DAY OF DESTRUCTION
The Canadian soldiers in Britain were restless. The lead elements of the 1st Canadian Infantry Division had arrived in late 1939 and had been joined by tens of thousands of comrades during the subsequent three years. Relentless training had lost its appeal, and in some places—especially in small town pubs—the Canadians were wearing out their welcome. The number of crimes committed by Canadians was on the rise, as was the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancy.1 Senior commanders worried that the Dominion’s army-in-waiting was degenerating into an army in stagnation while the navy and air force were fighting on multiple fronts. Defending the coast against a phantom invasion was a far cry from the glory of Currie’s Canadian Corps on the Western Front during the last war. The Canadian Army needed action.
The British were also under pressure. Stalin’s forces on the Eastern Front had absorbed the German onslaught of 1941. In the process, they had lost millions (killed, wounded, and captured), together with thousands of tanks, guns, and aircraft. They had been badly mauled, but they had turned back the Wehrmacht at the gates of Moscow. The Soviets subsequently lost even more men in battle in 1942 in a series of shambolic defeats, but German soldiers had suffered too, as they faced the brutal winter, chronically hungry and often seeking shelter rather than victory. The Soviet soldiers fared worse, but remained unbroken—forced to fight by political officers willing to use mass execution as a motivator, and by the knowledge that the Germans, should they catch them, would either murder them outright or starve them to death. In the Far East, the Japanese had overrun Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, and much of Burma with incredible speed. In the course of 90 days, the British lost 2 capital ships, 200 aircraft, and 166,000 men, of whom 130,000 were taken prisoner.2 British and Commonwealth forces were driven to defeat by a Japanese army inferior to their own in number. Only in North Africa had the British shown any signs of resilience. The fighting there took place in seesaw battles, both sides alternately attacking and defending, tethered to long and unstable supply lines, until Rommel’s Afrika Korps humiliated the British Eighth Army at Tobruk in June 1942.
But the primary battlefield lay on the Eastern Front, where the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine—more than two-thirds of the German army. Stalin pleaded with the West for some kind of relief. By this, he meant the opening of a new front, which came to be known as the Second Front, to siphon off German forces.3 While Churchill sympathized with the Soviet position—or, more accurately, was wary of how a Soviet collapse would allow his enemy to divert military resources to the Western Front—he blanched at the thought of invading Europe before the necessary resources were in place. The brash and reckless Americans, who were mistrustful of the seemingly gun-shy British, demanded an early invasion of Europe, preferably in 1943. There was even insane talk of going in 1942. The British, staggered by this exuberance, pointed to reams of studies that showed the Allies lacked enough bombers, fighters, warships, landing craft, or trained soldiers to successfully launch an amphibious attack, let alone supply it against the inevitable German counterattack. Passion over reason almost prevailed, and Churchill’s counter-claims made him seem timid as the impatient Yanks gnashed their teeth over the delay. Churchill, seeking to hold off his allies, proposed that a series of small-scale attacks might draw off some of the enemy’s resources. This failed to satisfy Stalin, who believed the Allies were all too happy to see the Communists and Nazis bleed each other white, just as he had once hoped the democracies would do in the West, but some form of attack was better than nothing. Meanwhile, Churchill and Roosevelt sent mountains of war supplies through the sea lanes to Stalin’s forces—a staggering $9.3 billion in aid from the United States between 1943 and 1945—and kept up the important bombing campaign against German cities and infrastructure.4
CHURCHILL TURNED FOR ADVICE to Lord Louis Mountbatten, the handsome second cousin to the future Queen Elizabeth, known to friends as “Dickie.” The ambitious naval captain had lost three ships during the early years of the war, but he retained his cavalier cheerfulness. Promoted far beyond his competence, Mountbatten was given command of the Combined Operations Headquarters in March 1942, at the rank of vice-admiral. He came with an aggressive mandate: to take the war to the Germans in a series of escalating raids.
The first raids had been launched in June 1940, and many had followed since then, usually conducted by British commandos. They enjoyed modest success: more often than not, the commando units limped back to Britain after taking grim casualties. At best, these “butcher and bolt” operations were mere pinpricks against the Germancontrolled Continent, but still they appealed to Churchill as a means of keeping the Germans on their toes.5 Aware that Churchill wanted larger and more aggressive raids, Mountbatten, now elevated to a position on the Chiefs of Staff Committee, set out to plan a newsworthy operation that would boost morale and placate Stalin. But Mountbatten had a peculiar headquarters, which was staffed by misfits and castoffs from other services. Among its failures was its inability to process intelligence, and so it relied on the other services for information.6 This failure would eventually result in a misreading and gross underestimation of the strength of enemy forces in Dieppe.
IN APRIL 1942, First Canadian Army was established in England, eventually consisting of two corps of three infantry divisions, two armoured divisions, and two armoured brigades. This was the first and last time in Canada’s history that the nation fielded an army in battle. In the absence of General Andrew McNaughton, who was on leave due to illness, Lieutenant-General Harry Crerar was now in temporary command of the army. Crerar had arrived in England in late 1941, having given up his appointment as chief of the general staff in Canada to take over I Canadian Corps. The fifty-three-year-old career soldier was aware of his lack of command experience, having never commanded at the brigade or divisional level, and he was anxious for an operation in which to prove himself. He had shown that he was willing to send Canadian infantry battalions to Hong Kong to see Canada pull its weight in the Empire’s war effort, and when he heard that a major raid was to be directed at the French coast, he again pushed aggressively for his forces to be involved. The Canadian government of Mackenzie King had no say in the matter, having generally abdicated operational control over the deployment of its overseas forces. As the plan took form, the target turned out to be the French resort town of Dieppe, long a popular destination for vacationing British tourists because of its casino and picturesque coastline. Close to 5,000 of the 6,000 troops assaulting the town and surrounding area would be Canadian.
The British agreed to the Canadian request to take the lead in the raid, even though Mountbatten’s headquarters would continue to plan the operation. The 2nd Canadian Infantry Division, under the command of Major-General J. Hamilton Roberts, was selected for the assault by General Bernard Montgomery, then commander of South Eastern Command, in which the Canadians served. “Ham” Roberts, a fifty-year-old professional soldier with a jowly, bulldog face, had risen to prominence after saving the guns in the embarrassing June 1940 sojourn to the Continent, and had subsequently proven himself to be a good trainer of men. His division was considered to be the best in the Canadian Army. He was optimistic about the raid’s chance of success, even though much of the planning was out of his hands. In one pep talk to his men, he told them that the forthcoming operation would be a “piece of cake.” The statement would come back to haunt him.
The 2nd Division underwent intense training, including moving to and from landing craft and assaulting beaches. At the same time, Mountbatten’s headquarters refined the plan, which was increasingly heralded as a dress rehearsal for the eventual invasion of Europe. It would be a test of combined arms and inter-service cooperation, as well as a chance to challenge German defences. As these expectations were raised, the raid took on the scale and substance of a major operation. Everyone involved in the planning knew casualties would be sustained: they were inevitable in an attack from the sea against a fortified port. Speed and surprise would, it was hoped, carry the day.
There was a second, secret component to the Dieppe operation. The British were desperate to acquire German intelligence documents, code books, and possibly one of the new four-rotor Enigma encryption machines. Since early 1942, the German wireless communications from the U-boats in the Atlantic to their shore-based headquarters had gone dark, leaving British cryptologists unable to read the chatter that had been so essential in guiding the Allied high command and saving merchant shipping. A number of “pinch” raids had been pulled off by British commandos to gather secondary bits of intelligence, but more information was needed to break the codes. Now, at Dieppe, a larger raid by Royal Marine commandos would go in behind the Canadian main assault with the goal of ransacking a local German naval headquarters. Though this part of the raid was cloaked in secrecy to avoid letting the Germans know what the British cryptologists were up to, it could succeed only if the main Canadian assault made headway into Dieppe, blasting and breaking everything in its path. But while the operation was expected to provide valuable information to assist in breaking the U-boat codes and gaining an upper hand in the Battle of the Atlantic, the failure of the Royal Navy to devote any of its large ships to the Dieppe operation would suggest that this stealth raid did not matter as much to the navy as some historians have sensationally claimed—going so far as to argue that the entire Dieppe raid was but a cover for the commando pinch.7 It was not. The navy saw an opportunity to add the pinch operation to the already ballooning Dieppe raid in the hope of gaining advantage should the operation be a success.
After months of training and marshalling of resources, Operation Rutter was set for early July. But a German air raid on the concentrated troop ships that had gathered for the assault left the planners worried that the German pilots would report what they had seen and so destroy the chance for surprise. While this did not happen, poor weather on July 8, with rough, choppy waters, would have disrupted the embarkation of soldiers into the landing craft (a procedure that had been identified as a problem during training over the previous month), and that would have led to an uncoordinated assault on the targets.8 Surprise and shock were vital to the success of the raid; uncoordinated landings would lead to disaster. Rutter was cancelled. Many of the Canadians were disappointed to hear the operation had been scrubbed—Canadian journalist Ross Munro reported that some cried openly.9 Even though everyone involved in the raid was sworn to secrecy, soon the Canadian soldiers and British sailors talked about the botched raid that the bloody “red tabs”— the staff officers and commanders—had failed to pull off.
MOUNTBATTEN’S HEADQUARTERS conducted a post mortem in the days that followed the scuttling of the plan. With unpredictable weather having ultimately led to the cancellation, Mountbatten wondered if the operation could be remounted. Perhaps the element of surprise had not been blown? Even if it had been, the Germans would never believe that the same operation would be directed against the same target. Mountbatten chewed over this tasty morsel and decided to tee up the operation again. It was to be top secret. No record has ever been found of the order to remount the raid, which has led some historians to believe it was done without Churchill’s knowledge.10 This seems unlikely, however, because Mountbatten and Churchill worked closely together, Mountbatten had Churchill’s full support for mounting raids in general, and Churchill still needed an operation to pacify Stalin. This last factor became even more pressing in July after convoy PQ 17, taking supplies through the Arctic Ocean to the Soviet Union, was savaged, losing twenty-four of thirty-five merchant ships. Ship-borne aid was temporarily curtailed, and Churchill quaked a little at having to explain this to Stalin. When he had his first face-to-face meeting with the Russian dictator in Moscow in early August, Churchill spoke of an upcoming major raid—thus leaving little doubt that he was in the know about the Dieppe raid, despite the absence of a paper trail.11 That is not to say that Mountbatten’s plan was not foolhardy: he ordered the new raid to be directed against the same target, using the same troops, apparently in the belief that the Germans— should they have got word of the previously cancelled operation—would assume that no one in their right mind would order such an attack.
The Canadians began to feel uneasy. The optimistic Crerar commented on August 11 that “given an even break in luck and good navigation, the demonstration should prove successful.”12 This was scarcely an expression of unbridled enthusiasm. But the Canadians had asked to be involved in the operation, and now Crerar and McNaughton, who had returned to command the army, felt that their hands were tied.13 It would have taken enormous courage to turn down the operation after asking to be a part of it, and after the Canadian Army’s years of relative inactivity.
There were other problems. Mountbatten’s command was to coordinate the three major services, but the operation had lost its lustre and it was difficult for the service heads to see how success, as it related to their particular arm, would be achieved and measured. The navy wanted little part in this operation. Its forces already were spread thinly in several theatres of war and desperately trying to keep from losing the Battle of the Atlantic. When Mountbatten asked Admiral Sir Dudley Pound for a battleship to supply crushing firepower with its 15-inch guns, the admiral, still sore about the loss of his two capital ships to land-based aircraft in the Far East, replied, “Battleships by daylight off the French coast? You must be mad, Dickie!”14 The Royal Navy was willing to commit only eight small “Hunt” class destroyers equipped with relatively weak 4-inch guns. This disastrous shortcoming in firepower might have been made good if Sir Charles Portal, chief of the air staff, had been willing to devote his formidable bombing force to smashing the Germans, but he too refused to risk his assets. The withdrawal of the air element represented another major change from the original Rutter plan, but Portal was concerned about German anti-aircraft defences, and he also knew that the bombers would have grave difficulty in targeting the rather narrow enemy fortifications along the landing sites. The likelihood of significant French civilian casualties was another consideration: any bomber strike would almost certainly hit the residential areas near the beach. Moreover, with the concentrations of German Luftwaffe warplanes in the area, Portal and the air officer commanding-in-chief of Bomber Command, Arthur Harris, believed that the bombers would be savaged by flak and fighters. Events would prove that their misgivings were unwarranted: the Luftwaffe was surprised by the heavy raids that commenced the operation, and a bombing run would likely have achieved its objective and returned home by the time the enemy mounted any sort of defence. Bomber Command bowed out of the operation, allowing only eight squadrons of Hurricane fighter bombers and five squadrons of medium bombers to soften up the defences. The one positive contribution to the planning was made by RAF Fighter Command, whose senior officers were always spoiling for a fight. Forty-eight squadrons of Spitfires—six of which were RCAF—were committed in the hope of bringing the Luftwaffe to battle, which was in accordance with the air arm’s aggressive policy of “leaning into” Europe. However, the ineptitude demonstrated by Mountbatten’s headquarters in corralling the proper assets revealed scandalous deficiencies in planning for the operation that was set for August 19, 1942.
WHILE MOST OFFICERS would readily acknowledge that no plan survives contact with the enemy, few battles begin without some semblance of a plan. For the raid on the 19th, the primary landing beach in front of the town of Dieppe would be assaulted by the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry and the Essex Scottish, both drawing their recruits from southwestern Ontario. The infantry was to be supported by Churchill tanks of the Calgary Regiment, as well as artillery, engineer, and medical units. In the aftermath of the wide-ranging tank battles of France, the Middle East, and the Russian steppes, the Allied planners put enormous faith in the power of the tank to suppress and overcome enemy defences. On the far flanks, about three kilometres from each of the outside beaches, British commandos were to knock out a series of coastal battery positions that could rake incoming Allied ships. Closer to the main Dieppe beach, the village of Puys to the north was the objective of Toronto’s Royal Regiment of Canada and the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment), while Pourville to the south of Dieppe was to fall to the South Saskatchewan Regiment and the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders of Canada. The objective on these two flanking beaches was to destroy guns on the headlands that overlooked the main beach. A floating reserve consisting of the Fusiliers Mont-Royal (FMR) from Montreal was to be ordered forward onto the main beach to exploit the initial push into the town. Additionally, a secret reserve of 250 British Royal Marines was to land behind the FMRs to punch through the centre to the German headquarters at the Hotel Moderne. Here, it was hoped, the marines would capture key intelligence documents or codes to the German Enigma machine. The flanking beaches and operations were to be assaulted concurrently at 4:50 A.M., a time of day known as nautical twilight, just as the horizon was becoming discernible. The primary assault on Dieppe would follow half an hour later to allow time for the guns along the cliffs and headways to be captured. Nowhere in the planning documents does this discrepancy of thirty minutes square with the operation being based on surprise and shock. Once ashore, the Canadians were to hold the town for one tidal period, about six hours, before landing craft returned to take them off the beaches.
Mountbatten’s staff put much stock on landing in the dark to ensure that enemy defenders, should they be alerted, would have few identifiable targets. The planners placed far less emphasis, and disastrously so, on suppressing the mortar, machine gun, and sniper positions that honeycombed the cliffs overlooking Dieppe and the landing beaches. Even though these positions were camouflaged and almost invisible on the aerial photographs, common sense dictated that the Germans would hold the high ground that allowed them to sweep the beaches with enfilade fire. Mountbatten’s planning officers hoped that the light bombers and Spitfires might stun, or even demolish, these positions, but this wishful thinking was unsupported by experience. Airpower, to that point in the war, had been unable to take out camouflaged ground forces in hardened positions. For these strongpoints to be neutralized, the beach landings at Puys and Pourville had to be a complete success, or the landing on the main beach had to be so rapid as to overrun the enemy and pass through the kill zone. This was just one of the many examples of Mountbatten’s deficient planning. Another equally egregious oversight was the failure to plan the withdrawal: how were the troops, at the end of the six hours, going to retreat to their landing crafts and pull back to the waiting ships if they simultaneously were engaged in a firefight with the enemy? The FMRs, supported by a new wave of Churchill tanks, were to hold open the perimeter, but the planning documents do not explain in any detail how this last wave was to be pulled off the beach while being pressed back by German defenders-turned-attackers, who would be surging in strength even as the Canadians were drawing down their forces in retreat. Too much of the plan was left to chance and hope, all of which was contingent on a coordinated surprise landing on several fronts.
The raiders were to demolish fortifications, wreck harbour facilities, kill Germans, and then withdraw. A radar station in the Pourville sector was a target of opportunity and it was hoped that actionable intelligence would be gathered there, while the marines’ raid on the German headquarters, if successful, would serve up a grab bag of intelligence goodies for the cryptologists at Bletchley Park, the British intelligence-cracking unit. It is unclear how these new codes would have assisted the wizards at Bletchley Park, as the Germans would have known that their codes had been snatched, and therefore compromised, and so it is highly unlikely that they would have resulted in any long-term reading of the enemy’s signals. But the cryptologists had proved effective in the past in breaking enemy transmissions by using only scraps of information gleaned from obscure sources. While the strategic goal of pressuring the Germans to guard against a second front and, hopefully, pull back military resources from the east, was worthy—as was the dress rehearsal aspect of the raid for a future invasion—the tactical goals of the raid were almost trivial.
Dieppe would be a hard nut to crack. The 90-kilometre front of the Dieppe sector was held by the 302nd Infantry Division. It consisted of three regiments of infantry augmented by artillery and anti-aircraft units, including sixteen 10cm field howitzers, eight French 75mm guns, and two batteries of 37mm and 20mm anti-aircraft guns.15 While the entirety of the French coastline was indefensible, the Germans had focused on the port of Dieppe, which they had spent months fortifying with wire entanglements and concrete barriers. They demolished anything along the beaches that could be used for cover. In fact, turning Dieppe into a designated “Defended Area” had been the Germans’ only goal in that sector, and though some of the best and most aggressive German units and formations had been transferred to the Eastern Front, the garrison had trained intensely to repel an amphibious landing. The Germans were ready for battle, with multiple machine guns, light mortars, and medium artillery all situated to saturate the beaches with intense fire.16 At the same time, throughout August the German high command had issued warnings to the various garrisons along the coast, reminding them to be vigilant—not because of leaked information, but simply as a precaution on days when the tides were low and advantageous for an amphibious landing. August 19 was singled out as a possible invasion day, and the entire German garrison was at the alert.
IN THE DAYS LEADING UP TO THE OPERATION, the Canadians were first put in isolation and then transferred to the waiting warships. Many infantrymen assumed it was another training operation, but the tension was more palpable, and soon rumours and information leaked by officers revealed the nature of the raid. Most of the confident Canadians were aching for battle and prepared themselves for the coming fight as the sun set on August 18.
The Allied operation got off to a poor start in the early morning of the 19th, when British warships and other Allied vessels steaming to the beaches ran into a German inshore convoy at 3:47 A.M. off Berneval, on the left flank. The sharp firefight was heard by the German coastal defence troops, but they interpreted it as another regular Royal Navy assault against their convoys, and no additional alarm was raised. However, the brief sea battle had a deleterious effect on the commando units that were directed to the northern flank against Berneval, as the battle scattered their small boats and many never landed at their assigned targets. The commando raid against Berneval had little success, but the assault on the southern flank, against the coastal battery at Varengeville, achieved its objectives as Lord Lovat’s No. 4 Commando unit of 252 raiders fought their way forward.17 The commandos bore up well against the enemy, and their attack was a model operation, knocking out the battery in sustained and fierce fighting. They achieved their mission, although this success ultimately had little impact on the Canadian attacks on the Pourville beaches.
THE DIEPPE OPERATION, AUGUST 19, 1942
By the time the commandos had destroyed or screened the guns to the south, the Canadians’ assault was already well underway, with the attacking battalions having begun their run-in around 3 A.M., after having moved from large troop ships to smaller landing craft. They faced about a 15-kilometre voyage to the beach, which took some two hours, and despite the gentle breeze and the full moon, the distance was too great to allow for the coordination of multiple vessels. It all but guaranteed that some of the dozens of landing crafts would arrive late.
Landing craft carrying Canadian troops ashore to Dieppe, August 19, 1942. Because of the long run-in to the beaches, many of the landing craft were late in dropping the infantry on their objectives.
AT PUYS, THE GERMANS had established concrete machine-gun positions along the chalk cliffs that rose 60 metres from the narrow cove. The beach was a mere 200 metres long and 15 metres deep at high tide. The two machine-gun positions in bunkers on the flanks of the beach, along with three machine guns situated along the cliffs, could rake the entire area. Quite apart from the barrier imposed by the terrain and the careful placement of the machine guns, the beach was blocked by a 3.5-metre concrete seawall and dense coils of barbed wire. It was lunacy to expect any force to land under these conditions.
The Royal Regiment of Canada sent all four companies, some 554 strong, into the beach area, backed by another 111 officers and men from the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment). The landing flotilla would come ashore in three separate waves, but the five first-wave landing craft drifted off course during their lengthy voyage, leaving them to close on the beach about twenty minutes late, around 5:10 A.M. Dawn was breaking, and the Canadians were visible for hundreds of metres before they reached land.18 The German defenders, roused by the fighter-bomber attack against various fortifications along the main Dieppe beach to the south, watched the unreal spectacle of the Canadians chugging stolidly towards their gun emplacements. Ammunition was checked and rifle triggers fingered nervously. Even though the defenders numbered a mere two platoons, a total of around 100 soldiers, every single one of them had time to line up their Mauser rifles or heavy machine guns under the glow of aerial flares, and simply wait for the steel doors of the landing craft to drop.
Private Alfred Moody was on one of the lead landing craft. When the ramp dropped, a number of men were bowled over by machine-gun fire. “How anybody could get through it and still live, I still don’t know,” Moody wrote. “I looked out there and saw all these little white things going by. Every one of these was their tracer bullets. For every one you saw, there was four or five you didn’t see. I saw guys falling, and said to myself, ‘This is sheer madness.’”19 He hesitated for a second, but then he and his surviving platoon mates pushed forward into the cold water, waded awkwardly to the beach, and then ran to the seawall, which seemed to offer some cover. When Moody glanced behind him, he saw dead and dying Canadians all over the beach and dozens more lying in bloodied piles inside the yawning landing craft.
Many of the Germans were shooting through the narrow slits in concrete pillboxes, leaving little opportunity for Canadians to take them out. A few officers and men ran through the firestorm to throw grenades at their enemy, but most of these Royals paid for their bravery with their lives. The terrible crossfire on the beach was thickened up by machine gunners raking the ground from the cliffs, while mortar teams lobbed their bombs into the confined beach area to devastating effect. The only protection was afforded by the seawall, and even this was partially enfiladed by machine-gun fire from the eastern cliff. Lance-Corporal L.G. Ellis of A Company made the run from his landing craft to the wall with his platoon around him. When he arrived, he was alone. Every single one of his platoon mates had been cut down by bullets or mortar fragments.20 Private Peter Macleod had a very short battle. As he left the landing craft, a bullet slammed into his face. The slug tore out his eye, sending him flopping back into the crimson-stained water. Stunned by the trauma, he nonetheless dragged himself forward out of the water, already choked with bodies, and was shot in the leg before he reached the seawall. Then, in his words, “all hell had let loose.”21 He got a bandage on his leg, but agonized over finding a way to stop the bleeding from his shredded face. As he was trying to wrap a bandage around his eyes, he was shot again in the head. He slipped into unconsciousness, but somehow survived his wounds.
The wall protected the men if they hugged it tightly, but it was also a trap. Once there, it was very difficult for the attackers to get up and keep moving. The Royals’ platoons were scattered along the barrier, and many of the junior officers and NCOs had been shot down. The top of the wall was fringed and blocked by three layers of barbed wire, and more rows of wire lay beyond it that were, according to one rifleman, “virtually impassable.”22 Fire from the Germans intensified as they found their range, and the Canadians could do little in reply. Both of the regiment’s 3-inch mortar teams had been wiped out, the first without launching a single bomb, while the second managed to get off just three bombs before the entire team was killed. From the wall, riflemen snapped off a few rounds from their Lee Enfields, and the Bren gunners laid down some fire, but with the Germans camouflaged and protected, not much could be seen, let alone hit.23 And anyone who exposed themselves for long was a target for riflemen from above. “The Royals were shot down in heaps on the beach without knowing where the firing was coming from,” remarked one eyewitness.24
The second wave of landing craft landed at about 5:35 A.M., but dozens of infantrymen never even passed out of the steel confines. The sailors took in living Canadians, dropped the ramp, saw most of their infantry comrades torn apart by machine-gun fire, and then pulled back off the beach with their bleeding cargo. The wounded riflemen writhed in agony, their screams echoing inside the confines of the steel craft, while mortar fire crashed down in the water and bullets pinged off the sides. When the third wave, consisting of the Black Watch, arrived and surveyed the beach, its officers looked for an opportunity to reinforce success. None could be seen. But no news had been received from the Royals because all the wireless sets were broken, and the Black Watch made the fateful decision to continue with the landing. Perhaps more experienced officers would have aborted the mission. As it stood, 111 Black Watch troops came ashore in a slightly secluded part of the beach, but were funnelled back to the seawall, where they had little impact on the battle. Only a single Highlander from the Black Watch got off the beach and returned to Britain.
The seawall soon resembled a charnel house. Blood flowed from bodies, forming puddles or soaking into the sand. The journalist Ross Munro was on one of the landing craft and miraculously survived the dropping of the ramp and the staggeringly heavy fire that ripped men apart around him. As he looked out over the open bow, he saw dozens of slain Canadians floating in the water, crumpled on the beaches, or lying motionless along the seawall. “It was brutal and terrible and shocked you almost to insensibility.”25
Even amid the horror, some of the junior officers and NCOs struggled on, ordering forward Bangalore torpedoes—long, thin tubes filled with explosives—to blow a ragged hole through the barbed wire. About half a dozen riflemen passed through the gap before German fire found it. The storm party encountered additional barbed wire obstructions beyond the first barrier and found themselves without Bangalores. They were reduced to snipping the metal strands by hand, using wire cutters. But soon several Germans had turned their attention to this threat, and at least one Canadian was riddled with machine-gun fire here, his body left tangled in the wire. All of the riflemen would have been annihilated if one of their comrades from the seawall had not thrown a smoke grenade. The Canadians ran back to the uncertain safety of the beach.
In another section of the fire-swept front, on the eastern headlands, the Royals’ commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Douglas Catto, a Great War artilleryman and Toronto architect, was able to rally about two dozen men who were partially protected from the enemy fire by a shallow curvature that jutted into the seawall. They tried to move forward up a narrow staircase, but it was blocked by barbed wire. With no Bangalore torpedo, they spent thirty excruciating minutes cutting the wire by hand. Each man took his turn in the dangerously exposed position, including the colonel, while the others laid down fire. Their determination paid off and they were eventually able, around 7 A.M., to race up the stairs to the top of the cliff, where they cleared a number of positions. Unfortunately, their exit from the beach was soon thereafter blocked by enemy riflemen and machine gunners who swept it with continuous small-arms fire. Catto’s battle group swept along the cliff, and eventually turned in an attempt to complete their objective in connecting with the Essex Scottish on the main beach. It would have been wiser to try to engage the Puys beach defenders who were shooting vulnerable Canadians below. Their decision to turn towards Dieppe ensured that no other Canadians made it to the top.
Nothing prepared the Canadians trapped on the beach for the cacophony of noise in the battle zone. Or for the mauling. Heaps of bodies lay along the seawall. One observer described the beach as pure “carnage … the whole slope was just littered with khaki bodies of the wounded and killed Royals.”26 This unfettered butchering went on for some three hours before most of the Royals surrendered around 8:30 a.m. Catto’s group at the top of the cliff held out until the afternoon, but it too was in a futile position and eventually downed arms. Only 67 of the 554 Royals got off the beach, and many of them were wounded in the second-wave landings, having never stepped off their landing craft. Riflemen killed many Canadians who sought to swim away, while others drowned from their exertions. A number of the landing craft braved the fire in an attempt to pick up survivors, but several were blown apart by mortar bombs or, in one tragic case, were so heavily laden with the wounded that the craft capsized, leading to a mass drowning. In the end, some 227 Royals were killed, including 20 men who died of their wounds in captivity or after returning to England. The Royal Regiment of Canada lay in ruins, one full company of the Black Watch was killed or captured, and the German guns on the eastern headland overlooking Dieppe were intact.
AT THE POURVILLE BEACHES to the south of Dieppe, the navy put the twelve landing craft carrying about 500 infantrymen of the South Saskatchewan Regiment ashore on time at 4:50 A.M., while the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders of Canada were to come in half an hour later in a second wave, although they were delayed another thirty minutes after that. The Pourville beach was much longer than that at Puys, but like the other, it was dominated by cliffs on both sides. The enemy strongpoints here would have to be knocked out early in the battle. However, more than half of the South Sasks—A (Able) and D (Dog) Company—landed in the wrong place, on the west side of the Scie River (furthest from the main Dieppe beaches), which divided the front.
On the eastern side of the river, C (Charlie) Company of the South Sasks advanced on the village of Pourville, which consisted of a few blocks of red-brick buildings and houses with white picket fences. Terrified French civilians sought cover in cellars or attics, praying for the storm to pass over them. When the Canadians encountered German resistance, they pinned the enemy down with Bren gun- and rifle fire, allowing other units to advance on the flanks and bomb them into submission. Their Sten guns—a submachine gun with forty-seven parts—were much less effective than the Brens or the Germans’ machinengewehr 34, and most jammed at some point in the battle. Still, the Germans were either killed or driven out of Pourville by around 5:30 A.M., and the Sasks on the eastern side of the Scie fought their way forward, some 3 kilometres, occupying hills southwest of the village.
Private W.A. Haggard, who took over his platoon when his NCO was gunned down, later claimed, “The Canadian troops showed themselves far better soldiers than the Germans whom they encountered. Their morale was excellent, and they were ready to fight, whereas the enemy infantry gave in easily when it came to close quarter fighting.”27 However, Haggard’s optimistic assessment was contradicted in an official report by the Cameron Highlanders, which observed that the German defenders were well trained, resilient, and flexible: “Machine guns were situated to cover all beaches, about 800 yards to the rear. They were well prepared sites and camouflaged. The snipers were numerous and very accurate, well-spread out, predetermined positions, very hard to locate.… They changed positions frequently, kept away, moved back when our troops advanced and followed our troops as they withdrew.”28 Further to the rear, a few German 81mm mortars harassed the village and beaches with bomb fire that exploded and sent hundreds of slivers of metal in all directions.
In response to the Canadian inroads, the Germans rushed forward reinforcements. Some of these made for the heights of Pourville (closest to Dieppe), which overlooked the landing sites. The South Saskatchewan attack party that sought to clear that position and reach the radar station (about halfway between Pourville and Dieppe) was turned back with heavy casualties, and thereafter the Germans could fire down and into the Canadians advancing off the beach. Royal Canadian Artillery forward observers sent coordinates back to the Royal Navy destroyers by wireless to drench the positions with shellfire, but either the observers or the gunners were unable to spot the camouflaged German strongpoints.29 A few salvos of 4-inch shells slammed into the cliff face, but did little to slow the rate of enemy fire.
A Hunt Class destroyer firing in support of Canadians on the beaches. The destroyers had little impact on the battle.
The advance was harder on the western side of the river, where the Sasks were soon pinned down at the only bridge across the Scie. It was covered by enemy mortar and machine-gun fire. Bodies piled up. Watching the Germans gain the initiative as the Canadians were cut down crossing the 24-metre bridge, Lieutenant-Colonel Cecil Merritt, the youthful commander of the South Sasks, whose moustache lent only slight gravity to his baby face, moved up from his forward headquarters on the beach and rallied his men. Merritt raced back and forth as bullets and shrapnel whirled through the air and, at around 5:50 A.M., led his men across the bridge, shouting encouragement and somehow escaping unscathed. Many of his men were not so fortunate, and soon the bridge was heaped with bodies. Merritt survived and continued to throw himself into battle, later racing forward into heavy fire before tossing a grenade and blowing up a machine-gun position. Their colonel’s inspiring leadership notwithstanding, the South Sasks who crossed the bridge made little progress.
Back at the beach, the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders of Canada landed late, at around 5:50 a.m. They took fire from about 1,000 metres out, bullets ringing off the steel hulls of the landing craft. As men cringed inside the fragile vessels, a brave piper stood up on the fo’c’sle to inspire his comrades. Much of the skirling wail from his instrument was lost in the unremitting noise of battle, but the Highlanders charged into the fight. Their commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Alfred Gostling, was shot down by machine-gun fire almost as soon as he hit the beach.
The Highlanders pushed forward, platoons and sections fanning out from the landing sites, driving through Pourville and engaging a number of enemy defenders who had been bypassed by the South Sasks. About 1.5 kilometres inland, a series of houses hid enemy riflemen. Company Sergeant Major George Gouk remembered that an ad hoc Highlander battle group “got busy … and were doing a fairly good job cleaning them out with rifles and grenades when all of a sudden they opened up on us with their mortars.” Casualties mounted, but “there was no stopping the boys then, they were seeing their pals for the first time being killed and wounded at their side and the only thought that seemed to be in everyone’s mind was to have revenge.”30 The houses were cleared with bombs and bullets.
Around 9:30 A.M., with the Germans now holding much of the high ground along the headways and cliffs that separated the main beach from the Pourville landing site, the Canadians began their methodical retreat. It was now that the most conspicuous flaw in Mountbatten’s plan was revealed. Once engaged with the enemy in close-quarters combat, the two Canadian battalions had no way to withdraw to the landing craft unless a sizable force was left behind to cover the retreat. Moreover, as long as the Germans held one of the cliffs, they could pour fire into the beach area and engage the in-bound landing craft. “The boats started coming into the teeth of it all,” wrote Private Clarence Bourassa of the South Saskatchewan Regiment. “They came through a wall of lead and fire, not a one turned back.”31 Bourassa survived the mad scramble to the boats, but was killed two years later in Normandy. The navy bravely took the remaining Camerons and Sasks out, but Major A.T. Law, now leading the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders of Canada, remembered bitterly that his men “suffered more heavily during the last phase of the withdrawal than during all the previous stages of the operation.”32
The vice was tightening on the Canadians, and the only way to hold off the enemy and forestall even greater carnage was to leave behind a sacrificial force. Lieutenant-Colonel Merritt chose to stay back and orchestrate the desperate defence. He was wounded several times, but still had the strength and courage to race out under fire, grab a wounded Canadian, and drag him back to the seawall where the Canadians made their desperate stand. As one of the Camerons observed of the South Sasks’ commander’s actions, “It wasn’t human, what he did.”33 Merritt, who survived the battle to face three years of imprisonment, was awarded the Victoria Cross for his “matchless gallantry and inspiring leadership.” The rearguard of about 250 men, nearly evenly split between the two regiments, continued to fight against impossible odds until about 1:30 P.M. Their brave actions had bought enough time for about 600 of the 1,200 men who landed to get away.
WITH THE FLANKS UNSECURED, the centre could never hold. The Royal Hamilton Light Infantry and Essex Scottish motored towards the main beach at 5:20 A.M., between ten and thirty minutes later than the assaults on the Puys and Pourville. Their staggered run-in was meant to give time for the forces north and south of Dieppe to immobilize the guns along the white cliffs that towered over the main beach, but now it was evident—and this should have been anticipated by the planners—that the fighting on those two beaches had alerted the German defenders in the town of Dieppe and along the high cliffs that overlooked it.
The 4-inch guns of destroyers pounded the fortifications on the Dieppe beach to no avail: the defenders were holed up in the hotels, a tobacco factory, churches, and the long esplanade. The gun positions closer to the beach or camouflaged on the cliffs, as well as the pillboxes, concrete bunkers, hidden snipers’ posts, and artillery, were not easy to either locate or silence. Before the Canadians landed on the main beach, fifty-eight Hurricane fighter bombers shot up the town, directing 20mm cannon fire into known enemy positions, but the Germans were not suppressed for long by this drive-by shooting. Denis Whitaker, a former professional Canadian Football League player and a captain in the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry, wrote later of the sinking feeling in his stomach as his landing craft closed in on the beach: the fortifications looked “terribly wrong. Everything was intact!”34
Off the 1.6-kilometre stretch of beach, the Germans had installed underwater mines that blew a number of landing craft out of the water, the blast ripping through metal and flesh. The craft that negotiated the mines were hit with withering fire from machine-gunners and riflemen who tracked their movement from hundreds of metres out. To add to the carnage, several of the landing craft were hit with mortar fire and opened up like tin cans.
“The instant we jumped from our boats,” recounted Private Joseph Johnston of the Rileys, as the Hamilton boys were known, “we were … swept with a murderous crossfire.”35 Scores of men died instantly, but their comrades plunged forward, down the landing craft ramps and into a firestorm. A concrete seawall halfway to the town, similar to the seawalls on other beaches, became the focus for many of the soldiers caught in the kill zone. However, unlike the others, this wall was uneven in height, ranging from about 1 to 2 metres high, and beyond it was a broad esplanade, which offered little cover.
Mortar fire crashed down along the beach, and proved the most deadly German weapon. The bombs exploded on the egg-sized chert, sending steel fragments and stone splinters in all directions. The soldiers either crouched behind the seawall or retreated and took shelter among the landing craft that were now riddled with holes and taking on water. All the while, snipers in the town picked off NCOs and officers, and anyone who seemed to be coordinating the advance.
The battle broke down into a series of isolated engagements as the front-line formations lost all coherence. It was nearly impossible to advance past the thick rows of barbed wire, which was coiled 1 metre high and 5 metres deep beyond the seawall. Many of the Bangalore torpedoes had been lost and their carriers killed. Furthermore, the relative safety of the wall made it very hard for the infantry, once they stopped there and lost momentum, to start again. Matters were made worse as many officers and NCOs were already down and voice commands were all but lost in the whirlwind of destruction.
Lieutenant-Colonel Fred Jasperson, commander of the Essex Scottish, wrote shortly after the battle about the stunning brutality of combat on the beach that day. “The scene of it,” he wrote, would be “imprinted on my mind forever.”36 Men’s arms and legs had been amputated by shells; long ropes of entrails lay in gruesome clumps next to bodies. Three times, ad hoc Essex battle groups tried to breach the barbed wire beyond the seawall, and each time they were forced back with casualties. In the end, only a small group of Essex, led by Company Sergeant Major Cornelius Stapleton, made it off the beach. They charged for cover in the hotel and killed a number of riflemen. Stapleton would be awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for this action, but such small victories were the exception. The vast majority of the battalion simply endured the crippling fire on the beach.37 More experienced soldiers might have found a way forward, but this seems unlikely in the face of the hopeless position and the defenders’ strength.
Official war artist Charles Comfort tried to capture the chaos of the Canadian attack on the main beach.
THE 14TH CANADIAN ARMY TANK BATTALION, better known as the Calgary Regiment, was the first unit of the Canadian Armoured Corps to go into action during the Second World War. But because of a navigational error, they were about fifteen minutes late touching down on the main beach, arriving a little after 5:30 A.M. At that point, the battle there was already shaping up as a bloodbath. Could the tanks reverse the infantry’s grim fortunes?
More than half of the Churchill tanks were equipped with the powerful 6-pounder gun (the others had the wimpy 2-pounder), which would have been useful in the first critical minutes of the battle, and in trading return fire with the Germans. In fact, the Canadians had high expectations with respect to their armour, hoping it would shock the enemy, even though the infantry had had only a few opportunities to train with tanks in mock battles.38 As it was, the Germans, far from being surprised, could see the landing craft ferrying in the 45-ton Churchills, and directed their fire in an attempt to stop them before they had a chance to play their part. A weak smokescreen did little to obscure the landing, although the lumbering beasts, which had been fitted with waterproof material, drew considerable fire that allowed some of the exposed Canadian riflemen on the beaches to pull themselves to cover. A number of tanks were damaged or sunk before they made it to the beach, but twenty-seven tanks eventually made it ashore and brought their guns to bear on the enemy.39
The Churchill tanks ground up and down the beach, their coaxial Besa machine guns cooking off 7.92mm small-arms ammunition, and the 6-pounder throwing armour-piercing, solid-shot shells at enemy fortifications. While the firepower had an immediate impact on the enemy, the solid shot was not as effective as high explosive shells that might have done more damage. At the same time, the tanks had difficulty in finding purchase on the shingle. Incredibly, Mountbatten’s planners had not warned the Canadians that they would encounter the chert, even though tens of thousands of British vacationers had visited Dieppe before the war. Between six and nine of the tanks were disabled because stones were caught between their treads and bogey wheels, eventually breaking the track.
Far more damning to the operation’s success was the inability of the tanks to get off the 200-metre-wide promenade between the beach and town, because the exits were blocked by concrete metre-and-a-half-high barriers. The Royal Canadian Engineers were to have removed these obstacles earlier with explosives, but the engineers had almost all been killed or wounded.40 And so the tanks rumbled back and forth on the beach and the promenade, attempting to avoid the wounded and dead Canadians that littered the ground, hurling shells into enemy positions, but always suffering from constricted vision and suffocating heat that, according to Trooper Dennis Scott, began to melt the paint on the interior of the tank.41
The German anti-tank guns, the impotent 37mm, had little effect against the Churchill’s armour, but the pounding against the steel hull created splash—little bits of metal that flew around the interior—injuring the troopers. The German fire was more effective in dislodging the tank tracks. When that happened, the resolute tankers kept firing from their immobile, yet still hardened, positions. The Churchills blasted away at the enemy until they ran out of ammunition, and even then the tanks remained deadly. Lieutenant Edwin Bennett, a twenty-year-old tank commander who was blinded in one eye by a sliver of metal during the battle, remembered seeing a German soldier advance on the tank with a stick grenade in his hand. He was ground to death under the tank’s tracks when Bennett ordered his driver to run him over.42
The tanks added firepower to the Canadian attack. But they did not turn the tide of battle.
ABOVE THE TERRESTRIAL BATTLEFIELD, the RAF and RCAF fought in the largest air battle that had been seen to that point in Western Europe, committing 863 pilots to drawing out and destroying the Luftwaffe. Throughout the long day, Spitfires, Hurricanes, and P-51 Mustangs engaged Focke-Wulf Fw 190s and Messerschmitt 109s, with some of the RAF and RCAF pilots flying up to five sorties.43 The Germans had the advantage of fighting on the defensive, but throughout the battle flaming aircraft on both sides crashed down to earth.
RCAF pilot John Maffre would serve in a number of squadrons during the war, but he flew his first operation over Dieppe, in a Spitfire V with No. 416 Squadron. Just twenty years of age at the time, he described the scene as a “tapestry of aircraft, wheeling all over the place—just nothing but aircraft.”44 In the whirling confusion of combat, Maffre temporarily lost his leader. “I was number two, and my number one and I got separated for a moment.” That was when he noticed “tracer bullets going past your wingtip, and you realize that some SOB is trying to kill you….”45 Maffre survived the battle and the war, as did his twenty-four-year-old brother, Jim, who served in Coastal Command, although two of their other brothers were killed while flying with the RCAF.
Don Morrison flew a Spitfire with No. 401 Squadron, RCAF, in the air battle. The twenty-one-year-old already had four kills to his credit and would get his fifth on the 19th, when he tangled with an Fw 190. “As I closed to about 25 yards, I opened up with a two-second burst of cannon fire,” Morrison recalled. “As both the enemy aircraft and I went into thin cloud he exploded. Suddenly my windshield and hood were covered with oil and there was the clatter of debris striking my aircraft. I imagine it punctured my radiators. The engine started to cough and the aircraft shuddered violently.”46 Morrison ditched his plane and parachuted into the water. Parachuting into water was often a death sentence, but he was able to climb into a small inflatable dinghy (attached to the parachute) and was eventually rescued. It was his seventh Spitfire, and he would lose another when he was shot down over Calais a few months later, leaving his left leg in the plane as he was wrenched out. That ended his war as a fighter ace, and he was a prisoner until liberation.
Bruce and Douglas Warren were twins who served together in Fighter Command and flew together in No. 165 Squadron, RAF. The twins had been briefed the night before to prepare for a massive battle, and been warned that, in the course of it, the Royal Navy would fire on anything below 7,000 feet. Douglas Warren revealed, “My twin brother and I were … especially interested in the Dieppe operation as we were the only Canadians in the squadron. We were in the air at first light, and could see the battle area alight with tracers, with many fires on the esplanade of Dieppe. Several landing craft were grounded offshore.” They spent the morning chasing enemy fighters that raked the infantry pinned on the beach. The first sortie was at dawn, followed by a second one at lunch. At noon, “there were many dogfights, and Dornier 217s [bombers] were dive-bombing our ships. Our section of four attacked a Dornier from astern and rear quarter. It appeared that the pilot bailed out while the rear gunner was still firing at us!” Even at thousands of feet above the battlefield, the Warrens could see that the battle was going against the Canadians, and he and his brother fought with added desperation to relieve the strain on the ground forces. “We had no trouble appreciating what our boys were going through down below.”47
When the fighting on the beaches hit a fever pitch, at around 8:30 A.M., the first German bombers targeted the ships and beaches. The Ju 88s were very effective in swooping down from a high altitude and dropping their bombs close to the ground, and at least two Churchill tanks were knocked out this way. The Germans were outnumbered for most of the battle, but they could stay in the air longer, and the Allied fighters coming from across the Channel had only a limited time—sometimes as little as ten minutes—in which to do some damage. The Canadian and British pilots had to worry both about the enemy and their own fuel tanks. Consequently, there were periods when few Allied fighters were positioned over the beaches and the skies swarmed with the Luftwaffe, as well as the opposite situation—a seeming armada of Allied fighters and no enemy planes. By the end of day, the RAF and RCAF had lost ninety-nine aircraft. The Allied flyers claimed that even more Germans were shot down, but later figures revealed the number was forty-eight.48
ON THE MAIN DIEPPE BEACH, the Essex Scottish remained pinned down, but on the right flank a few aggressive battle groups from the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry pressed into the casino overlooking the Promenade. The Rileys fought through the inside of the large building and were largely protected by its walls from the fire directed at the beach. Sergeant George Hickson of the 7th Field Company, Royal Canadian Engineers, was attached to a group of Rileys as they moved through the labyrinthine interior. They overran a German concrete casement, chiefly by throwing hand grenades at the enemy, and then set about blowing up machine-gun posts and a gun battery, the latter unmanned because the Germans were already either dead or captured. At one point, the group heard a sniper firing at the Canadians on the beach from the other side of a concrete barrier. Sergeant Hickson set a high explosive, 3-pound plastic charge and blew him and the position to rubble.49 Another group of Rileys, led by Captain A.C. Hill, fought its way through a number of buildings in Dieppe. French civilians were, peculiarly, still on the streets; some of them greeted the Canadians, while others pointed to where enemy soldiers lay in ambush. After a series of firefights, there was nowhere for the Highlanders to go, and because they were running low on ammunition, they retreated back to the beaches.
“The beach was a deathtrap,” recounted Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Labatt, commander of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry.50 It was also a mass of confusion, with almost all communication cut between the survivors on the beaches and the headquarters on HMS Calpe several kilometres out at sea. Signalmen were dead or their radios destroyed, leaving only crackling dead air for General Hamilton Roberts to interpret as he waited anxiously for news. But then, at 6:10 A.M., a garbled message from shore seemed to indicate that the Essex Scottish had pushed into town. Roberts clung to the hope implied by the message, even though the ominous radio silence and the obvious signs of fierce fighting on the beach, and, much closer, the return of landing craft shot up and filled with bloodied and broken bodies of his troops, indicated that it was likely untrue. Roberts could have sent liaison or intelligence officers forward. Instead, wishing to exploit success and turn the tide, he ordered into battle Lieutenant-Colonel Dollard Menard’s Fusiliers Mont-Royal. The 584 French-Canadian soldiers never faltered, even as enemy fire raked their small unarmoured boats during the run-in. They hit the beaches around 7 A.M. and ran headfirst into the storm.
A few made it through the firezone, but most of the FMRs took cover along the western end of the beach, under the cliffs or behind burning landing craft and immobilized tanks. Lieutenant-Colonel Dollard Menard was struck by shrapnel in the shoulder (the first of a number of wounds he endured that day). “You say a bullet or a piece of shrapnel hits you but the word isn’t right. They slam you the way a sledgehammer slams you. There’s no sharp pain at first. It jars you so much you’re not sure exactly where you’ve been hit or what with.”51 Stunned and driven to the ground, Menard came to as bullets potted the stones around him. He stumbled for cover, past the bodies of men who would never rise again.
Sergeant-Major Lucien Dumais was one of the lucky ones. He and a few mates made it off the landing craft before it reversed violently and pulled away from the beach. Firing and advancing towards the casino, they found it already cleared by the Rileys. After an hour of fighting, Dumais and a Bren gunner knocked out two German machine-gun positions, and eventually met up with elements of the retreating Rileys. They carried wounded men back to the beach and loaded up a landing craft under smoke cover. Dumais nearly made it onto the landing craft too, but it pulled away and he sank about 3 metres under water, his hobnailed boots taking him down.52 He swallowed a lot of the sea before he swam back to the beach, where he was eventually taken prisoner. He later escaped and made his way back to England.
THROUGHOUT THE LATE MORNING, one tank after another had been put out of action or had run out of shells. The fusillade from the pinned-down Canadians gradually dropped off as they succumbed to wounds, burned through their ammunition, or simply gave up fighting. Still the German counterattack was stymied by pockets of resolute attackers-turned-defenders. One German observed that the Canadians took “effective cover behind their dead comrades” and “shot uninterruptedly at our positions. Thus with their bodies these dead soldiers provided their comrades with the last service of friendship.”53 The plan to send the Royal Marines to penetrate to the German headquarters was partially cancelled after the FMRs were cut to ribbons, although dozens of commandos were carried right into the battle on fast boats, where they suffered the same fate as the Canadians. With the main beach a ruin of blood, tangled metal and bodies, the challenge now was to see how many men could be saved.
The landing craft arrived on the beaches a little after 11 A.M. in staggered and scattered individual runs. Despite covering fire from the destroyers’ guns, many were holed and sunk by the Germans who fired from the cliff tops. Observant Canadians would have seen the stakes driven at intervals into the shingle: these were distance markers for the mortar men who methodically blasted every sector of the shallow beach where the Canadians were hanging on by their fingertips.54 As one German artillery officer recalled of the target-rich scene, “Two whole regiments … clinging tightly against the concrete wall…. Everywhere along the whole strand our shells were exploding, their effect multiplied ten times by the exploding of the stone splinters.”55 Nonetheless, many Canadians continued to hold off the enemy, and to buy time for the landing craft to begin the evacuation.
The unwieldy landing craft were easy targets for the German gunners, snipers, and mortar teams, who often held their fire until men ran from their protected positions at the seawall into the open, yawning mouths of the waiting boats. Enemy fighter pilots also took low-flying runs to rake the beaches and water with cannon fire. A desultory smokescreen provided some concealment for the trapped Canadians, but much of it dissipated just as the landing craft hit the beach. Nonetheless, the officers and men of the Royal Navy, according to one Canadian infantryman, “showed a complete disregard for death and carried on as if this action was an every-day occurrence.”56
A view of the carnage inside a landing craft.
On the beach, brave Canadians rushed back and forth between the seawall to the beaches to pull injured comrades to safety. Honorary Captain J.W. Foote, the burly chaplain of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry, was a non-combatant who worked relentlessly on the wounded, bandaging, giving morphine, and offering last rites. During the withdrawal, Foote carried several Canadians to the landing craft, risking his own life to save others. On one of the landing craft, wounded men called out for Foote to stay, but he was heard to say, as he returned to the beach, “the men ashore would need me far more in captivity than any of those going home.”57 For his self-sacrifice and devotion he was later awarded the Victoria Cross.
The surviving Canadians could see that the landing craft would never be able to take them all off. Too many landing craft had been destroyed, including six of the eight meant for the Essex Scottish. In desperation, some of the Canadians stripped down to their shorts, intending to swim back to the waiting ships. German snipers showed no mercy, picking them off, driving bullets through bobbing heads and exposed backs. Even more devastating were the German bombers that swooped down and dropped high explosive bombs into the water. Private Geoffrey Ellwood, a signaller attached to the Essex Scottish, recounted seeing “parts of bodies flying up—heads, arms, legs. This brought everybody [the swimmers] back to shore. And afterwards, the bodies and debris were washed ashore. A good six or eight feet along the water’s edge was just bodies and parts of bodies just floating there.”58
Some 33 landing craft were destroyed by enemy action, mortars, and mines during the frantic battle. But amid the carnage about 400 Canadians were brought back to the ships. It is surprising that anyone at all got off the beach.
THE SHOOTING ON THE MAIN BEACH finally ended at around 2 P.M. For the shell-blasted soldiers, the quieting of the guns brought some relief. Hands up and heads bowed, the Canadians were led from the corpse-strewn beaches and through Dieppe. Despite the ferocity of the battle, the captors treated the Canadian prisoners fairly gently, considering their propensity for murdering those who fell into their hands. While cases of physical abuse were recorded, and some of the more grievously wounded Canadians were executed on the beach, most were simply herded towards prison cages. In town, injured men were cared for, although almost all the surgery— from amputations to deep-tissue cutting—was conducted without anaesthetic, due to the chronic shortage of medical supplies experienced by the Germans on all fronts.59
On the beaches, the Germans combed through the wreckage, looking for souvenirs and for documents that might shed light on why the raid had been launched. Propaganda photographs were taken to highlight the achievement of the gloating supermen who had defended Europe from “invasion.” The ugly task of stacking the Canadian dead, like seeping cordwood, and of collecting body parts, was conducted without picture-taking.60
Over the coming days, the Canadian survivors—those who made it back to England and those made prisoners—tried to reconstruct their traumatic experiences. The death of comrades tore at the mind, and the battle was reduced to a vague memory of fading faces, dying screams, and the pain of irreparable loss. Men looked for their friends, counted heads, and compared notes, wondering who had got back to safety and who had been left behind. Grief turned to anger as most of the Canadians concluded that the Germans had known about the raid in advance. This wasn’t the case, but the defenders knew that an attack was most likely to be launched in the period when the moon and tide were favourable, as they were on August 19, and long-standing orders had put the coastal garrisons on alert. The Germans did not need forewarning: their defences were in place. They simply responded efficiently when the attack came.
The aftermath of the raid. The Germans used photographs of the victorious battle as effective propaganda.
While the lopsided battle favoured the Germans, they nonetheless suffered 591 casualties in all three services. The final toll on the Canadians was far worse. Of the 4,963 Canadians who embarked in England, only 2,211 returned. Of those, 589 were wounded but survived, while in 28 cases the wounds proved to be mortal. Another 1,946 Canadians were captured, and at least 568 of them were wounded. Seventy-one would die in captivity. In nine hours of battle, the Canadians had 836 killed, and six of the seven Canadian battalions sent into battle lost their commanding officers.61 Dieppe was the single most costly day for the Canadian Army during the Second World War.
Notwithstanding the resounding failure, prepared communiqués went out throughout the British Empire and the United States claiming success and lauding the Canadians prowess in battle. The eye-popping fabrications that the assault was “decisive,” or, as the Toronto Star reported, that it helped “Smash Nazi Opposition,” might have made even inveterate deceivers like Stalin blush.62 But over the coming weeks, the whitewash was slowly revealed for what it was, and some brave newspapers questioned the government’s account, especially when, in mid-September, the Department of National Defence released a staggering 134-page list of the Canadian casualties.
Major-General Roberts wrote a ludicrous appreciation of the battle in its aftermath: “All the men who returned are in wonderful spirits,” he concluded, “and have expressed their desire to go back at the enemy again as soon as possible.”63 Roberts must have known better. The Canadian general was scapegoated by his superiors after the battle; he never complained or spoke publicly of his role in the raid, but his career was all but finished. Removed from command after a polite delay of a few months, he was cast aside to oversee reinforcement units. Some of the Dieppe survivors never forgave him. Every year until his death in 1962, on the anniversary of the battle, unknown Canadian veterans of the raid sent him a stale piece of cake, a harsh reminder of his earlier cheery prediction that the operation would be a “piece of cake.” Admiral Mountbatten sought to forget the mess, shifting blame and emphasizing the claim that Dieppe taught valuable lessons for future operations, even going so far as to later claim that the D-Day landings of June 1944 would have failed without Dieppe. It was a hard sell because it was untrue. At least, no scholar examining the record has been able to draw a direct line connecting the two operations. Mountbatten’s royal blood protected him, however, and he went off to an even higher-profile position as Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia.
THE DIEPPE RAID comprised but a single day in the six-year war, but it remains hotly contested by generations of soldiers, historians, and commentators.64 Success has a thousand fathers, goes the saying, while defeat is an orphan. But the defeat at Dieppe was multi-sired. Mountbatten and his staff were guilty of poorly coordinating the various arms involved in the operation, of failing to pick the right target, and of orchestrating a misguided multi-timed beach landing. None of the friction of war was taken into account. The plan’s success was predicated on surprise, speed, and darkness. Instead, what the Canadians got was an alert enemy that used its tactical advantages of terrain and firepower to shock and then shatter the raiders. Dieppe was launched to appease both the Americans and the Soviets, both of whom demanded action. If the raid was mounted with too little careful thought, the Canadian high command of Crerar and McNaughton has to wear some of the blame. These generals accepted the flawed plan with little protest. Braver commanders would have questioned the operation, rather than roll the dice and look skyward. One British admiral, Sir Bertram Ramsay, observed, “Dieppe was a tragedy, and the cause may be attributed to the fact that it was planned by inexperienced enthusiasts.”65
At a strategic level, the raid confirmed in Churchill’s mind the difficulty of opening a second front. Amphibious attackers had to bring everything into battle—from ammunition to reliable communication systems to medical facilities—and an assault from the sea introduced new factors to disrupt plans, from the challenges of combined-arms warfare to different service cultures, and more opportunities for the fog of war to obscure and confuse. If Dieppe served any purpose, it was that of stiffening Churchill’s resolve to postpone the invasion of Europe until the Anglo-American military commanders could gather the necessary forces, and until the Battle of the Atlantic was won. While additional lessons were processed from the difficult American experiences in the Pacific campaign, as well as landings in the Mediterranean, Dieppe always remained a sepulchre to remind senior officers of the folly of shoddy planning and misplaced hope. The preparations for D-Day would be far more thorough. The application of overwhelming firepower in June 1944 was a lesson learned from Dieppe. Or the lesson learned was not to allow inter-service rivalry to dictate operations: on D-Day a central headquarters exercised control over both bombers and warships. None of this is to suggest, as Mountbatten claimed, that Normandy was won on the beaches of Dieppe, only that Dieppe caused Allied planners to be more careful than they might otherwise have been. They had seen what failure looked like.66
The Russians were unmoved by the failure of Dieppe. They had the equivalent of scores of Dieppe-like slaughters weekly, at times daily, but the Americans sheepishly dialled back their pressure on Churchill for the invasion of Europe, at least for the short term. In the Canadian Army, the raid provoked a seemingly paradoxical pride: censors who read the troops’ letters home observed that morale was “enhanced” by the raid. In fact, the message implicit in the letters was that of a “great feat which was accomplished [that] has completely vindicated the Canadians as first-class fighting men.”67 It may seem odd that the Canadians took a somewhat perverse satisfaction in their battered glory, but such is sometimes the way of soldiers. Canadians also celebrated the costly stand made by the 18,000-strong Canadian Division at the Battle of Second Ypres in April 1915, where 6,000 soldiers were killed, wounded, and made prisoner in a few days of intense fighting.
The Germans also took away lessons from their resounding victory. They concluded that an amphibious landing could be defeated on the beaches, especially if an Atlantic Wall of some 15,000 fortifications was built before the next invasion.68 They therefore clung to a thin defence that covered much of the French coast rather than constructing a defence-in-depth from which to launch rapid counterattacks. The Germans were also led to believe that the Allies would have to capture a port to meet the logistical needs of ground forces after they landed, and so they went about fortifying the ports along the coast. These issues would be critical two years later, when the Germans confronted the five-division landing on D-Day.
Critics of Dieppe have argued that the Allied operational and tactical appreciations could have been learned without the destruction of the Canadian force. That is certainly true, but lessons learned in blood are those that are remembered longest. None of this smoothes away the jagged scar of Dieppe that runs through the Canadian psyche to this day.