie and her sister ship, HMS Calpe, among the myriad destroyers, troop transports, converted Channel steamers, motor launches, anti-submarine trawlers, gunboats and landing craft in Portsmouth harbour. They were welcomed aboard the Fernie by first officer Lieutenant Willett—“a young public school entrant in his early 20s,” as Fleming described him.3 Willett explained that his commanding officer, a gregarious sort with immense bravado, had run his motorcycle into an immovable object earlier in the day and would not be able to take Fernie into battle. Nevertheless, Willett did, and Fleming later recorded that he won respect and admiration for his handling of the ship by raid’s end. Days earlier, both destroyers had undergone a special refit that transformed them from traditional submarine-hunting and convoy escort vessels to modern headquarters ships, or floating communications fortresses, for raiding operations.

  Fernie and Calpe bristled with scores of antennae connected to hypersensitive communications and navigational gear whose settings proved so delicate that they prohibited the firing of her main four-inch gun except in emergencies. Clearly impressed by the technological array, Fleming eagerly noted at least four additional wireless teams totalling forty to fifty operators. Positioned on deck, below deck, in wardrooms and the captain’s cabin, as well as on the bridge, these wireless operators would perform a variety of communications tasks designed to keep all parts of the raiding force linked together—the two force commanders on board and those on shore—either by direct voice link or through eavesdropping on the labyrinthine radio net. Forward Observation Officers (FOOs) would control air and naval support to the troops ashore; “Phantom” and “J Service” personnel would monitor Allied messages from special liaison officers; and “Headache” teams of German-speaking radio operators would scan the airwaves for German plain-language messages uttered in the heat of battle. The chatter from these wireless sets would establish the backbeat for the drama about to unfold—and once the operation began, would provide Fleming and the other observers with a ringside seat at the raid.

  As Chief of Combined Operations, Mountbatten knew that effective command, control and communications formed the potential key to success in this operation, and he was leaving nothing to chance. As he had planned for Operation Rutter, Jock Hughes-Hallett and Major General Ham Roberts would, respectively, call the shots for the sea and land forces from the floating command centre aboard the Calpe, but if something went horribly wrong there, the Fernie housed a complete backup command team led by Roberts’s chief of staff, Brigadier Churchill Mann. Meanwhile, an RAF liaison officer would work from the bridge of Calpe, with Air Vice-Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory orchestrating the entire air umbrella from his Uxbridge headquarters in London. In Portsmouth, Admiral Sir William James would keep tabs on every aspect of the raid from his newly constructed command bunker under Fort Southwick. Patched into all the networks, his headquarters became the relay hub: he could eavesdrop on the action from across the Channel and send on the latest intelligence provided from the Operational Intelligence Centre, working under John Godfrey’s watchful eye in London.

  On the Isle of Wight, close to four thousand men from Ham Roberts’s Second Canadian Division, along with sixty tanks from the Calgary Tank Regiment and nearly a dozen teams of Royal Canadian Engineers and other ancillary elements, loaded onto troopships and landing craft. Few, if any, suspected that this “preparatory exercise” would in fact be the “real deal.” Amid the scores of vehicle convoys heading to the coast were several trucks with tarpaulins drawn, carrying Colonel Joseph Picton-Phillips’s Royal Marine commandos to the port of Cowes. There they would board the Locust and the French chasseurs anchored offshore.

  Despite the intense security and the cover plan, suspicion had begun to grow within the ranks of the Royal Marines that something big was brewing. On August 15, Picton-Phillips and his company commanders received word that Operation Jubilee would take place on any day between August 18 and 23, weather permitting, and that they should draw up their orders for the pinch—an exact replica of Rutter but with new code names. Under strict instructions to keep the men in the dark until the last possible moment—ideally when aboard their assault craft—only the company commanders and platoon officers knew about the remount of the raid. Picton-Phillips had even initiated Operation Inchen, a bogus week-long training scheme designed to conceal the nature of the preparations—particularly if inclement weather forced a day-to-day postponement, as had been the case in Rutter.4

  However, the natural flurry of pre-raid activity, which called for the Marines to prime grenades, fill Bren gun magazines and oil weapons, only fuelled rumour and conjecture. “The explanation given,” recalled Jock Farmer, “was that we were going on an exercise! Even the dimmest amongst us wasn’t going to buy that.”5 By the afternoon of August 18, Picton-Phillips received word that the tanks had embarked—a sure sign that the raid was on—and he held an Orders Group that night with his officers and NCOs to go over the exact details of their mission. Following the meeting, the Royal Marine Commando jumped in the trucks bound for Cowes, and by five o’clock that afternoon all were safely aboard the Locust and the chasseurs en route to Portsmouth, where they would link up with the raiding force.

  For the men of Robert Force, commanded by Major Robert Houghton, speculation hit fever pitch while they waited aboard the chasseurs. “After a while no one was allowed on deck and all the NCOs were summoned for a briefing,” wrote the intrigued eighteen-year-old Bob McAlister. The anticipation rose after Commander Red Ryder arrived to discuss “special duties” and the men were issued with ammunition, special tools and emergency rations, along with escape instructions.6 McAlister recalled:

  We were shown aerial 3D photographs of Dieppe and areas along the coast for two or three miles, and inland too. We were told this was the real thing. A thrill ran through everyone. This was what the lads wanted. Everyone was thrilled and excited … the fact that we soon [would] be in action brought us closer to each other and depen
dent on each other. Our attitudes changed, little differences forgotten. We were brothers in arms and ready for anything.7

  The same sentiment prevailed among the Royal Marines of Tiger Force and the IAU aboard the Locust. After they squeezed below deck, they were issued with French currency, which immediately told them that this time the raid was on. According to Jock Farmer, “It was so crowded that anybody who had hand grenades hanging from their pouches were told to fuck off, as we did not want any accidents amongst ourselves.”8 Their orders remained the same as in Rutter, reported Corporal Paul McGrath: “driving into the harbour, attacking and capturing the German Naval headquarters based in a dockside hotel and extracting specified contents therefrom, and removing a number of German invasion barges for towing back to England.”9 However, as eager and optimistic as the Royal Marine commandos were about the mission, Jock Farmer recalled that they remained quite sober, realizing that they could be embarking on a one-way ride:

  Locust was designed to ram any obstacle in its way, it was obvious it was not coming back. Somebody tentatively asked “How do we get back?” It was a question that should not have been asked and there was just a stony silence. Later it was suggested in a jocular tone, “Why don’t we raise one of the boats we just sunk, dry it out, find out from the Germans where they kept the diesel and fill up?” That too, was greeted by a stony silence.10

  Assault landing craft on the one-day crossing of the English Channel, carrying Canadian soldiers towards the beaches in and around Dieppe during Operation Jubilee, as the Allies’ raid was code-named. By nightfall, Operation Jubilee would become the deadliest amphibious raid in recorded history. (photo credits 13.1)