On 16 May the Isle of Wight began to fill up with Canadian soldiers. As far as they knew, they were there to undergo yet more training and no one apart from those at the very top were aware they were preparing for a real operation. The new regime marked a departure from their usual drills. According to Major Forbes West of the Royal Regiment of Canada, these had been ‘largely endurance propositions’ designed to build up stamina. What they got now was ‘commando-type training. They really ground it into us and life was really very difficult.’1
The Isle of Wight was the perfect place to prepare for the task ahead. It had cliffs, coves, and rolling downland just like the coastline around Dieppe. It also met another vital criterion: it could easily be sealed off from the outside world, and the intense secrecy surrounding Rutter could, it was hoped, be maintained. Once on the island, the troops were stuck there and every letter was scrutinised by army censors.
Roberts set up his divisional HQ at Osborne Court, a 1930s mansion block close by the navy’s much grander HQ in the Royal Yacht Squadron clubhouse. Within a week, 5,000 men had arrived. From the 2nd Division’s 4th Infantry Brigade came the Rileys, the Royal Regiment of Canada and the Essex Scottish Regiment. The 6th Brigade provided Les Fusiliers Mont-Royal, the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders of Canada and the South Saskatchewan Regiment. The 14th Army Tank Regiment, known as the Calgary Regiment, supplied the all-important armour. The specialised jobs of blasting through obstacles to get the armour off the beaches, then carrying out the numerous demolition tasks, were in the hands of the Royal Canadian Engineers.
The trials of two years spent far from their homes and their loved ones had reinforced each unit’s sense of identity. The battalions were about 800 men strong including soldiers and support staff, small enough for everyone to know everyone else and for the character of the commanding officer to count for a lot, shaping the morale and efficiency of his men. In some cases they also acted as father figures to soldiers who were often little more than boys. ‘I knew almost everyone very well indeed,’ said Lieutenant Colonel Dollard Ménard of the Fusiliers Mont-Royal.2 ‘They were almost all French Canadians like me and they would show me photos of their wife, their children their mother or their fiancée, with smiles on their faces but tears in their eyes.’
Each battalion had its own ethos and identity. The ‘Royals’ were a new formation, an amalgamation of other militia units including the Toronto Regiment. Before the war recruiting policy was informal and, according to West, ‘the CO invited people that he thought suitable to hold a commission to join’. If after two years they had proved acceptable, they became lieutenants. Their current commander was Lieutenant Colonel Hedley Basher who had fought in the last war and took them on their first assignment on garrison duty in Iceland before moving to England in November 1940. He would soon be promoted and his place taken by his deputy, Major Douglas Catto, a former Toronto architect.
The Essex Scottish came from south-west Ontario and were commanded by Fred Jasperson, in civilian life an easy-going lawyer from Windsor who wrote stories for Canadian magazines in his spare time. The Fusiliers Mont-Royal would represent French-speaking Canada in the Rutter force. Their commander Colonel Ménard was always known as ‘Joe’ and had a rather more colourful background than most COs. After graduating from the Royal Military College (RMC) he turned his back on peacetime soldiering and joined the British Army, took a commission with a Sikh regiment and spent two years guarding the Khyber Pass. When war broke out he offered his services to his native country only to be rejected. By luck, charm and persistence he made his way back to Ottawa and after a spell at staff college was given command of the Montreal-based Fusiliers.
The Camerons of Canada were drawn from Winnipeg, where their commander, Alfred Gostling, had in peacetime once been a radio repair man. The South Saskatchewans were led by Cecil Merritt, an athletic twenty-nine-year-old and the youngest of the battalion commanders. He went to school in Vancouver and Victoria then graduated from the RMC and trained as a lawyer. He was called to the Bar in 1929 practising in Vancouver and joining the militia.
Most of the men in the Calgary Tanks came from small farming towns in Alberta where they grew up around heavy machinery. Their CO Johnny Andrews was another RMC graduate who joined the tiny Permanent Force where he specialised in the neglected area of armoured warfare.
Apart from Andrews and Ménard all the battalion commanders were pre-war part-timers, but they strove to be just as rigorous in their preparations for action as their professional counterparts and their British Army colleagues. Many of their subordinates were cut from the same cloth as themselves. Among them were men who had proved themselves in the civilian world as farmers, tradesmen and small businessmen and the social gap between officers and other ranks was relatively narrow. In pre-war British regiments officers and men were treated as different species and an unscaleable social barrier stood between the leaders and the led. The Canadians did things differently. The headquarters of 4th Brigade directed that ‘parties among all ranks should be encouraged’, something that would never have occurred to a British brigade at this stage of the war.3
Although Canadian commanders tended to come from the same sort of middle-class, professional backgrounds and most had passed through the RMC, they nonetheless had behind them a broader social hinterland and wider life experience than their British counterparts. Even the two brigade commanders were not career soldiers but products of the militia with distinguished civilian careers behind them. The 4th Brigade’s Sherwood Lett was a former Rhodes Scholar and partner in a prominent Vancouver law firm, while Bill Southam of the 6th Brigade was a publisher.
The man at the head of the division seemed at first sight to be made of slightly duller metal. John Hamilton Roberts was opaque, reserved and spoke quietly in an Anglicised accent, the result of two years between the ages of fourteen and sixteen spent at Epsom College, an English boarding school south of London.
He was born in the south-western Manitoba village of Pipestone in 1891 the son of a Vancouver estate agent. After the family returned home from a spell in Britain, he went to Upper Canada College then on to the RMC where he was best known as a sportsman, excelling at football, tennis, shooting and cricket. In 1914 he was commissioned into the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery and went to France with the Expeditionary Force. According to Robert Rothschild, who served in his battery, he was ‘a gentleman who looked after his men’.4 He won an MC at the Somme and two years later was wounded badly enough to have to see out the rest of the war in England. He stayed on with the Permanent Force serving as a gunnery instructor.
Roberts started the war a lieutenant colonel. He was tall and thickset and his jowly, expressionless features made him hard to read. According to William Anderson, who served under him as a young artillery officer before the war, he ‘didn’t hang around the mess’, however ‘the men adored him because he could sing “Old Man River” better than Paul Robeson.’5 He was regarded as able but not particularly hard-working. He did not attend staff college and had never commanded infantry before he took over 2nd Division. Views differed as to his intelligence. Rothschild generously judged him ‘as bright as Harry Crerar’. Bob Bennett, who was among the officers gathered for Roberts’s first address to the division, took a different view. He ‘had no brains. When he took over…he shuffled his feet and looked at the floor, telling the officers that he’d forgotten what he was going to say.’6
He soon revealed a streak of ruthlessness, weeding out superannuated commanders and replacing them with younger, fitter and more motivated men. The high standard of fitness they had reached by the time they arrived on the Isle of Wight was largely due to his hard driving. Roberts’s problem was that he saved his assertiveness for his Canadian comrades. When it came to dealing with the British, he was inevitably overawed by Monty’s blazing self-confidence and the aura of God-given superiority that shimmered around Mountbatten. What doubts he had he expressed softly and did not make a fuss when they were ignored.
The units gathered on the island were now designated ‘Simmerforce’. The Canadians regarded the move as a welcome change from their old routines. The Rileys found their new quarters a great improvement on the dismal camp they left behind in Sussex. After finishing Beaver III, the last exercise inflicted on them by Monty, they were sent to Billingshurst where, the unit diary noted, ‘roads were very poor, buildings only half completed [and] wet weather and mud made it an unpleasant site’.7 The companies were divided between Billingham Manor, the former home of the novelist J. B. Priestley, now a prolific broadcaster doing his bit to buoy public morale, and Northcourt, a Jacobean mansion once owned by Lord Byron, both in the centre of the island and altogether ‘most extensive and picturesque’.
The beauty of the surroundings was some compensation for the brutality of the new regime. All the battalions regarded themselves as fit and competent. As well as being physically toughened up they had all received solid battle-drill training which grounded them in infantry war fighting. ‘[It] taught all ranks to appreciate a battle situation quickly, to issue brief orders and then swing immediately into an attack,’ wrote Denis Whitaker.8 ‘Everything was done at top speed in open country. Each section was divided into two groups: a Bren-gun group of two men and a rifle group of five. The section commander would give an order: “Enemy machine gun, line of my arm (pointing) 200 yards – Bren give covering fire – GO!” ’ The rifle group then raced to attack the enemy position while the Bren poured down fire until it was captured. This routine was ‘the guts of any infantry attack at any level’ and it was repeated until everybody had it down.
On the Isle of Wight the training moved into a different realm. ‘This began where battle drill left off,’ remembered Colonel Bob Labatt.9
We swam with and without our uniforms, with and without Mae Wests. We climbed slopes, hills, 250-foot chalk cliffs, sheer and overhanging, complete with weapons. The same with rock quarries. We learned all about house-to-house fighting in bombed-out sections of Cowes. We learned to shoot from the hip and to reload quickly by slipping in a full loaded magazine in place of the empty one, instead of charging it from clips. Every rifleman carried five magazines. All our movements were in battle order, carrying all weapons and ammunition. And all training was carried out with and under the fire of live ammunition – Brens et cetera – [firing] just overhead and to a flank.
Their weapons were now a part of them, as familiar as a limb. The rifle was an improved version of the standard Lee Enfield .303 as carried by their fathers in the previous war. There were two types of sub-machine gun, the American .45-inch Thompson and the Sten which had just been introduced. It was light, simple and cheap to make and initially very unpopular. The bullets – 9 mm calibre so captured enemy ammunition could be used – had a tendency to jam and the firing mechanism was temperamental requiring patient filing to fix. There would be several stories of soldiers throwing away their Stens after they jammed in the heat of action on the Dieppe beaches. The Bren light machine gun on the other hand was the essence of reliability, not as quick-firing or long-ranged as the German equivalent but steady and dependable.
For mortars they had a two-inch which fired a 2.5-pound bomb. The three-inch could lob a ten-pound bomb about a mile but was much heavier and needed a wheeled dolly when employed in an amphibious landing.
Reveille was at 05.30 and everyone was on parade at 07.00. The Rileys’ first day of training, 22 May, took place in the Royals’ area near Freshwater on the west coast. The morning was spent ‘going through a very tough and difficult obstacle course. This consisted of scaling a cliff, through barbed wire at the top, climbing scaffolding and crawling through culverts, through muddy trenches, over water-filled ditches by swinging from ropes and hand-over-hand, jumping more ditches and finally clambering down to the beach again.’10 This was all done ‘at the double and all ranks such as clerks, drivers, mechanics, pioneers etc. went through the course’. So too did the padre. The Reverend John Weir Foote was good-natured, tolerant and very popular with the regiment. He was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1934 and after the war broke out enlisted as an army chaplain. Foote knew there was only so much formal religion the soldiers could take. ‘I didn’t preach all the time,’ he remembered. ‘I only preached ten minutes on Sunday. If I preached fifteen, I’d have been shot and never been in the war at all.’11 He saw his duty as being alongside the troops at all times, doing what they did, no matter how arduous or dangerous. On the Isle of Wight he marched with them every step of the way, though at thirty-eight years old ‘I felt my age.’
In the fields and woods of the island, safety was pushed to the limits to bring the troops as close as possible to feeling the reality of combat. Lucien Dumais was a short, tough thirty-eight-year-old sergeant with the Fusiliers Mont-Royal who had joined as a territorial in 1934. He was in the middle of the Achnacarry commando course with other battalion NCOs when they were ordered to the Isle of Wight to oversee training. They applied the lessons they had learned in the Highlands with the zeal of the newly converted. ‘Physical and psychological resistance had to be brought to a peak,’ he wrote.12 ‘To this end we drove our men more and more ruthlessly. We were asking for more than they could give – and we got it – and then we asked for still more.’ There was ‘no question of using blanks for training; when firing around or over our troops we used regular service ammunition’. One afternoon the men were made to crawl along a ditch while the instructors fired a Bren above their heads. ‘One soldier refused to get dirty and we could see his kit moving above the top of the trench. Using my very accurate rifle I put a bullet right through his haversack less than two inches from his skin’. The round pierced his water bottle and ‘as the tepid water ran down his back he subsided quickly in the mud, convinced he had been hit’.
On 6 June Roberts recorded in his war diary that ‘the condition of the men has improved and better results have been secured from speed marches’, though there was not enough time to get his men to the standard he wanted before the operation was due.13 This seemed an overly cautious assessment. The training had been linked closely to the targets each unit would be assaulting, and the landing exercises were carried out by the same craft and crews that would carry the men to the beaches. The men were fit and hardened by cold, wet and exhaustion, and as habituated to the crack and whine of bullets and the flash and thud of incoming mortars as they would ever be without experiencing the real thing.
The tight focus of the training fuelled speculation that this was the prelude to a major operation, perhaps even the invasion of Europe. The boat drills were one giveaway. On 30 May the Rileys travelled to Cowes to board assault landing craft (LCA) and mechanised landing craft (LCM) which took them to Thorness Bay and Osborne Bay where they landed and re-embarked under a smokescreen. Two days later they went on board the landing ship Princess Beatrix at Yarmouth to practise loading onto the landing craft prior to being lowered into the sea and then heading for Osborne Beach where they waded ashore under a smokescreen. Then on 3june they progressed to a full battalion mock beach landing. One company acted the part of the enemy manning machine-gun posts and a four-gun field battery, while three others made the assault with one company in reserve.
There was another glaring indication that something big was in the offing. One morning the Rileys’ officers were summoned to Osborne Beach for a demonstration laid on by the Calgary Tanks. They watched Churchill tanks fire their two-pounders, machine guns and smoke projectors before loading and unloading from the new tank landing craft (LCT).
The Churchill was designed to support dismounted infantry by suppressing strongpoints and machine-gun posts and had yet to go into action. It had been conceived in a hurry to replace the equipment left behind in France, and its history was one of serial reworkings to overcome flaws in its design. It was heavy, weighing forty-three tons with a long chassis and multiple bogies, but the Bedford 350-horsepower engine lacked power and was unreliable and difficult to access. The tracks were unable to sustain a direct hit and the noise they generated tended to drown out radio conversations. Against these shortcomings, the weight of the armour offered good protection to the crew. When German experts examined the remains of the Churchills that got ashore at Dieppe they judged them inferior both to their own tanks and to the Soviet T34s. Their conclusion was that the best tank the British could then put into the field: ‘in its present form, is easy to combat’.14
By the middle of 1942 three versions had been produced. The Mark I mounted a feeble two-pounder (40 mm) in the turret as its main armament alongside a coaxial Besa medium machine gun, plus a three-inch howitzer in the hull for use against infantry. The Mark II replaced the howitzer with another machine gun and the Mark III upgraded the main gun to a six-pounder (57 mm). The Calgarys’ sixty Churchills included all three types as well as a few equipped with flamethrowers.
Johnny Andrews and his men had been chosen for the raid because of their outstanding performance in the Beaver III exercise. They were delighted to get their hands on the Churchill after years of making do with antiquated relics from the First World War. A technique for waterproofing them up to a depth of six feet had been worked out using rubber balloon fabric and extending exhaust pipes vertically to raise them well above the waves when they drove off the LCTs.
The next obstacle was the steep beach. Pre-war research had established that pebbles could pose fatal problems for tracked vehicles. The Royal Tank Regiment conducted experiments on the shingle beach at Lydd in Kent which proved that ‘movement on shingle was not possible unless tanks were prepared to move straight and on the level’.15 Establishing the precise geological composition of the beaches at Dieppe and Pourville was clearly of vital importance. The flat, rounded galets of Dieppe were known as ‘chert stones’ in English. After the war Stan Kanik, a geological engineer who had been a trooper with ‘A’ Squadron of the Calgary Tanks, made a technical study of where he had gone ashore. ‘The entire beach is composed of chert stones, boulders and rubble,’ he wrote, which the action of the tides pushed into an ‘angle of repose’ of fifteen to twenty degrees.16 The layers were deep, meaning that vehicles could not dig down to a solid rock base for traction. The result was that ‘when a tracked or wheeled vehicle tries to climb up this slope, it immediately digs itself down; when the tracks are turned to either side the stones roll in between the drive sprocket and track and the object that first gives way is the pins holding the track links.’
The German defenders had already come to the conclusion that the beach was impassable to tanks and did not bother siting anti-tank guns or anti-tank mines on the beach in front of the town. The Canadians would find this out the hard way. It would have been a relatively easy task to send a small commando team at night to bring back samples of the pebbles. They could then be matched to an equivalent British chert beach – such as Dover – and the Churchills tested in something like real-life conditions. But no such reconnaissance was ordered. Instead they carried out their landing tests on the firm, sandy beaches of the Isle of Wight and the small-pebbled beaches of Dorset.
The problem posed by chert was only recognised after the event in a report to Mountbatten by the War Office intelligence department on 1 November 1942, which casually acknowledged: ‘That tank tracks should tend to sink in or spin round without taking hold is to be expected particularly in well-rounded shingle which may act as a pile of ball bearings.’17
The preparations did address the problem of the sea wall which ran for nearly a mile along the promenade. Its height varied according to the level of the pebbles pushed up against it by the tide. Major Bert Sucharov of the Royal Canadian Engineers came up with a device mounted on the hull which unrolled a carpet of wooden ‘chespalings’ in front for the tank tracks to climb. However these were ‘only fitted to a very few tanks one or two days before the raid’. The report finished with the recommendation that ‘in view of our Dieppe experiences we suggest that exhaustive studies and experiments be put in hand now so that in future combined operations we can be confident of what tanks can and cannot do on selected beaches.’
Given that Rutter was to be the first occasion on which tanks were to be used in an amphibious attack, it was astonishing that someone had not come to this conclusion before it was launched. The Churchill’s bulk was not suited to the narrow streets of Dieppe, and Trooper Stan Edwards, a loader/wireless operator who sat next to the driver in the upper tier of the tank, found them ‘very big and cumbersome’ and ‘hard to handle’.18 Sight was restricted to a couple of periscopes and a narrow triplex vision port, and a commander opening the lid to get a better view was liable to get a sniper’s bullet through the head.19 Yet nonetheless they could provide much-needed firepower for the raiders. As long as they could get off the beach.
The COHQ reflex when confronted with difficulties was to make light of them. It was on display in ‘Imperator’ which was being developed in parallel with Rutter. Of all the schemes under consideration in the early summer of 1942, this was the most reckless. The idea that an armoured column could be landed on the coast of northern France, race to Paris, shoot up various military headquarters then retreat to a captured port and sail home to England appears to have originated with Hughes-Hallett. When the plan was revealed to the RAF, who would have to protect the raiding force, it was met with near incredulity. The chief of Fighter Command’s 11 Group, Air Vice Marshal Leigh-Mallory, pointed out that Paris was beyond the range of his squadrons which meant ‘the Force will be operating outside the area in which air cover can be provided for two to three days’.20 He went on: ‘If I were the German air-force commander I would concentrate my attacks on the motor transport carrying fuel with cannon fighters. If such an attack were carried out with determination, I think that the inevitable result would be the loss of the entire Armoured Force through lack of petrol to get it out of the country again.’
The prospect of annihilation in detail did not deter Colonel Antony Head, military adviser to Mountbatten, who wrote back: ‘I do not accept this opinion for the following reasons: 1. The march of the Armoured Raiding Force on Paris…is likely to take the Germans by surprise…2. The raiding force will not move concentrated on one road but will be dispersed over a wide front. 3. The majority of the roads in France are lined with trees and in August a good deal of concealment should be possible.’ Fortunately the idea that raiders should put their faith in surprise and the plane trees along the routes nationales was never put to the test and Imperator was eventually dropped, though not on the grounds of its inherent craziness.
The impulse to emphasise the positive was sharpened by the arrival of Americans on the Combined Ops staff, following the arrangement agreed between Mountbatten and Marshall in April. Here was an opportunity for Richmond Terrace to enhance its prestige with its powerful allies and the Brits were eager to impress. Nine US officers led by Brigadier Lucian Truscott joined COHQ on 20 May.21 On day one Truscott was taken by the vice chief General Haydon to a meeting at Home Forces headquarters, across St James’s Park at 20 Queen Anne’s Gate, presided over by Paget’s deputy Gregson-Ellis to discuss the outlines of ‘operations in North-West Europe in 1943’ – in other words, Roundup. At first he found he had difficulty following the discussions as the British ‘spoke with astonishing rapidity, practically through closed teeth and with little action of the lips’. In time he came to appreciate their way of doing business and the ‘unfailing courtesy of British officers towards each other as well as toward ourselves’.
That did not mean that there were not real animosities and passions swirling below the surface civility. Truscott quickly picked up on the frustration and resentment felt by many at COHQ that their approach and efforts were unappreciated. They were being held back by the ‘defensive and defeatist attitude’ of Paget and the Home Forces team and by the indifference shown to their projects by the RAF’s Bomber and Fighter Commands who were ‘interested only in the air war’.
The Combined Ops team believed they deserved a privileged place in the organisation of the war effort. The aspiration came from the top. Mountbatten was as angry as anyone at what he saw as the hostility shown towards COHQ schemes, complaining to the senior Conservative Leo Amery of the ‘incredible mass of obstruction’ he had to overcome.22 He believed, reasonably enough, that the organisation should be given its head on raids. But his ambition went much further than that. As Truscott soon discovered, Mountbatten interpreted the original brief given to him by Churchill in the broadest possible terms and claimed ownership of the great invasion enterprise for COHQ with himself, naturally, at the head. ‘Admiral Mountbatten,’ he wrote, ‘believed that COHQ was the organisation most eminently qualified by training and experience for planning the assault, conducting training for it, and actually controlling it when it should take place.’23
This grand conception greatly magnified the dimensions of Rutter in the minds of COHQ. It would test the claims which they made for themselves and, if it succeeded, bolster their candidacy to lead the effort to reconquer north-west Europe.
At the same time, the political dimension of Rutter was expanding at a rate that greatly increased the pressure for it to go ahead. The distaste at the top for Sledgehammer was now strong. There seemed to be no plausible circumstances in which Churchill and the chiefs could justify a decision to launch it. At the Chiefs of Staff (CoS) Committee meeting of 5 May, Mountbatten warned that landing-craft shortages meant the operation could not go ahead until the middle of August. Brooke already doubted that it would achieve anything anyway, predicting that ‘no effort that we could make this year would be likely to draw off land forces from the Russian front.’24 In the circumstances, Mountbatten suggested, it ‘would be advisable to have something on a smaller scale ready by say 15 July’, and reminded them that Rutter was scheduled for the end of June.
At the CoS Committee meeting of 1 June aversion to Sledgehammer had deepened further. Mountbatten pointed out that persisting with it would tie up all available landing craft and therefore push back preparations for Roundup. It would also mean stopping all amphibious training and would disrupt arrangements for Imperator. He therefore ‘reluctantly felt obliged to recommend…that we should not attempt to mount [Sledgehammer or Roundup] this year’.25
This was not at all what the Americans or the Russians wanted to hear. Another round in the Anglo-American wrestling match over the time and place of the Allied offensive was about to begin. Churchill was due to visit Washington later that month to try to lower American enthusiasm for an early landing in France and push his alternative of an Anglo-American invasion of North Africa. Mountbatten, accompanied by Hughes-Hallett, was about to board a flying boat to take him to the States on an advance diplomatic mission to soften the Americans up.
If Sledgehammer was to be killed off, something had to be offered in its place to dull the blow and offer proof of aggressive intent. Such a decision, he told the chiefs, ‘made it all the more important to do one more big raid’. He pointed to Rutter, due to take place at the end of June when conditions were suitable, with the start of the flood tide coinciding roughly with daybreak and a moon phase during passage that offered sufficient but not too much light. There was ‘every chance therefore of this operation coming off’. If, however, the weather did not oblige he proposed that ‘the operation should be remounted a month later’.
No one had suggested the Dieppe plan was a substitute for Sledgehammer. A one-day hit-and-run raid would do nothing to divert German troops from Russia. However, it might achieve another much-discussed objective – to drag the Luftwaffe into an attritional showdown that might conceivably force the Germans to switch air assets from the East. ‘Peter’ Portal, the steely, cerebral Chief of the Air Staff, offered support, recommending that ‘our military operations should be confined to a series of minor raids with only one larger-scale operation, calculated to bring on a big air battle’.
Everything was now pointing in the same direction. Brooke ordered a report to be drawn up recommending that policy for the continent that year ‘should be confined to a series of small raids, together with one larger-scale raid which would be Operation RUT – TER in June, or a similar operation staged in July’. In its short life the Dieppe plan had thus assumed an importance far in excess of its military significance. On its back rested the prestige of COHQ and the reputation of Britain as a reliable ally whose promises of action were sincere. It would now take a remarkable change of circumstances to prevent it going ahead.
On the same day as the chiefs’ momentous meeting, the Rutter senior commanders gathered at Richmond Terrace. There was a new face at the table. Rear Admiral Tom Baillie-Grohman had been appointed the naval force commander for the operation when the chiefs gave their approval for the outline plan two weeks before, but illness had prevented him from starting work until now.
Baillie-Grohman had come directly from Cairo where he was head of the Combined Operations Directorate for the Middle East.26 In many respects he was a typical British naval officer, institutionalised since adolescence, who knew only the ways of the senior service and had fierce opinions about the way things should and should not be done. He had done wartime service on the Dover Patrol and peacetime duties in China and the Mediterranean, where as commander of the 1st Destroyer Flotilla one of his junior captains had been Lord Louis Mountbatten.
Baillie-Grohman worried that Mountbatten and Edwina would set a standard of extravagant living that his humble shipmates would ruin themselves trying to emulate. He took the pair aside ‘for a private word’, he recalled, ‘with the result that they always lived modestly’.27 Baillie-Grohman grew to like Mountbatten and when he joined Rutter regarded them as being ‘on terms of intimate friendship’.28 However the reversal of roles did not incline him to any great deference towards his new boss, the Combined Ops acolytes or the Rutter plan.
For the first time, the proposal was subjected to the stern scrutiny of a man who had played no part in its inception and was not conditioned by any considerations other than its merits as an operation of war. Unlike many of those he was working with he had direct experience of mounting large amphibious operations. At Middle East HQ in Cairo he had planned an operation, subsequently abandoned, to capture the island of Rhodes. Baillie-Grohman made free with his opinions, peppering Mountbatten with criticisms of staff arrangements and weak intelligence as well as his vitriolic opinions of some of the COHQ officers. Mountbatten’s responses were always civil and wherever possible accommodating. Despite his blasé manner he respected the traditions and protocols of the navy which had shaped him since boyhood. Baillie-Grohman with his total lack of sophistication and mistrust of smart foreigners was far from being Mountbatten’s usual cup of tea. Yet the rear admiral had earned the rings on his sleeve and the chief showed him a marked respect, listening patiently to his numerous complaints and criticisms.
Baillie-Grohman was now charged with delivering the crucial part of the plan. Without the navy there would be no landing and he had just three weeks to devise a way to get hundreds of craft across a hostile sea and arrive exactly where they were supposed to be at exactly the right moment. In Rutter the timings were calculated in minutes not hours, and even a small delay could make the difference between success and catastrophe. At least enough landing ships and landing craft for both men and tanks were now available to do the job. Training crews to sail them was another matter. Landing craft were flat-bottomed and hard to handle and there were few who had experience of their ways. The British and Canadian officers detailed to command them were mostly young and green reservists. They were now required to learn in short order how to form up in columns, manoeuvre in the dark without lights and ground on beaches at the right point for men and machines to get safely ashore and not drown or sink. An added complication was that the training craft could not all be assembled in the main anchorage at Cowes for fear of being spotted by German reconnaissance flights, so many of them had to be dispersed at ports around the island.29
Baillie-Grohman learned the size of the task ahead of him at the 1 June meeting. Also present were generals Paget and Montgomery and Air Vice Marshal Leigh-Mallory whose squadrons were providing the air cover for Rutter and had been nominated air-force commander. Baillie-Grohman listened as the plan was rolled out and then raised two questions. He asked if there was any prospect of increasing the strength of the naval gunfire support available in order to better suppress the Dieppe defences. He also wanted to know where he could obtain further intelligence on enemy dispositions.
The provision – or lack thereof – of heavy-calibre naval gunfire had been a sore point from the start. The only naval artillery mentioned in the plan was that of the flotilla escort of eight Hunt-class destroyers whose main armament was four 102 mm (four-inch) guns. These would have little impact on the blockhouses and pillboxes shielding the enemy guns. It would take the shells from the fourteen-inch guns of a battleship or the eight-inch guns of a heavy cruiser to do real damage. The principle of naval fire support in Combined Ops raids had been established five months earlier when the salvos from HMS Kenya’s six-inch armament on the German garrison at Vaagso had helped make Mountbatten’s debut as chief of COHQ such a success. Vaagso was much more lightly defended than Dieppe. Yet Baillie-Grohman was told that the Admiralty was not willing to risk anything bigger than a destroyer for the raid.
In their eyes, sending a capital ship into the narrow waters of the Channel with German airbases all around was asking for disaster. The sinking of the battleship Prince of Wales and the cruiser Repulse by Japanese bombers off the coast of Malaya in December 1941 was still fresh in everyone’s mind. The story was told that when Mountbatten had bearded the First Sea Lord Dudley Pound to ask for a big ship, he was told: ‘Battleships by daylight off the French coast? You must be mad Dickie!’30
Baillie-Grohman thought the Admiralty’s attitude ‘pretty feeble’.31 He had taken part in several combined-operations exercises at both the army and navy staff colleges and elsewhere ‘and always heavy gun support had been presumed’.32 He was partially reassured by Leigh-Mallory that a heavy air bombardment before the raid would have the same effect. The promise of a primary high-level attack by as many as 300 bombers had earlier soothed the COHQ planners’ fears about the dangers of a frontal assault. Nonetheless he later pressed Admiral Sir William James, the Portsmouth naval commander who would have control of Rutter while the flotilla was at sea, for a capital ship, only to get another firm negative.33 So it was, he recalled later, that the ‘only gun support for the troops attacking would be from the little four-inch guns from a few destroyers wallowing about in the sea’.34
On the Isle of Wight the Canadians went about their training ignorant of these fateful decisions. As the days passed the 5,000 Canadians were joined by another 4,000 sailors, airmen, airborne troops and motley Allied units. They included Free French commandos and men from the US Rangers, a new specialist unit established by Truscott, fresh from the Achnacarry course. The hard training and the tight security put a charge of expectancy in the island air. The censors combing the mail noted a high level of cheerfulness, professional satisfaction and readiness for whatever lay ahead. ‘You wouldn’t recognise the regiment now,’ wrote a soldier of the Royals. ‘All dead wood weeded out and we’re now the trimmest and fightingest little unit you ever did see.’ Another from the Camerons of Canada reported that ‘the battalion is in good shape and ready for anything, getting the good old offensive spirit.’ A survey of the mail judged that ‘the troops are generally satisfied with conditions and life…on the whole they are keen for action.’35
Security was a constant concern. To drive the message home, every unit was taken to watch a newly released film called Next of Kin. It was an expensive production using well-known actors and told the story of the efforts of a security officer to maintain secrecy during the preparations for an amphibious operation on the coast of northern France that bore an uncanny resemblance to Rutter. During the training, complete with cliff-climbing and boat drills, he tries to drum into officers and men the need to keep their mouths shut. Even so, careless talk soon reaches the ears of Nazi agents and the force goes ashore to be massacred by the waiting Germans.
The Rutter field security team were satisfied that the men of Simmerforce had got the message. Everyone was ‘very aware of the importance to themselves of not giving away any information’.36 However the main danger now facing the Canadians was not German spies, but the decisions of their own commanders.