At the beginning of April Hughes-Hallett and his team got to work on the Dieppe plan. They were keen to get things moving. The failure of the Bayonne venture after a string of achievements was a jolt to their self-esteem, and pride, as much as any strictly military consideration, demanded another success. Dieppe was now at the top of the target list with a proposed launch date of June. Nothing had been done to develop the project since it was first mentioned at the end of January and there was no time to lose.
The first thing the planning syndicate needed was precise information on the topography and defences of the area. This was the province of the senior intelligence officer, Wing Commander the Marqués de Casa Maury, who acted as liaison with the various intelligence organisations. The merits or otherwise of ‘Bobby’ Casa Maury, the pre-war socialite, racing driver and friend of the Mountbattens, were a subject of dispute at COHQ and elsewhere. He was almost certain to raise the hackles of old-school naval officers like Tom Baillie-Grohman, and sure enough the rear admiral disliked him on sight. Baillie-Grohman joined the Dieppe team as naval force commander late and at his first meeting at Richmond Terrace to discuss the raid he ‘asked who would be assisting us in Intelligence [and] was referred to a foreign-looking officer in RAF uniform…I recognised him as a polo player and a foreign grandee of some sort.’1 He was ‘most surprised for a foreigner to be in this position’. His prejudices were confirmed for he ‘never saw him or heard from him again during the whole planning period and certainly there was very, very little intelligence to be obtained’.
A bigger problem was that Casa Maury was resented by some of the very people on whom he most relied for help. According to Hughes-Hallett ‘of all those serving at COHQ [Casa Maury] came in for most criticism from the Admiralty and the War Office, not so much on personal grounds but rather because the Naval and Military Intelligence Staffs strongly objected to having an intermediary between themselves and COHQ.’
There were other reasons for their animosity, laid out by Brigadier Robert Laycock, the dashing and efficient head of the Special Service Brigade and a friend of the Mountbattens. Writing to Casa Maury in an attempt to console him after the fusillades of criticism which followed the raid he wrote: ‘although you undoubtedly produced the very best finished article from the sources at your disposal…the raw material fed into your department was of a poorer quality, and it appeared to me that much was being withheld from you…because you…are not on really intimate terms with the Naval Intelligence Division, the Director of Military Intelligence and [the RAF’s] Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence or accepted as 100% persona grata by “C” [the head of the Secret Intelligence Service or MI6].’2 Their hostility was ‘prompted by jealousy and a refusal to believe that anyone outside their immediate acquaintance and sphere of life could do their job just as well as they can. Also, I think, they are biased by a wholly irrational prejudice against you in that you are a marquis and your name is Casa Maury and not Smith, Jones or Robinson.’
Casa Maury could not help his exotic background and, excepting Mountbatten himself, worked as hard as anyone at COHQ. Hughes-Hallett reckoned he performed his duties ‘with considerable despatch displaying considerable skill, artistry and imagination’.3 The fault lay with Mountbatten for choosing him. Casa Maury’s problem was that he was an outsider in the jealous and conspiratorial intelligence world. The material he was able to obtain was the standard data available from conventional sources and he had to go through the formal channels to get it rather than using the short cuts that would have been available had he been a member of the club. There was therefore some truth in Baillie-Grohman’s description of his department as a mere ‘postbox’ for intelligence gathered elsewhere.
Despite these handicaps, the planners soon had a fairly comprehensive picture of the target area and enemy dispositions. From 3 April information on the Dieppe defences started to arrive from the service intelligence departments as well as the odd snippet from MI6 and the Special Operations Executive which operated its own networks on the continent.
The basic lie of the land was mapped out by the Inter-Services Topographical Department (ISTD), a very efficient set-up which like many successful wartime organisations had emerged from early failures. The disastrous Norwegian campaign of 1940, in which RAF crews went into action with maps obtained from old Baedeker guidebooks, brought home the necessity for an agency that amassed up-to-the-minute geographical intelligence that all the services could draw on. The driving force behind the ISTD was the director of naval intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey. It began work in October 1940 and was based in Oxford where the university press was on hand to print reports and surveys.4
The starting point for all raid planning was the images provided by the RAF’s Photographic Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) based at Benson, Oxfordshire. Its aircraft flew routine sorties that included the Dieppe area about once a week. Beyond that they could be tasked with special missions to gather the images needed to construct ‘mosaics’ of the coastal approaches and target sites. Photographs were analysed at the Photographic Interpretation Unit at nearby Medmenham which was by now expert at identifying the smallest details of military infrastructure. In one case it was noticed that cows in fields on the flanks of coastal towns in northern France had avoided grazing certain patches of grass, thus revealing the presence of barbed wire.5
Almost any image of the target had some value. Goronwy Rees, an intelligence officer at South-Eastern Command headquarters who was attached to the planning staff for the raid, remembered how ‘for much of our knowledge…of the town and the beaches we had to depend on picture postcards and family snapshots…How strange it seemed sometimes, as one studied some old-fashioned photograph showing a French family taking its luncheon on the beach, the little boys in sailor suits and straw hats, as in some illustration of a scene from Proust, that the reason why this particular photograph was of particular interest was that it showed with extreme clarity the gradient of the beach at the exact point where our tanks would disembark.’6
The RAF was bombarded with demands for special PRU missions. At one point the Air Ministry pushed back, pointing out that to meet every outstanding request from the COHQ Intelligence Section would mean their aircraft would have to take 2,860 photographs.7 They were ‘much concerned over the question of security’ and refused to comply without clearance from higher authority.
Even with saturation coverage, photographic reconnaissance could not be expected to reveal everything. The shadows cast by the cliffs obscured the western end of the promenade and entrances to the town. Neither were they going to show the gun positions in the gobes in the east and west headlands, nor the anti-tank guns that were rolled out only at night into the streets running down to the seafront and withdrawn in daylight.8
There was a dearth of supporting information to fill in the gaps. The intelligence departments and agencies were able to provide only sketchy details about the enemy units in place and how they were deployed. A German report after the operation noted that while the raiders’ information about their defences had been quite accurate, ‘there was a general lack of knowledge as to the location of regimental and battalion command posts’.9
To get this sort of fine detail the planners needed to have eyewitness reports from agents on the ground. During the planning some Combined Ops staff had ‘misgivings’ about the quality of the material Casa Maury was serving up, particularly ‘the German arrangements for defending the beaches in front of the town’.10 They suggested sending in an agent to investigate but were told that it would take up to six weeks to put one in place. Even then, ‘the report of an agent could not be entirely depended upon and…a grave security risk was also involved were he to be captured.’ Hughes-Hallett or one of the naval planning staff had the bright idea of tasking a Channel patrol to ‘capture fishermen off Dieppe in order to get the most up-to-date information’, but it came to nothing.11 Material in the intelligence files reveals that some details were getting through from local sources. An early unattributed report gives locations for a few military posts in the town as well as other information such as the identification of a hotel-café at Puys as a brothel.12 Another mistaken report stating that there were armoured troops in the area came via the pigeon carrier service overseen by the MI 14 department of the War Office Directorate of Military Intelligence.13
None of this suggested an established link between the planners and local underground networks in the Dieppe area. In fact there was a well-organised Resistance network active at this time, secretly surveying the defences to pass on to British and Free French intelligence in London and it was already well known to COHQ. The success of the Bruneval raid owed a lot to agents linked to the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (BCRA), the Free French intelligence service in London. The BCRA controlled several networks operating in occupied France including the Confrérie de Notre-Dame. This was run by Gilbert Renault, an energetic former film producer who operated as ‘Colonel Rémy’.
Renault came from a large Breton family and was patriotic, rightwing and Catholic. When the war began he was thirty-five with a wife and four children to whom he was devoted. Many with his outlook accepted Pétain’s claim that France had no choice but to capitulate and sign an armistice that put the government at the abject service of the Germans. Renault was appalled. He left France on 18 June 1940 with one of his brothers on a trawler bound for England. Two of his sisters, Maisie and Madeleine, who stayed behind also joined the Resistance and ended up in Ravensbrück.
In London Renault joined the embryonic court assembling around the obscure figure of Charles de Gaulle and was assigned to the BCRA, led by André de Wavrin, known as ‘Colonel Passy’. The Gaullists were already working closely with MI6, and Renault was introduced to several officers including the head of the French section, Kenneth Cohen. That summer he returned to the continent and travelled around France, building a network of agents stretching the length of the western Atlantic coast who provided valuable information about German naval activity in the Battle of the Atlantic.
By 1942 the confrérie had extended its operations to Normandy. Some recruits with flying backgrounds were charged with finding secluded landing sites and drop zones for the RAF. Among them was a forty-five-year-old former air-force officer called Roger Hérissé, alias ‘Dutertre’. On his travels in upper Normandy he noticed an unusual radio mast perched on the cliffs near Bruneval south of Cap d’Antifer, and guessed it was linked to German coastal radar monitoring RAF activity. The report was passed on to London. On 24 January Renault received a radio message from BCRA on behalf of the British with a shopping list of precise information required on the defences in the Bruneval area, right down to the state of morale and alertness of the garrison troops.14
He entrusted the mission to Roger Dumont, alias ‘Pol’, another pilot. Dumont left Paris immediately to rendezvous with a local contact, a Le Havre garage-owner called Charles Chauveau (‘Charlemagne’) and they set off in a borrowed Simca 5 to conduct a recce. Bruneval was a modest seaside resort and Chauveau was on good terms with the owners of Le Beauminet, the one hotel-café there. According to Renault ‘after fifteen minutes they knew all the details’.15 A month later Operation Biting was launched and succeeded brilliantly, greatly boosting the prestige of Mountbatten and Combined Operations.
COHQ should therefore have been well aware of the value of Renault and the confrérie. In March, Roger Hérissé visited Dieppe where he met local sympathisers. Together they spent two weeks gathering details of guns and gun positions, the location of pillboxes, anti-tank barriers and anti-tank guns, and the addresses of military HQs. There was too much material to be transmitted by wireless and the material would have to be taken to London by courier. Early on the morning of 25 March Hérissé left for Paris to hand over the dossier to Dumont at their regular weekly lunchtime rendezvous at the Farandole restaurant in the rue d’Anjou. On his way to the station he witnessed a collision between two German vehicles and was ordered to help get the injured to hospital. He missed his train and the meeting with Dumont, and had to wait another week until the next scheduled rendezvous. Dumont was arrested that morning. The dossier finally reached London in the hands of Pierre Brossolette, a key figure in the Resistance who was exfiltrated in late August. By then the material was useless.16
Renault laid part of the blame for the failure on the excessive caution shown by British intelligence who refused on security grounds to give the Resistance any inkling of future plans. ‘If they had let my network know the extreme urgency of updates on the coastal defences,’ he wrote, ‘[they] could have organised a sea pick-up for Dutertre’s information and the raid could have been a lot less costly.’
In the third week in April the project had acquired a name. It was Operation Rutter, a code name that had no particular meaning beyond being the next on an approved list. Everything was being done at high speed, creating a sense of urgency and a brisk tempo of bureaucratic momentum. Information-gathering was coordinated by Major Walter Skrine, a diligent and methodical officer who badgered the service departments and intelligence organisations with questionnaires chasing up ‘additional intelligence requirements’ to fill in the picture.17 In less than three weeks the Rutter staff believed they had gathered enough information on which to base a plan. They had accurate descriptions of the beaches in and around the town, including their geological composition and gradients as well as the defences and obstacles behind them and possible exit routes, all of which were essential if tanks were to be used successfully. They had identified a list of potential targets in and around Dieppe including military and naval headquarters, shipping, radar stations and the airfield at Saint-Aubin-sur-Scie. Knowledge of artillery and anti-aircraft batteries and machine-gun and mortar posts was incomplete, but the gaps were being filled in every day.
The details of the enemy’s order of battle were also sketchy. The main unit in the area was correctly identified as the 302nd Infantry Division, though not the name of its commander. Force numbers were fairly accurate as well as the strength of other units in the area and the time it would take to reinforce Dieppe once the raid was launched. However, there were major errors which an agent on the ground might have corrected. The divisional headquarters was consistently placed at Arques-la-Bataille, on the southern edge of the town, when in fact it was at Envermeu, nine miles to the south-east.
The reports tended to make casual assumptions about the calibre of the defending troops. They were marked down as ‘second rate’, under-equipped and in low spirits.18 This, it was believed, applied to all German troops on the occupied coast. Some ‘Notes on the Military Situation’ in the occupied coastline drawn up for Home Forces claimed ‘morale…is poor in that discipline is slack and training bad…Personnel, particularly officers, are generally inferior.’19 Their low spirits were partly attributed to the success of the Combined Ops cross-Channel operations as a result of which ‘there is jumpiness about raids as these usually result in casualties and dismissals.’
These snap judgements revealed an overconfidence on the part of the intelligence staffs that also appeared in crucial evaluations of the enemy’s defensive infrastructure. ‘The defences of Dieppe and neighbourhood are not heavy,’ stated an early assessment of the aggregated intelligence. This breezy evaluation would be reaffirmed in the opening words of the outline plan.20
The COHQ ethos was to make light of difficulties. Even so, it was clear that the planners were concerned at the possible strength of the German artillery support. There were constant requests to all potential intelligence sources for precise information about the hardware. One dated 19 April addressed to Home Forces stressed: ‘If the limits of available information merely referred to the type of gun usually found in these batteries it might have a very restricting effect on the plan in its entirety.’21 All the supplementary information received added to, rather than subtracted from, what was known of the enemy’s fire-power. Yet the tone remained optimistic and almost insouciant.
There were, however, no illusions about what cross-Channel operations could hope to contribute to the overall strategic situation. The Home Forces ‘Notes’ cautioned that while ‘British raids have caused anxiety to the German authorities and a number of measures have been taken to meet the situation…there are no signs that troops are being detached from Germany or the Russian front and sent to the West. In fact the reverse is the case.’ The conclusion was that ‘only a threat to some vital objective would cause a reversal of this policy so long as Germany is occupied in Russia’.
It was clear from the beginning that there were no vital objectives in Dieppe. No U-boat was ever seen there and it housed no important repair facilities. ‘The enemy makes no great use of Dieppe,’ the Home Forces report observed. ‘It serves merely as a base for patrol craft and minesweepers and is likely to be of importance only in the event of a German attempt to invade England.’
It was also true that the targets on offer were of limited value and their destruction would do little to reduce Germany’s warmaking capacity. High on the list was the aerodrome at Saint-Aubin-sur-Scie. However, an RAF intelligence report of 12 April revealed that it comprised only one small hangar and blast shelters to accommodate twelve Me-109 or Me-110 fighters. As such it was a minor Luftwaffe outpost with no strategic and very limited tactical worth.
But the number-one target was the forty or so invasion barges moored in the inner harbour. The intention was not to destroy them but to tow them back to England. Their value to the Allies was questionable. They were between 100–600 tons, diesel-powered and capable of lifting both men and armour. Now that a German invasion was all but inconceivable they posed no threat. As an asset they might seem fairly desirable but the risks and effort involved in a ‘cutting out’ operation to bring them back across the Channel were enormous, and the shipyards were now turning out landing craft for men and tanks that were designed precisely for the Allies’ needs.
A host of other objectives were soon added to the list. There were various German headquarters and barracks, railways and marshalling yards, the gas and power stations, a pharmaceutical factory, oil tanks and port installations including a swing bridge across the harbour. Damage to these was unlikely to be permanent and in the case of the utilities would cause as much harm to the town’s remaining population as it would to the enemy.
Some targets made more sense. The radar station on the western headland was of obvious interest and a plan was developed to repeat the success of Bruneval and seize parts of the apparatus. It was also fairly certain that searches of naval headquarters in town and ships in the harbour would yield more Enigma material, which would be of enormous help to Bletchley Park, though the need for intense secrecy meant this was not mentioned in documents.
None of this made Dieppe obviously special or substantiated Bernard Fergusson’s subsequent claim that it was ‘by far the best prospect’ of all the targets on the Channel coast. Nor was there anything in the preparations that lent credence to the assertion that the raid was mounted as a trial for the invasion and liberation of the continent. When the outline plan was eventually drawn up it was accompanied by a covering letter from Mountbatten with a statement pointing out ‘the value of this operation in order to gain experience for future large-scale operations’.22 But this was true of all raids. A report by the War Cabinet’s Joint Planning Staff in February had stated: ‘Raiding policy is intimately bound up with the problem of a return to the continent.’23 Mountbatten went further, stating that ‘apart from the military objective given in the outline plan, this operation will be of great value as training for Operation “SLEDGEHAMMER” or any other major operation as far as the actual assault is concerned.’ He went on: ‘it will not, however, throw light on the maintenance problem over beaches’, that is, the question of resupplying an invasion force.24 There is no suggestion here that it is part of a much bigger design to test the myriad unknowns in what would be the greatest amphibious invasion in history. Nor do the operational orders contain anything like a systematic programme for evaluating performance and gathering data.
If Dieppe really was intended as an experiment it was a strange target for Mountbatten to approve. In the many arguments in the spring of 1942 as to where a major landing should take place he consistently opposed those who favoured the Pas de Calais, arguing that the beaches of Calvados and the Cherbourg Peninsula in Lower Normandy, though further away from Germany, would be easier to take and hold as well as to resupply. This explains his caveat about the ‘maintenance problem over beaches’ which would be a major consideration if his proposal was adopted.
At the outset, at least, it would seem that the Dieppe raid was neither conceived nor planned to garner vital information about how to go about launching a full-scale cross-Channel invasion. Judged on such documents as survive, it looks more like the latest and most spectacular of Mountbatten’s Combined Ops productions, driven by the desire to demonstrate aggressive intent to the Germans, the British public, the Americans and the Soviets, as well as restoring lustre to COHQ’s reputation.
This was the biggest raid yet attempted by Combined Ops. It would require a scale of troops beyond the resources of the three commandos of the Special Service Brigade which numbered about 1,500 men. COHQ’s official report into the raid recorded that ‘though intelligence reports showed that Dieppe was not very heavily defended, a town of its size could only be successfully raided if the number of troops used was considerable.’25 It was estimated that up to six battalions were needed. They would need armoured support so ‘the use of tanks was considered very early in the planning.’
Arrangements were already in place for troops for large-scale COHQ-inspired operations to be provided by General Paget from the resources of Home Forces Command, and a procedure was agreed at the end of March that Home Forces staff officers would help prepare the plans. On 14 April a team arrived from Paget’s headquarters to join the Combined Ops planning syndicate.
By then, however, the COHQ planners had already developed their own ideas as to how the attack should be launched. Despite the contention that the Dieppe defences were ‘not heavy’, they had quickly rejected the idea of a frontal assault on the town. Conventional military wisdom dictated that funnelling large numbers of troops into a narrow front before the defences had been effectively suppressed was a recipe for a massacre. The only justification would be if the attack stood a good chance of taking the defenders completely by surprise. It was assumed that the Germans were fully expecting some sort of major action somewhere along the Channel coast sometime soon. There was therefore no hope at all of achieving what was called ‘strategic’ surprise. Tactical surprise, which caught the enemy off balance, might be possible. It seemed nonetheless to Hughes-Hallett that it was more prudent to follow what was the conventional course and approach the target indirectly with attacks going in on either side of the town to envelop it from the flanks. He took the idea to Brigadier Charles Haydon, Vice Chief of Combined Ops, who ‘felt there were attractive features to putting the main weight of our assault on the flanks’.26 Mountbatten also later approved the concept.
The plan that followed was largely dictated by the topography of the coastline. There were a few gaps in the cliff wall either side where a sizeable landing was feasible. At Pourville, a holiday resort a mile and a half to the west, the heights dipped down to the flat-bottomed valley of the little River Scie. They then swooped up again for four miles before descending where the almost identical River Saâne entered the sea at Quiberville. On the eastern side, about a mile from the harbour, there was a break in the cliffs at Puys, but the beach was narrow and the valley walls leading up from it tight. After that there was no sizeable gap until Criel-sur-Mer, twelve miles from Dieppe as the crow flies and considerably more by road.
At first the team favoured landing the tanks and one infantry battalion at Quiberville who would race eastwards along the coast road, capture the west headland and seize the airfield at Saint-Aubin-sur-Scie three miles inland. Two more infantry battalions would be put ashore just to the east at Pourville, within easier reach of the town.27
Another two would land on the far side of Dieppe at Puys then move west to seize the eastern headland before descending into Dieppe. Two more battalions were to stay offshore on ships as a ‘floating reserve’.28 Once the town was taken, specialist engineer teams would blow up stores and infrastructure, capture prisoners and raid headquarters to snatch documents, before everyone re-embarked from the front on the second tide of the day having spent about fifteen hours ashore.
Not long after the two teams joined forces, a major difference of opinion emerged. The army staff believed that flank attacks on their own would not work. Success depended on the effective use of tanks. Quiberville was ten miles by road from Dieppe. To reach it the tanks would have to cross the Scie and possibly the Saâne and the bridges spanning the rivers might well be blown by the time they reached them.
Despite the enemy’s assumed high state of readiness, they did not know where precisely the blow would fall. By striking fast just before first light it might be possible to catch the enemy on the hop and achieve an element of tactical surprise. That would be impossible with the COHQ plan. While the tanks were trundling towards the target, or worse sitting impotently on the banks of a river, the whole of Dieppe’s defences would have plenty of time to come to full readiness.
For the raid to have any chance of success it would have to confound the enemy’s expectations by abandoning orthodoxy and doing what common sense and military precedent dictated you did not do. The army proposition was therefore that ‘Dieppe should be assaulted by a frontal attack delivered against the beaches of the town itself.’29 It would be supported by two flank attacks, one at Puys and one at Pourville. Simultaneously, or shortly before, parachute and gliderborne troops were to capture the heavy coastal defence guns menacing the Dieppe approaches at Berneval and Varengeville.
The pros and cons of the alternative plans were debated at a high-level meeting on 18 April. According to the official record it was chaired by General Haydon deputising for Mountbatten who was busy with General Marshall’s visit to London to settle the great strategic issues of where and when the Allies would strike first. Leading for Home Forces was Major General Philip Gregson-Ellis, deputising for Paget. General Frederick Browning, commander of the 1st Airborne Division, was also there. At the end it was decided ‘a frontal assault would have to be included in the plan.’ However, this would take place only after Browning’s men had successfully knocked out the coastal defence guns and the RAF had delivered a heavy air bombardment on the town. This was not enough to satisfy Hughes-Hallett who still considered that ‘a frontal assault was hazardous’, even though feasible from a purely naval point of view.
A second meeting of staffs was held a week later to settle the matter formally, this time chaired by Mountbatten and with Gregson-Ellis again representing Home Forces. The Home Forces team laid out in detail the arguments for their approach. Quiberville was just too far away to achieve surprise. The tanks landed there would have to cross two rivers to get to Dieppe. The bridges over them would have to be seized early to prevent the enemy demolishing them.
In a reversal of their customary roles it was now the army urging boldness and Combined Ops voicing restraint. The Home Forces representatives pointed out that the latest intelligence reports ‘showed that Dieppe was lightly held by a single low-category battalion’ of about 1,400 men supported by ‘ten AA guns, three or four light anti-aircraft guns, one four-gun dual purpose battery and four coast defence batteries’. Furthermore the garrison would be fighting on its own for some time and it would be five hours before another 2,500 reinforcements could be pulled in with a maximum enemy strength of 6,500 after fifteen hours, just as the raiders were departing.
According to the first post-operational report drawn up by Mountbatten’s team and embedded in subsequent official narratives, the COHQ naval planners were not convinced and again questioned the wisdom of a frontal assault. The army tried to reassure them with details of the proposed air attack on the town. It would go in ‘just before the craft carrying the assaulting troops touched down’.30 The bombardment would be ‘of maximum intensity’ with the result that the defenders ‘would be too confused by it and by subsequent attacks by low-flying aircraft to be in a position to offer stout or prolonged resistance’. The army were clearly not budging. COHQ resistance ceased and ‘the Plan, which included the principle of a frontal assault and preceded by bombing, was then adopted’.
Whether the debate was quite so clear cut is open to question. Walter Skrine later strayed from the Mountbatten/Hughes-Hallett line, writing to Haydon in 1958 that ‘Home Forces were quite ready to take the lead from us in any plan that could be found workable. I think therefore that the military [planners] in COHQ were quite as much responsible for the idea of a frontal assault…as the Home Forces planners.’31
Certainly the vehemence of the army arguments seems out of keeping with Paget’s sceptical attitude to the value of cross-Channel adventures. Under the directive given to Paget by the chiefs of staff it was his prerogative to delegate his authority for such operations to a subordinate. The man he selected was Bernard Montgomery, who since the autumn of 1941 had been chief of South Eastern Command, or as he chose to style it ‘South Eastern Army’. As his area of operations covered the coastline from where the raid would have to be launched, he was the obvious choice. It is not clear when precisely Montgomery took up this responsibility, though the official account says it came shortly after Home Forces staff joined the COHQ planners on 14 April.
It makes no mention of his being present at either of the crucial planning meetings on 18 and 25 April. However, Hughes-Hallett claimed later that Montgomery was at the first discussion and led the charge to demolish the COHQ proposal. ‘Coming directly to the point he opened the meeting by saying that the military part of the plan was “the work of an amateur”,’ wrote Hughes-Hallett. ‘If it was a fact, and indeed it was a fact, that we could only allow troops to remain ashore for a maximum of fifteen hours, then it would be impossible for the flank brigades to work round and reach Dieppe from the landwards side in time. This would still be true if there were no Germans to oppose them. He pointed out that the only way the town and seaport could be captured quickly was to deliver a frontal assault by coup de main.’32
Montgomery went on to ask Hughes-Hallett for an expert view of whether it would be possible for the navy to land ‘the major part of a division’ on the seafront at Dieppe at the same time as putting two or three battalions at Pourville to the west and another at Puys to the east. The answer came that there would be ‘insufficient sea room’, meaning that the waters off the coast would be simply too crowded to get a large number of landing craft to form up in the predawn darkness without a high chance of chaos. But if the attack was staggered so that the flank attacks went in twenty minutes ahead of the frontal assault, then the landings ‘would be possible from a naval point of view’. Montgomery considered this delay was ‘too small to matter’ and told the two staffs to work on a new plan along the lines he suggested.
Hughes-Hallett claimed that Montgomery also dominated the 25 April meeting at which Mountbatten was in the chair. Even though the chief ‘made it quite clear that he and his staff preferred the original plan, nevertheless, the general insisted on the new plan…and that from the intelligence at our disposal there should not be any great difficulty in a frontal assault’.33
Whichever version is correct, Hughes-Hallett’s account certainly sounds like the sort of performance people had come to expect of Bernard Montgomery. Still largely unknown outside military circles, inside them he was a controversial figure attracting scepticism and admiration in equal quantities. He came from the same sort of background as virtually every other senior officer at the time, belonging to that section of the British middle class that provided the empire with soldiers, sailors, administrators and clergymen. Bernard was born in 1887 in London, the fourth child of an eventual nine of an impoverished Anglican vicar and a cold, unloving mother. Two years later the family moved to Tasmania where his father had been appointed bishop. He took his duties seriously and was sometimes away in the bush for six months at a time. The children were left with Maud, daughter of a famous preacher, who was eighteen years younger than her husband. She handed them over to tutors imported from Britain, starved them of love and beat them regularly.
Montgomery’s attempts to show affection and win some display of it in return were rebuffed and the tortured relationship ended in estrangement. He did not attend her funeral. This upbringing turned him into something of a rebel and a bully, ‘a dreadful little boy’ as he admitted to friends.34 After St Paul’s School in London he resisted family pressure to go into the Church and went instead to Sandhurst where he got into trouble for his violent behaviour.
He joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment and went to France at the start of the First World War, fought at Le Cateau and the retreat from Mons and was wounded twice. Thereafter he served on various staffs finishing the war an acting lieutenant colonel. In the interwar years he attended staff college but with no real wars to fight progress was slow. At the age of around forty he discovered a life outside soldiering. In 1927 he met and married Betty Carver, whose husband had been killed in the war leaving her with two sons. She was the sister of Percy Hobart who would go to command an armoured division in the Second World War. They had a son together and the marriage was extremely happy.
The idyll ended when she contracted septicaemia from an infected insect bite, dying in his arms in 1937. Henceforth Montgomery’s work was his life. At the start of the war he commanded the 3rd Infantry Division which was part of the British Expeditionary Force. In the succession of defeats following the German attack in the West, he distinguished himself by getting his men back home with minimum casualties.
The episode gave him much scope for the outspokenness that was starting to become a trademark. Monty was seen as unusually vain and egotistical in a profession where vanity and self-regard abounded. Concern for his reputation shaped his approach to truth, so that his version of the facts was concerned primarily with putting the best possible construction on his actions and judgements, making his testimony far from reliable.
For all of that, Montgomery had much to be egotistical about. His professionalism and dedication made him stand out from the ranks of the surrounding mediocrities. When the war began, there were some impressive officers advancing towards the most important command positions. Those at the very top, though, were mostly ill-equipped to lead the army into a battle against the modern world’s most ruthless and efficient warriors.
The upper ranks of the army formed a club where the top jobs were decided on seniority, and incompetence and failure were treated with the indulgence that the upper classes showed to those they had grown up with. The malaise was evident in the figure of the man who served in the vital position of Chief of the Imperial General Staff in the run-up to the war and then in 1939 led the British Expeditionary Force to France. The dimness of John Vereker, 6th Viscount Gort, was legendary. ‘It had never occurred to me nor, I fancy, to any of his contemporaries, to describe Gort as intelligent above the average,’ wrote General Sir Edward Spears, who served with him in France.35 His political boss, the war minister Leslie Hore-Belisha, put it more bluntly. He found him ‘utterly brainless and unable to grasp the simplest problem’.36 He was blind to the big picture but obsessed with small details, once insisting on opening an important conference at the start of the war with a discussion about whether a tin hat, when not on a soldier’s head, should be carried on the left or right shoulder. By 1942 a new order was in place at the top of the army led by Brooke, the master of the big picture, who created an environment in which driven, dedicated individuals like Montgomery could flourish and their bolshiness be tolerated.
The Dieppe raid seems to have held little more interest for Montgomery than it did for his boss General Paget. The impression he gave to those close to him like his liaison officer Goronwy Rees was that it was a distraction from the more interesting work of training up his ‘South Eastern Army’ while waiting for some more dramatic and active command which, though he did not then know it, was about to come his way and steer him to his rendezvous with history.
Subsequently he would downplay his role in the whole affair. The outcome did not fit happily into the legend he spent so much energy constructing, often with a complete disregard for facts. Nonetheless it is clear that he approved the plan and endorsed the vital subsequent amendments that did so much to diminish the chances of success.
With the close of the 25 April meeting Rutter took a long step closer to becoming a reality. The crucial decision had been made. Dieppe was to be taken by a head-on attack launched from the sea. Work now began on an outline plan that would then be put to the chiefs of staff for their approval.
Winston Churchill would later claim that the central proposition took him by surprise. When ordering an inquiry into all aspects of the preparations in December that year, he reflected that ‘at first sight it would appear to a layman very much out of accord with the accepted principles of war to attack the strongly fortified town front without first securing the cliffs on either side, and to use our tanks in frontal assault off the beaches…instead of landing them a few miles up the coast and entering the town from the back.’37
Mountbatten and his staff certainly resisted the idea. Why did they not try harder? One explanation is that Mountbatten was reluctant to oppose a scheme which was being pushed by political necessity, a dynamic he was intimately aware of due to his close involvement in a vitally important visit by the US chief of staff General Marshall which was taking place as the deliberations were going on.
Marshall arrived with Roosevelt’s adviser Harry Hopkins, who held no official position but exercised more influence over the president than any other American, soldier or civilian. They were there to try to resolve the great strategic dilemma that threatened to paralyse the Anglo-American war effort. The American goals were to keep Stalin in the war and prevent his making a separate peace with Hitler, maintain and nurture the alliance with Britain and fight the Germans on the ground as soon as possible. However, the White House and the US War Department differed on how to pursue them.
Marshall and Eisenhower believed in rapid action and striking the enemy at the closest point. That meant an all-out bombing campaign followed by a full-scale invasion of Western Europe after air superiority had been achieved. As Eisenhower put it in his diary in late January: ‘We’ve got to go to Europe and fight…We’ve got to begin slugging with air at West Europe, to be followed by a land attack as soon as possible.’38 Churchill’s enthusiasm for ‘Gymnast’ – the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa – they regarded as an enormous waste of time and effort that would tie up Allied troops and delay the big event of a continental invasion until 1943 or perhaps 1944.
Roosevelt and Hopkins agreed with them on the need for early action. ‘I doubt if any single thing is as important as getting some sort of a front this summer,’ wrote Hopkins to the President on 14 March.39 But he was careful not to say where and the pair remained open to the possibility of Gymnast.
Nonetheless Roosevelt thought it wise to give Marshall his head, and with Hopkins by his side he arrived in Britain by Pan Am Clipper to begin talks on 8 April. Marshall was armed with a memorandum drawn up for him by Eisenhower laying out his proposal. It formalised his ideas for Roundup, a cross-Channel invasion by forty-eight British and American divisions in the spring of 1943.
The memorandum also promoted the cause of Sledgehammer, the emergency operation to relieve the Russians if they looked on the point of collapse or to seize the advantage in the more unlikely event of the Germans suffering a major setback that would force them to weaken their defences in France. The Americans had adopted Sledgehammer with far more enthusiasm than the British who conceived it, an irony that only added to the hosts’ difficulties.
The arrival of Marshall and Hopkins put Churchill and his military chiefs in a tight corner. They had kept Washington sweet with seemingly positive noises about an early move in Europe. In fact the idea filled all of them with something like horror. They believed with justification that it was military madness. Memories of Norway, the Battle of France and Dunkirk were still red raw. They knew the paralysing pain and demoralisation of defeat in a way that the Americans could not. Marshall had experienced the First World War as a staff officer. Eisenhower, to his great chagrin, was never in action. They saw war in terms of resources, organisation and logistics which if harnessed efficiently would logically lead to victory. The British knew only too well its messiness and Lady Luck’s cruel indifference when it came to bestowing her favours.
Brooke’s first proper conversation with Marshall on 15 April to discuss an invasion of France was alarming. ‘His strategical ability does not impress me at all!!’ Brooke wrote in an exclamation-mark-studded entry in his diary that night. ‘His plan does not go beyond just landing on the far coast!! Whether we are to play baccarat or chemin de fer at Le Touquet, or possibly bathe at Paris Plage is not stipulated! I asked him this afternoon – do we go east, south or west after landing? He had not begun to think about it!!’40
Brooke knew very well that he must never allow the visitors a glimpse of his true feelings. Like the maître d’hôtel and the staff at a de luxe establishment, he and the British war leadership had to keep their smiles in place as they danced attendance on their big-spending guests.
The essential fact was that the USA brought with it the means of victory. At the moment the relationship was presented as a partnership of equals but in time the might of the Americans’ contribution would give them the upper hand. Even so, another catastrophe, squandering divisions in a doomed enterprise, was inconceivable. The British were determined to resist it, but how? The answer was a typically British combination of feigned enthusiasm for Marshall’s naïve proposals, accompanied by a subtle campaign to undermine them.
The search for harmony was conducted over ten days of formal meetings interspersed with lunches, dinners and visits to Chequers. Churchill did what he did best, creating a warm symphonic swell of bonhomie, declaring with masterly vagueness after a few days that ‘there was complete unanimity on the framework’ of the Marshall Memorandum and committing the government to ‘this great enterprise’.41 Brooke was equally suited to sounding the discordant notes, particularly British doubts about Sledgehammer.
The visitors had plenty of opportunities to meet Mountbatten. He was now well established as Churchill’s charmer-in-chief to the Americans. He had already won many conquests in his visits to the States and was about to make important new ones. Marshall had brought with him a favourite staff officer, Colonel Al Wedemeyer, a lean, blond, soldier-scholar whose intellect roamed far beyond military boundaries.
Wedemeyer was cautious in his judgements of the British brass on first meeting them but his approval of the dashing chief of Combined Operations was unqualified. ‘Mountbatten was by all odds the most colorful on the British chiefs of staff level,’ he wrote.42 ‘He was charming, tactful, a conscious gallant knight in shining armor.’ He noticed that his relative youth told against him and ‘it was obvious that the older officers did not defer readily to his views’. They were nonetheless careful to give Mountbatten ‘a semblance of courteous attention’, which Wedemeyer thought was at least partly explained by the fact that he was ‘a cousin of the king and, no doubt about it, a great favorite of the prime minister’.
Marshall’s programme included a visit to Richmond Terrace. He arrived on 10 April and liked what he saw. On his own initiative he proposed that US staff officers should join CO HQ and work with them as a team. The offer gave Mountbatten the opportunity to add an international dimension to his empire which he seized eagerly. In May a nine-man team led by Brigadier Lucian K. Truscott arrived, charged with creating an American version of the commandos.
The Americans left for home on their Pan Am Clipper from Stranraer on the night of 18 April. Marshall appeared to have been satisfied by Churchill’s assurances of British commitment to his memorandum. Hopkins was not so sure, and had divined that beneath the persiflage Churchill remained wedded to Gymnast and North Africa.
It was later said by General ‘Pug’ Ismay, Churchill’s chief of staff: ‘We should have come clean, much cleaner than we did.’41 But the deception could not go on for long and sooner rather than later the British would have to make some practical demonstration of their commitment to action. Every day brought a further turn of the vice in which Churchill and his military chiefs were stuck. Domestic pressure for action to help Russia was mounting by the day. ‘Public opinion is shouting for the formation of a new western front,’ wrote Brooke on 16 April.43 ‘But they have no conception of the difficulties and dangers entailed! The prospects of success are small and dependent on a mass of unknowns, whilst the chances of disaster are great…’
It would only increase with the imminent arrival of the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, due to visit both London and Washington in the coming weeks to formalise a grand alliance with Britain and renew the pressure from Stalin for the early launching of a relief operation in Europe.
There was nothing of substance that the army or COHQ could offer. Despite Mountbatten’s advocacy of Cherbourg for the Sledgehammer emergency invasion he was no more enamoured of the project than anyone else who mattered. But clearly something would have to be done. In his eyes Rutter now took on a new dimension, and in the following weeks the political and diplomatic weight on its slender shoulders would grow until Mountbatten could present it as a plausible alternative to Sledgehammer. That consideration made it all the more important that it went ahead, whatever the risks and imperfections.
By 11 May an outline plan was ready to go to the chiefs of staff for their approval. The document opened on a note of high optimism with the now familiar assertion that ‘Dieppe is not heavily defended’. It went on to sketch an operation of great ambition and daunting complexity. The attack would arrive from several directions and involved two air drops and three landings on tricky shores. Victory depended on every unit achieving its objectives at the precise time laid out in orders. There was little account taken of the unexpected, and the old adage that no plan survived first contact with the enemy seemed to have been forgotten or ignored.
It would take enormous skill and a great slice of luck for Rutter to have any chance of success. But the plan was now a going concern and the men who would have to carry it out had already been chosen.