Red and White
As the craft carrying the Essex Scottish and the Rileys neared Red and White Beaches for the main assault it was still possible for Ham Roberts to believe that things were going well. The landing craft were on time, touching down at 05.20 or a few minutes after. The destroyers were banging away at the shore defences.
Meanwhile light-bomber squadrons were scheduled to attack the east and west headlands and batteries behind the town ten minutes before the landings. Others would lay smoke to mask the landing craft as they closed the beaches.
At 05.09 ten twin-engine Bostons from 226 Squadron arrived over the east headland and 100 lb smoke canisters tumbled from the bomb bays. According to Squadron Leader G. R. ‘Digger’ Magill the bombs were ‘simple enough being largish “biscuit tins” filled with a phosphorus compound which simply ignited and made masses of smoke when exposed to the air’. It was, as he wryly observed, ‘a handy load to have in the bomb bay when there was a lot of flak about…’1
As he came in, his aircraft shook with the impact of a flak shell – not from the German 88s, he believed, but from the Oerlikon cannons of the British fleet – and ‘we found ourselves with a fine old fire going on underneath until we dumped our load as near as we could to the battery…just over the clifftop.’ Then it was the turn of the enemy anti-aircraft guns and nine aircraft were hit. The gun crews knew their job, as bomb-aimer Flight Lieutenant Jock Cairns of 88 Squadron learned when he began his bombing run, still in semidarkness, on the Rommel battery just south of Blue Beach. ‘[The] searchlights came into operation at the same time as the [AA] batteries opened fire,’ he remembered. ‘When we were about ten seconds from dropping point we were picked up by…what we assumed was the master searchlight – possibly radar-controlled as it just came straight up at us and held us without any searching, and then we were coned by several others…’
For all the perils, the crews had no wish to change places with the tiny figures in the landing craft. The upturned faces watching them go over reminded James Pelly-Fry, the 88 Squadron CO, ‘for some reason of a Daily Express Giles cartoon – little men with snub noses and round faces. I was thankful to be an airman.’
Five Hurricane squadrons were also in the air over the main beaches. The first to arrive was a wing of thirty-four fighters led by Squadron Leader Daniel le Roy du Vivier of 43 Squadron, who flew with the Belgian air force before escaping to England and joining the RAF. They took off in darkness from Tangmere near Chichester at the foot of the Downs at 04.25 arriving exactly on time at 05.10. The Hurricanes were armed with four 20 mm cannon. They approached in line abreast delivering one attack then peeling off to return for a second run. It was still too dark to pick out individual gun positions and they soaked the seafront and headlands with fire which even if inaccurate cheered the Canadians as their craft closed the beaches. The German gunners were uncowed. A Canadian, Flight Sergeant Hank Wik of 43 Squadron, was the first pilot to die when his Hurricane was caught by flak and went down in flames in a field behind the town. Pilot Officer A. E. Snell, also of 43 Squadron was forced to bail out but was picked up by an LCT and spent the rest of the day on board manning a machine gun.
That day, the Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe fought their greatest battle. In the sixteen hours that it lasted, the RAF threw the largest array of aircraft it had ever assembled in the war to date, flying 3,000 sorties against the Germans’ 945. From first light, Leigh-Mallory intended to open an umbrella over the sea approaches and beaches to protect the fleet and the troops from attack and to fend off the enemy fighters swarming to shield their bombers which throughout the day pressed home attacks on the armada with grim determination. The result was an epic that distracted the men on the ground from their own intense experience and moved them to awed admiration.
While the German gunners were firing at the attacking bombers and fighters they were distracted from shooting at the approaching craft. They were also having to contend with the barrage raised by the destroyers Berkeley, Bleasdale, Garth and Albrighton which, as the air assault opened, laid smoke then joined in the general bombardment, setting three buildings on the front ablaze. On board Garth, Goronwy Rees, Montgomery’s liaison officer who had got himself attached to the force as an observer, described Lieutenant Commander Scatchard’s technique with anxious respect. ‘Calm and unmoved on the bridge [he] continued to issue his series of rapid, precise, thin-lipped orders,’ he wrote.
Garth’s tactics were simple. We dashed along the shore and when opposite the gun position fired broadside with all our guns. At the same time the gun on the cliff replied, bracketing us with one shot over us, one short of us and one accurately on the target. At that moment Garth dived behind the blanket of smoke which she had raised as soon as her salvo had been fired; then we raced behind our protective smokescreen to reappear again and release our broadside at the gun position…2
Watching from the deck of Calpe, Hughes-Hallett’s personal assistant Sub Lieutenant Ranald Boyle scrawled the progress of the attack in a reporter’s notebook, as ordered by his boss. Everything seemed to be going to plan.
05.12 Smokescreen being laid. Extremely effective. Large amount of fire now and planes flying very low inshore.
05.15 Destroyers start smoke barrage. Terrific fire from coast guns now. Planes all round.
05.20 Spitfires [sic] attacking coastal batteries. 4 LCTs approaching beach. Terrific fire…
05.38 Terrific fire all round. Some shells passing overhead, others at side. Bullets also. Smokescreen still most effective. LCTs going in firing all round under smoke. Wind is offshore so smoke slowly drifting this way. Other ships coming round firing. All most effective.3
The LCTs were carrying the first flight of the Calgary tanks. Despite Boyle’s optimism, things were already going wrong. For the Essex Scottish and the Rileys to get across the beach and into the town it was vital that the defences were suppressed or at least distracted by a continuous bombardment. The naval and air attacks were due to cease just before the Canadians hit the beach. Fire support would then be in the hands of the tanks, the first of which were timed to touch down alongside the LCAs and open up on pillboxes, strongpoints and batteries while the infantry scrambled across the bleak expanse of bullet-swept pebbles and mounted the promenade. Once the seafront was secure the engineer parties on board the LCTs could blow the obstacles blocking the tanks’ path into town.
The transition from one barrage to the other had to be all but seamless. As soon as the navy and RAF overture stopped the German gunners would be unmolested and could start to chop down the platoons as soon as the bow doors opened. If there was not to be a massacre, the LCTs could not be a minute late.
The first three LCTs and their nine tanks were due to touch down at 05.20. They arrived at about 05.35. The missing minutes would later be blamed for almost everything that went wrong on Red and White Beaches. The LCT flotilla was under the command of Lieutenant Commander Earl Beatty, son of the famous First World War admiral. Hughes-Hallett’s subsequent despatch said they ‘approached too far from the westward and were about ten to fifteen minutes late in touching down’.4 Subsequent inquiries never established the cause for the delay which was vaguely ascribed in the Admiralty’s report as due to ‘navigational difficulties’.5 It is unlikely that punctuality would have changed anything. The tanks could not on their own neutralise the enfilade fire pouring down from the headlands or the guns pumping out from the promenade. At best, their presence at the crucial moment might have lightened the casualties but they would never have swung the balance from defeat to victory.
Half an hour before landing the 350-horsepower engines of the Churchills coughed into life filling the LCTs with exhaust fumes. Crouched claustrophobically in each was a crew of five: commander, gunner, loader/radio operator, driver and a co-driver cum hull-gunner. There was a mixture of types from the Mark I which carried a 40 mm ‘two-pounder’ and a .303 machine gun in the turret and a three-inch howitzer in the hull, to the Mark III which mounted a 57 mm ‘six-pounder’ as its main armament. Their view of the battlefield was restricted to the small patches of vision offered by an armoured glass slit and two periscopes.
They were facing a huge test and without the benefit of prior experience. Never before had tanks been landed on a hostile shore to do battle. The choice of Dieppe as the first place to attempt it was, as Mann had acknowledged, ‘almost a fantastical conception’. Nonetheless with characteristic optimism, he judged that the appearance of the tanks would create a shock that ‘could have a terrific moral effect on…Germans’. The next few minutes would show whether or not he was right.
The first two flights of six LCTs landed within ten minutes of each other, carrying eighteen tanks. It was clear that the effect of the air and sea bombardment had been only temporary. Sergeant John Marsh, commanding a Black Watch detachment, was on LCT 2 which arrived at the east end of Red Beach, next to the harbour breakwater. His post-action report gave a taste of the drama that ensued. ‘Letting the ramp down seemed to be a signal for all hell to let loose,’ he told the preliminary post-operation inquiry.6 It was a phrase that would be heard many times in the survivors’ accounts.
‘Enemy mortar and shellfire seemed to hit us on all sides and tracer and explosive bullets were sweeping the decks and coming in around us. It seemed ages until the ramp was finally lowered onto the beach.’ Marsh had a ‘clear view of the tanks as they left the craft’. The first ‘was hit three or four times but kept going’, bounding over concertina rolls of barbed wire which seemed to spring back into shape once the tank passed over it. It was hit again by rounds from the French tank turret concreted into the east end of the promenade. The shots had little effect for the tank fired back and ‘must have scored a direct hit as the French tank seemed to explode into the air’.7
Meanwhile a second tank was off and immediately engaged a pillbox on the left. Those inside ran for it but were cut down. The third tank on board now tried to make its exit. It was towing a wireless-equipped scout car. Halfway down the ramp both got stuck and the LCT captain reversed in an effort to shake them free. Just then ‘a shell burst on the ramp and broke both winch cables’, releasing the tank which ‘rapidly pulled the scout car through the wire and also tore through the [sea] wall’. The last Marsh saw of the scout car ‘it was tearing like hell up Foch boulevard.’
The craft was listing and drifting but the captain was not done yet. There were still engineer and mortar teams on board to put ashore and once again he went full ahead to attempt to beach. It was impossible. The ramp had folded under the hull and he was forced to reverse away. As he did so, ‘four or five shells seemed to hit us at once and we began to take water rapidly’. The last salvo had killed both crews manning the craft’s two two-pounder Bofors guns and Marsh and his men stepped in to replace them. By then he reckoned they had suffered ‘about twenty casualties…’ They limped out to the offshore boat pool where, after delivering their cargoes, landing craft were to congregate to await further orders, dazed, shocked but alive.
The LCTs were 160 feet long with armour only on the wheel-house and gun shields and made an easy target. Of the first flight, LCT 1 got its tanks ashore but sank in shallow water near the west breakwater. The first tank to leave LCT 3 went off the ramp too soon and sank. The other two made it onto the beach but not to the promenade. The craft was crippled in the effort and unable to pull away. The next flight managed to land their Churchills but one LCT sank off the beach, another never got off it and only one got away.
The Calgary’s CO Colonel Johnny Andrews was with his regimental headquarters in the third flight. It arrived on time at 06.05. Andrews was in LCT 8. The first tank off dug itself in the shingle, blocking the ramp. The craft pulled back for another approach but was hit by shellfire which snapped the chains and the ramp flopped down, preventing the craft from touching down. In the confusion Andrews’ tank nonetheless drove off and plunged into eight feet of water. The Churchills were proofed to a depth of six feet and the sea closed over the top of the turret so that only the commander’s pennant was showing. Andrews announced ‘I am baling out’, and the crew swam for it. According to one report he boarded a small craft but was killed almost immediately. Corporal Thomas Carnie, who was in the CO’s tank, after returning from a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany maintained that all the crew got out safely and he ‘saw Lieutenant Col Andrews waist-deep in water approaching the shore’. A sergeant from the same tank told him that he later saw Andrews’s body ‘washing about in the shallows at the edge of the beach’.
The first three flights succeeded in getting twenty-seven of their thirty tanks on to dry land, a remarkable achievement in the face of the fire pouring down on the crews of the LCTs as they attempted what was in any circumstances a difficult manoeuvre. One huge problem had been overcome but there were daunting obstacles ahead in the shape of the sea wall and the roadblocks barring the way into town. It was essential that the tanks kept moving, creating a momentum that would suck the infantry along in their wake.
To do that they needed the beach assault party commanded by Major Bert Sucharov of the Royal Canadian Engineers. It was made up of four officers and eighty-four men, supported by two infantry platoons. The force was broken down into teams and distributed through the first six LCTs.
Their job was to get the armour across the beaches and onto the promenade, clearing minefields and obstacles. As well as the four bulldozers on board they carried an enormous amount of equipment: timber, ‘chespalings’, railway sleepers, wall charges, twelve-foot vehicle bridge ramps, Bangalore torpedoes, mine detectors and bulk explosives.
The plan was for four-man squads to run ahead of the first tanks to carpet the galets with chespaling, twenty-five-foot-long rolls of chestnut slats, linked like a fence, for the armour and scout cars to run over. The timber was to build ramps, which in training teams had managed to build in five minutes flat to help the tanks over the sea wall. Intelligence reports said it was up to six feet high. It turned out that in places it was only two feet high due to the action of the sea which piled the pebbles against it. Another mercy was that thanks to the Germans’ belief that the beach was impassable to tracked vehicles, there were no mines to clear.
Had there been ramps to build or minefields to negotiate, there was no one on Red or White Beach to do so. Within a few minutes, those engineers who got ashore were either dead, wounded or flattening themselves into what dips and hollows they could find in the pebbles to shelter from the awful squall of fire. Sucharov himself was unable to get ashore before the captain of his LCT withdrew. Only half the 350 engineers making up the beach party and the demolition teams were put ashore, and of those up to 90 per cent became casualties.8
The twenty-seven tanks that made it ashore had to flail towards the promenade unaided. Remarkably, fifteen of them got over the sea wall. Of the rest, two sank leaving their LCTs and the rest stayed stranded on the beach. Four had their tracks shattered by shellfire. At least four, and perhaps as many as seven were immobilised by the galets which worked their way into the tracks and bogies bringing progress to a literal, grinding halt.
Trooper Archie Anderson came in on LCT 7 on the third flight. All the tanks had code names and he was the loader/wireless operator on ‘Bellicose’. The commander, Lieutenant Edwin Bennett, had been badly burned when a shell hit the craft just as they landed. Nonetheless, he saw what was happening to the other tanks and ‘by staying close to the water we escaped the rolling-stone effect of loose shingle’.9
They climbed onto the promenade near the casino but with the roadblocks barring the way into town still intact, like the rest of the tanks they were limited to moving back and forth, guns blazing as they sought to do the best they could for the infantry. Anderson served the tank’s six-pounder main gun, which had a range of about a mile, burning his hands on the red-hot casings as he reloaded. Bennett ‘had to hold one eye open with his fingers to see but he managed to pick up a target’ a battery on the east headland. They fired at it repeatedly but ‘didn’t know how much damage we did to it, if any’.
The first thing the Essex Scottish saw when the bow doors lowered was a hill of stones. It rose before them in undulating waves that ended at the sea wall – the first bit of real cover. Each man was laden with the maximum load they could carry, toting extra mags and bombs for the Brens and mortars as well as their own equipment. Hobnailed boots wedged ankle-deep in pebbles that slithered underfoot. Rolls of concertina wire snaked across their path. The first men went at them with the cutters while the rest crouched behind, as mortar-bomb splinters mixed with shards of pulverised galets sliced the air. Private Tom McDermott decided it was taking too long and threw himself on top of it to make a bridge for the others.10
In these opening minutes – which in the memory of the survivors felt like hours, each second magnified by the hyper-reality created by massive, eardrum-bursting violence – the guts were torn out of the Essex Scottish.
The A Company commander Captain Dennis Guest reckoned he had lost all but thirty-five of his 108 men by the time they reached the sea wall. Another captain, Donald MacCrae estimated that 40 per cent of the regiment had been killed or wounded within twenty minutes of landing.
The sections, platoons and companies that had taken the place of families for the last few years were shredded, and the NCOs and officers whose word had ordered their lives were no longer in command of anything. Both brigade commanders were to land on the main beaches and set up their headquarters in town. The 4th Brigade CO Sherwood Lett was wounded on the run in and did not make it ashore. Bill Southam commanding 6th Brigade arrived on LCT 9 but soon found he was incapable of exerting any control on the battle. With him was Lance Corporal Leo Lecky, who was in charge of the brigadier’s map case. They came ashore separately and Lecky was shaken by the utter chaos he saw as the ramp descended. The memory was still raw when he recalled it more than thirty years later: ‘I was scared…I didn’t know what to do. There was an officer…he was sitting on the beach and one arm was completely torn off…he was holding his stump and he said “Get off the beach…it’s murderous. Try to get to the sea wall.” ’
The shingle slope ahead was barred by a concertina wire barrier. A gap had been blown in it and he remembered the advice his First World War veteran uncle had given him: when crossing an obstacle, never hesitate. It just gives the snipers time to zero in. ‘I thought, oh boy, here goes, so I ran and tumbled through and crept up to the sea wall.’ He found Southam next to a radio-equipped scout car belonging to the Calgary Tanks. The brigadier’s set linking him to Calpe had been destroyed, and over the objections of the two NCOs manning the car he commandeered their comms and began trying to gather information and issue orders. ‘There was stuff flying all around but he tried to maintain communications,’ Lecky remembered. ‘He was standing alongside [the car] with the microphone in his hand. There was no room for him inside because the two chaps weren’t getting out and I don’t blame them.’ Lecky marked on the maps ‘the little bit of information we were getting’.11
The Essex CO Fred Jasperson was no more bulletproof than anyone else and was immediately forced into cover, incapable of observing more than the ten yards of beach around him. He and his staff huddled in three hollows in the galets below the sea wall, unable to communicate with either the companies or Calpe as most of the signallers were dead or wounded or their radios out of action. In a letter from captivity he gave a glimpse of his plight. ‘Mortars and shell splinters were whistling all around me, some as close as eight feet but none got me.’ A man next to him had a limb blown off by a mortar shell, showering him with blood. ‘The experience was quite harrowing and how I was missed God only knows…it all will be imprinted on my mind forever.’12
It seemed obvious now that there could be no salvation. If the attack on Blue Beach had succeeded then the Royals would have been on the clifftop now and the guns there turned against the enemy. Instead, the batteries pumped fire down on them freely, supplemented by the machine guns flickering from numerous points in the chalky grey rampart below the church of Notre-Dame-de-Bonsecours. This was a horror they had not reckoned with. The intelligence reports had pointed out the caves in the cliff face. They did not mention that they might be an ideal place to site guns. Instead it was claimed they were used as storehouses, in particular for 2,300 torpedoes, a precise number which gave an entirely false impression of omniscience.
The guns could play on the cowering troops on the beach all day with almost complete impunity as no fighter attack or destroyer’s four-inch shell was ever likely to dislodge them. To survive, the attackers had to get off the beach and into the town.
Constant training and endless repetition had conditioned every soldier to do his part, to follow drills and obey orders with robotic obedience. Many of those who reached the sea wall chose not to anchor themselves in its slight but immensely welcome shelter, and stepped out into the maelstrom to try to keep some momentum going. Below the wall stretched a barbed-wire barrier pegged out on metal posts. Once through that there was another thicket of wire, this one much broader and as much as fifteen feet deep.
The first men to try to penetrate it died in seconds. Soon the wire was festooned with bodies. Those who were not already dead soon died as the German fire played on any sign of movement. Exposure for more than a moment or two invited instant death. Lieutenant Percy Lee scrambled onto the wall to try to see a way through the sea of wire and was killed by a mortar explosion. The Canadian mortar teams made sacrificial efforts to support their comrades. A three-inch mortar crew scrambled to set up their weapon and were all wiped out by a single shell. The German mortars were the biggest killer. An analysis of wounds in the ‘Combined Report on the Dieppe Raid’, produced in October, estimated that at least 31 per cent were caused by mortar bombs. Another 19.5 per cent were the result of ‘splinters of unknown origin’ – very likely shards of blasted pebbles. Of the rest, 20 per cent were caused by machine-gun bullets, nearly 11 per cent from sniper fire and 2.6 per cent from hand grenades.
The Essex Scottish attack died on the wire. For most of those who survived the beach crossing, the next hours were spent crouched in the lee of the sea wall, frozen in the knowledge that movement probably meant injury or death.
Until leaving the Glengyle, the Rileys’ CO Bob Labatt had been too busy to think about his feelings. He had been taken aback by the news that Dieppe was on again. Yet now, heading ashore in the LCA with his battalion headquarters he found ‘any misgivings I may have had regarding the plan had completely disappeared.’ They were ‘launched upon a daring expedition, undoubtedly the most hazardous operation undertaken by Canadian troops. I was elated to think that we had been amongst those chosen to carry it out.’ The eyes of his 520 men would be on him, watching for signs of fear. He was ‘pleased to realise that I was not scared and none of the physical reactions of this emotion manifested themselves’.13
As the sky lightened the horizon came slowly into focus and Labatt started to pick out the prominent features of the waterfront which he recognised from hours of studying the recce and intelligence photographs: the tall, flat-fronted hotels on the promenade, the chimneys of the tobacco factory and there, on the right below the chateau was their aiming point – the neoclassical pleasure dome of the casino.
The casino was the Rileys’ first objective. It had to be taken fast for the rest of their tasks to be completed. As ever the list was absurdly ambitious. After clearing the casino, B Company led by Major Bud Matchett was to maraud through the town capturing enemy headquarters and offices. Major Richard Bowery’s D Company were expected to scale the cliff, capture the chateau, knock out the clifftop batteries and then hook up with the South Saskatchewans advancing from Pourville. Each mission would have tested a battalion, shored up with full artillery and air support. In the delusional military plan they had become company tasks.
Heads turned upwards now as Hurricanes flashed above them and ‘flashes of flame ran up and down the esplanade as the bursts exploded’. Labatt saw three bombs strike the eastern headland followed by clouds of white phosphorus smoke. Then ‘all too quickly it was over’. The men who had stood up to identify landmarks and watch the show ‘were disappointed. “Is that all?” they asked.’
Captain Denis Whitaker was in the same landing craft as the CO. His platoon’s job was guarding the battalion and brigade HQ once it was set up in the church of Saint-Rémy just behind the promenade. ‘We looked at one another,’ he remembered. ‘Something was terribly wrong. Everything was intact! We expected a town shattered by the RAF’s saturation bombing…We thought we would see a lot of damage to the seafront buildings from the shelling. There was no sign of bombing. The window panes were glittering, unbroken, in the reflections of the sun’s first rays.’14
With 400 yards to go Labatt heard a ‘sharp staccato note’ rap out from the shore and machine-gun rounds thumped into the armour. They were followed by mortars and shells from anti-tank and field pieces that crashed around the craft, now spread out in line abreast, so that ‘the surface of the water was hidden by spray’. They appeared to be crossing a belt of pre-aimed fire, for a hundred yards from the beach the racket subsided. Already two landing craft on the right of the flotilla were sinking and the two platoons on board likely dead or lost to the fight. As they closed the beach they could see the muzzle flashes from the upper windows and ground floor of the casino.
The ramp dropped. Whitaker led the thirty-odd men inside in a charge about twenty-five yards up the beach. ‘We fanned out and flopped down just short of a huge wire obstacle,’ he wrote. ‘Bullets flew everywhere…mortar bombs started to crash down. Around me, men were being hit and bodies were piling up, one on top of the other. It was terrifying.’
Nearby, Corporal John Williamson was regretting the enormous weight he was carrying. ‘We had loaded ourselves down with so much ammunition we could hardly walk,’ he remembered. Besides ammunition for his Thompson he had ‘a couple of hand grenades and two mortar bombs. When the craft hit the beach, I stepped off and fell flat on my face in the bloody water. I struggled to get up, but with all this ammunition, as well as my battledress and heavy, hobnailed boots, I was weighted down.’
Labatt managed to get a signal off telling HQ he was ashore. He had landed in the middle of his companies. The one on the right was ‘having a bad time’. Twenty yards ahead the centre company was cutting through the first roll of wire. The lead section were pouring fire into a pillbox on the leftward side of the casino. He ran forward at a crouch to cross the wire and get a better look. Halfway through he got stuck and lay there for a few seconds with ‘the strands above me thrumming like banjo strings as they were hit’.
The section was in a hollow fifteen yards from the pillbox. Labatt watched a ‘lone man worming his way through the jungle of wire surrounding the emplacement. He reached it, then having pulled the pin from a grenade, he stood up and shoved it through a loophole.’
The capture of the casino had begun and the entire effort of the battalion would be exhausted in achieving it. Labatt’s ‘right-hand company had been practically annihilated before reaching the wire’ and ‘the left company…got through to the esplanade there to be practically wiped out’.
The casino finally fell at about 07.00 after an hour of fighting. Assisting the Rileys was a demolition party of engineers led by Lance Sergeant George Hickson who were charged with cracking the safe in the Dieppe post office and blowing up the torpedoes cached in the eastern headland. Hickson and his men moved through the halls and salons dealing with snipers holed up in seaward-facing rooms by the simple means of blowing down the walls. Many decided to come out with their hands up and twenty-three prisoners were taken.
Labatt remained on the beach below the casino where he felt he stood a better chance of making some sense of the surrounding chaos. He was in intermittent contact with 4th Brigade headquarters who first informed him that Brigadier Lett was about to join him, then told him that Lett had been wounded and he was now in charge. Labatt tried contacting the other brigade battalions but there was silence from the Royals on Blue Beach and the message from the Essex was that they were pinned down and bereft of any cover.
The Rileys were luckier. The casino offered a sort of protective corridor into the boulevard de Verdun and the adjoining streets. Labatt decided to ‘siphon everyone I could through the casino into the town’ and then work left via the buildings on the front to assist the Essex.
Another engineer party under Lieutenant William Ewener used the casino as a launch pad to try to blow up a roadblock at the top of the rue de Sygogne, which ran below the chateau ramparts into town, but were beaten back by heavy fire. At least two groups did make it out of the casino and into town. The first was led by Captain Tony Hill who had taken over the remnants of B Company after Major Matchett was killed in front of the casino. He and about a dozen men dashed across the boulevard from the rear entrance, and finding the rue de Sygogne impassable, worked left ending up in a cinema theatre. Its rear entrance took them onto the street leading to the church of Saint-Rémy which in the plan had been assigned as the main headquarters. They spent the next hour and a half in the streets around the church, running into groups of the enemy and sparking ragged firefights before falling back to the casino. Sergeant Hickson and his group also penetrated the town as far as the rue de la Barre, a main street running parallel with the boulevard de Verdun. Here there was ‘much activity by enemy snipers’. They killed one with a Boys anti-tank rifle. Coming under fire from a house they cleared it and ‘the party of German infantry holding it [was] destroyed. There was hand-to-hand fighting…’ Having all but exhausted their ammunition and seeing no other friendly units with which to join forces they retreated to the casino, cutting telephone cables on the way.
Despite the sniper fire the Hickson party reported seeing ‘civilians, or at any rate persons in civilian clothes…moving freely about the streets and making no attempt to take cover’. They decided the ‘civilians’ were giving away their position to snipers and ‘therefore cleared the streets with Bren-gun fire’.
This seems to have been an example of the scrambled perceptions that afflict men on battlefields making any scenario possible. The likelihood is that they were simply curious Dieppois displaying the same remarkable disregard for safety that the raiders found almost everywhere they went ashore. Pierre Delvallée was woken in his third-floor apartment opposite the church of Saint-Rémy on the rue de la Barre that morning by the sound of shooting out to sea. He thought nothing of it as convoy clashes ‘were pretty routine around Dieppe’.15 Half an hour later he was woken again, this time by aircraft flying low overhead. RAF raids were another habitual occurrence but when the noise persisted he turned on the wireless and heard the six o’clock news on Radio Paris announce ‘an attempted English landing at Dieppe’. He went downstairs and peered out of the front door. German soldiers, weapons in hand, were filtering into the rue des Bains and the rue de la Martinière which formed two sides of the church square.
A lorry with a gun on the back, camouflaged with branches, trundled past, firing skywards at British aircraft. The streets were empty of civilians. Then he saw a boy, ‘about ten years old, milk can in hand’ saunter across to the dairy on the corner. It was closed and the pavement in front carpeted with shattered glass. The boy walked away again at the same leisurely pace. Then a girl of the same age appeared, also heading calmly for the dairy. Delvallée yelled at her to go home. Then he found a balcony with a good view and settled down to watch the show.
A mile to the north and against all odds, men of the Essex Scottish also managed to cross the promenade and get into the streets around the port. Company Sergeant Major Cornelius ‘Tommy’ Stapleton was in charge of a section of cooks and drivers who had been trained up to provide a security detail to protect battalion headquarters. They were not in the first wave to land and were put down in the centre of the beach opposite the tobacco factory on the boundary with the Rileys. This stretch of beach was empty and Stapleton assumed that the rest of the regiment was inside the town. They awaited a lull in the firing and mortaring before launching ‘one mad dash’ across the bare space of the promenade to the boulevard de Verdun. They broke into a hotel, killing two Germans inside and exited from the back and into the harbour area. On the odyssey that followed they failed to find any of their comrades. This did not stop them shooting up every German they saw, including a truckload of troops they took on with their two Brens, one Thompson and three or four rifles.
News of the Stapleton party’s exploits somehow filtered back to Calpe. In transmission its importance became greatly and disastrously magnified. By the time it reached the headquarters ship it had been inflated to signify that the Essex were now across the beach and into town and one major aspect of Jubilee was being executed as planned.
Hughes-Hallett claimed later that one glance at the shore was enough to tell him the situation was dire. Calpe was less than three miles from shore and had a ‘grandstand view’. Although the smokescreens and fires made it impossible to see anything in detail he ‘felt sure that things were going badly, partly through the sight of so many damaged landing craft limping back…and partly because the reports being received by General Roberts in his improvised Operations Room below the bridge were chaotic and uninformative’.16
Hughes-Hallett’s assessment of the state of communications was correct. The surviving log of messages received reads like gibberish and it must have been impossible to discern any clear narrative about events on the beaches from the mangled phrases arriving over the net. To confuse things further, the timings attached to them are often much later than the events they describe.
As he studied the garbled scraps of intelligence Ham Roberts seemed determined to find a positive interpretation. Bad tidings were marked as ‘believed phoney’ or ‘may be bogus’, and dismissed as disinformation planted by the Germans who it was believed had somehow broken into the networks.17 The few wisps of intelligence lightening the picture were clung to gratefully even though they contradicted the evidence of his eyes.
The battalion and brigade commanders had been allotted code names that matched their first names so ‘Fred’ was Colonel Jasperson and ‘Bob’ was Colonel Labatt. A signal at 05.28 stated ‘Fred in houses. Bob landed.’18 Another at 05.44 reported ‘No news from Doug [Catto] yet.’ There was no information coming in from the Yellow, Orange and Green Beaches attacks but the absence of shells from the coastal batteries at Berneval and Varengeville gave grounds for cautious optimism. At 06.20 began a stream of signals suggesting that events at Puys and on one of the main beaches were going into reverse. The first stated: ‘Blue Beach landing has failed.’ Five minutes later came ‘Impossible to land Blue Beach.’ It was followed at 06.31 by a desperate-sounding signal from Red Beach: ‘Fred – we have to get off beach.’ Fifteen minutes later came another to Lett: ‘Fred to Sherwood – we have to get off beach. Coy [Company] held on beach.’
Those around Roberts searched his stolid face for some reaction. In vain. When he spoke his tone was positive and Lieutenant Dan Doheny, a 2nd Division liaison officer on Calpe, ‘gathered from [him] it was proceeding satisfactorily and it was just a matter of time before the town was in our hands’.19
Behind his monumental impassiveness Roberts was wrestling with a fateful decision, the responsibility for which was his alone. The only resource he controlled that could affect the outcome was his ‘floating reserve’, the main body of which was the men of the Fusiliers Mont-Royal. They were his to throw into the battle at the time and place where he judged they would make the most difference.
Around 06.40 he decided the moment had come to send them in. At that point, as far as he knew, the Royals had not got ashore. Imagining them to be holding somewhere offshore he now ordered their landing craft to divert to Red Beach and help the Essex. At the same time he ordered Lieutenant Colonel Ménard, the Fusiliers’ CO who had come aboard Calpe half an hour earlier, ‘to land and moving to the west, establish themselves on White Beach’.20
In his post-operational report Roberts justified the move by stating that ‘about one hour after touchdown information received indicated that Red Beach was sufficiently cleared to permit the landing of the floating reserve’. That ‘information’ seems to have been the signal reporting that the Essex had penetrated the town. Later there were various versions of what was originally transmitted and how it was subsequently misinterpreted.
Sergeant Dave Hart, a 4th Brigade signaller who survived the Red Beach landing along with his set, remembered reporting that ‘one man in the Essex Scottish has penetrated the town’.21 Colonel Stacey, the Canadian official historian, traces the decision to a signal from the Essex to the Rileys stating ‘twelve of our men in the buildings’, an accurate enough summary of the Stapleton foray. This was picked up at 06.10 on Fernie as ‘Essex Scots across the beaches and in houses’ and transmitted on to Calpe.
By 07.00 the Fusiliers were on their way. Twelve minutes later came another signal that seemed to suggest their mission was worthwhile: ‘Casino taken – Bob.’ That, by then, was true, but it did not alter the truth that the French Canadians were sailing into disaster.
By the time Roberts made his choice there was evidence to hand to contradict the dim picture painted by the signals. Hughes-Hallett claimed later that he learned of the catastrophe at Blue Beach at about 06.30 from Lieutenant Commander Colin McMullen who had led in some of the landing craft carrying the Royals and then come on board Calpe to give a verbal report. Hughes-Hallett was shaken. His first thought was for the Royal Marines’ ‘cutting out’ party, crammed into French Chasseurs and led by HMS Locust, who were due to sail into the harbour at 07.00 to capture the German landing craft. With the eastern headland still in enemy hands they would come under fire at point-blank range and every ship would probably be lost.
He ‘reluctantly…with General Roberts’s full permission…cancelled the Locust’s mission’ and had the marines transferred to LCAs.22 Roberts understood, as did everyone, that Dieppe could not be captured as long as the guns on the east cliff were firing. Yet not only did he launch the Fusiliers on a futile charge, he then ordered the marines to follow them. Roberts never made any serious attempt to justify or explain these decisions. In the absence of his testimony they will always remain incomprehensible. There was nothing apart from a few words over the radio to suggest that the battle had reached a tipping point and that one more push would bring victory. All the evidence suggested that a disaster was in the making and a responsible commander’s thoughts should have focussed on saving what lives and equipment he could. Instead Roberts violated a cardinal military principle so commonplace and obvious that it was widely known to civilians. He was reinforcing failure and he was doing it twice.
Lieutenant Colonel ‘Joe’ Ménard led his men in on a motor launch. At 200 yards out, fire started to smack into the R-boats behind. Ménard’s throat was ‘dry and burning. I was desperate to do something instead of being nailed down in the bloody boat.’23 On touching down he ran through a gap in the wire cut by the sappers and towards the sea wall. He had not gone three yards before he was hit for the first time. As he explained later, the word ‘hit’ was a euphemism. It was ‘like being stunned with a blacksmith’s hammer. There’s no sudden pain. What really shakes you is that you don’t know where you have been struck or by what.’ Even so, he waved his men on telling them ‘It’s nothing.’
He felt for damage and found he was bleeding heavily from his right shoulder. He fumbled in his hip pocket for a field dressing but found it impossible to apply with his left hand. He ‘lost all sense of the outside world’. Then the ‘fog lifted’. He stumbled forward across the beach shouting an order to spread out. Shell splinters slashed open his cheek. A soldier dropped in front of him. It was an officer he was particularly fond of. The man was clutching his stomach with both hands and struggling to breathe. Ménard groped in his first-aid kit and found a morphine tablet. ‘My friend never took his eyes off me but he didn’t say a word. He pushed out his tongue a little. I placed the pill on it and he swallowed it. He knew very well that there was nothing else I could do for him.’
Until now his body had responded to the disciplines drummed into him by many years of training but the sight of his stricken friend threw him into ‘a blind rage and I had only one idea in my head: to shoot, to get even with these pigs’. The madness passed and an analgesic numbness set in. He reached the sea wall and was crossing it when a bullet struck him above the wrist. He hardly felt it and reaching the cover of a bombed-out pillbox directed his men as best he could for the next hour until he was hit yet again, this time in the leg. Before he finally passed out his eyes wandered over the battlefield. ‘Not even a cat could move on the beach or promenade. Anyone who tried was immediately immobilised by a gust of machine-gun fire or a sniper’s bullet, not to mention mortar bombs and artillery shells. They were even firing at the corpses, as if they wanted to kill them twice…’
The sacrifice of the Fusiliers had changed nothing. Roberts meanwhile had added another sacrificial offering to the pyre. Shortly after 08.00 he issued an order to the Royal Marines. Its ambition revealed how far Roberts was now removed from reality. They were to go in and ‘support the Essex Scottish through White Beach…the idea being to pass through the beach to the town and there reform and report to the colonel of the Essex Scottish, the object…being to pass around the west and south of the town and attack the batteries on the eastern cliff from the south’.24 After the first three flights, no more of the twenty-seven tanks still afloat had gone ashore, yet some of them were now detailed to land alongside the marines. Ten minutes later the order was rescinded and the remaining LCTs turned for home.
Roberts may have been prompted to send in the marines by a string of encouraging-sounding signals from the main beaches. At 08.10 Calpe received ‘Elements of Johnny [the Calgary Tanks] have made progress now in front of Tobacco Factory.’25 It was followed at 08.17 by ‘have control of White Beach’. This did not amount to evidence that a breakthrough was imminent. The timetable had long since ceased to have any meaning, and the idea that any of the main objectives were attainable was a fantasy.
The marines went ashore in two LCMs and five LCAs led by Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Picton Phillipps. It was now getting on for 08.30. They were shielded on either side by an escort of Chasseurs. The senior officer Lieutenant Malcolm Buist wrote in his after-action report that ‘it was not long before I realised that this landing was to be a sea parallel of the Charge of the Light Brigade…shells started to burst all round the group of landing craft which we endeavoured to screen by smoke…I shouted to Colonel Phillipps to ask what he thought about going on but I doubt whether he heard me. Anyway he merely waved his arms and grinned to show that he meant to land at all costs…’26
Buist’s Chasseur was then hit and he pulled away to inspect the damage. When he resumed position ‘the landing was all over. Five of the seven craft had reached the beach and been shot to pieces.’ The other two had been saved thanks to Phillipps. At the last second he stood up on the deck and waved frantically for them to turn back into the cover of the smokescreen. Then he fell, mortally wounded. Two officers spared by his gesture reported that ‘the beach was a shambles with bodies of the soldiers lying in arrowhead formation as they had advanced from the landing craft’.
Above the carnage the Germans looked down in awe. Hauptmann H. H. Ditz, commanding a battery on the west headland, saw a ‘picture which…could teach any man what fear means’.27 The beach ‘was strewn with infantry equipment: machine guns, packs, grenade throwers, munitions’. The Canadians were ‘clinging tightly against the concrete wall, seeking protection’. On the broad lawn that ran the length of the promenade ‘tanks were twisting and turning…trying to get through into the town’. It seemed to Ditz that ‘they could try forever’ and it would make no difference.