The Isle of Wight emptied and the Canadians returned to their camps in Sussex to unwind and take off on overdue leave. In canteens and pubs, dance halls and cinema queues, the story of the raid that never was rippled across south-east England like wind through a field of barley. The army censors struggled to prevent its spreading further. Combing through the letters home they noted ‘a continuity of censorable matter’, which they put down to ‘the mistaken idea that it would be permissible to write once the expected operation did not take place…’1
The outline plan had allowed the possibility of the raid being remounted if weather conditions forced cancellation. With security in tatters, that option had surely vanished. Rutter was yet another might-have-been and Montgomery, for one, was ‘delighted’ to see the back of it.2
For COHQ the death of Rutter was a calamity. The evening after the cancellation, Mountbatten met the staff for what Hughes-Hallett called ‘a long inquest on the Dieppe operation’.3 In fact it was the start of an effort to bring the corpse back to life. Roberts and Leigh-Mallory were also present, but not Baillie-Grohman. His services had been requested by Admiral Bertram Ramsay, commander-in-chief designate of Churchill’s cherished North African landing. The vacancy as naval force commander was now filled by Hughes-Hallett. A sceptic had been replaced by an enthusiast, and whereas Baillie-Grohman could always be expected to highlight an obstacle on the path ahead, Hughes-Hallett’s impulse was to steer round it.
The organisation’s pride was dented. As Hughes-Hallett wrote later, the cancellation was ‘rightly felt to be tantamount to defeat. That is why so much importance was attached to remounting and carrying out the Dieppe raid after all.’4 Combined Ops had enjoyed no major success since Saint-Nazaire in March and was already feeling under pressure to perform when Rutter was conceived. Pride, ambition and a genuine desire to get to grips with the enemy compelled them to do something with all the training, planning, organisation and emotional energy that Rutter had generated. There was nothing in the pipeline that could serve as a substitute. A huge amount of effort stood to be wasted. Six thousand men were honed for action and a painful process of trial and error had at last produced workable arrangements for getting them across the Channel. Was all this to be thrown away? Someone at the meeting – the record does not say who – reached for the simplest but boldest solution. Before they left that night, all had resolved that one way or another, the Dieppe raid should be resurrected.
For Leigh-Mallory the revival presented no particular problems. Trying to get the Luftwaffe to come up and fight was what his squadrons did every day. For Roberts the question was more difficult. He was well aware of the plan’s flaws but if Dieppe was to be resuscitated it would have to be more or less in its original form. Abandoning the frontal assault and returning to the initial idea of flank attacks would mean a complete rethink and much extra training. With the summer half over there was no time to remount a substantially revised operation before autumn made it unfeasible.
The decision was not his to make. Crerar had made clear to Roberts that his views were irrelevant. Both he and McNaughton were still anxious to get the Canadians into action. They decided that, despite the risks, the 2nd Division would again be available. On 11 July Roberts phoned Hughes-Hallett at COHQ to pass on the news that the Canadians were in. That evening he met Mountbatten and Leigh-Mallory, and according to Hughes-Hallett it was ‘virtually decided to remount the Dieppe raid with only slight modifications…and carry it out on or about August 18’.
The push was all coming from Mountbatten and his team and he never subsequently tried to play down his central role in the rush to remount. Long afterwards he described how he ‘talked the situation over with the chiefs of staff and the prime minister. All were agreed that unless we could carry out an actual raid before the end of the “raiding season” our return to the continent would be delayed, while awaiting the necessary operational experience in 1943.’ However there was one huge concern that had to be addressed. ‘Mr Churchill and the chiefs of staff remained understandably worried about security.’5 Here, what Mountbatten called a ‘brainwave, so unusual and so daring that I decided that nothing should be put on paper’, came to the rescue. When he put the idea to the chiefs of staff, ‘for the first time, nothing whatever was recorded in writing’.6 So once again there is no documentation to illuminate a contentious turn in the story.
According to Mountbatten’s version, he seized on a reverse-logic argument to allay the fears at the top. It was of course sensible to assume that the Germans knew about the raid or would soon. Air reconnaissance alone would tell them something big had been planned. But could that not be used to the raiders’ advantage? When the German air force attacked the invasion fleet on 7 July ‘there was no suggestion that they knew what the actual mission of the force was’. If ‘by some unexpected chance they had stumbled on Dieppe as our target, they would never for a moment think that we should be so idiotic as to remount the operation on the same target’.
This was classic Combined Ops thinking. Mountbatten and his men were risk-takers and needed to be if they were to do their job. Even so, some of his own staff were startled by this argument. Walter Skrine, who had helped plan the original raid, was ‘horrified to hear that the thing was on’ again.7 As Baillie-Grohman later pointed out, ‘any commander, German or British, who once got the news that there had been a plan to raid his port, whether it had been cancelled or not, would most certainly look again, not once but twice or thrice, at his defences, and they would be strengthened.’8
That was true even if the precise objective of the operation was not known. In order to justify their initiative, Mountbatten and Hughes-Hallett would later cite German documents discovered after the war to support the claim that the enemy had no special knowledge about Rutter. There was no way of knowing that at the time. Their decision to press for a revival was based on a hunch and amounted to a gamble. Their willingness to take it could be explained by an anxiety, bordering on desperation, to pull off another coup and restore the fortunes of COHQ. The official historian of British intelligence in the war, Sir Harry Hinsley, believed that the suggestion that ‘pressure for the revival came from COHQ whose amour propre had suffered from the cancellation’ was ‘consistent’ with Mountbatten’s previous behaviour in the story.9
The secrecy imposed on the proposal means there is no record of what objections, if any, were raised by the Churchill or the chiefs when Mountbatten made his case. If resistance was offered, it was overcome, for on 14 July Mountbatten issued a directive to the force commanders and his senior COHQ staff informing them that ‘the chiefs of staff have directed that if possible an emergency operation is to be carried out during August to fill the gap caused by the cancellation of Rutter’. The resurrected plan was code-named ‘Jubilee’. Like its predecessor the code name was chosen from a pre-written list. It had several meanings, from the contemporary one of a celebration to the biblical one of a time of remission and liberation. They all carried a festive ring that would later seem to echo the hubris in which the whole enterprise had been conceived.
The cancellation came at a time when the utility of raids was coming under attack from a distinguished quarter. Admiral Bertram Ramsay was greatly respected for his handling of the Dunkirk evacuation. He had been closely engaged in Roundup and was now involved in naval preparations for the proposed invasion of North Africa. In late July he delivered a crystalline memo to the chiefs which seemed to demolish the case for any further cross-Channel operations. They might provide training for the troops involved but they were also ‘training the enemy’. Indeed it seemed likely that ‘the Germans welcome these raids for nothing shows up weakness in the defence more than an attack with a very limited objective. Every time we find a weak spot on the enemy’s coast we point out his weakness, and there is ample evidence that he has taken and is taking full advantage of this information to increase the strength of his defences both at sea and on land.’ He concluded: ‘As it is our present intention at some future date to make an attack in force upon the enemy’s coast, we are now doing our best to make that attack less likely to achieve success.’10
Ramsay’s implied indictment of Jubilee had no effect on Churchill and the chiefs. Once again there were bigger considerations in play than the simple military value of the operation. When Mountbatten presented the ‘brainwave’, another round in the delicate dialogue to settle Allied strategy was approaching. On 8 July Churchill had broken the news to Roosevelt that despite the belligerent noises made during the recent trip to Washington the Cabinet had now decided to drop Sledgehammer in its current form. If Anglo-American troops were to go into action in 1942, North Africa was the only feasible option. He flatteringly presented the scheme as at least partly inspired by the president. ‘This has all along been in harmony with your ideas,’ he wrote. ‘In fact it is your commanding idea. Here is the true second front of 1942…Here is the safest and most fruitful stroke that can be delivered this autumn.’11
Roosevelt and his éminence grise Harry Hopkins were anyway coming round to the British position and the idea of ‘Torch’, as the operation would be known. General Marshall was still unconvinced and his scepticism was shared by the Secretary of War Henry Stimson and the chief of the Army Air Forces, General Henry Arnold. Together they composed a robust memo to the president demanding the British be given an ultimatum. Either they commit themselves unambiguously to a ‘concentrated effort against Germany’ or America would reverse the fundamental strategic decision taken at the start of the Anglo-American alliance and turn its main effort to the destruction of the Japanese in the Pacific.12
Marshall and his supporters were on shaky ground. The US Navy’s great victory at Midway on 4–7 June had turned the tide in the Pacific. The Japanese advance westwards had been stopped and there was now no possibility of the Axis powers joining up in the Middle East. As Roosevelt explained to Marshall, turning to the Pacific left the Germans with a free hand against the Russians, greatly increasing the risk of a Soviet collapse. Nonetheless the havering had to stop. He was therefore sending Marshall, the Chief of Naval Operations Admiral King and Harry Hopkins to London to urge the British ‘with the utmost vigor’ for a cross-Channel invasion, but if they could not be persuaded then they must ‘determine upon another place for US troops to fight in 1942’.13 That, as everyone now knew, could only mean North Africa.
The American team arrived at Prestwick, near Glasgow, on 18 July, with a presidential instruction to reach agreement within a week. Marshall was not prepared to abandon Sledgehammer without a fight. Together with Eisenhower, who had moved to London at the end of June to take command of European Theater operations, he expanded the original plan to a wholesale and permanent occupation of the Cherbourg Peninsula.
A slogging match with Brooke ensued that lasted two days. Nothing Marshall said, observed Hopkins, ‘appeared to make the slightest impression on General Brooke’s settled convictions…He kept looking into the distance.’ The view of the CIGS was unrelievedly pessimistic. The RAF did not have the range to cover the invasion force. The six divisions the British could muster would be outnumbered, soon besieged and almost certainly lost to the war for ever. When Roosevelt cabled the US team saying that if the British would not agree to Sledgehammer then his choice for a 1942 battleground was for North Africa, Marshall was forced to give ground. He and his staff devised a new formula which accepted Torch but attempted to lock the British into committing to a cross-Channel invasion the following year. On 24 July Churchill and the War Cabinet happily agreed to it. ‘We have just got what we wanted out of the US chiefs,’ Brooke wrote in his diary that night. There would be no more talk of Sledgehammer and the Cherbourg Peninsula. Their eyes were now jointly fixed on Torch. An exhausting tussle that had tested the alliance was over. ‘I cannot help feeling that the past week represented a turning point of the whole war and that we are now on our way shoulder to shoulder,’ Roosevelt wrote to Churchill after his team had returned.
The fearful prospect of a premature invasion had vanished and Churchill had got his way. This did nothing to relieve the pressure for action. Public clamour for a second front was now deafening, led by the Canadian press baron Max Aitken. His elevation to the British peerage as Lord Beaverbrook and his close friendship with Churchill did nothing to curb his troublemaking instincts. Before the war Beaverbrook had been an appeaser, a supporter of Munich and an enemy of Bolshevism. By 1942 he was an ardent militarist and an admirer of the Soviet Union, at least for the time being. On 26 June tens of thousands of men and women, many of them in uniform, gathered outside Birmingham Town Hall before a stage decked with the hammer and sickle and Union Jack to hear the short, bald multimillionaire proclaim to thunderous applause: ‘We believe in Stalin’s leadership! Yes! In Stalin’s leadership! We believe in Stalin’s leadership and this is the day to proclaim our faith! We must carry the battle on, the Battle of the Second Front!’ A few days earlier the ideological opposite of ‘the Beaver’, Stafford Cripps, delivered an identical message to another large crowd at the Empress Hall in London.
The US too seemed to have fallen in love with Russia. Before the war, apart from the leftward fringe of the trade union movement, the Soviets were regarded with fear, suspicion and hostility. Within days of Pearl Harbor, Russia was America’s best friend. American correspondents in Moscow felt the same awe at the determination and willingness to self-sacrifice of ordinary people that Cripps had publicised on his return to Britain. ‘Heroic’ was a communist word. The capitalist press now lavished it on their allies with the profligacy of a Pravda hack.
Ralph Parker of The New York Times extolled the proletariat’s achievements and believed it ‘would need a Tolstoy to describe the heroic endurance of the men and women who have made these things possible’.14 General Douglas MacArthur, the essence of American martial manhood, praised the Russian fightback on the Eastern Front as ‘one of the greatest military feats in history’. Hollywood, which had never made a film about the Soviet Union before the war, had at least nine under consideration by July 1942 of which five got made: Mission to Moscow, Song of Russia, North Star, Days of Glory and Three Russian Girls. Pro-Russian rallies attracted the same big crowds as those in Britain. During Churchill’s June visit to Washington Harry Hopkins had addressed a large Russian War Relief rally at Madison Square Garden in New York, bringing the audience to its feet with a somewhat disingenuous promise of ‘a Second Front…Yes, and if necessary a Third and Fourth Front!’
The decision to go ahead with Torch might go some way to satisfying the perceived desire among the British and American publics for action. But Roosevelt and Churchill understood it would do nothing to relieve the Red Army, who whatever MacArthur said were in a perilous situation on the Eastern Front. Stalin would not be fooled. In his eyes the move was further evidence that his democratic allies were content for the time being to leave the communists and the fascists to exhaust themselves in a death grapple costing millions of lives before they committed their armies to the opening of a front in Western Europe. In a few weeks’ time Churchill would have to face the man directly. In August he was due to visit Moscow for the first time and was braced for a rough reception.
The Dieppe operation was already regarded by the government as a valuable asset in its diplomatic dealings with the Russians. On the eve of Rutter, Mountbatten passed on to senior officers a request from the Ministry of Information who were ‘anxious to promote good relations between Great Britain and Russia’.15 It requested that ‘messages be sent from force commanders on their return…to their opposite numbers on whichever part of the Russian front is then prominent in the news’ which would produce ‘beneficial results in the cause of Anglo-Soviet good relations’. In the circumstances anything that demonstrated Britain’s positive intentions was welcome. Jubilee nevertheless fell far short of what Stalin was demanding.
Mountbatten and the force commanders and their teams now had five weeks before the new launch date. The preparations were haunted by the need for absolute secrecy. Hughes-Hallett came up with a way of disguising the naval preliminaries. Even if the Germans remained ignorant of the original plan, reconnaissance flights were bound to spot any concentrations of shipping and transport or large-scale practice drills conducted in home waters that would tell them something new was afoot. Preparations, he decided, had to be kept to a minimum. Fortunately most of the assault flotilla vessels were still in the area. So too were the troops. Units could go straight to the embarkation phase without the need for further training. Roberts agreed. The troops were as ready as they would ever be. All that was needed was to issue last-minute orders to get them back into the starting blocks with no movements of ships and craft needed until dusk on the evening before the landings.
Following the approval of Churchill and the chiefs, the force commanders got together to re-examine the plan. Though there was no time to alter the basic concept, one major change could be made without fuss. This time the 1st Airborne Division would not be involved. There had been some resentment of their insistence on perfect conditions of wind, moon and cloud before committing to action. The longer nights of late summer would create more problems as the paras would have to land in darkness. A much better option was to use commandos who could arrive by boat like everyone else. They could take care of the big batteries at Berneval and Varengeville and one area of uncertainty was diminished. The commanders also confirmed that Jubilee would be a one-tide operation. The reported presence of the 10th Panzer Division at Amiens which had forced the truncation of Rutter dictated that.
Jubilee would go forward under a revised command structure. The new plan gave McNaughton and Crerar the chance to press Mountbatten and Paget for a change in the arrangements. During Rutter they had been consigned to the sidelines with Montgomery the ‘responsible military authority’. McNaughton now moved to assert Canadian control demanding a chain of command that bypassed Montgomery and descended from Paget to McNaughton to Crerar to Roberts. Crerar thus had military responsibility for Jubilee. Monty raised no objection. He had never been fully engaged in the Dieppe project which, according to his biographer, had been ‘a peripheral if not actually distracting operation’, and by his unequivocal recommendation that it be cancelled for all time he willingly disqualified himself from further involvement.16 He would anyway in a few weeks be off the scene, on his way to his appointment with destiny in the desert. Canadian hands were henceforth firmly on the military planning, led by Mann, recently promoted to brigadier.
Everyone now shaping Jubilee had a heavy personal investment in its success and were keen to press the pace. Qualms were to some extent allayed by thoughts of the kudos that would accrue to all concerned if it came off. This would likely be the biggest operation launched from Britain before the actual invasion and it had widened into a multinational event with participants from every corner of the empire as well as the US. Several countries that had felt the stamp of the Nazi jackboot would be represented including Free French commandos, Belgian and Czech pilots and the Polish navy, whose ship Slazak, formerly the Hunt-class destroyer Bedale, was part of the naval force.
But the risk of serious reputational damage for all directing the enterprise was also high. Jubilee would provide a demonstration of the British military’s capabilities at a delicate stage of the war, and their competence to bring off a complex and tightly coordinated land, sea and air operation. Everyone would be watching; the German enemy of course but also the American and Russian allies, as well as the world at large.
There was one concern about the plan that would not go away. At a meeting of the commanders on 16 July Roberts again raised the question of a preliminary heavy bombing raid. Leigh-Mallory had to tell him that nothing had changed. Accurate bombing of the houses on the seafront where German strongpoints had been identified ‘could not possibly be guaranteed’. Any raid would have to go in at the last possible moment, just before the troops hit the beaches. This was doubly dangerous, both for the bomber crews who would be operating at the break of dawn, and for the Canadians who had as much to fear at that point from friendly bombs as they did from the Germans.
The decision to dispense with a raid was confirmed and the units storming the Dieppe beach would have to rely on the success of the flank attacks and the destroyers’ four-inch guns to suppress enemy fire at the crucial hour. Ham Roberts accepted the decision stoically. If the raids had to take place in darkness, he explained later, then ‘inaccuracy rather than accuracy was guaranteed’. The enemy would be alerted and the streets of Dieppe choked with impassable rubble. The matter was not settled there. Roberts’s disquiet over the inadequate air and sea support persisted. Just two days before the raid he raised the question for the last time at a meeting with Mountbatten and the other force commanders at the Tangmere aerodrome on the south coast, only to receive the same answer.
Bomber Command would be helping the operation in another important way, however. In the time between the raid being stood down and remounted, the Germans had relaid a minefield in mid-Channel, right across the line of passage that the Jubilee armada would have to take.
Sweeping a wide corridor and laying marker buoys would be a long job, requiring minesweepers to operate in daylight. Hughes-Hallett reckoned two narrow flotillas of sweepers could clear two passages each a quarter of a mile wide, under the cover of darkness. The nine assault ships carrying the bulk of the troops and the eight destroyers would follow immediately behind.
Hughes-Hallett had recommended that if any one of the landing ships was sunk on passage, then the whole operation should be called off. Once in the minefield there was ‘no margin of time, or indeed of sea room’, Hughes-Hallett wrote. ‘The guiding ship of each group of assault ships must, therefore, hit off the north-westerly end of the narrow swept channels with dead accuracy, and the question was how?’17 Since March, Bomber Command had been using a radar navigation device called ‘Gee’ to guide them to their targets. The results had transformed their target-finding capability. COHQ pressed the Admiralty to secure some sets for fitting to key vessels in the armada which would receive signals from the Gee shore stations to keep the fleet on track.
All this was done ‘with astonishing speed’ and by the end of July the hardware was ready. For it to work, however, the navy needed the active cooperation of Bomber Command. The system used two chains of transmitters, only one of which was switched on at a time, depending on whether that night’s bombing raid was directed at targets in central or eastern Germany or in the Rhineland and France. Clearly the southern chain would have to be working on the night of the raid. There was only one person who could make sure that it was. Leigh-Mallory advised Hughes-Hallett that there was nothing for it but to approach Arthur Harris directly. This was not an encounter to look forward to but Hughes-Hallett caught him on a good day. ‘The air chief marshal proved more than friendly and helpful,’ he remembered. The sets were trialled at sea on several nights in early August and ‘the results gave us every confidence in the new navigational aid’.
By 11 August the force commanders had agreed all the details of the plan and Crerar wrote to McNaughton with his assessment. For security reasons he spoke of the raid as a practice rather than the real thing. He was ‘satisfied that the revisions made in respect to the previous exercise plans add rather than detract to the soundness of the plan as a whole’. Given ‘an even break in luck and good navigation, the demonstration should prove successful’.18 Three days later, after going over the whole plan again with Crerar and Roberts, McNaughton exercised the authority he had demanded from the British and pressed the Canadian seal of approval to Operation Jubilee.
For such a short operation, Jubilee involved an enormous amount of activity over a wide spread of locations. There were to be five attacks launched on a front of roughly thirteen miles stretching from Berneval in the east to Quiberville in the west. Four were aimed at the inner and outer flanks of Dieppe. The landing craft for these attacks would hit the beaches at 04.50 British Summer Time (GMT plus 1). This was ‘nautical twilight’ when, at sea, the first faint glow of dawn smudged the horizon. To the German sentries posted on the clifftops it would still feel like night, with the moon in its first quarter and a mere gleam in the sky. The hope was that they would realise what was happening only when the attackers opened fire. Half an hour later, the landing craft carrying the main body would scrape the shore directly in front of the town.
Holiday beaches and villages were now colour-coded targets on the raiders’ maps. Places that once evoked sunny summer days would soon be swept with bullets and the shingle stained with blood. The beach below and slightly east of the village of Berneval-le-Grand and another a mile to the west near Belleville-sur-Mer were designated Yellow 1 and Yellow 2. This was where one commando group would land to deal with the heavy battery code-named ‘Goebbels’. The short foreshore at Puys, just round the eastern headland overlooking the town, was Blue Beach. This was the landfall of the Royal Regiment of Canada who would then head up the steep wooded slope behind, through the half-timbered holiday villas, to take out the guns which commanded the port and the beaches in front of the town.
In Dieppe, the seafront below the mile-long promenade was divided into two. Red Beach was next to the western edge of the harbour breakwater. This was to be attacked by the Essex Scottish who would penetrate the town and harbour then move onto the eastern headland to join up with the Royals arriving from Puys. Next to it was White Beach, where the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry would fight their way into the town and then advance to the western headland. The first flight of Churchills were due to land with them, followed by successive waves accompanied by engineer teams tasked with blasting through obstacles.
Pourville, about two miles to the west, was Green Beach where the South Saskatchewan Regiment would go ashore. Once they had overcome the opposition they were to head south and east to take the strongpoint at Quatre Vents farm and meet up with the Rileys. Half an hour later the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders of Canada would land and pass through them and join up with the tanks which would by then have cleared Dieppe and be hurrying towards the aerodrome at Saint-Aubin. If time allowed, the battalion would move on to Arques-la-Bataille to capture the divisional headquarters which COHQ’s intelligence service claimed was sited there, and seize ‘secret documents’.
The other commando attack would go in at Orange 1, just below the village of Varengeville and Orange 2, a mile to the west near Quiberville. They would then move half a mile inland to take out the ‘Hess’ battery. Meanwhile, waiting offshore, were Roberts’s ‘floating reserve’, the men of Les Fusiliers Mont-Royal. Once the town was taken they would go ashore and take up positions on a perimeter inside the town to hold off the Germans as the main force returned to the ships. According to the immaculate timings of the plan, within two and a half hours of the assault beginning Dieppe would have fallen and the raiders would control a perimeter around the town about four or five miles deep.
With the town in their hands, the stated object of the raid could begin. Royal Canadian Engineer demolition parties were to fan out through the town blowing up infrastructure and enemy assets. Even in its amended form to take account of the reduction of time on shore, the array of targets was vast. It included railways, marshalling yards, tunnels, bridges and locks, a pharmaceutical factory, food stores and petrol dumps. The gasworks, power station and main telephone exchange were also listed, though the destruction of these would cause as much grief to the inhabitants as they would to the Germans.
The ‘cutting out’ operation to capture the forty-odd invasion barges in the Bassin Duquesne and Bassin de Paris, deep in the inner harbour, was in the hands of Commander Ryder, who having won a VC at Saint-Nazaire was now in the thick of another desperately hazardous show. Once the enemy artillery was silenced he would take the heavily armed, flat-bottomed river gunboat HMS Locust into the harbour followed by seven Free French submarine-chaser ‘Chasseurs’. About 200 Royal Marines split into specialised parties would open the locks and bridges to the arrière port. Landing craft would then sail in and ferry the barges to the Chasseurs in the avant port to tow to an assembly point offshore.
The force was also assigned more sensitive tasks. The last objective listed in the military orders was to ‘capture certain material’.19 This was a cryptic reference to a mission to seize Enigma machines and code books from naval headquarters in the town, part of the Naval Intelligence Division’s ongoing campaign in the cipher war. The raid provided a vehicle for another specially commissioned task. An RAF NCO radar expert was attached to the Saskatchewans to investigate the radar installation above Pourville.
The cutting-out plan typified the extraordinary complexity of Jubilee and the optimistic assumptions that it rested upon. Timings were almost ludicrously precise. The move of the Locust to the harbour was dependent on the suppression of the overlooking artillery which the orders ‘hoped…will be silenced by 05.45’. Anyone who had first-hand experience of battle knew that timetables were liable to evaporate once the shooting started. Mann had never been in combat, and his orders followed a minute-by-minute sequence of interdependent events.
They were setting off, as Hughes-Hallett declared in his last order before sailing, on ‘an unusually complex and hazardous operation’. From the beginning, Dieppe had been conceived as not one big mission but a conglomeration of small ones with many disparate objectives and no single aim. The action was spread over several locations using numerous units all of whom were attacking separately and who would meet up only if everything went well. It was impossible for a single military maestro to orchestrate events. As Hughes-Hallett admitted, success ashore was ‘likely to depend far more on the action of individual commanding officers than anything I shall be able to do from the command ship’.
Once they had landed, the troops were essentially on their own. On board their HQ ship, the destroyer Calpe, Roberts and Hughes-Hallett might get a rough idea of what was going on ashore, though given the limited signals capacity this was far from certain. The only person who could affect the course of events was Leigh-Mallory, who would be sitting at Fighter Command HQ at Uxbridge, in West London. Even then the difference air power could make was limited. All the aircraft at his disposal were already committed to the plan and there were no reserves to call in. Furthermore it would be difficult to respond swiftly and effectively to a particular circumstance on the ground. There was an unavoidable time lapse between a request for air support being made and a mission being ordered, so that by the time it arrived, the situation was very likely to have changed.
The plan was a delicate instrument. As the report prepared at COHQ afterwards stated: ‘It will be seen at once that its success depended upon a number of factors of which, perhaps, the most important was the correct and accurate timing of the successive phases of the operation by all services taking part in it. Synchronisation was, in fact, its keynote.’20
The commandos were spared entanglement in the central plan. They were coming late to the show and their missions were clear-cut and free-standing. They also had the luxury of being allowed to come up with their own schemes. John Durnford-Slater, commanding officer of 3 Commando, first heard of Jubilee when summoned to London by Brigadier Bob Laycock of the Special Service Brigade. There he learned there was ‘a big operation on against Dieppe’.21 His force was assigned the Goebbels battery at Berneval. No. 3 Commando had seen no action since Vaagso and Durnford-Slater was delighted to be asked. Laycock told him: ‘You can see that it will be absolutely impossible for the ships to lie off Dieppe while your battery is in action. Can you guarantee to do the job?’ He replied that ‘given a proper landing you can be quite sure that our battery won’t fire on the shipping.’
The men moved from their base in Largs to Seaford in Sussex, near Newhaven, and began cliff-climbing and day-and-night landing drills at Gurnard Bay on the Isle of Wight. Sledgehammer came in handy as a cover story. They were told that they were training for an invasion of the Cherbourg Peninsula. Meanwhile Durnford-Slater made his plan. Intelligence reports said there were up to 350 enemy troops in the Berneval area ‘so it was evident that we had quite a battle on hand’. He had done a photo interpretation course and could make his own analysis of recce images. Two narrow gullies on either side of the battery site provided a way up from the sea. However, both were blocked by thick wire and the more easterly one, directly above Yellow 1, was covered by machine guns. Nonetheless he was ‘entirely confident that our battle-trained officers and men would overcome all these obstacles’. Once on the heights they would overrun the battery, kill the garrison and then plant charges to blow up the battery’s three 170 mm and four 105 mm guns.
He was less sure about the arrangements for getting his men across the Channel. They would be carried directly to Yellow 1 and 2 aboard twenty-three small American-designed unarmoured LCP (L) personnel craft, also known as R-boats, with the headquarters in a river gunboat.22 Durnford-Slater was ‘not happy about the prospect of a sixty-seven-mile passage in small boats’. An abortive raid on Guernsey had demonstrated the unreliability of landing craft on long journeys. What if some of the craft broke down and only a depleted commando force made it ashore? In that case, the orders made clear, the tactics were to keep the crews from serving the guns by constant harassing sniper fire.
If Durnford-Slater was sanguine about 3 Commando’s chances he was less sure about the prospects for the main force. At the end of July he was at a force commanders’ meeting with Mountbatten presiding when the air-bombardment issue surfaced. Once again it fell to Leigh-Mallory to explain why a heavy air raid was unfeasible. But the airman did not hide his disquiet with a decision that was beyond his control and told the meeting: ‘I don’t like this…I think these Canadians are going to have a bad time in the centre.’ Durnford-Slater agreed. ‘After our recent tough battle at Vaagso, against comparatively minor defences, I was most doubtful of the Canadians’ success,’ he wrote. He was surprised at the attitude of the commander whose men were most affected. ‘General Roberts did almost no talking…he made no adverse comment at all.’
The task of knocking out the ‘Hess’ battery at Varengeville was given to 4 Commando led by Lieutenant Colonel the Lord Lovat. Known to his friends as ‘Shimi’ from the Gaelic version of his first name, Simon, Lovat radiated a feudal glamour. He was chieftain of the Fraser warrior clan and had a castle and vast estate near Inverness. As well as being rich and aristocratic he was intelligent and good-looking. Men wanted to be like him and women wanted to be with him. He had his detractors. Evelyn Waugh, who passed an ignominious spell in the commandos, sneered at his perceived vanity. Shimi gave as good as he got, later demolishing the pudgy social climber as ‘a greedy little man – a eunuch in appearance – who seemed desperately anxious to “get in” with the right people’. Lovat was certainly pleased with himself but nobody could deny his abilities. Under his leadership 4 Commando had been thoroughly rehearsed for battle and was bound together by a tight esprit de corps.
In July 1942 they were eager to show what they could do. To Lovat’s annoyance they had not been chosen for Saint-Nazaire, though if they had, the likelihood was that most of them would now be dead or behind the wire in some Stalag. Their most recent exploit raiding Hardelot on the coast near Boulogne in April had been a damp squib. Officers and men felt ‘it was time to prove something’.23 In late July Bob Laycock appeared during a live-firing exercise in the ruins of Dundonald Castle in south Ayrshire to tell Lovat that 4 Commando were about to get their chance. Lovat headed for London to start planning and the men followed forty-eight hours later to begin training near Weymouth. Fortunately for them they would be carried most of the way in the former Belgian cross-Channel ferry the Prince Albert. Then they would climb into eight assault landing craft (LCA) for the run in to Orange Beaches 1 and 2. The LCAs were powered by two Ford V8 engines and were each forty-one feet long with a ten-feet beam and drew only 2.5 feet of water. They were cold and wet in a running sea but, unlike the wooden-hulled R-boats or ‘Eurekas’, were bulletproof until the bow door went down.
Lovat had plenty of resources to make his plan. As well as aerial photographs there was a scale model of the terrain and they got to learn every fold and feature of the ground between the landing beaches and the battery. By the end 4 Commando were as ready as they would ever be. ‘The demolition squad could blow gun breeches in their sleep. Wireless communications were tested and counter-tested. Every weapon was fired over measured marks…The 2-inch mortar men became so accurate they could drop eighteen out of twenty shots into a 25-foot square at 200 yards.’24
As the launch date approached, RAF reconnaissance flights recorded the changing face of Dieppe and the surroundings. Every sortie brought evidence of new defences springing up. Photos taken on 5 August revealed ‘a four-gun battery position is under construction at 184650…three medium or heavy guns have appeared in the open close to the battery already reported at 308720. Two circular emplacements are under construction close by…’25 By August every inch of the Dieppe seafront was covered by guns of various calibres, skilfully sited to give layer upon layer of fire from multiple angles. Almost every position was sheathed in thick concrete impervious to all but a direct hit from a large shell, and the beach and promenade hedged with barbed wire. Every road from the seafront into the town was blocked by a wall and gun position.
A fair number of the defenders were not German. There was a constant seepage of garrison troops eastwards to replace losses on the Russian front. Their places were taken by conscripts and recruits from newly conquered territories. In the spring the 571st Infantry Regiment, which held the Dieppe sector, was badly under strength. Its numbers were topped up in March by a draft of 160 men followed by another of about 500 at the beginning of August. Four-fifths of them were Poles who had been granted the status of naturalised Germans. They were undernourished and some of them in such bad physical shape they had previously been rejected by the Polish army. But as the German army doctor who examined them remarked, ‘for cannon fodder, all are good.’26
The Jubilee team were under the impression that the enemy formation facing them had changed. From the start, intelligence had correctly reported that the 302nd Division held the area. On 6 August Home Forces issued a new enemy order of battle saying they had been relieved by 110th Division, ‘although this cannot be regarded as absolutely certain’.27 It soon became treated as fact and the final orders stated that they now held the area. They had ‘recently seen service on the Russian front’ with a ‘good fighting record’ and were therefore more formidable than the ‘second rate’ soldiers they replaced. The report may have been misinformation fed to an agent who had been turned. The mistake changed nothing. The 302nd Division had not moved and although untested were primed to a high pitch of readiness and fully expecting action at any time.
Even without any specific intelligence warnings, the Germans had no doubt an attack somewhere along the Channel coast was imminent. Throughout July and early August warnings blared from Berlin and Paris. The timing was easy to predict. All that was needed was a glance at the moon and tide tables. On 7 July, the commander-in-chief in the West, Gerd von Rundstedt, ordered a general alert along the Channel coast because ‘it is the most favourable period for Allied landings’. He thought it unlikely that the blow would fall on Dieppe, as it was too small to use as an invasion base.28 Hitler thought otherwise. A directive dated 9 July pointed out the suspicious build-up of craft across the Channel and warned: ‘The areas particularly threatened are, in the first place, the Channel coast…between Dieppe and Le Havre and Normandy since these sectors can be reached by enemy planes and also because they lie within range of a large portion of the ferrying vehicles.’
On 10 August, nine days before the raid, the divisional commander General Haase issued an excitable order of the day:
The information in our hands makes it clear that the Anglo-Americans will be forced in spite of themselves by the wretched predicament of the Russians to undertake some operation in the West in the near future…I have repeatedly brought this to the attention of the troops and I ask that my orders on this matter be kept constantly before them so that the idea sinks in thoroughly…The troops must grasp the fact that when it happens, it will be a very sticky business.
Bombing and strafing from the air, shelling from the sea, commandos and assault boats, parachutists and air landing troops, hostile civilians, sabotage and murder – all these they will have to face with steady nerves if they are not to go under. On no account must the troops let themselves get rattled. Fear is not to be thought of. When the muck begins to fly the troops must wipe their eyes and ears, grip their weapons more tightly and fight as they have never fought before. THEM OR US. That must be the watchword for each man.29
The exhortation came as Rundstedt ordered the 302nd Division to the ‘Threatening Danger’ level of alert for ten days from 10 August as ‘lunar and tidal conditions are such in this time span that they could be favourable for an Allied landing’.30 On Friday the 14th, Haase raised the garrison to ‘Stufe 2’, meaning all action stations were fully manned and everyone slept in their battledress and boots, weapons to hand. Whatever surprise the attackers achieved would not last long.
It was not until 1 August that the brigade commanders learned that the Dieppe raid was on again. Bill Southam and Sherwood Lett were summoned along with the Calgary Tanks CO Johnny Andrews to a meeting with Roberts and Mann at 2nd Division HQ to discuss a new operation. There was consternation when Mann unveiled a model with which they were already very familiar. Lett had originally thought that ‘if tactical surprise could be attained [Dieppe] had a chance of success.’31 The exercises on the Isle of Wight had made him realise that even with good luck, casualties would be extremely heavy. Now, as the fact that the operation was on again sank in, ‘I knew at once that we were for it.’
Three days later it was the turn of the battalion and commando COs. As Bob Labatt recounted it later, ‘General Crerar was there and he was the one who told us that the party was on again and we said “Fine, whereabouts?” And he said “The same place.” That shook us just a little bit.’32 Labatt had to keep his concerns to himself. Secrecy was more crucial than ever and it would be another ten days before company commanders were briefed.
Under various pretexts, the specialist soldiers, airmen and sailors who had been assembled for Rutter were now summoned again. Few were fooled. Something big was on and they felt once more the fluttering of excitement mixed with apprehension that precedes action. Captain Derek Turner, a young gunner attached as bombardment liaison officer to the destroyer HMS Garth, was told to report to Eastbridge House in Crondall, Hampshire. Turner was an upper-class Scot with a friendly, open nature. In his diary he described with unusual frankness his conflicting emotions as the moment of truth approached.
Like everyone, Turner found the countdown to battle hard to endure and the war-film cliché that ‘it’s the waiting I can’t stand’ was no more than the truth. During this time the sense of collectivity, of mutual interdependence, was overpowering and solidarity demanded that fear was internalised. But inside every head the same tussle was going on and the same opposing emotions clicked backwards and forwards with the regularity of a metronome. The tick of excitement at the prospect of finding out at last what battle really meant and whether your courage was a match for it was followed by the tock of fear: of death, maiming or, worst of all, some hideous loss of control and the lifetime stigma of cowardice. In between there was no comforting equilibrium. It was tick or tock and the only relief was to throw yourself into your work and take shelter in the hubbub of banter and horseplay raised by your comrades as they too struggled to still the ominous beat pulsing inside them.
Laughter, no matter how strained, was almost as good as whisky, cigarettes or hot sweet tea when it came to calming nerves. The tension hanging over the briefing room where Turner and his fellow gunners were studying their orders evaporated when ‘Jimmy James, a small man who wore thick glasses and a silly, bristly moustache suddenly leapt from his chair and shot up in the air hitting himself all over with his hands and then went one further than any of us expected and took off his trousers…out flew a large wasp’. This ‘put us all in excellent humour and I decided to read no more orders’.33
To everyone’s relief they found the navy was operating an onshore wardroom and Turner and a good friend Captain Denis Woolley, who was the bombardment liaison officer on HMS Berkeley, grabbed a drink and settled down in armchairs looking out on the sunlit lawns of the house. Melancholy soon cast a shadow. Turner watched the old lady who owned the place walking towards a flower bed with a basket over her arm. He ‘couldn’t help feeling how strange it all was for us to be sitting there looking at a Hampshire garden on a beautiful August day and at the same time tomorrow we’d be looking at France. I thought how nice it would be if all the world were as peaceful as it seemed to be for that old lady and her flower basket and we were all going to France for a holiday.’
At 14.15 the transport officer began calling them in groups to board the buses taking them to Southampton and their ships. Denis was one of the first to leave and he ‘collected all his junk and went out as if he was going out to a tennis party’. Derek did not see him off. ‘I knew that I must have no feelings towards my friends and we all behaved as if we’d hardly ever met each other before.’
Then it was his turn. As they drove round the docks looking for Garth he felt ‘a horrible sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach’. It was quickly replaced by panic when it turned out that the destroyer had left without him. He boarded HMS Bleasdale which laid on a whaler to row him over to Garth, lying at anchor in the Solent awaiting the final departure. His mood was lifted by the crew of the whaler as they pulled away. They were all ‘such hearty fellows’. It fell again as the destroyer grew closer. He ‘couldn’t help thinking how very small and frail she looked…’ But then he was on deck and the sailors he knew from training were greeting him with the amiably derisive nickname they reserved for all soldiers (‘Good old Pongo!’) and the captain, Lieutenant Commander Scatchard, was leading him below for a large brandy and ginger ale. He was ‘relieved beyond belief to find everyone in such high spirits’.
Roberts and Hughes-Hallett oversaw the last preparations from Fort Southwick, an underground headquarters buried in Portsdown Hill overlooking the Portsmouth naval base. On Sunday 16 August, the force commanders decided to postpone for twenty-four hours due to an adverse meteorological report. On Tuesday morning, even though the weather situation was still uncertain, all agreed they could wait no longer and the fleet would sail that night. A cover story had been constructed to explain the troop movements to get the units to the assault ships, and various landing craft lying at Southampton, Portsmouth, Gosport, Newhaven and Shoreham. The units were told they were taking part in a movement exercise. Throughout Tuesday 18 August at battalion bases strung along the south coast troops boarded buses that carried them along country roads through villages and seaside towns to the embarkation ports and the waiting ships. By early evening they were all aboard and everyone was told they were bound again for Dieppe.
The Royals embarked on the Princess Astrid and Queen Emma at Portsmouth. The British war correspondent Alexander Austin was on board when the CO Doug Catto addressed the men from the head of the troop-deck stairs. ‘The sergeants quieted the buzz of talk round the hammocks and the weapon racks and the trestle tables,’ he wrote. ‘Dixies of meat, potatoes and vegetables were being carried in. The men stood quiet in their khaki shirtsleeves, gaze fixed on the stairhead…some with towels in their hands, hair wet and faces freshly scrubbed…When the CO began to speak, the only sound you could hear was the drip of water from a tap.’34
By Austin’s account Catto’s promise that ‘we are not going to land in England again until we have met the Boche’ was met with ‘a great explosion of human sound forced from them by the impact of news they had been waiting months to hear’. The regiment’s battle adjutant Forbes West remembered it differently, seeing little of the enthusiasm for action the men had shown seven weeks previously. ‘The first time they were pretty hopped up,’ he recalled.35 ‘The second time it was more “ho-hum”. I think we thought it wasn’t really going to happen.’ Denis Whitaker noted the same subdued reaction among the Rileys. ‘We did our best to prepare them, but the feeling of optimism many of us had shared before Rutter was now being replaced by apprehension,’ he wrote.36 Before they sailed Mountbatten toured the ships giving one of his pep talks, just as he had before Rutter. The men of 4 Commando embarked on Prince Albert cheered dutifully. ‘It was a very nice talk,’ remembered Private George Cook. ‘He said he wished he was coming with us…Two hundred blokes thought, well, we wish you were going instead of us.’37
An assortment of military spectators and pressmen were also taking their places for the show. Mountbatten’s predilection for publicity ensured there was room for plenty of journalists. Thirteen civilian reporters and cameramen accompanied the troops, assisted by numerous army, navy and air-force press officers. The Canadian and American media were well represented. A place for the unspecified operation had been offered to a London-based Soviet correspondent but he decided he did not want to assist in what he assumed was a propaganda stunt designed to take the place of a real second front, and turned it down.
The lavish coverage arrangements reflected the optimism among the Canadian brass and at COHQ. Despite the risks, there was a feeling that the gamble would work. Alexander Austin was impressed by the brisk confidence of Mann who Roberts charged with meeting the press party and ‘putting them in the picture’ before they boarded their ships. He was ‘slight, thirtyish, with a humorous face and a quick, dry wit, he perched himself on a shelf above the relief plan of Dieppe and, using a splinter from a packing case as a pointer, began to talk to us at midnight…He talked without flagging for two hours, marshalling his points lucidly, choosing his phrases with care and yet with a sense of fun.’38
As for the object, it was to ‘test the German defences; to take prisoners and bring back military papers and every possible kind of information which the Germans would wish to keep to themselves; to rehearse, under fighting conditions, the movement and timing of a large force across the Channel, and its landing on enemy beaches’.
It was from this point that the idea of Dieppe as an experiment and a ‘rehearsal’ started to gain a strong footing in the subsequent narrative. Bob Bowman, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reporter who was accompanying the Calgary Tanks, would tell listeners on his return: ‘We’ve learned a most valuable lesson which may enable us to free the continent of Europe and end the war…That was the purpose of the raid as set out officially and told to us before we set sail.’ Although there was nothing in the orders to reflect it, this now became the official justification for the events that followed.
At 19.30 Hughes-Hallett left Fort Southwick and was driven to the docks to join Roberts on their headquarters ship. At 20.00 they sailed. ‘It was a beautiful night and the Calpe stopped at the gate through the Spithead anti-submarine boom and watched as the whole force passed through, eastward-bound, in perfect formation and dead on time.’