One Day in August

by David O'Keefe

  That, however, would be the only clear-cut success for the raiding force that day. Although Merritt’s South Saskatchewan Regiment achieved surprise, a navigational error by the landing craft flotilla put his battalion on the wrong side of the river Scie. This mix-up delayed their advance, forcing them to fight their way across the bridge in town, a narrow bottleneck where Merritt personally led them in an act of extreme valour that garnered him the Victoria Cross. Although the regiment established a small bridgehead in the town (for subsequent landings by the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders from Winnipeg) and captured the radar station, they could not reach the top of the western headland overlooking the main beach, and it remained in German hands throughout the raid.

  To the east of Dieppe, things were worse—much worse. Because of the convoy clash, only a handful of Durnford-Slater’s No. 3 Commando made it to shore at Yellow Beach, and the ones who did ended up being killed or captured as they tried to rush the openings leading to the top of the cliff. The one exception was the intrepid platoon under Lieutenant Peter Young, whose small force of commandos managed to land, climb a steep cliff and creep up close to their target—the Goebbels coastal battery. After cutting the phone lines that connected it with Dieppe, Young ordered his vastly outnumbered platoon to snipe at the battery with mortar and rifle fire from an adjacent cornfield, in the hope of drawing the Germans’ attention away from other targets. They succeeded for close to three hours before they ran short of ammunition, at which point Young ordered them to beat a hasty retreat back to the boats that had brought them ashore. Although Hughes-Hallett and Roberts were out of touch with events on the east flank of the bridgehead, Young would later boast about what he believed was his greatest success on the day: “I took 18 men ashore, did the job we had to do and brought 18 men back.”32

  Even though the landings on the outer flank had experienced some success, as had those on Green Beach to a lesser extent, it was a different story that developed at Puys, overlooking Blue Beach, to say nothing of the slaughter about to unfold on the main beach in Dieppe itself. At Puys, Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Catto’s Royal Regiment of Canada had the crucial task of seizing the eastern headland and capturing the guns on Pollet Cliff overlooking Dieppe harbour—the armaments that controlled access to and from the harbour. Unlike in other parts of the defended zone around Dieppe, the convoy clash had initially led the German commander in that sector to put his men on full alert. Not expecting anything to come from what he too suspected was a routine clash, he was moments away from calling a stand-down when his enthusiastic second-in-command had a brainstorm. Seeing that his men were awake, alert and already at their guns, why not carry out an impromptu anti-raid drill? Reluctantly, the commander agreed, in complete ignorance of the scores of landing craft steaming towards Blue Beach, carrying the first wave of roughly five hundred men from the Royals, who were now running seventeen minutes late and would land in daylight rather than under the cover of darkness as originally prescribed in the plan.

  From such lucky—or unlucky—chances are battles sometimes won or lost: arriving late on Blue Beach proved catastrophic for the Royal Regiment, and that in turn had a cascading effect on the entire plan for Operation Jubilee and the pinch itself.

  The delay, however, was due not so much to the convoy clash as to human error. While loading into landing craft from their converted passenger liners, the Queen Emma and Princess Astrid, which acted as mother ships for the ALCs, the first wave of the Royals found themselves following the wrong steam gunboat towards Dieppe. Confusion ensued when they realized they were halfway to the Dieppe harbour mole rather than Puys. It was only when they saw the harbour lights flashing to assist the German trawlers escaping from the clash at sea that they realized their mistake, changed course and headed for Puys, now seventeen minutes behind schedule.

  By that time, the pre-dawn darkness crucial for success had lifted, the early morning sun only intermittently obscured by haze. Within seconds of the landing craft coming into view of the defenders at Puys, the Germans opened fire in almost robotic fashion. The men aboard the landing craft who dared to sneak a peek could see flashes from the shore, announcing the projectiles that whizzed over their heads or smashed into the doors and walls of the boat. With touchdown on the beach only moments away, the tension soared, relieved only by the surge forward when the first craft contacted land. As the doors swung open, the slaughter on Blue Beach began.

  German small-arms fire joined the staccato machine-gun bursts, the increasing thumps of mortars and the whine of artillery shells as the other craft closed on the shore. In some boats, when the ramps dropped or the doors swung open, the men exited in orderly fashion—right rank first, left rank second and middle rank last. In other craft, swept by gunfire, a frantic scrambling ensued as the living, laden with helmets, webbing, equipment and personal weapons, stepped over the dead and the dying to rush through the tight doors of the craft or plopped over the sides into the water. Almost immediately, the water off Blue Beach turned crimson.

  Arriving in daylight, the men had no cover and few places to hide. They had no chance to take out the German defenders with the speed, dash and daring that Hughes-Hallett and Roberts had planned. The Germans, sitting in relative comfort on the cliffs above on three sides, saw hundreds of soldiers from the Royal Regiment clamber awkwardly out of landing craft into a hail of murderous fire as they attempted to cross a hundred yards of open beach. Only the Germans’ cries for more ammunition proved louder than those of the wounded and dying below. Before long the full weight of mortar and artillery shells added to the carnage, while Wehrmacht soldiers casually dropped grenades onto the Canadians huddled below.

  For Private Ron Beal, approaching in the third wave, with German tracer fire buzzing over his head, the sights and sounds from the beach ahead recalled an ominous discussion he had overheard hours earlier with his mates aboard the Queen Emma. When told of their destination, one soldier asked innocently, “How do you spell Dieppe?” He thought about it for a while before he said, “You know, the first three letters spell die.” As Beal related to me years later, “When we got there, that’s exactly what we did.”33 That exchange was foremost in his mind as his landing craft hit its mark and the doors swung open. Sprinting over bodies of wounded, dead and dying friends, wading through severed body parts and the discarded weapons and equipment of a battalion already torn apart, he saw flashes from German machine guns. Most of his comrades who had landed in the first two waves lay dead or writhing in pain on the beaches, or, like him, sat trapped along the seawall or under the cliff, hoping to avoid a needless confrontation with German fire from the flanks or from above.

  At one point there was a glimmer of hope when Douglas Catto, using a gap in the firing while the Germans brought up more ammunition, managed to get to the top of the cliff with a small band of men and push on towards the eastern headland. The Germans were quick to realize what had happened and recommenced their deadly hailstorm onto Beal and his comrades, forcing them to surrender just a few hours after their inauspicious landing. Meanwhile, Catto, when the rest of his battalion failed to appear on the clifftop, ordered his men to hide out in a copse not far from their objective, the German gun battery atop Pollet Cliff, to await the reinforcements that never came. In the early afternoon, with the sounds of gunfire now a distant memory, he ordered them to lay down their weapons and surrender.

  By 0520 hours—the moment the frontal assault had been scheduled to hit the main beach, following on the heels of the carefully timed air and naval bombardment—Ham Roberts and Jock Hughes-Hallett aboard the Calpe had nothing to rely on but the scraps of information pouring in over the dozen or so wireless sets, augmented by an occasional glimpse of the shore through the ship’s naval binoculars. Everything—from the ships at sea to the units on land and afloat, from the air force above to Leigh-Mallory’s No. 11 Group headquarters at Uxbridge and Admiral James’s fort in Portsmouth—was patched in to the Calpe and the Fernie, offering Fleming a
nd those fortunate enough to eavesdrop a vivid but incomplete account of the battle.

  For the historian all these years later, the message logs kept by operators to record the conversations provide a unique testimony crucial for reconstructing events. Only some of the logs have survived, unfortunately, while others collected by Hughes-Hallett for his official after-action report were never seen again in their original form, only in the extracts he released with his official account. However, some messages compiled by 1st Canadian Corps Headquarters in England and by a few of the wireless operators on board Calpe and Fernie are available in the archives. This collection offers a unique, though partial, insight into what the force commanders faced as the raid unfolded—and, along with the contextual understanding of the pinch imperative as a driver for the operation, they provide a dramatic new understanding of decisions taken by Ham Roberts and Jock Hughes-Hallett that day.

  Unlike commanders in the field, historians have the luxury of time: we can weigh and assess each message without the pressures of command or of life-and-death decisions hanging in the balance. Roberts and Hughes-Hallett, listening intently in real time to the radio chatter, were forced to play the role of coaches attempting to guide their side to victory from the remoteness of a dressing room rather than from the sidelines or behind the bench. In this case, moreover, the stakes were immeasurably higher than the outcome of a simple sporting match.*

  At 0500 hours, the increasing drone of dozens of RAF attack aircraft announced the start of the main beach assault, with air attacks on the headlands on each side of Dieppe and a naval bombardment of the German positions on the beach. Up to this point, everything in this sector had proceeded like clockwork, with the assault troops lowered into landing craft from the troopships Prince Charles, Prince Leopold and Glengyle without incident and ten miles out, beyond the range of German radar. Unlike at Blue Beach, the landing flotillas formed up successfully and departed on time, providing the men with a near-perfect view of the fireworks ashore before the low-flying Boston bombers swooped in and the destroyers turned windward to lay down a thick smokescreen on the east headland and the beach ahead. The only hitch so far was the slow river gunboat Locust, which, having lagged behind the raiding force across the Channel, arrived forty-five minutes behind schedule—too late to participate in the Jubilee overture.

  As prescribed in the plan, the landing craft slowed to a crawl about five hundred yards from shore to watch attack aircraft shift their attention from the headlands to the beachfront and the buildings on the boulevard de Verdun. Swarms of fighter bombers temporarily lifted the spirits of the infantry as aerial cannons pounded away at enemy positions, followed by the “crump, crump, crump” from sticks of bombs dropped by low-level bombers and the roar of engines at full throttle as they made good their escape over the Channel from the cascade of German anti-aircraft fire sweeping the skies. From their narrow viewpoint on the landing craft, the spectacle ahead suggested to the assault troops about to storm the main beach that the intricate Operation Jubilee was unfolding as it should. Then came touchdown.

  Ordered to get off the beach and move as fast as possible over the promenade and into the town and port, they had no time to waste once the first landing craft opened its door. Captain Donald Fraser McCrae, attached to the Essex Scottish for the raid, recorded:

  At about four-thirty some of our aircraft began attacking shore targets and almost immediately the sea was lit up by flares and within a few minutes we were being fired upon. It was then light enough to see a little bit and while everyone kept their heads down in the assault craft, we were able to see some of the earlier air battles, and some of our bombers diving in to attack shore targets. As we continued to move in, visibility grew better and we came under fire of the shore weapons about five o’clock. The intensity of the fire increased and shells and long-range mortar bombers were bursting in the sea among the advancing craft. Some of the craft were hit and sunk but the majority of them were able to carry on. There was no hesitation, flotillas retained their formation and despite the heavy fire, the assault wave of craft touched down on the beach at 0505hrs.34

  Although both the Essex Scottish and the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry landing next to them on White Beach arrived on time and on target, along with the Canadian combat engineers, they were aghast to find the beach devoid of Churchill tanks. The first group of landing craft bringing the tanks was fifteen minutes behind schedule, leaving the men hopelessly exposed, with only the undulating rock beach or the low seawall for protection. Worse still, that delay gave the German defenders time to recover from the initial shock of the bombing and the naval gunfire. As McCrae continued:

  Immediately, the troops disembarked and ran up the shingle on the beach, where they were held up by the first row of barbed wire. They started to cross this immediately, some cutting a pathway through the wire to get through. The casualties were not very heavy at the first wire[,] and the bulk of the troops were able to take cover in the shingle while wire parties went on to cut the second fence of concertina wire. By this time, the enemy had begun shelling the beach very heavily with what seemed to be field artillery and heavy mortar.35

  At first, the German fire was light, but as soon as the men crested the beach, they faced a torrent of steel and fire from carefully concealed machine-gun and sniper positions in the buildings on the boulevard de Verdun and the pillboxes and slit trenches on the promenade. Every move provoked a torrent of enemy fire and, despite the thick smokescreen wafting across the beach, German shells of all calibres began to find their mark. The engineers, essential to clear the six-foot-high, barbed-wire-crowned concrete anti-tank obstacles placed in the tiny roads that led to the port and the town, began to fall by the score while attempting to drag their explosives ashore and up the beach.

  Remaining on the beach was a guaranteed death sentence; pushing ahead offered a slightly better chance of survival. But with both headlands still in German hands and the smokescreens laid down by the aircraft and the ships offshore providing only intermittent cover at best, progress meant tackling pillboxes, barbed wire entanglements and German slit trenches while simultaneously dodging bullets and shellfire pouring down from three sides. Casualties soon became horrendous in number and, given the circumstances, gruesome in nature.

  Howard Large, a twenty-two-year-old private in A Company of the Essex Scottish tasked with storming aboard the trawlers and seizing the signals material before their crews could destroy it, wondered what kept hitting him as he sprinted over the seawall to the second belt of wire. Once he reached it, he discovered to his horror that the projectiles were the severed body parts of comrades torn to pieces by sizzling shrapnel splinters or blown apart by high explosives. As he related his experience to me almost seventy years later to the day, nothing was more vivid or lasting than those moments on the beach. Next to him, an officer with one leg sheared off was still barking orders; another lay curled in the fetal position, his nerves fried by fear; a sergeant, writhing in pain as he tried to stuff his disgorged entrails back into his sliced abdominal cavity, was begging someone to finish him off. Further ahead, a friend, Everett McCormick, who had failed in his previous attempts to place a Bangalore torpedo to clear the barbed wire, decided instead to hold it in place as it detonated, ripping both the wire and the thirty-eight-year-old private apart. To the right, just yards away, Large watched in agony as another private, tangled in the wire, squirmed helplessly like a macabre marionette, yelping in high-pitched tones for his mother as the phosphorus grenades he carried on his webbing ignited and burned into his entire body, immolating him in seconds.36

  At last, a quarter of an hour after the main landings went in, the Churchills from the Calgary Tanks arrived—but they struggled to get off the landing craft and up the chert-rock beach. Some, as expected, threw their tracks when the fist-sized stones clogged their sprocket holes, while others lumbered forward, attempting to make the steep grade to breach the seawall. Of the twenty-nine tanks that eventually l
anded during the course of the morning, just over half made it over the seawall and onto the promenade. Lacking support from the engineers, who lay scattered with the dead and wounded of the Royal Hamilton and the Essex Scottish regiments on the beach and promenade, the thirty-eight-ton beasts could not pierce the concrete roadblocks erected by the Germans in the narrow streets near the tobacco factory or in any alternative street leading to the port. So they roamed on their own up and down the formerly grassy promenade, ripping up the turf and crushing friend and foe alike under their treads, while the crews searched in vain for any exit that would lead to the harbour, or at least off the beach.

  By 0600 hours, the four companies of the Essex Scottish were pinned down on Red Beach taking heavy casualties, as were the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry on White Beach. Some of the “Rileys” were forced to clear the casino and enter into close-quarter combat inside the walls of the dilapidated structure, including a dreaded hand-to-hand confrontation with its German defenders.37 Right across the beach, cohesion at the battalion and company level began to break down, leaving the initiative to carry on in the hands of individual solders, platoons or even section-sized groups of intrepid but desperate men.

  Although most of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry remained trapped on the beach on either side of the casino, several men penetrated into the western part of the town through the walls of the local theatre (now a museum dedicated to the raid), about thirty yards beyond the boulevard de Verdun, reaching the post office, the Gestapo headquarters and Saint-Rémy church. This area was the only “bright spot” on the main beach—the obvious place for Ham Roberts to send reinforcements should he plan to exploit the success. Unfortunately, the Essex Scottish did not share the Rileys’ relative good fortune on Red Beach.