Dieppe’s very familiarity made it seem a strange place to launch an attack. Its name evoked memories of sunlit summer holidays. ‘Little did I ever think in the old days of my regular journeys of Newhaven-Dieppe that I should have been planning as I was this morning!’ was the reaction of Alan Brooke when the raid first came before the Chiefs of Staff Committee for approval on 13 May.1
It lies in a dip in a solid rampart of chalk, stretches of which are 200 feet high. The cliffs are a dingy white and streaked with ochre from the rich topsoil of the fields and woods above. Seventy or so miles across the Channel in East Sussex you find an identical coastline. It’s as if a giant meringue has been snapped in half, and little imagination is needed to understand that aeons ago the two land masses were one.
The British knew it as a mildly exotic holiday destination. Since the 1850s when the ferry service began, the town filled up each summer with holidaymakers who came to bathe, gamble at the casino, watch the latest Paris plays and entertainments in the Theatre Royal, play golf on the links and go to the races at the hippodrome at Rouxmesnil-Bouteilles. Famous British and French artists set up their easels there. Sickert, Turner, Monet, Pissarro and Renoir were all drawn to the crystalline light and subtle colours of the port, the beaches and the seaward vistas from the clifftops.
As well as the visitors there was a core of permanent expatriate residents, the ‘colonie anglaise’, many of them military and Civil Service widows who found that pensions went further and the risk of social embarrassment was lower on this side of the Channel. At the posher end of the spectrum were some grand families, including Lord Salisbury, three times Conservative prime minister between 1885 and 1902. His stone and brick villa in the Normandy style completed in 1872 stood above the beach at Puys, just to the east of Dieppe. As a girl, Clementine Churchill knew Dieppe well as her mother moved the family there in the summers, and after marriage she and Winston visited often.
The welcome the British received was in keeping with the cosmopolitan outlook of the Dieppois. The town owed its existence to the sea. It is omnipresent in Dieppe. Even when out of sight it makes its presence felt in the cry of gulls, the tang of salt and seaweed and the kinetic rumble of the waves. The sea brought opportunity. Dieppe men sailed the oceans in small ships to plant the flag of France in Asia and the New World. They helped colonise Florida, the Carolinas and Canada, a link commemorated in the Bassin du Canada, in the docks.
The sea also brought danger. In 1694 the town was bombarded by an Anglo-Dutch fleet and almost completely destroyed. It was rebuilt under the supervision of Louis XIV’s great military architect-engineer Vauban. His assistant Monsieur de Ventabren designed a townscape of narrow streets lined with tall houses enclosing courtyards, pierced by brick arch windows and adorned with wrought-iron balconies that brought a touch of elegance to the utilitarian port.
In the spring of 1942 Dieppe was about to start its third year under German occupation. It fell in the Zone Interdite, the band of coastline running from Dunkirk in the north to Hendaye in the south subject to special anti-invasion measures and restrictions. The town had become a ghostly sketch of its pre-war self. Gradually the pre-war population of 23,000 ebbed away so that only about a half remained. To one inhabitant, Madame Ménage, it ‘was like living in a house with no windows, black everywhere’ and with no light on the horizon.2
The occupiers promised to be magnanimous in victory. They would conduct themselves ‘correctly’ and if the French behaved nobody – apart from the Reich’s racial and ideological enemies – would get hurt. In practice, that meant acting according to a rulebook they had written to suit themselves. They took what they wanted, requisitioning public buildings, hotels and private houses and scarce food, issuing worthless receipts in return.
The conquerors stamped their identity on everything. The town was festooned with giant swastika flags and each crossroads was a forest of signposts in German directing the troops to barracks, offices and bases. Dieppe had become an outpost of the Reich and even the clocks were set to Berlin time.
The local authorities had no choice but to conform. There was no protection from the government because the Vichy regime’s commitment to collaboration was wholehearted from the start. An article of the armistice signed with the Germans stated: ‘The French government will immediately order all French authorities and administration services in the occupied zone to follow the regulations of the German military authorities and to collaborate with the latter in a correct matter.’ Vichy dismantled the political architecture and symbolism of the Third Republic, abolishing the National Assembly and all elected bodies. It banned the tricolour and the 14 July national holiday. The bust of Marianne which used to sit in the mairie of every commune was replaced with one of Marshal Philippe Pétain and his pale blue eyes looked down on his ‘enfants’ from portraits hung in every schoolroom. Newspapers and radio stations all spoke with the voice of Vichy.
Pétain presented himself as a shield against the invader. It was soon clear that his protection did not extend to everyone. In the autumn of 1940, with the full backing of Vichy, proclamations were issued announcing ‘measures’ against the Jews. Jewish-owned shops and businesses were forced to display signs identifying themselves as such. In the department of Seine-Inférieure to which Dieppe belonged, the prefect René Bouffet decreed that every public employee from high officials to workers in the municipal abattoir must sign a declaration stating they were not Jews or Freemasons. There was much worse to come.
At first the speed of the catastrophe left most people too numb to react. More than 100,000 Frenchmen died in the seven weeks between the start of the German attack in May 1940 and the 22 June armistice. A million and a half more were in prisoner-of-war camps. Defeat was followed by economic collapse. In Dieppe, much of the local economy was based on fishing and related industries which provided a living for 6,000 people. The Germans banned fishing at first and when the ban was lifted there were heavy restrictions. Factories, brickworks and coal depots were destroyed in the German air raids that struck the town in the first week of the war and the British ones that followed, and economic activity dwindled to almost nothing.
The first months of the occupation brought widespread destitution. The local courts filled up with previously respectable people reduced to thieving to stay alive. The pathetic story revealed at the Tribunal Correctionel for 7 August 1940 was typical: ‘Marie Hervy, 47, unemployed, of 3 rue Bouzard and Angèle Prudent, 53, day labourer, of 7 rue David-Lacroix, three months’ imprisonment for theft of an overall…Auguste Arnaud, 66, retired, two months’ imprisonment, suspended, for theft of foodstuffs from the Prisunic store…’3
Among the population were supporters of the ideologies that had pulled France apart in the years before the war. The far right were anti-democratic, anti-Semitic, anti-communist and nationalist. To some of them defeat was almost welcome. It offered a catharsis and a leader who would guide the nation back to the virtues of an imagined past. Marshal Pétain’s most fervent supporter in Dieppe was the editor of the local newspaper, La Vigie. Louis-Marie Poullain used its columns to promote the ‘National Revolution’ and its values of ‘Travail, Famille, Patrie ’. He was also violently anti-British, claiming England – as both the Germans and the French persisted in calling Britain – had always been the real enemy. ‘The day of her annihilation,’ he wrote, ‘will surely be liberation day for the whole world.’4
Facing them across the ideological front line were the communists. They won 15 per cent of the vote in the 1936 general election and supported the Popular Front government from the outside. They took their orders from Russia and in August 1939 backed the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact resulting in the party being banned and its leaders fleeing to Moscow. When the Germans arrived in June 1940 the communists found themselves loosely on the same side as the conquerors and Vichy refrained from overzealous repression. A year later Germany invaded the Soviet Union and persecution resumed, this time with Nazi assistance.
There were about fifty communist activists in Dieppe, many of them dock workers. Clandestine activity mostly consisted of distributing anti-Vichy, then anti-German tracts. Sometimes things went further. In November 1940 Charles Pieters, a docker, and a companion tried to grab the weapons of two German NCOs as they left the Tout Va Bien café, a popular German hangout overlooking the port. Pieters was caught running away but his friend escaped. Pieters claimed he was an innocent bystander caught up in the commotion but was still sentenced to nine months in prison in Rouen, from where he subsequently escaped. Three months later, unknown assailants attacked two soldiers on the seafront, wounding one of them. The attackers escaped and the mayor René Levasseur warned the population of the ‘very heavy and severe punishment that will hit everyone without exception’ if it happened again. This was no deterrent to a schoolteacher, Valentin Feldman, and a young woman called Lucienne Lemaire who while out distributing communist tracts one night in the winter of 1941–2 saw two Germans staggering out of a brothel in the port. They followed them and pushed them into a dock. When the bodies were recovered the Germans suspected nothing, as it was not unusual for drunken soldiers to come to grief in this way after a night on the town.5
After June 1941 the communists joined supporters of Charles de Gaulle in a loose coalition called the National Front. Their underground news-sheet L’Avenir called for ‘all-out action to smash the German war machine’. Before a campaign could develop the French and German security services moved to crush the fledgling resistance. Among those captured was Feldman, a Russian-born Jew and a brilliant philosophy student, who was eventually shot in July 1942. Organised resistance was ended and the small nuisance it had caused the occupiers eliminated.
Most Dieppois had voted for centrist parties before the war. There was little enthusiasm now for Vichy. Their attitude was reflected in the response – or lack of it – to Poullain’s attempts to promote the pro-Pétain ‘Amis du Maréchal’ organisation in his newspaper. A local branch was set up in February 1941 with membership restricted to those ‘born of French parentage’ and who were ‘neither Jew nor Freemason’.6 Within two months it attracted 500 members, some quite prominent including a shipowner, the director of the local hospital and most of the town’s booksellers, and also a fair number of workers, shopkeepers and farmers. In October they held a conference attended by 800 people. That was the high point. Despite the best efforts of Poullain and La Vigie, the marshal seems to have attracted no more friends and mentions of the ‘Amis’ faded from the paper’s pages.
Most stood back from politics and ideologies, minding their own business and keeping their heads down, absorbing themselves in the full-time work of keeping food on the table. Life was an obstacle course of bureaucratic hindrances. The authorities, both French and German, operated an ‘administration paperassière’ requiring everyone to go everywhere armed with identity card, certificate of employment, ration cards and tickets, military identity documents for former soldiers and a laissez-passer (Ausweis) if you ventured out of the immediate area.
For the Germans there were frequent reminders that resentment and hatred seethed beneath the veneer of compliance. Some anonymous patriots risked the death penalty by acts of sabotage, repeatedly cutting military communications cables and bringing down communal punishments on the local male population who were ordered to stand guard for twelve-hour stints to protect the cables. Some mornings the town woke up to see walls covered with graffiti declaring ‘Vive La France Libre!’, ‘Vive de Gaulle!’, ‘À bas Vichy’ and ‘Hitler au poteau!’ (‘Hitler to the firing squad!’).
On 11 May 1941, in response to calls broadcast from the French service of the BBC in London, many took to the streets to stroll in the spring sunshine wearing red, white and blue, the colours of the tricolour. A month later a police agent reported an incident at the Kursaal cinema in the rue Aguado during a showing of Paramatta, bagne de femmes, a German period melodrama set in nineteenth-century Britain and Australia. The soundtrack carried a few bars of the British national anthem. ‘The crowd recognised it and applauded frantically, despite the presence of German soldiers,’ he wrote.7
Yet human nature still had a way of finding weak points in the wall between the conquerors and the conquered. In contrast to their attitude towards the Slav Untermenschen in the East, the Germans had nothing against the French. For many the war was just business. Now the Battle of France was over they wanted a minimum of trouble and the enemy’s attempts at fraternisation were often successful.
The unclouded eyes of eleven-year-old Gérard Cadot saw something to admire in the first German he met. He was stranded at the home of some friends who were sheltering refugees when a soldier walked up the path and gave the front door a kick. He was ‘tall and strong-looking. His sleeves were rolled back…a hand grenade was shoved into his belt and another in one of his incredible black leather boots…for a while he examined us French, all paralysed by fear, then left the house telling us not to go out.’8 The boy was impressed. ‘The German had not been aggressive. He was just doing his job as a soldier and paying due respect to civilians. We all of us felt a little reassured and had to admit that the boches were not the barbarians we had been expecting.’
Gérard lived in the hamlet of Vasterival, six miles west of Dieppe, with his parents Gaston and Simone. His father was the gardener at La Lézardière, a large villa looking out to sea which was the summer residence of a Parisian, Georges Painvin, a scientist, businessman and banker who in the last war had been a brilliant cryptanalyst, cracking the German military codes. The house was taken over by Luftwaffe troops who manned an observation post at the lighthouse at Cap d’Ailly a mile away. Men from the coastal battery at Varengeville, just to the south, were installed in La Maisonnette, another substantial villa.
The airmen at La Lézardière took a shine to Gérard. They gave him food for the family and took him on expeditions around the countryside, once to the radar station at Bruneval. Gérard’s father Gaston despised Pétain, listened to the French broadcast on the BBC every day and welcomed the first RAF raids on Dieppe saying ‘that will take the Germans down a peg or two’. But he did not turn away a French-speaking Luftwaffe airman stationed at the big house who took to dropping round at the gardener’s cottage for a chat, and who apparently saw the Cadots as a substitute for the family he had left behind in Germany.
The gunners at La Maisonnette acquired local girlfriends. Gérard noted how ‘each Sunday two or three bikes would be propped against the fence while the girls passed several hours with the soldiers’. Then ‘mission accomplished, they returned to their weekly occupations until the following Sunday. They came to La Maisonnette the way that others go to evensong.’
Roger Lefebvre, the chief administrator at the mairie of Hautot-sur-Mer near Pourville, noted with distaste many other cases of ‘collaboration horizontale ’. He worried in his diary that when the Germans eventually departed ‘it was the France of tomorrow that would pay the price’ in the form of ‘the ruination of family life, disease and the sapping of the life force of the nation’.9 The thought that the Germans would one day be driven out sustained him through the humiliations that came with his position. His job was to translate into action the orders coming from the German administrative headquarters in Dieppe. Lefebvre was conservative, Christian and a silent supporter of General de Gaulle. He stayed in his post because he believed that he was doing his patriotic duty, trying to protect the interests of the community while every now and then managing to thwart those of the occupiers in some small way.
It was scant compensation for the fact that most of the time he was being forced to make life easier for the enemy. When billets were needed for troops it was he who had to find them. It was Lefebvre who was given the job of smoothing things over with the locals when the Germans decided to flood the pasture land on either side of the River Scie, which ran through the commune, in order to improve defences.
The Germans trashed everything. In the long cold winter of 1941–2 they chopped down private woodland and burned anything combustible they could find in the villas along the seafront: doors, window frames, parquet flooring and all. They were like ‘termites’ hollowing out the fabric of France. Another metaphor had gained currency. By an evil chance the occupation coincided with another invasion. In the summer of 1941 an infestation of Colorado beetles, doryphores in French, swept through the fields gorging on the crops. Gérard Cadot and his classmates were put to work in the fields gathering the larvae, ‘fat, sticky and disgusting’, and like everyone saw them as the animal equivalent of the invaders. Soon les boches, the old slang for the Germans, was heard less and they became les doryphores.
Lefebvre saw the Germans close up and was alive to anything that revealed the state of their morale or the progress of the war. Early in 1942 he started to notice signs of alarm that suggested faint cracks in the occupiers’ facade of granite confidence. On 24 March he wrote in his diary: ‘Received a circular indicating that the situation of coastal communities is going to get very complicated as the German authorities now consider the coastline as a war zone.’ A few days later they issued a warning that following the raids at Bruneval and Saint-Nazaire, there would be ‘heavy consequences’ for local communities if any town or village was found to have given shelter to stranded enemy soldiers.
The raids were just one indication that the British were taking the offensive. On the night of 4 March the sky blazed with sustained anti-aircraft fire, aimed, he learned later, at RAF bombers on their way to devastate the Renault factory at Boulogne-Billancourt in south-west Paris. British light bombers and fighters were increasingly seen around Dieppe. In early June there were three raids in the space of a week. Lefebvre was bucked by such shows of aggression: ‘Excellent visit by the RAF at noon today,’ he noted in his diary after fighters shot up an artillery battery in the neighbourhood.
The Germans seemed suddenly concerned about the state of their seaward defences. Lefebvre was told to provide billets for Dutch and Belgian workers, who at the beginning of the summer started to arrive in ever bigger numbers to build a string of concrete bulwarks along the coast. At the same time, some houses along the promenade at Pourville and the high ground to the west were dynamited to provide clear fields of fire over the beach.
The echoes of the real war being fought in the East carried to the Channel coast. At the end of April Lefebvre was at Dieppe station when a unit boarded a train for the start of a long journey to the Russian front. ‘They didn’t seem very keen to go,’ he wrote. ‘The departure was stopped six times while they rounded up strays.’ Some soldiers were unshaven and others still buckling up their kit bags and there was an air of doom hanging over them as the last ones climbed into the carriages. ‘These ruffians were well aware that the good life in the rich land of France was now over,’ he wrote with satisfaction.
What Lefebvre saw were the ripples spreading from the great strategic changes transforming Germany’s war. Now that the Americans had joined the British, the initiative in Western Europe had passed to the Allies. Sooner or later they would attempt an invasion and the units strung along the entire occupied coastline would live from now on in a state of perpetual vigilance and anxiety.
The longer the war continued in the East, the greater the danger in the West. The reality of the situation was obvious to everyone from Hitler down. On 23 March 1942 he issued Führer Directive No. 40 which declared ‘in the days to come the coasts of Europe will be seriously exposed to the danger of enemy landings’. It urged that ‘special attention must be paid to British preparations for landings on the open coast, for which numerous armoured landing craft suitable for the transportation of combat vehicles and heavy weapons are available’. It was one of a stream of warnings, sometimes vague, sometimes more geographically precise, that issued from the German high command that left the German units in no doubt that they were in for a fight every bit as fierce and decisive as the death grapple on the Eastern Front.
The man charged with repelling the inevitable attack was Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, appointed Commander-in-Chief West in March 1942. He had been one of the main engineers of the French defeat in 1940 and gone on to direct the great German victory against the Russians at the Battle of Kiev in the summer of 1941. He came from a Prussian military family and presented himself as an honour-able soldier above politics. In reality he had done his share of scheming in the Reich’s perpetual military-political power struggles. He had also colluded in the campaign of mass murder of civilians and Jews in the East.
Rundstedt was now sixty-six, in poor health and a heavy drinker and smoker but alert and purposeful and as convinced as Hitler that an attack was imminent. From his Paris headquarters he pressed the pace of a massive coastal defence construction programme while stimulating an atmosphere of impending danger among his commanders and troops. In April Rundstedt issued a general order stating the principles for repelling the attack. Amphibious forces were to be ‘defeated while still off the coast if possible but on the beaches at the very latest’.10
The coastline from Ostend in Belgium to Le Havre on the Seine Estuary was controlled by the 15th Army. It was commanded by General Curt Haase, a beefy Württemberger who had won his first Iron Cross serving as an artilleryman in 1914 and commanded a corps during the invasions of Poland and France. He was sixty years old, but according to a British intelligence assessment, ‘appears to have aged prematurely’ and ‘could easily pass for ten or fifteen years more than his actual age’.11 His worn-out look reflected a heart condition that would kill him the following year.
The coastline either side of Dieppe was held by the 302nd Division which took over in April 1941. It was untried in battle and had been raised in Mecklenburg and Pomerania at the end of 1940 specifically for occupation duties in Western Europe. Its area of operations stretched from the fishing port of Le Tréport in the east to the picturesque village of Veules-les-Roses in the west. At its head was the divisional commander’s namesake, Major General Conrad Haase, known to the men as ‘little Haase’ in contrast to his boss ‘big Haase’. He was born in Dresden in 1888 and fought in the First World War. He was tall and heavily built with unmilitary glasses and drooping jowls. His appearance was misleading. Haase was energetic and efficient and kept his troops on their toes with regular warnings and exhortations.
When the division arrived it was up to strength and properly equipped. As the months passed and the war in the East began to consume vast quantities of men and resources, many of the original recruits were transferred to the Russian front. From early 1942 the drafts replacing them included barely trained Poles, Czechs, Belgians and even Russians who had been lured or pressed into service. They had little appetite for fighting, and even when spread through the units reduced the division’s overall effectiveness. Fortunately for Haase, only the most basic skills were required from an infantryman to adequately defend this section of the coast.
Nature had sided with the Germans. Even to the amateur eye it was obvious that Dieppe was hard to attack and easy to defend. According to one inhabitant, a Madame Ménage, no one expected an Allied attack there as ‘everyone thought that this was the most difficult part of the Channel coast’.12
The first natural obstacle any assault would face was the beaches. They are made up of thick, smooth pebbles, some as broad and flat as demitasse saucers, that slither under foot, called ‘galets’ in French. The beach in front of Dieppe town shelves quite steeply and the tides push the galets into a succession of undulating slopes of up to fifteen degrees, or one-in-four.13 Assault troops would have to flounder up them, weighed down with weapons, ammunition and equipment and with bullets lashing the air before they could reach the limited cover of the sea wall and fire their first shots. Once the battle began the galets themselves would be shattered by exploding shells and mortar bombs, multiplying the volume of lethal shrapnel slicing the air. They offered absolutely no protection in return, as digging a shell scrape in them was impossible.
The beach was also a natural tank barrier. Haase had ordered experiments with armoured vehicles which persuaded him that the pebbles were impassable and anti-tank defences were therefore unnecessary on the shoreline.
Behind the beaches lay the cliffs. They reared up like castle walls and the few narrow ravines leading from the sea were easily blocked with concrete, wire and mines, 14,000 of which were planted at likely spots. The cliffs swooped down at two points west of Dieppe at Pourville and Quiberville where the Rivers Scie and Saâne flowed into the Channel. These were obvious landing points and easily commanded by guns on the valley slopes. There was another at the village of Puys, just a mile to the east of Dieppe port, but the beach was narrow and the sides of the valley leading up from it were steep.
Into these natural defences the Germans had installed a wide array of weaponry, much of it looted from the French army, siting the guns where they would inflict the maximum damage on any attacker. From the clifftops they had complete control of the seaward approaches to Dieppe. Two heavy-gun batteries were placed one either side of the town, capable of annihilating any naval force rash enough to launch a frontal attack as soon as it came within nine miles of the shore. One was on the cliffs at Berneval, six miles to the east of Dieppe, equipped with three 170 mm and four 105 mm pieces. It was matched by another battery of six 155 mm cannon near Varengeville.
If the invasion fleet survived the long-range bombardment it would then face a second curtain of fire from a ring of batteries that looped in a horseshoe around Dieppe from the cliffs on either side. The eastern clifftop was dominated by the church of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours. Nearby stood a battery of six 88 mm anti-aircraft guns which could also be used against sea and ground targets. Just inland was a battery of four French 105s, with an ensemble of six heavy 155s four miles from the sea on the southern edge of the town near Arques-la-Bataille. The big bluff looking seawards on the western side made a perfect gun platform, and sited around Quatre Vents farm were six 88 mm AA guns, and four 105s as well as numerous 20 and 37 mm cannon.14 On one side it formed the western headland. Perched on top was the fifteenth-century Château de Dieppe, ‘Vieux Château’, which loomed over the casino and the west end of Dieppe. There were two 75 mm artillery pieces plus two heavy mortar posts in the grounds.
Thus the defenders had a wide array of artillery with which to rain down fire on an invasion fleet as it approached, then blast those troops who somehow got ashore as they struggled over the galets, as well as any armoured vehicles supporting them. By that point they would be exposed to another deadly scourge.
The basic weapon of the German defences was the MG34 machine gun. The MG34 was reliable and devastating. It was versatile, and at just over 12 kg and four feet in length, light and portable enough for attack or defence. It fired 7.92 mm bullets at a rate of up to 900 a minute and was effective up to 2,000 yards. The nearest British equivalent, the Bren gun, fired a similar-calibre bullet at just over 500 a minute and was effective up to 600 yards.
The machine-gun posts on the headlands could cover almost every inch of Dieppe’s main beach and promenade. On the west side there were four sited near the chateau. The cliff face below provided even more advantageous positions. They were honeycombed with gobes, caves dug out of the chalk which were used as storehouses and at one period for human habitation. They were thus ready-made gun emplacements that were almost impervious to incoming fire and also invisible to the prying cameras of enemy reconnaissance aircraft. Below the western headland there were reinforced concrete casemates housing a 75 mm and several 37 mm guns and flamethrowers, and there were more interconnecting bunkers to the west with steps leading up to a reinforced observation post.
The defences on the eastern headland opposite were equally well appointed with several machine guns on the heights and numerous gun positions in the gobes and at the base of the cliff. Immediately below lay the port entrance framed by two jetties reaching out into the sea. The mouth was partially blocked by three cargo ships sunk by the British before they left. A 37 mm gun sat near the end of the western arm, covering the entire beach, and at the landward end the turret and cannon of a captured French tank was concreted into the road.
The Dieppe seafront was bounded by the port entrance on the east and the casino and the Vieux Château on the west. In between ran a broad promenade. The boulevard Maréchal Foch ran along the seaward side. The boulevard de Verdun marked the start of the town, a mile-long row of hotels, boarding houses and villas, with a tall-chimneyed tobacco factory plonked incongruously in the middle.
These had been transformed into a bastion against frontal attack. There were sandbagged firing points for snipers and machine-gunners in the upper windows. The casino dominated the west end of the promenade. The main rooms were grouped in a block at the front with large picture windows looking out to sea. Behind it, neoclassical colonnaded wings curved out on either side. The white stucco had been camouflaged in places with green and brown paint and the whole building had been turned into a fortress with machine-gun and sniper posts on each floor and a 37 mm gun at the entrance. There were six machine-gun posts spaced evenly along the promenade running west and anti-tank guns stood at the entrances to the roads leading from the front into the town. All but two streets leading into the town from the sea were blocked by concrete anti-tank barriers.
Between the beach and the promenade was a sea wall. A timber and double barbed-wire barrier had been built along the top. Below was another thick ribbon of wire strung from metal posts concreted into the stones.
The two possible landing beaches either side of Dieppe were equally well defended. At Puys, a mile to the east, a narrow valley lined with holiday villas ran down to a cramped beach. It was overlooked by pillboxes mounting MG34s. One was sited in the garden of the last house on the right-hand side of the lane leading to the sea. It alone was capable of seeing off all but the heaviest assault. At Pourville, two miles to the west of the town, where the Scie entered the sea, the gentle eastward slopes of the river valley were dotted with pillboxes and the beach was within easy range of the strongpoint at Quatre Vents farm.
Some positions had been there long enough to start to look as if they were part of the landscape. Many had thick overhead protection. The others were well dug in. The most vulnerable were the anti-aircraft pieces which had to be able to fire upwards. Even so, the sheer volume of hardware made it unlikely the defences could be completely suppressed by bombardment by sea or air. Both the ships and attacking aircraft would anyway have to contend not only with the light and heavy flak guns but also with the Luftwaffe. The German air-force base at Abbeville was less than twenty minutes flying time away and home to the Focke-Wulf 190s of the ace Jagdgeschwader 26 fighter unit, known to their Fighter Command opponents as the ‘Abbeville Boys’. All together there were 206 fighters and 107 bombers stationed in the region who could come to the aid of the defenders.15 The Dieppe sector was the responsibility of the 571st Regiment of the 302nd Division, commanded by Oberstleutnant Hermann Bartelt. It was undermanned, with only three thin battalions numbering about 1,500 men in total spread between Berneval and Varengeville. Half the force was held in reserve at Ouville-la-Rivière seven miles to the south-west. The seafront in the town itself was held by only one company of around 150 men, while at Puys a garrison of just fifty guarded the beach.
The regimental adjutant Captain Linder was charged with overseeing the defences. Despite the weakness in numbers he was confident that it could hold the position comfortably. The spate of small-scale raids of the spring and the obvious toughness of the target led the defenders to doubt the likelihood of a major attack. They expected instead ‘a commando-type enterprise as the British had done before’.16 Linder was sure that the benefits offered by the terrain meant they could handle anything that was flung at them. The topography ‘offered an advantage to the defender which you couldn’t estimate too highly’, he remembered. The narrow valley at Puys made it ‘even easier’ to defend and it was reckoned that only a ‘small company’ was needed to repel an attack on Pourville.
The east and west headlands bracketing the town and port were ideal for laying down ‘enfilading fire’, that is a sustained barrage sweeping in from the flanks that attackers would have to get through to reach the relative safety of the town. With ‘heavy machine guns, your light machine guns and light cannon and anti-tank guns you could reach the esplanade from either side’, he explained. If attackers did manage to make it across the killing zone to the ground below the Vieux Château they would be shielded from the guns on the headland. There was another protected spot below the east headland. However the Germans had ‘tried to overcome this problem by manning some positions within the houses’ on the front ‘from where you could reach the dead angle’.
The Germans had thus created a near-perfect system of interlocking arcs of fire that combined to generate a maelstrom of bullets and shells that, unless preceded by a shattering bombardment, should stop dead any frontal assault on the town. Each line of defence had a role to play in the orchestrated annihilation. The gunners in the seafront buildings, for example, were ordered to shoot only at approaching and departing landing craft. In that way they would draw the attackers’ fire, leaving the guns on the headlands to mow down those who managed to disembark.17 It fitted with Rundstedt’s orders to crush any attacking force before it could establish a foothold ashore. If everybody did their job, a task which only required staying at your post and firing your weapon, few attackers would get off the beach alive.
Despite the soundness of the defences, the Germans were taking no chances. By the end of April Dieppe looked very much like a battlefield in waiting. In April, the mayor René Levasseur ordered everyone on the seaward side of the town to leave their homes ‘in view of the grave potential dangers facing the population and out of military necessity’.18
The fishing quarter of Le Pollet on the eastern side of the port emptied and the last remaining inhabitants of the tall houses in the boulevard de Verdun on the seafront departed. Dieppe was now nearly half empty. Most families had relations in the surrounding countryside and had moved out to join them. Others handed their children over to the authorities and on 4 June forty boys and girls left for a home for evacuees in Issoire, a village in the Auvergne in the Unoccupied Zone. Many of those with jobs in the town left at night, journeying to safety on a special train that ferried them back and forth to Auffay fifteen miles to the south.
Most of the activity in the emptying landscape now was ominous. Since the start of the year work had begun along the occupied coastline from Norway to the Pyrenees to create an Atlantic Wall of reinforced concrete strongpoints, ordered by Hitler to provide ‘a solid line of unbroken fire’ and a fortress ‘which will hold in any circumstances’. At the same time the garrisons were being brought to something approaching battle-readiness.
Most of the men in the 302nd Division had not fought before. Many had undergone little beyond basic training. From his HQ at Envermeu, nine miles south-east of Dieppe, Haase worked hard to get his men up to scratch. The rawest were ‘Germanised’ drafts from the conquered territories. There were several field exercises to lick them into shape. In February a mock raid led by British paratroopers was staged in which the referees awarded success to the attackers.19
Haase raised readiness states according to the perceived threat. At level three, the lowest, only half the strength were on duty at any time. At level two, all were at their posts, and slept fully dressed and equipped. Level one meant action stations. The degree of vigilance was determined by factors ranging from the overall strategic situation to the weather conditions. If the wind was strong, units on the seafront could relax to level three. If dead calm prevailed, it was raised to level one.20 Vigilance was also high when the moon and tide favoured the attackers. The training programme and Haase’s leadership raised both efficiency and morale. ‘Hase’ means ‘hare’ in German and in a punning reference to their chief, soldiers painted a sign on the wall of the casino and positions nearby showing the silhouette of a hare and the slogan: ‘The little hares that bite’.
Despite the training and the regular alerts the troops had little to complain about. They were living easy. The food was not bad, with meat and fried vegetables for lunch, thick army ‘Wehrmachtsuppe’ for supper and a daily ration of bread, butter and sausage to fill the gaps. There were occasional issues of honey and jam and tomatoes and fruit were on sale in the town and eggs and cream in the countryside. Black-market items could be had for exorbitant prices in the canteen at the Hotel Royal. A bottle of schnapps or cognac cost twelve marks and a bottle of red wine four marks (a private got thirty-five marks a month). Stockings, underwear, artificial silk, perfume and chocolate were available to send to sisters, wives and girlfriends who could not get them at home. There were plenty of bars and cafés in town, which stayed open until midnight for the off-duty troops though not for the locals. The cinema in the Grande Rue, reserved for the soldiers, showed a film every night at 7 p.m. and was always packed. Leave was reasonably frequent and long enough to allow time to visit Paris or Rouen. It was all, as everyone was fervently aware, hugely preferable to life on the Eastern Front.
Even this knowledge could not always keep boredom at bay. ‘Day after day nothing,’ wrote Hauptmann Joachim Lindner in his diary. ‘We had a problem with the men guarding the coast, the poor man walking with his rifle along the cliffs. Nothing happened but the waves coming and going, coming and going.’21 It was only a matter of time. ‘We wait, every night we wait for Tommy,’ wrote another watcher over the Channel coast, Gefreiter Heinrich Böll, to his wife Annemarie in Germany, ‘but he doesn’t seem to want to come yet…’