On Friday 5 June, the Rutter force commanders gathered at Richmond Terrace to review progress. Mountbatten was in Washington smoothing the path before Churchill’s visit and Montgomery was in the chair. However, it was Air Vice Marshal Leigh-Mallory who dominated the discussion.
He was large and pink-faced with sleek hair and a neat moustache, the very picture of a military grandee. He was also ambitious and frustrated. Fate had denied him a starring role in the Battle of Britain. Since it ended, Fighter Command had been engaged in a costly and largely pointless campaign of attrition with the Luftwaffe over the French Channel coast. Dieppe would give his fighters the opportunity for a massive showdown with the German air force and himself the chance of a victory as glorious as that of the summer of 1940. Today, however, the subject at hand concerned not fighters but bombers.
The minutes recorded: ‘Air Vice Marshal Leigh-Mallory proposed and the meeting agreed that air bombing of the port itself during the night of the assault would not be the most profitable way of using the bombers, as a raid which was not overpowering might only result in putting everyone on the alert.’1 The bland wording disguised the shock of the thunderbolt Leigh-Mallory had delivered. Even the Home Forces proponents of a frontal assault accepted that it was potentially a very bloody affair. The plan was adopted on the understanding that the risk could be significantly reduced by a heavy bombardment by sea and air. It was these elements that made it acceptable, if only just, and even then the naval officers involved had retained severe doubts.
First, the sea bombardment had been stripped out, victim of the Admiralty’s refusal to put a precious capital ship at the mercy of the Luftwaffe. Now the aerial bombardment was being taken away and the Canadians would be wading into the teeth of German defences untouched by heavy shell or bomb. Instead they would have to put their faith in ‘tactical surprise’, the intangible and unmeasurable supposition that German amazement at the audacity of a frontal attack would at least temporarily slow their reactions.
This was an alarming development but equally startling was the apparent ease with which Montgomery and the force commanders accepted it. Leigh-Mallory had offered an alternative bombing proposal by way of compensation in the form of a diversionary raid by seventy aircraft on Boulogne and further attacks on Crécy and Abbeville aerodromes, timed between 02.30 and 04.00. The latter two would ‘tend to occupy the RDF [radar] organisation at DIEPPE and might put out of action, at least for some hours, two aerodromes which the enemy would wish to use during the day of the operation’.
The force commanders knew there were political and practical problems with bombing French towns.
Bomber Command raids on the German naval bases in French Atlantic ports like Brest, Lorient and La Pallice had killed many civilians. This had led to a War Cabinet directive inspired by Churchill banning attacks on targets in Occupied France unless ‘weather conditions are such that accurate attack can be expected’.2 This rule was resented at COHQ who blamed it for depriving the Saint-Nazaire raiders of a preliminary bombardment during Operation Chariot. When presenting the outline plan to the chiefs on 13 May, Mountbatten had reminded them of the difficulty and they agreed to ‘seek Cabinet approval for the air bombardment of the town should the force commanders decide that this was desirable’.3 Churchill relented and ruled that though ‘still against the indiscriminate bombing of French towns at night…an exception would be made in the case of a coastal raid’.4
There remained the problem of accuracy. Bomb aiming was primitive and aircraft attacking a small port town huddled in a cleft in a wall of cliffs would be incapable of discerning between friend and foe. If their bombs hit a machine-gun post rather than a school it would be through luck rather than judgement. Leigh-Mallory fixed on this truth to soften the bad news. The fear was, he said, that collapsed buildings would block the streets of the town making it impossible for the Calgary Tanks to get through to the aerodrome at Saint-Aubin-sur-Scie several miles to the south. This was an argument that Roberts would later accept though no mention is made of his reaction in the minutes of the meeting.
The main reason put forward by Leigh-Mallory for the cancellation of the bombing was more contentious. The claim that an air raid would ‘only result in putting everyone on the alert’ was unconvincing. Dieppe had often been bombed, albeit not heavily. There had been five attacks since the beginning of May and it was bombed again on the very night of the meeting. The lesson that the Germans might be expected to draw from this was that an air raid was just another event, not the precursor to an amphibious attack. The flank attacks timed to go in half an hour before the main assault were much more likely to put the Dieppe garrison on the qui vive. The elevation of the Saint-Aubin-sur-Scie aerodrome to the status of a major objective was puzzling. If it was so important, why not just bomb it, which for all the problems of accuracy facing the RAF still stood a better chance of success than a convoluted armour and infantry attack and had already been proposed in the 25 April version of the plan? Why, if Rutter was, as subsequently claimed, a ‘dress rehearsal’ for a full-scale amphibious landing, was it necessary for the tanks to push through the town to Saint-Aubin-sur-Scie at all? In the contemporaneous documentation and the subsequent testimony of some of those present there is no mention of these questions being raised, let alone answered.
Whether an air raid by heavy bombers would have done much to improve the chances of a frontal attack succeeding is doubtful. The 25 April plan talks of the bombers targeting ‘the town and the aerodrome’. In the revised version circulated on 13 May the scope has been reduced to simply ‘the dock area’. The bomb sight on the four-engine Halifaxes and Lancasters now arriving at Bomber Command squadrons was not capable of pinpoint attacks on batteries, strongpoints and the like, and any reduction of Dieppe’s defences would have been achieved by the bludgeon not the rapier. All this was well known. When killing off Operation Blazing, the raid on Alderney which was supposed to be preceded by an air raid, Brooke declared he was ‘strongly of the opinion that indiscriminate air bombardment would not succeed in neutralising well-sited coast defences particularly on undulating and open ground’, which well described the terrain overlooking Dieppe.5 The best the heavies could do to help the Canadians was create general mayhem that might keep the defenders’ heads down, at least for a while.
Given Bomber Command’s current preoccupations, it was not certain that even this help would materialise. When revealing the change of plan, Leigh-Mallory failed to mention a major factor in the decision. Some time before he had approached Bomber Command’s newly appointed chief, Arthur Harris, to ask him to allocate 300 bombers for the raid. This meant diverting a large part of his force from their current mission and he was unlikely to be amenable. Since his takeover in February, Bomber Command’s war had entered a new phase. The arrival of four-engine bombers and improved navigational aids gave him the means to start a war on German cities, euphemistically termed ‘area bombing’ and designed to destroy civilian morale as much as damage war production. The results were devastating. Five nights before the meeting Harris had scraped together every available aircraft to launch the first 1,000-bomber raid against Cologne, destroying more than 3,000 buildings and killing nearly 500 people.
The raids generated huge publicity and were thoroughly approved of by a population eager for revenge for the Blitz. As a demonstration of British resolve and aggression they were valuable to Churchill as he struggled to maintain the confidence of his Soviet and American partners. If Harris said yes to Leigh-Mallory’s request it would mean diverting his precious squadrons from what he regarded as the vital business of the war. According to one account of the meeting, Harris told him: ‘I have neither planes nor crews to spare for useless sideshows.’6
Harris could afford to be obstinate knowing that he would not be overruled by either Portal his chief, who was a fervent supporter of area bombing, or Churchill who was uncharacteristically wary in his dealings with Harris. Leigh-Mallory left the meeting accepting that ‘if Rutter depended on the air bombardment, it would probably never take place’.
The contribution that Bomber Command could make to Rutter was probably psychological as much as practical. A heavy bombing raid just before the troops went in would hearten them and give the impression that as much as possible was being done to support them. As such it was still valuable, though not as much use as a heavy naval bombardment which could deliver much greater accuracy. With both now gone, a prudent commander might have concluded that the plan was unsound and that to proceed with it risked large-scale casualties and – not the least important consideration – severe damage to the reputations of those whose names were attached to it. There were some murmured caveats and expressions of concern. But no one was prepared to deliver a forthright rejection of the plan as it now stood and thereby in all likelihood scupper its chances of ever being mounted.
Each of the force commanders had his own reasons to go along with the new arrangements. Due to his passive temperament and lack of seniority, Roberts was the least likely to dig in his heels. This was Canada’s chance get into the war in the European theatre. Putting the brakes on just as the project was gaining seemingly unstoppable momentum risked annoying the British. To object forcibly to the change he would need the backing of McNaughton and Crerar, both of whom had been eagerly pushing for action for months. It was a daunting prospect for an unassertive man who would also be throwing away the sort of chance that came rarely in a military career. A story later circulated that Roberts had felt obliged to pass on some criticisms of the plan voiced by the brigade commanders Lett and Southam to Crerar, who assumed that Roberts shared their views. Crerar told him: ‘If you don’t want to do it, I’ll find someone else who will.’7
Baillie-Grohman, like Hughes-Hallett, already had doubts about the wisdom of a frontal assault which the new developments reinforced. However he was only five days into the job and anyway his task was to get the troops across the Channel and back. It was not his place to put a spoke in the wheel of the whole enterprise. It was a decision he would regret. ‘I feel I should have taken a stronger line on this point than I did,’ he wrote later. ‘I should have done more…
For Leigh-Mallory, the landing was not his main concern. His mind was focussed on a much bigger conception that had little to do with the arguments about the form of the main attack. The disparity in goals was noted by Montgomery’s liaison officer at COHQ, Goronwy Rees, who remarked later that from the air-force commander’s point of view ‘it hardly mattered whether Rutter succeeded or failed as a purely military operation. For it appeared to the RAF its principal objective was to force the Luftwaffe into the air and to give battle over the Channel.’9 He went on: ‘We were assured that a landing in France on the scale of Rutter would compel the Luftwaffe to react violently; if it did so, the RAF was confident of winning a decisive victory in the air.’ To his eyes it seemed that ‘the military forces…were also bait. What did it matter if the bait was devoured whole, as long as the fish, or rather the Luftwaffe, was properly hooked?’
This was a cynical interpretation. On the day the air force would do an outstanding job protecting the troops and the fleet. It was true that Leigh-Mallory saw the raid as the climax of the offensive he and his chief, the head of Fighter Command Sholto Douglas, had been waging since early 1941, but in planning meetings he had shown more sympathy than anyone to Roberts’s efforts to beef up naval gun support.
Montgomery was the one with the least to lose by pulling the plug on Rutter. It was not really his show. He had not been there at its birth and was given custody of it by Home Forces only because it would be mounted by troops from his command. His lack of engagement was noted by Rees who wrote that Montgomery implied to him that this was ‘an operation which had been decided on by the chiefs of staff, not by himself, and for reasons with which he was not concerned…the planning of the operation had not been in his hands; its execution equally was not in his hands but in those of the military, naval and air-force commanders. There was nothing he could do to affect the result, and it would therefore have been a waste of time and effort for him to worry about it.’10
If true this was a remarkable display of cold-bloodedness, and Rees admitted he was ‘surprised…that the army commander should be so little perturbed about the risks of the operation’. Montgomery’s own wartime experiences taught that a frontal attack with no heavy bomb or gun support was a recipe for a massacre. At this stage intelligence was reporting the presence of numerous machine-gun posts the length of the promenade facing the beach where the main body of troops would go in. Anyone who had served on the Western Front in 1914–18 knew what that meant. As Ballie-Grohman reflected later, he ‘must have seen what devastation a small nest of machine guns and barbed wire could cause to attacking troops’. At Dieppe the results were likely to be more devastating still as ‘the troops would be more concentrated in their landing craft and when emerging from them and thus an easier target than would be the case on land. And all this without a comparable preliminary bombardment.’11
Monty never gave a satisfactory answer. In his memoirs and elsewhere he claimed to have disagreed with the decision to cancel bombing. Yet it was he who had chaired the meeting which eliminated it. Had he spoken up Rutter would have been killed stone dead. Why didn’t he? His failure to answer the question honestly leaves only speculation. Perhaps he believed that, left alone, Rutter would die a natural death, a reasonable expectation given the current mortality rate of projected COHQ operations. He might have wished to keep a hand in the enterprise, calculating that if it succeeded he could claim the credit for the success and if it failed the blame would fall on Mountbatten.
It was lucky for the chief that he was in Washington when the aerial bombardment decision was taken. He wrote afterwards that he had been ‘surprised’ to learn of it.12 In a long memo four months after the raid, written in response to the prime minister’s demand for answers to criticisms of Mountbatten’s conduct, he stated that he regarded it as ‘a very important alteration indeed’. He had ‘taken up the point [with the force commanders] several times and again on 17 August [two days before the raid finally went ahead] but was unable to alter their opinion’.13 This suggests a passivity on Mountbatten’s part that was at odds with the enthusiasm he consistently showed for Dieppe even when, as later on, other considerations intervened to make dropping the whole thing the sensible option.
On the Isle of Wight from dawn to dusk and beyond, the soldiers marched up and down hills and climbed in and out of boats, oblivious to the developments in London. By now it was impossible to maintain the pretence that their exertions were unconnected to forthcoming action. Cowes was inundated with important visitors and inquisitive officers who managed to wangle themselves a security pass to see what was going on. Their presence was unwelcome to Baillie-Grohman who had only three weeks to train and rehearse mostly inexperienced landing-craft crews for the most complex amphibious operation yet undertaken. He was infuriated by the arrival from COHQ of a Royal Marines officer, Robert Neville, a polo-playing friend of the chief who had apparently been despatched to prepare a confidential report on preparations. ‘It appears that you are unaware of how this officer is disliked by the navy in general for very good reasons,’ he fumed in a letter to Mountbatten.14 ‘I must ask you quite firmly to see that Col Neville is not sent down to any forces under my command in future.’
Among the observers was a senior figure taking a worm’s eye view of the preparations. Jock Hughes-Hallett’s part in the planning was over and on returning from Washington he got himself ready for a very different role. He decided that he wanted to witness the raid himself as an ordinary soldier with the Camerons of Canada. ‘This was not merely idle curiosity,’ he wrote. ‘The truth was that I had always been a little uneasy about planning hazardous operations backed by no personal experience and no sharing of the risks.’ 15 Mountbatten approved and General Roberts gave his blessing providing Hughes-Hallett joined the troops for training. It was decided he would go disguised as ‘Private Hallett’, a clerical worker from COHQ who was being sent off for infantry training. After being briefed by a security service major on how other ranks addressed NCOs and behaved in the presence of an officer, he set off in his scratchy battledress down Victoria Street to catch the train to the Isle of Wight, ‘praying inwardly that I should not come face to face with any friend or colleague’. He had never worn army hobnail boots and after only a few paces skidded on the pavement and fell heavily, to be helped to his feet by a kindly old lady.
Life in the Camerons camp near Wootton Creek was ‘rather an eye-opener’ for a man used to the cocooned existence of a naval officer. He lived in a tent with eight men from his platoon. ‘Most of the men came from the Winnipeg area and a number of them earned their living as hunters and trappers [and] were aged by their tough life,’ he remembered. ‘They were naturally very fit and displayed a complete indifference to all outward forms of discipline. The days were long and hard starting at 6 a.m. and finishing at 9 p.m. with a meal which normally consisted of one or two chickens stolen from a local farm and boiled in milk.’ After that ‘we went to bed and slept the sleep of the just’. ‘Private Hallett’ stayed with the Canadians for much of the next four weeks. The ‘outstanding impression’ they left on him was ‘a friendly acceptance of strangers like myself…coupled with a total lack of curiosity’. The ordinary soldiers and sailors surrounding him were not quite as unobservant as Hughes-Hallett imagined. When he turned up at the start of the operation someone reported him as a suspected German spy. The result, as Baillie-Grohman pointed out forcefully to Mountbatten, was ‘my security officer and his limited staff spent many wasted hours through shadowing and watching him.’16
Rutter provided an opportunity for others who were keen to get a taste of action. Lucian Truscott had arranged for American Rangers to undergo the Achnacarry course and he persuaded Mountbatten to allow fifty commando-trained men to be spread through the units. Several were assigned to the Rileys and Labatt remembered that they were ‘terrifically keen about it’.17 They came armed with the new M1 Garand semi-automatic rifle, and were ‘very excited to be the first ones to take [it] in against the Germans’. However, they would have to ditch their steel helmets as ‘in the half dark and the hurly-burly our people might have mistaken [them] for German helmets.’
The Special Operations Executive (SOE) also sought an invitation to the ‘party’. They offered the service of six men described as Sudeten Germans who could make themselves useful acting as interpreters as well as ‘shouting instructions calculated to mislead and confuse the enemy’.18 The request was approved and the six, now serving as privates Bates, Harvey, Smith, Platt, Rice and Latimer, were ordered to report to Cowes. A six-man French team from SOE were at one point also assigned to raid the Dieppe prison and rescue French Resistance members and bring them back to England.19
On 10 June the battalion commanders were called to Roberts’s headquarters and finally told what they had long suspected. ‘We were shown a model,’ remembered Bob Labatt, ‘but not told that it was Dieppe though some of us recognised the place.’20 Mann told each of them the objective they had been allotted. They were then instructed to ‘get on with training each individual part of our regiment [in] the tasks that it would have to perform without letting them know it was going to be an operation of war’. Labatt had no qualms about the plan as Mann had laid it out. For him and many others, they would come later.
Each of the units had been assigned a colour-coded beach. From east to west, the Royals were to attack Blue Beach, the narrow strand at Puys just east of Dieppe harbour. The Essex Scottish and Royal Hamilton Light Infantry would land at Red and White Beaches respectively, which lay directly in front of the town, at the same time as the Calgary Tanks. The South Sasketchewans would go ashore at Green Beach (Pourville). The Camerons would join them once the objective was secured while the Fusiliers Mont-Royal were to float offshore, landing on the main beaches to secure the town for the withdrawal.
Putting each force ashore at the precise times and places laid out in the plan was crucial to its success. After nearly a month on the island, the navy’s ability to do so was tested in a large-scale exercise called ‘Yukon’, a simulated landing at West Bay just south of the Dorset town of Bridport which had similarities with the Dieppe coast. It was also the same sea distance as the passage across the Channel, though the tidal conditions were trickier than would be faced at Dieppe.
On the morning of Thursday 11 June the docksides at Cowes were crowded with Canadians boarding their landing ships. The Rileys were onboard the Glengyle. An hour before dawn on the 12th, ‘boat stations’ were called and the troops climbed into the flat-bottomed LCAs to be winched onto the water six miles from the shore. The sea ‘was quite rough and many were seasick’, the war diary recorded. ‘Several times searchlights found us but no ill effects resulted.’ From then on all went well. The boats touched down at exactly the right place at exactly the right time. They were ‘held up momentarily by heavy wire entanglements which had to be cut’. However ‘all Coys [Companies] got through…and were on their way to objectives with exception of A Coy.’ In the next hours ‘many prisoners [were] taken and numerous vehicles’ which were ‘used to good advantage evacuating casualties’. By 15.00 they were all back on Glengyle. For them and the Essex Scottish on neighbouring Red Beach, the exercise had gone rather well. There was one ominous note, however. The diary reported: ‘We saw no LCTs arrive on the beaches.’
The LCT carrying the Calgary Regiment Churchills appeared only an hour and a half later having got lost in the dark. The Rileys and Essex Scottish were the exceptions. Thanks to the difficult tide conditions and the crews’ inexperience, almost every other unit arrived late or in the wrong place and the plan’s minute-by-minute timetable lay in ruins. The South Saskatchewans were put ashore a mile from Green Beach and the Royals two miles from Blue Beach. To landlubber eyes, nautical twilight was not much better than total darkness. Major Walter Skrine of the COHQ staff took part in the exercise and went ashore with the South Saskatchewans at what was designated ‘Pourville’. He remembered embarking the landing ship Princess Beatrix and boarding the landing craft ‘in the dark. We were almost onto the beach before we could pick up the coastline and I found to my horror that there were some houses just inshore [where] there should have been cliffs! We could do nothing about it…I remember stopping the men from going into a minefield which had not been cleared…the point is that you couldn’t see more than a hundred yards.’21
Goronwy Rees also witnessed the shambles. ‘The division on landing fell into an indescribable confusion, which was in itself sufficient to throw doubt on the feasibility of the operation,’ he recalled, ‘even though there was no enemy present to turn confusion into bloodshed and slaughter.’22
Given the navy’s performance Rutter could not possibly go ahead as planned. The question was whether to postpone it until competence improved or cancel it all together. General Paget’s limited patience was spent and he was all for folding. The Canadians, from McNaughton downwards, were as eager as ever to proceed. Roberts believed, with reason, that the Canadians had performed well enough in Yukon. It was the navy who were the problem.
Mountbatten arrived back from Washington too late to witness the exercise but he also refused to be daunted. Too much time and too many resources had been invested in Rutter and the imperatives for action had not changed. Baillie-Grohman’s reputation stood to suffer if Rutter was cancelled and he moved to salvage the operation proposing a fourteen-day postponement ‘in order to improve the very inadequate training of the whole force’.23
At a meeting at Richmond Terrace on 15 June of Mountbatten, Montgomery and the force commanders it was decided to postpone the raid until a date between 4 and 9 July inclusive, when the tides and moon phase would again be favourable. In the meantime there would be another rehearsal, Yukon II, scheduled for 22/23 June. Paget did not object and Rutter staggered on.
Yukon II turned out better than its predecessor, but not by much. Once again the troops landed at dawn on the same stretch of coast and once again there were delays and diversions. This time the Rileys and Essex Scottish were the victims. ‘Royal Navy took us six miles or more WEST of our beach,’ the war diary recorded. They finally landed forty-five minutes late. However once ashore A Company ‘did a particularly good piece of work in capturing a Divisional] HQ and returning with prisoners and important papers’.
Despite these setbacks, at a meeting with his staff at his Royal Yacht Squadron HQ in Cowes the morning after, Baillie-Grohman announced that ‘on the whole everything was satisfactory’. Roberts was not so sure. He would continue to fret about the navy’s navigational abilities and the amount of smoke available to cover the landing, a factor which had taken on great significance in the absence of any serious bombardment. Paget and McNaughton shared his concern and Montgomery and COHQ were ordered to put things right. With that, the Rutter juggernaut jolted forward again.
The meteorological reports forecast fair weather on 4 and 5 July. A week before, all Canadian officers were finally let in on the secret and about 300 of them gathered at HQ. Below the dais stood an irregularly shaped object, about ten feet long and six feet wide, covered by a cloth. The expectant hubbub subsided as a phalanx of staff officers strode in with ‘Ham’ Roberts at the head. As he mounted the stage, the cover was removed, revealing a relief model of an unidentified port town and the neighbouring coastline. Roberts was not much of an orator but he tried to rise to the occasion, declaring: ‘Gentlemen, we have waited over two years to go into battle against the Germans. The time has now come for a party.’24 He then delivered the outline of what the ‘party’ entailed.
Without revealing the name of the objective he rapped out the essentials that must govern the action and the most crucial were speed and momentum. ‘You must get in and secure the beaches fast,’ he told them. ‘Any hesitation will only result in senseless casualties. When you are over the beaches, run over the Boche defences just as fast as you can. You may see men fall. But if you stop once it will be much worse.’ The raid was not just a chance to get into action. Roberts made it clear that success could make a real contribution to final victory. This was not, though, in the form of a ‘dress rehearsal’ that would iron out problems before the real invasion. ‘Important things are at stake,’ he declared. ‘Certain pieces of equipment are needed for examination by our boys.’ They included ‘a new four-barrelled flak gun’. But beyond that, ‘overall, the information we get back may have an important bearing on the outcome of the war.’25
The sense of drama was reinforced by strict warnings to maintain secrecy. There must be no hint to the men that they were going to Dieppe and they would not be told the truth until they were sealed on the landing ships.
Roberts urged them to study the model and the maps and photographs in the detailed ‘confidential book’ prepared by the COHQ Intelligence Department. Roberts knew the necessity of displaying confidence and boosting the illusion that mortal combat was an experience to be looked forward to and enjoyed. The term ‘party’ said it all. It wasn’t Roberts’s invention. It was a commonplace of the vocabulary of the war, heard on the lips of fighter pilots and commandos. Later some at the briefing claimed that he had told them that the operation would be ‘a piece of cake’. It was not the sort of thing that Ham Roberts would say and he always denied saying it. The story though reflected the bitterness subsequently felt at the gap between what the Canadians were asked to do, and their chances of actually achieving it.
As they crowded round the model, some felt a chill of apprehension. The Canadians had spent the last two years training to repel an enemy invasion. If the Germans had attacked a similar British Channel port the Canadians would have been utterly confident in smashing them back into the sea.
‘We doubted the words of wisdom that were being fed to us,’ remembered Lieutenant John Edmondson, who commanded D Company of the South Saskatchewan Regiment.26 On garrison defence duty, ‘when the tide was right and the moon was right we doubled everything. The Germans couldn’t possibly gain surprise. So we said, the Germans are just as smart as we are. How do you think we can gain surprise?’ To this vital question ‘there was no answer’. When Lieutenant Art Hueston of the Essex Scottish saw the model he was reminded of one of the first tactical lessons he had been given, which was ‘you never go into a defile, which is a valley. So the first thing we are doing is we are going into a defile if I ever saw one and I thought this is crazy.’27 Denis Whitaker wondered at the long list of tasks assigned to each regiment. ‘They had company objectives that you wouldn’t give to a battalion,’ he remembered.28 These feats were expected to be completed in times that would have been difficult to achieve on an exercise, let alone in battle. Mann’s orders read like a military symphony in which everyone had to come in exactly on time and play their part perfectly.
As the operational window approached, Paget asked Montgomery to make one last review of the preparations. On 30 June he visited Cowes to talk to Mountbatten and the force commanders. Roberts was still concerned about the navy’s navigational abilities and worried about the enemy gun emplacements on the east and west headlands. In the plan they were to be engaged from the rear by the parachute troops then overrun by the Royals and South Saskatchewan advancing from east and west respectively. That would take time. He asked if destroyers could be tasked with bombarding the headlands until the beaches were secure. Baillie-Grohman was discouraging. The destroyers’ four-inch guns were incapable of knocking out reinforced gun positions. They would be much better used in supporting the frontal assault by concentrating on the machine-gun posts fronting the beach where they could make a difference.
Roberts was unconvinced but did not press the point. More reassuring was the news that navigation risks would be reduced by the presence of a ‘mark’ ship stationed in the Channel to direct the fleet on a straight course for Dieppe.
Montgomery left believing all outstanding difficulties had been cleared, and on 1 July he assured Paget that in his opinion everything was now ready to go ahead.
‘I went over to the Isle of Wight yesterday and spent the whole day there, checking over the whole operation with Roberts, and with the naval and RAF force commanders,’ he wrote.
I am satisfied that the operation as planned is a possible one and has good prospects of success, given: –
(a) Favourable weather.
(b) Average luck.
(c) That the navy put us ashore roughly in the right places and at the right times.
In a jaunty PS he added: ‘The Canadians are 1st Class chaps; if anyone can pull it off, they will.’29
The hammer was now cocked on the Dieppe operation. The prime minister regarded it with mixed feelings. It was an uneasy time for Churchill. The trip to America had gone well. As always he had been sparing with the truth of Britain’s real intentions. He continued to make encouraging noises about an early initiative on the continent, but was silent about the de facto decision taken by himself and the chiefs on 1 June that Sledgehammer would never happen. When he left for home on the 25th there were signs that the president was leaning towards Churchill’s cherished proposal for an Anglo-American invasion of North Africa later that year, though the American generals were still far from convinced. The visit was marred by another shocking blow to British pride and morale.
On 21 June, during a meeting with Roosevelt, a messenger arrived with an urgent telegram for the president. Without a word Roosevelt handed it to Churchill. The news was so bad that at first he did not believe it. Tobruk had surrendered to Rommel’s forces and 33,000 men had been taken prisoner. ‘This was one of the heaviest blows I can recall during the war,’ he wrote.30 ‘Not only were its military effects grievous, but it had affected the reputation of the British armies.’ It was a national and personal humiliation. ‘Defeat is one thing,’ he reflected; ‘disgrace is another.’
Churchill felt vulnerable. He was ‘politically at my weakest and without a gleam of military success’. The Germans were once again pressing forward on the Eastern Front, Rommel seemed poised to enter Egypt, the Japanese threatened India, and in the Atlantic U-boats were sending hundreds of thousands of tons of ships to the bottom every month. At home his prestige was faltering and he was bracing for a no-confidence vote in the Commons on the issue of the government’s handling of the war. The last thing he needed was another catastrophe.
On the eve of the parliamentary debate, 30 June, Churchill summoned Mountbatten, Brooke and two of his senior military advisers to an informal conference at Downing Street. According to Hughes-Hallett who was also present, the prime minister wanted ‘one final review of the outlook for the Dieppe raid [to] decide whether in the prevailing circumstances it was prudent to go on with it’.31
They met at 15.00 in the Cabinet Room and while they talked, Clementine Churchill arranged flowers in the background. The prime minister wanted reassurance. He asked whether Mountbatten could guarantee that the raid would be a success. It was an absurd question and the fact that Churchill asked it was a measure of how low his spirits had sunk. In Hughes-Hallett’s account Churchill was answered by Brooke who told him that if success could be guaranteed ‘there would indeed be no object in doing the operation’. It was ‘just because no one had the slightest idea what the outcome would be that the operation is necessary’.32
Churchill replied tartly that ‘this was not a moment at which he wanted to be taught by adversity. “In that case,” said Alanbrooke [as Brooke later became when raised to the peerage], “you must abandon the idea of invading France because no responsible general will be associated with any planning for invasion until we have an operation at least of the size of the Dieppe raid behind us to study and base our plans upon.” ’ This argument carried the day and ‘Mr Churchill at once agreed that if that were Alanbrooke’s considered view, we must go forward. He would ask Mr Attlee to inform the War Office and he would inform the king.’
This encounter became a keystone in the narrative constructed by Mountbatten and his team later. It was a very useful story. It transformed Dieppe from a raid that went horribly wrong to a calculated gamble, which if it came off would pay huge war-winning dividends. It also spread the responsibility wider to include Churchill and Brooke. However with no other record of the meeting we have only Hughes-Hallett’s account, written long afterwards, to go on. Brooke barely mentions it in his diary (‘meeting with PM and Mountbatten to discuss the large raid which is to be carried out next Saturday…’). He felt no need to expand on this when in the years 1951–6 he went through his journals adding copious notes and comments. If Brooke’s intervention had been as significant as Hughes-Hallett suggests, it would surely have merited more than a few words. His unsupported account is so favourable to the COHQ version of events that it must be treated with caution. It also raises questions. Having persuaded the prime minister and the CIGS of the necessity for the raid, why did Mountbatten not press his advantage and demand the heavy ship support that he knew was so important to its success?
The last barriers were falling. Protocol required the Canadian high command to give their formal approval. McNaughton and Crerar had played only a tangential part in the project and Montgomery seemed determined to keep it that way. His letter approving the operation was directed to Paget, and the Canadians were merely copied in. McNaughton felt compelled to insist that Crerar deliver an opinion on the troops’ preparedness. He arrived on the Isle of Wight on 2 July to meet Roberts, Mann and the brigade commanders Southam and Lett. Roberts took the opportunity to press once again for a naval bombardment of the headlands but the visit was a formality. Despite their prickliness on matters of protocol he and McNaughton were determined not to miss this chance. The following day Crerar reported to his chief that Roberts ‘and his brigadiers expressed full confidence in being able to carry out their tasks – given a break in luck’. In his view ‘the plan is sound, and most carefully worked out.’ Indeed, he would ‘have no hesitation in tackling it, if in Roberts’ place’.33
On 1 July in the ports of the Isle of Wight, Canadian soldiers marched up the gangplanks of their infantry landing ships in the belief that they were sailing off on yet another exercise, this one called ‘Klondike I’. Cowes Roads, Yarmouth Roads and Southampton Water and the small Sussex port of Newhaven were now crowded with nearly 200 vessels of all shapes and sizes: destroyers, gunboats, motor torpedo boats and radar ships. By breakfast time on 3 July, everyone was aboard and the ships were sealed. The Rileys were aboard several vessels and Bob Labatt had to visit them by launch to tell them they were embarking on the real thing. All ranks were told they were off on ‘a large-scale raid on the German-occupied coast…one of the largest yet attempted’ and that preparations have been so well considered that ‘success is assured’. The diary recorded that ‘great enthusiasm was shown by the troops’, and as the commanders spread the word to other battalions, the sound of cheering swelled over the anchorages.
That afternoon Roberts toured the landing ships to give a final pep talk, telling them: ‘At last you are going to meet the enemy. Shortly after midnight you sail for France. The target is the port of Dieppe. This is the operation you have been trained for, so at dawn tomorrow come off those boats running and don’t stop until you have reached your objectives.’34
Mountbatten planned to watch the operation from Fighter Command’s 11 Group Headquarters at Uxbridge, alongside Leigh-Mallory, Montgomery and Crerar who, after being initially told he could not be present as there was no room, had finally been allowed to attend. That afternoon he arrived on the Isle of Wight to wish the troops Godspeed, together with General Eisenhower who was there to do the same for the US Rangers. Rousing speeches that mixed chumminess and noble sentiment were a speciality, and as dusk fell the force had been tuned to a fine pitch of emotional readiness for what lay ahead.
Midnight passed. The Canadians listened in vain for the rattle of anchor chains to announce the adventure had begun. As the ships came to life on the morning of the 4th the news spread through the cramped decks that the operation was off for at least twenty-four hours. The delay was caused by the unseen element in the attacking force – the paratroops. The previous evening General Browning who commanded the 1st Airborne Division had received a met report forecasting strengthening south-westerly winds during the night. Glider operations were cancelled and by morning an accurate parachute drop was deemed impossible. He recommended postponement. Mountbatten pressed Paget to urge a special effort from the Airborne but was overruled. The following day the forecast was still negative and the launch was put back again. The outlook was more promising for the 8th – the last day that tides and moon were favourable.
Then came news that darkened the picture. Intelligence reports, accurate as it turned out, stated that the 10th German Panzer Division, a unit which the British had learned to fear during the Battle of France, had moved to Amiens. That put them within eight hours of Dieppe. On the current two-tide timetable which allowed fifteen hours ashore, the tanks could arrive well before disembarkation. Given the other factors, this might have seemed enough to deliver the coup de grâce to Rutter. Instead the staffs of the army and navy force commanders worked frantically to redraft the orders and strike out some of the demolition tasks. The operation was now compressed into the span of a single tide, so that all troops would be re-embarked by 11.00.
The new plan was agreed by Mountbatten and Montgomery and zero hour set for dawn on the 8th. A very noticeable flotilla had been sitting in the anchorages of the Isle of Wight since the beginning of the month. It was inconceivable that the daily Luftwaffe reconnaissance flight had not spotted them. At 06.15 on 7 July four Focke-Wulf 190 fighters each carrying a 500 lb bomb appeared over the Yarmouth Roads to the west of the island and attacked the landing ships Princess Astrid and Princess Josephine Charlotte, loaded with men of the Royals. The bombs smashed through the decks without exploding and only four men were injured. One of the ships was at risk of sinking and the troops were put ashore. The setback was surmountable. The weather was not. The naval experts were now saying that the outlook for the 8th was bad. By mid-morning there had been a unanimous decision to cancel and the troops returned to dry land. That afternoon, sitting again in the billets they had left six weeks before, the men of 2nd Division heard a message from their commander: ‘It is with the deepest regret that I have to announce that our party is off…the Gods were against us and the weather conditions and tide have defeated our attempt.’ He appealed to them ‘to say nothing about this operation…because if you do not there is always the possibility that we may be able to do it at a later date’.35 That Dieppe could remain a secret or that it should ever be a target again seemed highly improbable. Montgomery’s immediate recommendation to Paget that ‘the operation be off for all time’ seemed no more than common sense.