We now know too what the main “targets” were. Until these were revealed, and their prime, urgent importance to the war effort contextually understood, their inclusion in the planning documents made little sense. That has changed, as it is now clear that both naval headquarters located in the Hôtel Moderne and the nearby trawlers were front and centre from the start, and remained constant imperatives throughout. The plans that Jock Hughes-Hallett and his team drew up for Dieppe—with, as is now apparent, crucial input from John Godfrey and Ian Fleming—saw all roads lead to the port and these targets. Even when the raid was postponed, these targets did not change; their centrality was, in fact, accentuated.
The resources devoted to the pinch and their coordination in the plan also provide compelling evidence. Nearly half the entire raiding force was committed to supporting the pinch (in both Operation Rutter and Operation Jubilee): two infantry battalions, the Royal Marine Commando containing Fleming’s specially crafted IAU, one-third of the Calgary Tanks and the majority of the engineer units, not to mention the naval outlay that included “expendable” vessels such as the Locust. One must also consider the choice of Red Ryder—a recently minted Victoria Cross winner—to command the Cutting Out Force. Ryder, who had a passion for intelligence and would go on to command 30 Assault Unit after Dieppe, was one of very few men in the entire Royal Navy who possessed actual raiding experience. That rare commodity alone would have precluded risking him on a secondary objective such as a publicity stunt, a theory that has been promulgated over the years.2 If you were willing to risk losing Ryder, the potential payoff had to be significant.
The plan itself, now clarified after the discovery of Royal Marine Commando orders and the record of the coordinating meeting, is revealed to have a remarkable redundancy built right into it to ensure the objective was achieved. Three waves of troops, supported by tanks, engineers, a river gun boat, a sloop and half a dozen French chasseurs, were tasked with carrying out the pinch: first the Essex Scottish, Calgary Tanks and Royal Canadian Engineers; then the Royal Marines, broken down into two strike forces set to spring into action twenty minutes apart. Surely, the thinking went at the time, at least one of these three groups would succeed. If not, the “floating reserve” was standing by offshore, with the remaining Calgary Tanks and the Fusiliers Mont-Royal, which if necessary could form a fourth wave. No other objective in the Dieppe operation received such major attention or rivalled this effort in the slightest.
Compounding this evidence, the very way in which Jock Hughes-Hallett and Major General Ham Roberts handled the operation from their floating headquarters aboard the Calpe shows how firmly they were focused on the pinch. As the morning progressed, they continually tried to reinforce the Essex Scottish in their attempts to get to the trawlers and the Hôtel Moderne. Although more attractive opportunities for advancing inland appeared—in particular the relatively secure and tank-friendly Green Beach, and to a lesser extent White Beach after the casino fell—the commanders discounted these options. Yet each of these alternatives would have sufficed if their main objective had been to obtain a quick victory for public relations points, to bolster sagging morale, entice the Germans to fight, draw off German resources from the eastern front, build Mountbatten’s reputation, or raid for the sake of raiding—all theories suggested over the past seventy years. Instead, on three separate occasions, the documents show that even when the operation did not unfold “according to plan,”3 Ham Roberts, no doubt with the support of Jock Hughes-Hallett, favoured a straight run down the middle of the main beach, over the shortest, most direct route to their targets in the port. Following Ryder’s three futile attempts to breach the harbour mole under heavy fire, and after news reached them of the Essex’s precarious position, they augmented the plan on the spot, ordering the Royal Regiment of Canada to land on Red Beach in direct support when it appeared they could not land on Blue Beach at Puys. This was soon followed by orders to land the Fusiliers Mont-Royal on the main beach and then send in the Royal Marines and the remaining tanks in their wake. The key here is that all had orders to link up with and reinforce the Essex Scottish, who, although pinned down and suffering heavily, seemed within inches of reaching the trawlers and the Hôtel Moderne.
In aerial photos taken during the raid, we can see there were indeed German trawlers berthed in the outer harbour; and from German records it is now known that sometime during the morning, when it became evident that the port might be overrun, the special security unit tasked with destroying sensitive documents went into action. As the battle raged, they proceeded to fill and drop overboard seven stuffed bags of Top Secret signals material in order to destroy their contents. The last bag, however, failed to sink, leading to a near-comical scene in which they used grenades to try to scuttle the floating sack. Instead of perforating it as expected, the explosion blew the contents sky-high, showering the dock with the very material they were trying to destroy—part of the proverbial pot of gold the raiders were after.4
Despite the importance of the raid to the war effort, and although the commanders were operating in an atmosphere that condoned heavy casualties in order to achieve the pinch, by no means does the new evidence exonerate Ham Roberts or Jock Hughes-Hallett, or lessen their responsibility for the failure of the Dieppe Raid. However, it does cast their decision making in a fresh light that now raises a new set of questions for generations of Canadians and others—historians, military professionals and armchair generals—to consider. What must be factored in is the terrible human cost itself. In the end, it too forms a piece of compelling evidence.
On that one day in August, roughly one thousand Allied soldiers, sailors and airmen lost their lives for what appeared to be no real purpose, with approximately another three thousand wounded or taken prisoner. What is truly striking, and what has never been considered before, is the proportion of casualties incurred in pursuit of the pinch part of the raid. Of the 369 Royal Marines involved, one hundred—over a quarter—were either killed, wounded or captured. Had it not been for the selfless sacrifice made by their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph “Tiger” Picton-Phillips, that toll would have been dramatically higher. The cost to the other units involved was even more alarming. The Essex Scottish lost 530 men either killed, wounded or captured on Red Beach—96 percent of the total number they took into Dieppe. The Royal Regiment of Canada suffered similarly, losing 534 at Blue Beach (96 percent), with the Fusiliers Mont-Royal losing another 513 men (88 percent) and the Calgary Tanks 174 men and twenty-nine Churchill tanks. In total, after factoring in the casualties from the Canadian combat engineers, the naval officers and the ratings, the number of men lost whose involvement was specifically with the pinch reached over 1,800—of whom 500 were killed. All told, this accounts for over half of the casualties sustained and deaths suffered in the Dieppe Raid.
In sum, the evidence is irrefutable that the pinch formed the main driver for Operation Jubilee. Even a cynical interpretation of the raid would have to admit that, if the raid was a pinch by opportunity at its conception, it was a pinch by design at delivery. But the evidence is mounting that, as in other raids, Jock Hughes-Hallett and his planning syndicate had the pinch in mind right from the start: less than a month after the most successful pinch raid up to that time (at Vaagso and Lofoten), and just forty-eight hours after John Godfrey introduced a new pinch policy, Dieppe, long considered a possible raiding target due to its proximity to England, was added to the list of likely targets for the coming year. Because the planning for the raids at St-Nazaire and Bayonne were in their final stages, Dieppe sat on the back burner until early/late April. It exploded onto the scene, firmly supported by the NID, following the failure of those two raids to produce the coveted pinch material. And it provided a perfect opportunity to use the newly formed Intelligence Assault Unit.
With the Axis Powers on the offensive around the world, raiding proved the only way to access the desired material on land in a fashion that offered greater cover. To
pinch effectively, the British had to overrun their targets and then cover their tracks, which meant using over-compensation, or the “sledgehammer to crack a nut” approach. In this case, the employment of disproportionately large forces to deflect suspicions not only brilliantly succeeded in blinding the enemy, but also generations of observers long after the war ended.
When I first read those two sentences at the British National Archives in 1995—“No raid should be laid on for SIGINT purposes only. The scope of the objectives should always be sufficiently wide to presuppose normal operational objects”—the implication was fantastic, moving, I thought, into the realm of speculation and conspiracy theories. Would they really mount a raid of that size and magnitude to cover a pinch? As more classified documents were released over time and the evidence started to build; slowly a new view of the raid emerged, with this passage now key. The Dieppe Raid was a natural extension of the earlier pinch raids, but it was coupled with a new policy for carrying them out—a new form of “special operations,” albeit on a scale never witnessed before.
Generally speaking, there are no monocausal operations of the scale and complexity of Dieppe. In order to get a combined operation off the ground in 1942, planners needed to have objectives that would appeal to each of the players before they would agree to participate. For the War Office, Dieppe provided a chance for it to maintain its operational dominance over the Channel area in the face of the fast-rising Mountbatten and his Combined Operations; it was also an opportunity to take the offensive and get the Canadian Army some much-needed experience, placating their unyielding demands for action. For the Royal Air Force, Dieppe was an occasion to draw the Luftwaffe into battle and test various tactics and schemes, including harnessing Ultra and signals intelligence as an asset to be used in air battles. For the Royal Navy, in addition to the obvious benefits that would flow from a successful pinch, there were other attractions, such as testing out their ability to sneak a massive raiding fleet across the Channel under the cover of darkness and using cutting-edge technology to deceive the enemy, foil their radar and signals intelligence capabilities, and achieve surprise. Finally, both strategically and politically, Jubilee—had it been successful—would probably have drawn at least some German forces from the eastern front and would temporarily have placated both Stalin and the Americans in their calls for a second front in Europe.
There is no doubt that each of these imperatives was a driver, but not the main one. After the raid at St-Nazaire failed to strike gold by chance or opportunity, after the abortion of Operation Myrmidon at Bayonne and the cancellation of Rutter, Operation Jubilee looked like the only way of scoring a dramatic and potentially war-changing pinch. This was not just a naval intelligence problem, or simply an Admiralty or “British” problem; when the blackout hit, it quickly became an Allied problem, for the constant, uninterrupted flow of intelligence had been helping everyone. Everything depended upon control of the sea lanes, just as the body depends on blood in the veins to sustain life. And that meant that air, land, sea, industrial and domestic concerns—the very centre of gravity for the Allied war effort—were at stake.
And then there is Ian Fleming, whose important position as an intelligence officer began to surface a few years ago but whose true role in the raid remained shrouded in mystery. Fleming’s actual inclusion in the raid was an enormous—and in hindsight irresponsible—risk to take if the stakes were not high. Fleming was, after all, Ultra indoctrinated and knew the inner workings of Bletchley Park; and as the DNI’s personal assistant and main liaison officer, he had intimate knowledge of the landscape of British and Allied intelligence. He was privy to secrets that could prove highly damaging if he was captured. Even his presence on Fernie close by the main beach at Dieppe was either incompetent from a security perspective or a calculated roll of the dice undertaken because the stakes were high enough and the potential payoff deemed worth the risk—particularly for naval intelligence.
The inevitable question that will arise in light of all the new evidence is whether or not Dieppe was worth it in the end. No doubt that debate will rage on. Were the deaths of nearly a thousand men and the loss of three thousand others worth the potential, but unrealized, gain? Was there a better way to go about it than this? With hindsight, we might think so. But it is clear now that, at a moment when Britain’s and the larger Allied war effort was in a most vulnerable state, what was at stake was—in the context of the time, wisely or unwisely—deemed worth the risk.
Perhaps the last voice on this should be that of Ron Beal, who, along with only a few comrades, not only survived the raid and German captivity but dedicated his life to finding the answer to a seemingly simple question: why?
That afternoon, after spending some time with him going through the recently declassified documents, I asked his opinion of them. At first, as could rightly be expected, all he was able to murmur was, “I’m in shock.” On camera, he reiterated his original comment about his friends being thrown away for no reason. Then, in tears, he listed their names, apologizing for his sobbing, saying, “You’ll have to forgive an old man, but I guess I am like a lot of the other ones, that carry very heavy loads about their friends that didn’t make it.” The old soldier gathered himself abruptly, and after a pause to reflect he said, “It gave me a different perspective on why there was a Dieppe Raid … there was a reason behind it. Despite the fact that it was never accomplished, that doesn’t mean anything. There was an objective, and I know in my heart that my comrades did not die for nothing; that there was an absolute reason and purpose to the raid.”
At that point, we shut the cameras off and took a much-needed break. Ron Beal turned back towards his wife, who had stood by his side throughout his post-war ordeal. Then, as if finally liberated from shackles he had worn for seven decades, he looked at me and uttered the line that made all the years of research worthwhile. “Now,” he said, the tears welling up again, “now I can die in peace. Now I know what my friends died for …”
The redoubtable Essex Scottish veteran, Private Howard Large, survived the carnage on Red Beach and actually made it into the town and as close to the trawlers and the Hôtel Moderne as anyone did on that day. Like many of his comrades, he was forced to surrender. He lost his leg as a result of a wound he received in Dieppe. He spent the next few years in a prisoner-of-war camp in eastern Poland before being marched across much of east and central Europe in the dead of winter in 1945, as part of Hitler’s “forced march.” (photo credits epl.1)
Private Ron Beal of the Royal Regiment of Canada spent several horrifying hours pinned to the bottom of the cliff after landing under intense fire as his comrades fell around him on Blue Beach. After the real reasons behind the raid were revealed to him in 2012, he was moved to say: “Now I can die in peace. Now I know what my friends died for.” (photo credits epl.2)
ABBREVIATIONS
ALC assault landing craft
CIA Central Intelligence Agency (United States)
CCO Chief of Combined Operations
CMHQ Canadian Military Headquarters (London)
COHQ Combined Operations Headquarters
COI Co-ordinator of Information (United States)
DDNI Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence
DNI Director of Naval Intelligence
FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation (United States)
GC&CS Government Code and Cypher School
GHQ General Headquarters
IAU Intelligence Assault Unit
ISIS Inter-Services Information Series
ISSB Inter-Services Security Board
ISTD Inter-Services Topographical Department
JIC Joint Intelligence Committee
MEW Ministry of Economic Warfare
MI6 Secret Intelligence Service
MTB motor torpedo boat
NID Naval Intelligence Division
OIC Operational Intelligence Centre
OSS Office of Strategic Services (United States)
P
WE Political Warfare Executive
RAF Royal Air Force
RDF Radio Direction Finding
RFP Radio Finger Printing (see Glossary)
RNVR Royal Naval Voluntary Reserve
SIS Secret Intelligence Service (or MI6 as it is popularly known)
SIGINT signals intelligence (see Glossary)
SOE Special Operations Executive
TLC tank landing craft
GLOSSARY
BLOCK SHIP: a ship purposely sunk to render a port or waterway unusable
BOMBE: a high-speed electromechanical device designed specifically to decipher Enigma-encrypted messages, originally designed by Polish cryptographers in the 1930s and perfected by the British at Bletchley Park
“C”: the name by which the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service was known, his or her actual identity being top secret until only recently. Stewart Menzies was “C” at the time of the Dieppe Raid.
CIPHER: a disguised writing system in which individual letters are replaced by other letters. Enigma was a cipher machine. To decipher an enciphered message requires knowledge of the cipher key. Second World War German cipher keys included Offizier (officer), Stab (staff), Triton (for U-boats), Heimisch (for German home waters; later called Hydra, or Dolphin by the British), RHV (a hand cipher) and Werftschlüssel, a dockyard hand cipher.
CODE: a disguised writing system in which groups of letters, or entire words, or even groups of words, are replaced by symbols (which might be letters, numbers or words). WW (Wetterkurzschlüssel), for example, was a weather code used by the Germans.
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