One thing the British were not short of was plans. In early 1942 a stream of proposals for offensive continental operations flowed over the desks of the chiefs. They varied enormously in size, intent and location from thirty-man smash-and-grab raids to full-blown armoured landings, and many were doomed to die on the drawing board. Taken together they chimed with the air of expectancy gripping Britain, the feeling that the time had come to hit the Germans hard on their own ground.
The chiefs looked on the minor projects with favour. Little harm and some good might come from a steady tempo of tightly-targeted raids potentially delivering practical benefits as well as lifting national spirits.
The major ones they viewed with foreboding, overlaid with resignation. All the big plans on the table were driven by political rather than military considerations. Given the continuing enormous imbalance in forces, all were risky in the extreme. The material situation was not about to change soon for it would be some months before America could contribute troops to a big amphibious operation. A major cross-Channel expedition was therefore seen as an operation of last resort to be launched with a heavy heart only when grand strategic pressures became too great.
Nevertheless, all the scenarios for 1942 envisaged by the Joint Planning Staff, who sifted strategic data for the Chiefs of Staff Committee, pointed to a continental landing of some description. The most optimistic foresaw the Germans collapsing on the Eastern Front and being forced to move many of their French divisions to Russia. The second envisaged stalemate, and the third the Russians being pushed to the brink of defeat.
The first possibility – highly unlikely to British eyes – would open the door to an American proposal for a joint invasion of France against significantly weakened opposition before the end of the year or early in 1943. This was Roundup, a code name disliked by Churchill for its boastful overtones which seemed to him to tempt fate. The other two also prompted some sort of action in response. Whatever happened, the Russians would need all the help they could get and the Allies were duty-bound to offer it, even though the operation might amount to little more than a goodwill gesture and token of serious future intent.
Sledgehammer – the plan for a large-scale, cross-Channel emergency invasion if the Eastern Front seemed on the point of collapse and which had the enthusiastic backing of the Americans – lay un-appetisingly on the table. Originally it had been conceived as a short-term operation aimed at the Pas de Calais, on the grounds that this was the only place where Fighter Command could supply a measure of air cover. Mountbatten’s advice as Combined Ops chief was firmly against it, arguing for landing much further west. In the end attention had settled on the Cherbourg Peninsula, with a large force capturing and holding it in the autumn of 1942 then breaking out in the spring. It was a fantastic scheme. The peninsula was beyond the effective range at which the RAF could provide air cover and the resupply problems would be nightmarish.
Sledgehammer was outdone in improbability by Imperator, a quixotic proposal to land an armoured force in northern France which would race to Paris, destroy the German military headquarters in the Crillon hotel then speed back to the coast for re-embarkation. Commenting to the chiefs on various versions of the Imperator plan, Mountbatten remarked that ‘none of the above…can be classified as normal “operations of war” since they are largely devised for the purpose of achieving a political object.’1 It was ‘important to avoid embarking on an operation which the enemy can make appear as a total defeat’. However, something was needed that would provide ‘the best solution to an unpleasant military problem’.
Responsibility for the big cross-Channel show, if it ever came, would lie in the hands of the commander-in-chief of Home Forces, General Sir Bernard Paget, who took over from Brooke at the end of 1941. Paget had a short fuse. According to Goronwy Rees, who met him in the course of his liaison duties, he displayed a ‘brusque manner, that seemed to combine rudeness and bad temper’, the consequence it was said of the constant pain from a 1918 wound that rendered his left arm virtually useless.2 He made it clear from the beginning that he regarded these schemes as a waste of time, lives and resources.
The home-based divisions had since 1940 been braced to repel a German invasion. As the threat dwindled they were now needed for an eventual landing on the continent, a day that in Paget’s view was still a long way off. In the meantime any sideshows could only disrupt preparations and delay the advent of the main event, and he struggled against being dragged into them, questioning directives ordering him to draw up interim plans.
In November 1941, when Britain’s resources were minimal and America had not yet joined the war, he was told by the chiefs to prepare ‘a large-scale raid of some duration in the Low Countries and France’ for the spring. He settled reluctantly on Brest as the target but at the end of January reported that shortage of shipping and inadequate air cover made the project impracticable and asked that it be put off until September. Even then he considered ‘the chances of success are uncertain’.3
He went on to suggest some criteria for judging the value of such enterprises. ‘The sole object of killing Germans is not worthy of a large-scale raid since they are in good supply and of comparatively low propaganda value,’ he wrote. ‘The destruction of material objectives must have lasting results on enemy operations or war production and the objectives themselves must not be such as can be more easily or less expensively destroyed by: a) air bombardment b) naval bombardment c) minor sea or airborne raids d) local patriots.’
These were sound enough rules to the conventional military mind but the emphasis on caution and sobriety struck no chord at Combined Operations. Raiding was their business and they approached each project great and small with the same hectic enthusiasm. The activity suited the personality of their chief and his team. It was a very British form of warfare reflecting temperament as much as geography. One of the proudest moments in British naval history came in 1587 when Sir Francis Drake launched fireships into the Spanish fleet at Cadiz, ‘singeing the king of Spain’s beard’ and delaying the sailing of the Armada for a year. The instinct was just as strong on land. On the Western Front in the First World War commanders kept the troops on their toes by ordering regular ‘trench raids’.
A handful of men crept in darkness across no man’s land, dropped over an enemy parapet, shot or bludgeoned to death whomever they found there, sparing a few to take back as prisoners. The enemy did not think the exercise worthwhile. Although the British had launched regular provocative raids across the Channel since the start of the current war, the Germans had not bothered to mount a single one in return.
The same impulse was also on show in the air. Since the Battle of Britain, the Spitfires of Fighter Command had been flying across the Channel daily to try to provoke the enemy to come up and fight, a challenge the Luftwaffe usually declined unless the odds were strongly in their favour.
Combined Ops was a new cog in the war-planning machine. As such it had to mesh with the other service mechanisms driving military activity. The foundation directive handed to Mountbatten had given COHQ the long-term task of preparing, along with multiple other organisations, for the eventual invasion of the continent. In the meantime, though, its primary activity was all aspects of the planning and mounting of raids.
COHQ planners were charged with advising on big existing projects like Sledgehammer but they were also commissioned to devise specific raids requested by the army, navy and air force. They were also expected to come up with schemes of their own in accordance with the prime minister’s desire to keep the Germans off balance by constant harassment of the enemy-held coastline.
The process began at Richmond Terrace with a nucleus of officers discussing requests and proposals. It was usually led by Jock Hughes-Hallett and his naval colleagues on the basis that there was ‘no use suggesting places which could not be reached by the appropriate landing craft or other vessels’.4 Helping him were commanders David Luce and ‘Dick’ de Costobadie. Both were career officers who had seen plenty of action. Luce commanded a submarine in the early part of the war winning a DSO for his exploits, and de Costobadie had earned a DSC at Dunkirk. The COHQ military and air advisers were then brought in and once an embryonic plan looked viable it was taken to Mountbatten, who seems to have almost invariably given his approval. Every operation depended on the help of the navy and air force and as the project gathered pace their representatives joined the team. In the case of larger raids requiring more troops than the commandos could provide, the planning team would be reinforced by officers from Home Forces HQ.
Anything other than very minor raids were referred to the Chiefs of Staff Committee which approved the outline plan and reviewed onward progress. Thus they could control the pace of projected operations like Sledgehammer for which they felt little enthusiasm but felt compelled to keep alive in the interests of Anglo-American harmony, while giving the green light to less contentious schemes. Churchill was also kept informed. Despite his fierce opposition to a premature return to the continent he was all in favour of modestscale cross-Channel adventures, the more dashing the better.
On 21 January 1942 Hughes-Hallett sat down with Luce and de Costobadie to ‘make tentative proposals for one raid every month up to and including August’.5 Some were in response to outside demands and others were in-house productions. The first on the list was a parachute raid, scheduled for the end of February, to seize equipment from a radar station in Normandy. It had been requested by the RAF, who feared that the Germans had dramatically improved their anti-bomber electronic defences. Next came a major seaborne attack on the port of Saint-Nazaire. The target was the huge dry dock whose destruction the Admiralty had long desired as it would deprive the Germans of the only facility on the French Atlantic coast capable of repairing their largest warship, the battleship Tirpitz.
These operations had clear objectives and obvious military value. The purpose of others on the list was less precise. They included Operation Myrmidon, a long-range expedition to land a large force near Bayonne in south-western France to blow up war factories and disrupt rail traffic to Spain which was scheduled to take place immediately after Saint-Nazaire. Operation Blazing, timed for May, was an ambitious plan to seize and hold the small Channel Island of Alderney. From there, Hughes-Hallett explained, ‘we hoped it would at least be possible to cut the German coastal route to the Atlantic ports by which they had sustained much of the U-boat campaign’.
No clear reason was offered for selecting the next target on the list. ‘For June we chose Dieppe,’ he wrote, ‘as by that time we expected to have sufficient landing craft to lift an entire division.’ They would attack Dieppe, it seemed, simply because they could. It was a curiously limp explanation for the event that would stain the entire history of Combined Operations Headquarters.
The early months of 1942 were a happy time for Mountbatten and his team. A string of successes seemed to more than justify the faith Churchill had invested in them. Their debut was a triumph. In late December 1941 they pulled off an operation that saw the commandos going into serious action for the first time. The objective was once again Norwegian islands and their fish-oil factories and other worthwhile targets.
In many ways the raids were a rerun of the Roger Keyes exploit of the previous March. This time though the Germans put up a proper fight. The ensuing battle showed what the new units were capable of and proved the value of the Achnacarry curriculum.
Operations Anklet and Archery were a two-pronged attack on widely separated Norwegian islands. Anklet, the smaller of the two, was aimed at the Lofoten Islands. Once again the objectives were to destroy enemy assets, take prisoners and seize any code books and Enigma material they could find. It was also intended to divert attention from Archery, the bigger raid, on Vaagso, an island between Trondheim and Bergen 300 miles to the south. Both raids had the added benefit of contributing to a grand strategic deception being played by Churchill. The return to the islands, it was hoped, would persuade Hitler that the Allies intended a landing in Norway and prompt him to boost troop numbers, thereby relieving pressure on the Eastern Front.6
With Archery, combined operations took a great step forward. This was a properly tri-service effort with the navy providing the troop carriers plus a cruiser and four destroyers, the army the troops, and the RAF contributing air support in the shape of nineteen Blenheim twin-engine fighters and ten Hampden bombers. Each service nominated a force commander and staff to work together on a combined plan, setting the pattern for the raids that were to follow.
The Anklet force, a mix of commandos and Free Norwegians, was embarked on the landing ship HMS Prince Albert, one of the requisitioned Belgian cross-Channel ferries available for Combined Ops missions. It was supported by the light cruiser HMS Arethusa and a phalanx of destroyers and corvettes. They landed early on Boxing Day morning when it was hoped the defenders would be lying in after the previous day’s festivities. They met no resistance and set about blowing up radio transmitters, capturing prisoners and quislings and sinking ships. On one patrol vessel the raiders discovered an intact Enigma machine with rotor wheels, part of a rich haul of intelligence material gathered in the twin operations. On 27 December the force was attacked by a German seaplane and Arethusa damaged. In the absence of any protection from the air, the commander, Rear Admiral L. H. K. Hamilton, decided to head for home, mission by and large accomplished.
Vaagso was well defended with coastal guns, 200 regular troops, anti-aircraft batteries and four squadrons of fighters. A fight was expected and so it turned out. This was to the liking of John Durnford-Slater, commander of 3 Commando which provided the core of the land force. He and his men had been on the original Lofoten raid which ‘everyone had enjoyed…and felt that they had done useful work’.7 However they ‘were disappointed at not seeing more action. All ranks had a burning desire to get at the enemy…’ Durnford-Slater was thirty-two and born in Devon to a military family. His father was killed in the first few weeks of the previous war. Despite strong encouragement from his mother he had shown little inclination to follow the colours, dreaming instead of emigrating to Argentina and breeding horses. Mother’s will prevailed and he ended up training as a gunner at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich before being posted to India where he eked out his pay by training and betting on racehorses.
His fellow commando Lord Lovat admired him as a ‘genial sportsman…All his faults were of a lovable kind. No beauty in appearance, going bald, stocky and of medium height with a jerky, short-stepping kind of action [he] spoke in a high voice, but the restless energy and drive were immediately apparent’.8 Durnford-Slater ‘knew what he wanted’ and ‘got the best out of his men’. He also enjoyed a party and could ‘drink all night in the mess, parade the next day as fresh as a daisy, train for the morning and play a good game of rugger in the afternoon’.
At the end of November 1941 he had been summoned to Richmond Terrace to hear a proposal for 3 Commando’s next job. He was given a thorough intelligence summary of the formidable German defences on Vaagso and the neighbouring small island of Maaloy to study before meeting the chief. The raid was Mountbatten’s operational debut and he seemed uncharacteristically cautious, wondering out loud whether it might not ‘be better to take on something not quite so strong?’ He was particularly concerned about the shore batteries covering the approaches. Durnford-Slater assured him that if the cruiser Kenya leading the raid flotilla and its escort of destroyers closed to 3,000 yards of the shore just before the landing, they could give the batteries ‘a real pounding’ that would dispose of the problem. As for the opposition, Mountbatten could ‘rely on our men to look after the German garrison’. With this response Mountbatten became ‘most enthusiastic. Knowing that it was desperately important at this stage of the war to have a success, he had just wanted to be convinced.’
The timetable gave Durnford-Slater a few weeks to put his men through an intense preparation programme at their base at Largs, a seaside resort near Glasgow. COHQ provided a large model of the target area, location unidentified to maintain security, to familiarise them with their objectives. The force numbered nearly 600 men. It included the whole of 3 Commando, two troops of 2 Commando and a dozen Free Norwegians. They set sail from Scapa on Christmas Eve, seen off by Mountbatten who told them: ‘I regard you as my test pilots. Nobody knows quite what is going to happen and you are the ones who are going to find out.’ On 27 December, before dawn, the troops climbed into their landing craft and were lowered into the icy waters of the Vaagsfjord. As they approached the shore the first broadsides from the escorts slammed into the coastal battery on Maaloy. Four troops headed for the village of Sor Vaagso and two for Maaloy, with two troops of 2 Commando held back as a floating reserve.
Just before they touched down, three Hampdens flashed overhead and dropped smoke bombs to mask the approach. One was hit by flak and as it went down a bomb fell away and hit a landing craft. The phosphorus inflicted terrible burns among the men and detonated grenades, demolition charges and small-arms ammunition ‘in a mad mixture of battle noises’.
Durnford-Slater led the attack on the settlement, a line of unpainted wooden buildings which straggled along a narrow street three-quarters of a mile long. His account gave a taste of the frantic energy of a raid where everything depended on maintaining momentum and denying the defenders the initiative. The example was set by the troop commanders. Durnford-Slater watched as Captain Johnny Giles of 3 Troop yelled ‘Come on!’ and raced at the head of his men into the smoke. Fifteen minutes later he was dead, shot by the last survivor of a house they were storming. Captain Algy Forrester commanding 4 Troop ‘went off like a rocket’ up the street ‘leaving a trail of dead Germans behind him’. The two officers with him were soon wounded and out of action but ‘Algy waded in, shouting and cheering his men, throwing grenades into each house as they came to it and firing from the hip with his tommy gun. He looked wild and dangerous…He had absolutely no fear’. When the party reached the German HQ in the Ulvasund Hotel he darted forward to hurl a grenade but was shot by someone firing through the front door. As he fell he landed on his own bomb.
With Forrester’s death the pace faltered and the attack threatened to stall. Martin Linge, a well-known actor before the war, now commander of a Free Norwegian unit, tried to smash open the hotel door but fell back dead in a burst of gunfire. Durnford-Slater had passed him as they left the beach, smiling and happy and promising ‘We’ll have a party…when we get back.’
By now the air was thick with the smoke of burning buildings and filled with the crack and stutter of rifle and machine-gun fire, the boom of the ships’ guns and the answering salvos of the batteries, and further away the echo of cannon shells and anti-aircraft barrages as German fighters attacked the flotilla. Despite the mayhem they had brought with them, the raiders were welcomed by the inhabitants, some of whom risked their lives ferrying grenades to the advancing troops.
The deadlock on the main street was broken with the arrival of 6 Troop who had finished their work on Maaloy. Captain Peter Young and Lance Sergeant George Herbert launched themselves at the hotel hurling grenades through windows and doors, killing or disabling everyone inside. The attack moved on only to be baulked again by a sniper. Durnford-Slater was pinned down with half of 6 Troop in a timber yard. One man fell dead beside him. Then another. Later he recalled that ‘this was the first time in warfare that I truly felt fear.’ The sniper was perched in an upper window in a nearby house, firing whenever anyone showed themselves. They were saved by the initiative of Sergeant Herbert who discovered a can of petrol in a shed behind the yard. While the others sprang to their feet to rake the building with covering fire he ran up to a window and tossed in the can. A shower of grenades set the house instantly ablaze, ‘a funeral pyre for the sniper’.
This was what the commandos had spent long months and endless hardships training for. Despite their sophisticated skills they knew that battle still came down to a killing competition and there was no room for pity or time for reflection. As the commandos advanced further up the street, a door opened and a German lobbed a grenade which badly wounded Durnford-Slater’s batman. Thirty seconds later ‘the same door opened and the German who had tossed the grenade came out with his hands up and expressing his earnest desire to surrender’. He was ‘a small man, yellow and scared’ and Durnford-Slater was prepared to let him live. However ‘one of my men…was so angry that he shot the German dead, through the stomach.’ He later considered whether a man who had lobbed a death-dealing grenade one minute should be allowed to surrender the next before concluding ‘I hardly think he [could] expect much mercy.’
While the battle blazed the navy had been sinking the ships in the anchorage. The intention had been to seize some of the larger ones but the Germans scuttled most of them. The defenders were unable to prevent one of the great coups of the operation. On board the destroyer HMS Onslow was Lieutenant Commander Allon Bacon from the Naval Intelligence Division, which led the hunt for Enigma material. With him was Dick de Costobadie from CO HQ. After Onslow cornered the armed trawler Fohn, they gathered a boarding party and stormed the boat, capturing a precious list of Enigma daily settings plus a copy of the current encryption tables.9 Other parties were busy elsewhere and the final haul amounted to two Enigma machines and a wealth of coding tables that four days later were in the hands of the Bletchley code breakers.
The raiders departed at 15.00 leaving 120 German dead. They took with them nearly a hundred prisoners as well as a party of Norwegian volunteers. Durnford-Slater reckoned their own losses ‘reasonably light’ at seventeen dead and fifty-seven wounded. The action had been captured on film by two movie cameramen and a stills photographer who earned Durnford-Slater’s admiration for staying continuously at the forefront of the battle. Their material boosted the rapturous publicity that followed. It was, The Times declared, ‘the perfect raid’.
The next operation brought more glory to Richmond Terrace. Operation Biting was mounted to capture key components from a Würzburg radar station perched on a cliff at Bruneval, north of Le Havre. After analysing reconnaissance photographs and intelligence reports, some from French Resistance agents, the COHQ planners thought the defences too strong for a commando attack from the sea and decided to use paratroops instead. On the night of 27 February 1942, 120 men from C Company of the 2nd Parachute Battalion dropped a few miles from the villa where the radar was installed. They overcame the defenders and an RAF signals expert dismantled the vital parts. Then, having captured one of the technicians, they retreated to the beach where landing craft ferried them to motor gun boats which sped them back to Britain. Examination of the equipment revealed the system was impervious to conventional jamming and opened the way to the use of ‘window’, aluminumised paper strips which created a blizzard of signals on radar screens effectively blinding the defences.10
Then came the coup that really made COHQ’s name. The Admiralty had been pressing for a raid on Saint-Nazaire for months. In the autumn of 1941 fears rose that Hitler’s last remaining battleship, Tirpitz, would soon be heading to the Atlantic.11 The Naval Intelligence Division began working with COHQ on a plan to cripple its ability to operate by denying it the use of the only dry dock on the French Atlantic seaboard large enough to accept it for maintenance and repairs. Operation Chariot was a broad collaborative effort with input from all the service intelligence agencies as well as MI6 and civilian engineers. Together they constructed a full picture of the topography, defences and port facilities.
Their contribution gets little mention in Hughes-Hallett’s often immodest and self-serving memoir, which makes it sound as if it were largely a Combined Ops affair. He claimed that after the initial approach from the Admiralty it took him and David Luce only an hour to sketch an outline plan. COHQ certainly played an important part in shaping the operation, including the proposal to use HMS Campbeltown, an obsolete destroyer packed with explosives, to ram the lock gates before being blown up. During February the outline plan was finalised and the date set for 28 March.
Mountbatten took a close interest in the details, particularly the air support available to the raiders. The plan called for Bomber Command to carry out continuous attacks on the dock area before the assault began, shifting to the town once it had started. Laying on a bombing raid in occupied France raised political difficulties. Churchill had forbidden major operations that risked serious civilian casualties unless weather conditions guaranteed a high degree of accuracy, a vain hope given the technical abilities of Bomber Command at this point in the war. However, Mountbatten insisted and the chiefs of staff agreed that ‘the success of Operation Chariot depended very largely on the success of the diversion created by the bombing’.12 In the event, low cloud forced the aircraft to circle overhead without dropping their bombs, leaving the defenders unmolested. The episode nonetheless showed the importance Mountbatten placed on aerial bombardment as a vital component in a large raid.
The Saint-Nazaire proposal got the immediate approval of the chiefs. Here was an operation that made sense and whose undoubted risks were greatly outweighed by the potential benefits. Commanders were appointed. Commander Robert Ryder, ‘Red’ to his friends, a thirty-four-year-old career sailor whose two brothers had already died in the war, would lead the naval force. The military force commander was Lieutenant Colonel Charles Newman, thirty-seven, a genial, pipe-smoking former Territorial with four children and a fifth on the way, and commanding officer (CO) of 2 Commando who made up the bulk of the troops.
According to Hughes-Hallett things went smoothly until a meeting on 28 February when Mountbatten and he, together with Ryder and Newman, met Rear Admiral Sir Arthur Power and Admiral of the Fleet Sir Charles Forbes to discuss the plan. Power was Assistant Chief of the Naval Staff, supervising home operations. Forbes was Commander-in-Chief, Plymouth, where the fleet would assemble, train and depart from. Both men thus had a say in the project and Forbes made it clear he regarded it as akin to a suicide mission.
Hughes-Hallett claimed that when they walked in he greeted them with the words: ‘Well I congratulate you gentlemen. As long as you don’t mind having every ship in the raiding force sunk and every soldier and sailor killed, I am sure it will be a great success.’13
Mountbatten and Forbes had history. When commander of the Home Fleet in 1940 Forbes had turned down Churchill’s suggestion that Mountbatten should be awarded the DSO for nursing the Kelly back to port after being torpedoed in the North Sea, declaring it was only what any captain would have done. Time had not made the admiral any more amenable. He was ‘strongly opposed’ to the COHQ proposal to blow up HMS Campbeltown soon after arrival, while the ship’s company and soldiers took cover alongside nearby air-raid shelters. Experts had told him that the blast would kill everyone within half a mile. Hughes-Hallett assured him that his own advisers were confident that the troops would be safely protected by the earth and masonry of the shelters. The admiral stood his ground, insisting that the explosion be delayed until after the force had withdrawn. In the end he got his way.
There was worse to come. The force commanders now began raising objections. Newman said he disliked having ‘all his eggs in one basket’ with the bulk of the force embarked on the destroyer. He wanted them to be spread out among a larger number of launches and landed at different points around the dockyard. Ryder began to question the wisdom of using the Campbeltown, fearing it might run aground. Hughes-Hallett recalled that ‘it was in vain that we pointed out that motor launches were made of wood and driven by petrol and the chances of achieving surprise with an armada of…coastal craft were slim’. The likelihood was that ‘they would all be blazing wrecks before they got alongside at all’.
To Hughes-Hallett’s indignation, ‘such was the deference paid to Newman and Ryder simply because they were going to do the job that they nearly got their way’. Opposition collapsed only when Mountbatten ‘made it clear that COHQ would have nothing more to do with the operation unless the expendable ship remained its central feature’. In the end a compromise was reached with some of the commandos sailing on the Campbeltown and the others split between an expanded flotilla of eighteen launches.
Chariot largely followed the script written for it by Hughes-Hallett and his team. The raiders bluffed their way to within striking distance of the port, rammed the lock gates, then leapt ashore to start demolishing facilities. Resistance was fierce and only a remnant made it back to the launches. Eight hours after the Campbeltown hit the gates the explosives erupted, tearing away the caissons and killing a party of forty German soldiers and civilian officials who had gone on board. The dry dock was put out of action for the rest of the war.14 There were medals galore, including five VCs with Ryder and Newman among the recipients.
For Mountbatten and his team the operation was above all a vindication. There were still some of the old school who failed to see the point of the organisation, or like Admiral Forbes, doubted the qualities of its chief. With Saint-Nazaire, Mountbatten and his team had shown them. The things that went right, like the idea of using a destroyer to ram the gates, were Combined Ops ideas. The things that went wrong, like increasing the number of launches, were someone else’s and done against their advice. The price of success had been high. Of the 622 sailors and soldiers who took part, 168 were killed and 215 taken prisoner.
This was a staggering casualty rate but COHQ planners could disclaim responsibility for it, insisting losses would have been lower if their proposal that fewer craft should be used had been followed. The episode had not only boosted the planning staff’s already considerable self-esteem; it had also reinforced its belief in the soundness of its judgements, even when they clashed with established service wisdom and the objections of conventionally minded colleagues including those like Newman and Ryder whose own lives were at risk.
With Saint-Nazaire, the run of luck Combined Ops had enjoyed since Mountbatten’s takeover came to an end to be replaced by a period of failure, frustration and setback. Operation Myrmidon was meant to follow hard on its heels. It was a large seaborne attack around Bayonne in south-western France and conceived as an alternative to a tentative proposal for another raid in Norway which was abandoned when it seemed German dispositions in the target area were too strong.15 The Chiefs of Staff Committee reviewed it on 22 February when its objectives were described as ‘the destruction of coastal shipping…the destruction of an important explosives factory at the mouth of the River Adour and the severing of the rail connection from France to Spain which is vulnerable in this area’. The proposal failed in every respect the tests suggested by General Paget for judging the merits of a raid. All the targets could be attacked more cheaply by bombing, and any damage to the railway was likely to be repaired within days. It was approved nonetheless, probably because it had the enthusiastic backing of the prime minister.16
Myrmidon was an unredeemed flop. At the end of March about 3,000 commandos and Royal Marines with supporting armour boarded the former Dutch ferries HMS Queen Emma and HMS Princess Beatrix and sailed for the mouth of the River Adour which led to Bayonne. They arrived at the estuary without trouble. It was only when the landing craft had been lowered to carry the force ashore that the officer in charge decided that a sandbar across the mouth of the river was probably impassable. An emergency flare summoned all craft back and the force departed for home having, as Hughes-Hallett admitted, ‘achieved nothing whatsoever’.17 This was just the start of ‘weeks of frustration’. Myrmidon was supposed to be followed in May by the projected landing on Alderney, code-named Operation Blazing. It faced trouble from the start, and Hughes-Hallett’s enthusiasm was constantly dampened by the objections of those who would have to carry it out. Unlike Chariot and Myrmidon, this was not a commando operation. The raiding force was made up of the 1st Guards Brigade and a battalion of airborne troops. The aim was to capture and hold the small, rocky island which lies west of the tip of the Cherbourg Peninsula for use as a base to attack German shipping supplying the Atlantic ports. The plan proposed a ‘saturation’ bombing raid before the paratroops dropped and the guards hit the beaches.
It was obvious from the outset that the hearts of the soldiers and airmen were not in it. Hughes-Hallett suspected that the military commander was ‘reluctant to chance his arm’.18 Bomber Command were only prepared to operate in darkness whereas the Airborne Division commander General Browning insisted his troops could only be dropped in daylight. Blazing was stopped in its tracks at a chiefs of staff meeting on 11 May attended by Churchill who warned that they could not ‘in the present circumstances afford the risk of heavy casualties to our bomber force’.19 Brooke was very sceptical about what effect the bombing would have on the German defences. As was often the case, the project was not pronounced dead there and then but put on life support until the autumn when it would be evaluated again. So it was that as summer arrived COHQ had only two major schemes on its books. One, Imperator, was still a work in progress with wide disagreement on the form it should take. The other was Dieppe.
‘Why choose Dieppe?’ That was the first question on everyone’s lips when the news of the raid became known. The second was: ‘And what for?’ There is little in official records to provide answers. As the Canadian Army’s official historian Colonel Charles Stacey noted after being given free access to all the files when writing his account post-war, ‘Although the Dieppe raid is in general a very well documented operation, the documentation with reference to its origins and objects – points of special importance – is far from complete.’20 As a result ‘the historian is obliged to rely to a considerable extent upon the memories and the verbal evidence of informed persons’. These recollections brought their own difficulties. If Dieppe had been a success, the victory would have had many fathers. As a failure it was an orphan and the key participants fell over each other in the rush to deny paternity.
The responsibility for choosing Dieppe lay primarily with Hughes-Hallett as chair of the planning group which in January 1942 drew up a list of suggested operations for the first eight months of the year. Mountbatten also bore some liability as he oversaw the proposals, agreed them in principle and asked ‘for outline plans to be prepared and discussed with him as soon as possible’.21
In his memoirs Hughes-Hallett gives a few words to justify the inclusion of the other targets on the list. About Dieppe he is strikingly reticent. On the face of it nothing linked Dieppe to the imperatives of the day. Unlike Saint-Nazaire, Brest and the other U-boat bases on the Atlantic, it had no military significance and was merely a port of call for coastal convoys. Destroying it completely would do nothing to reduce Germany’s war-making capacity. Nor was a division-strength raid of short duration likely to result in any significant shift of enemy troops away from the Eastern Front. His vague statement on the subject – ‘For June we chose Dieppe, as by that time we expected to have sufficient landing craft to lift an entire division’ – tells us nothing.
Elsewhere, he claimed that there was no particular significance to the location, telling an American TV interviewer in 1967:
Dieppe was chosen really for no particular reason originally except that it was a small seaport and we thought it would be interesting to capture a small seaport for a short time and then withdraw. It was just about the extremity of the range at which Fighter Command could give us cover in those days. It was not thought to be of any particular military importance and it was known at the time when we chose it early in the year not to be very strongly defended. And it appeared, so we were told by the military adviser, that it would be about the scale of objective that would be suitable for a divisional attack. That, in a nutshell, were the reasons for choosing Dieppe…we were raiding for the sake of raiding – that was the strategy really.22
But a few seconds later he corrected himself. There was, after all,
an object within an object in the special case of Dieppe. We were desperately anxious – or the senior military officers were – to get some experience to carry out what might be called an armed reconnaissance – to try and find out the sort of conditions that would be met in carrying out a fairly large-scale landing operation against determined resistance. It was something that had never been done since Gallipoli…so it was very important to gain experience and that really was the main object of Dieppe as such.
A fuller explanation was laid out for the public in the official history of Combined Operations The Watery Maze, written under Mountbatten’s close supervision by his friend Bernard Fergusson, and published in 1961. Fergusson wrote that in all the discussions that spring about attempting a temporary lodgement on the continent, like Sledgehammer, or a permanent one, like Roundup, ‘there was always one constant accepted by everybody: a good port, in working order, must be seized early on, and before the enemy could have time to carry out demolitions’.23 The view was that ‘generally speaking one division, with two brigade groups in the assault and one in reserve, would suffice to capture a continental port, provided that it was supported by bombardment from sea and air, and that it included an element of tanks.’ It was widely accepted that before such an exercise could be mounted the proposition ‘must be tried out in practice’.
It was true that attention had focussed on the feasibility of capturing a major port which could supply the needs of an invading army. The only ones within reach big enough to handle the huge flow of stores needed to keep the force in the field were Antwerp, Cherbourg and Le Havre. Dieppe was modest by comparison. That, said Fergusson, was one of the reasons why it was chosen. The planners had ‘already ruled it out as a desirable place to capture in the early stages of a real invasion, and we should therefore be giving nothing away by raiding it now’.
There were other considerations that made it a good choice. ‘It quickly became obvious,’ he wrote, ‘that of all the targets up and down the Channel coast Dieppe was by far the best prospect.’ The defences were believed to be ‘tough, but not too tough’. There was a range of attractive targets in the shape of the airfield three miles inland and a harbour full of shipping including barges left over from 1940 when an invasion of Britain was still in prospect which could be seized and brought back across the Channel. Dieppe was near enough to England to allow the passage over to be made under cover of darkness in summertime. Crucially it was also within range of the many fighter bases sited in Sussex, Kent and Dorset, allowing a high level of fighter cover during much of the operation.
Beyond testing the feasibility of capturing a port intact, Fergusson offered a higher goal. ‘The real purpose,’ he declared, ‘was to gain experience: to test certain tactical conceptions, and to learn more of the technique required to breach…the Atlantic Wall.’ Thus it ‘would be a raid, certainly, in the sense that the force, having got ashore, would re-embark and return to base; but it was in reality a rehearsal for re-invasion’.
The claim that Dieppe was ‘a rehearsal for re-invasion’ was advanced repeatedly by Mountbatten and his lieutenants and those most closely associated with the raid to defend themselves against the accusations and recriminations that would pursue them down the years. It was the rationale given by Churchill when he stood up in the House of Commons three weeks after the raid on 8 September to offer an explanation for what was by then regarded as a disaster. The operation was, he said, ‘a reconnaissance in force’, a term that he had just invented, with the object of getting all the information necessary before launching operations on a much larger scale, and ‘an indispensable preliminary to full scale operations’.24
It was popularised in the title of the first book-length account to appear, Dress Rehearsal: The Story of Dieppe by the American journalist Quentin Reynolds who sailed with the attacking force. Far more expert military observers like Captain Stephen Roskill, the official historian of the Royal Navy in the Second World War, repeated it in his history of the war at sea, in which he stated: ‘the War Office was insistent that, before a full-scale invasion was launched in Europe, it was essential to gain up-to-date experience by making a raid in force against the enemy-held coastline.’25
But the people who most needed convincing that the operation had a real purpose were the troops who before long would be called on to do something similar. To them, Dieppe would be presented as a tragic but necessary sacrifice, the cost of which was justified by lessons learned which resulted in many fewer lives being lost in the invasion to come. The justification was memorably laid out by General Crerar, the commander of the 1st Canadian Corps, who told the men of 3rd Canadian Infantry Division on the eve of the Normandy landings: ‘The plan, the preparations, the method and technique which will be employed are based on knowledge and experience bought and paid for by 2 Canadian division at Dieppe.’26 Mountbatten went as far as to quantify the ratio between lives lost and lives saved, telling Canadian veterans at a gathering thirty-one years after the event that ‘the effect on the OVERLORD casualties was fantastic…twelve times as many men…survived the D-Day assaults and I am convinced that this was directly the result of the lessons we learned at Dieppe.’27
Repetition did not make these claims true. Neither did the frequency and vehemence with which they were uttered. Instead they only deepened the impression that whichever way you looked at it, little about Dieppe made sense.