By 09.00 it was clear that Roberts’s gamble had failed. Even Mann despaired. He turned to the American observer aboard Fernie, Lucian Truscott, and admitted: ‘General, I am afraid that this operation will go down as one of the great failures in history.’1 The only option left to the force commanders was to get the surviving troops off as quickly as possible, yet Roberts still seemed reluctant to accept the inevitable. In the end it was Hughes-Hallett who pressed for the withdrawal order to be brought forward. He suggested that re-embarkation begin at 10.30 or earlier. Roberts held out for 11.00 which the senior air officer on Calpe, Air Commodore Cole, told him would give the RAF time to maximise air cover.
All Canadian units were supposed to be evacuated from the Dieppe beaches. The re-embarkation schedule was just as elaborate as every other part of the plan. The South Saskatchewans, for example, were expected to fall back in ten precisely timed phases, although the orders did admit that ‘the tactical situation during re-embarkation cannot accurately be forecast’ and ‘large deviations from this plan must be expected’.2 Reality now dictated that the Green Beach units would have to leave from Pourville. As for Blue Beach, there was no one left to take off.
The evacuation would be a desperate business, more testing even than Dunkirk. Human life was the priority and the tanks would have to be left behind. The code word for withdrawal was ‘Vanquish’. Somehow it filtered through the airwaves, reaching the headquarters of 4th Brigade, still afloat on an LCT at 09.40, who then passed it by their sole remaining set to the Essex and the Rileys. Whatever relief was felt at the news was crushed by the knowledge that the retreat would be as traumatic as the attack. All the efforts of the RAF had failed to reduce the Germans’ firepower. In the hours since the landing it had actually increased as General Haase ordered more artillery and troops into the area. The Germans could afford to bide their time. ‘Enemy along headlands, waiting for Vanquish,’ ran a fatalistic message from the main beaches as they prepared from their next ordeal.3
The man left commanding the Camerons, Major Andrew Law, had already decided to fall back to Green Beach when the news reached him. The battalion penetrated further inland than any other unit but were still far short of the Saint-Aubin-sur-Scie airfield. They had made painful progress up the west side of the Scie and stopped on high ground near Petit-Appeville on the main road leading east into Dieppe. Law had intended there to cross the river and swing north to attack Quatre Vents farm from behind. From his vantage point he could see this was now impossible. Horses were hauling guns up to the hill overlooking the bridge. He ordered the men to fall back to Pourville, just as his radio operator picked up a signal from 6th Brigade to the Saskatchewans telling them to rendezvous on the beach and prepare to be taken off.
The Saskatchewans were still fighting on the east bank of the Scie but soon after 10.00 everyone had made it back to Pourville. As they retreated the enemy moved in to fill the vacuum. Rearguard parties took up positions in the shattered houses of the village to cover their comrades hurrying for the shore.
When Sergeant Marcel Swank of the US Rangers arrived at the eastern end of Pourville he was ordered to hold the perimeter and settled behind a hedge with his M1 Garand rifle trained on the road ahead. A Canadian Bren-gunner dropped down beside him and began loosing off bursts at unseen enemies. The Germans fired back and ‘laid a streak of fire over our heads through the hedge and little leaves began to float down on us’.4 The Canadian took off and Swank was on his own. For the first time since going ashore he felt really frightened. Long afterwards he remembered ‘pulling my rifle back through the hedge, laying my head on the stock and praying. I wanted to live so badly.’ Swank was a Roman Catholic and said an act of contrition in readiness for death, then ‘rolled over on my back and looked at the sky…It was a beautiful day, little puffy clouds floating over. I was nineteen years old and I just didn’t want to die.’
He heard a voice behind asking: ‘Are you frightened, Yank?’ He turned to see a Canadian major and told him, ‘I’m scared to death.’ ‘Don’t worry about it,’ the major told him. I’ve been in stickier places than this and got out.’ Swank gave up thoughts of dying and followed the major’s orders to get down to the beach to help evacuate casualties.
By the time the first wave of LCAs arrived at 11.04 the Germans were already on the high ground at either end of the beach.5 Gunboats and destroyers fired shells and smoke at their positions throughout the evacuation but with little effect.
The tide had gone out. To reach the boats meant a 200-yard dash through a heavy crossfire of mortars, machine guns and artillery. The wounded went first and German prisoners, at least two dozen of whom had been taken during the day, were ordered to carry stretchers. The enemy guns did not spare their comrades. Only one captive made it back to England.
Swank teamed up with a fellow Ranger, Sergeant Lloyd Church. He had landed with him but not seen him since. Together they moved men to an abandoned pillbox on the promenade where stretcher-bearers carried them to the boats. On the shore men were steeling themselves for the fateful dash. He saw them ‘run across the beach, get hit then roll as they were hit…you could tell where a boat had loaded because there were bodies rolling in the sand at that point.’
He and Church dropped to the beach and ran. Halfway across Swank realised he was alone. Church was down. He turned back and dragged his buddy back to the sea wall. He had a head wound but was conscious. He asked him, ‘Do you think you can make it?’ Church said ‘No.’ Swank thought hard. He could ‘stay with this man and be captured, possibly killed, or I could make my break across the beach and back to England’. He made his decision – one that Church subsequently ‘had no complaints about’ – and ran for the nearest LCA. It had come in fast and got stuck. ‘Men were all about the boat, some up front pushing, some along the side dragging on ropes some at the rear pulling and the motors were racing and all around there was mortar fire and automatic weapons playing into this group.’
As he waded out, semi-submerged corpses bumped against his legs. He was clinging to the side of the boat when a young Canadian started to haul himself over the side. He had ‘just got his head and shoulders above the level of the deck…when I heard this “slam!”, just like someone had rammed his fist into a piece of raw meat and the kid came tumbling back down on me and knocked me down into the water. I picked him up by the front of his battle jacket. Most of his face was gone and I just laid him back in the water.’
The craft was still stuck. He saw another boat pulling away and decided to try to reach it. He pushed through the water, clutching his rifle. ‘The butt was up and the muzzle was down and I felt something tugging. I couldn’t understand what it was. I turned around…my [rifle’s] front sight had caught in the clothing of a body and I was dragging it out to sea with me as I walked.’ He broke down his Garand and scattered the pieces, dumped his steel helmet and ammunition and struck out for the landing craft as machine-gun bullets and sniper rounds smacked around him. Someone on the boat saw him and it stopped to pick him up. Then his hands closed around a rope and he pulled himself aboard. He heard the whine of a ricochet and a bullet struck his arm. It was the first injury he had received all day and it was a flesh wound.
About a dozen LCAs made it in to Green Beach. Some of them had been ordered to Red Beach but, confused by the smoke that drifted everywhere, had landed at Pourville. Only eight made it out again. Nonetheless, the majority of the waiting Saskatchewans and Camerons got off. Colonel Merritt led the party covering the withdrawal. ‘Throughout the day his actions had been almost incredibly gallant,’ declared Captain John Runcie of the Camerons in his after-action report.6 There was one more act of selfless heroism before the end. Incredibly, Merritt had got through the day without injury but had just been wounded by a sniper. Nonetheless he now ‘crossed the wide beach through…extremely heavy fire and carried to shelter under the wall a wounded soldier who was lying at the water’s edge’.
The landing craft withdrew leaving about 250 men on the beach. They knew the rescuers would probably not be returning. The enemy fire slackened. It was replaced with the roar of Merlin engines, and six Spitfires, believing the figures below to be Germans, swept in and machine-gunned the beach, causing further casualties.
The dozen or so officers held a ‘confab’. They had little ammunition left. Runcie recalled later how they argued whether they should ‘fight to the last man and the last round or…surrender in order to prevent further loss of life’. There was little hope of inflicting further damage on the enemy. They decided unanimously to surrender. There were still men firing from a scaffolding frame shoring up the sea wall. They were ordered to climb down and ‘we chucked our weapons down and called it a day.’ The Germans were already on the beach.
For the men on Red and White the signalling of ‘Vanquish’ marked the start of another appalling ordeal. The battle was lost. The struggle now was to stay alive and in one piece until the boats got in. Those on the beach who had not made it to the casino clung to the sea wall or flattened themselves on the galets. Few were unwounded. A sort of exalted fatalism gripped some, inspiring unforgettable displays of courage. Captain the Reverend John Foote, the Rileys’ burly Presbyterian military chaplain was one of four padres who went ashore. On landing he attached himself to the makeshift Regimental Aid Post (RAP) sited in a dip in the beach which gave just enough cover if you were stretched out flat. Later when the tide retreated they shifted to the shelter of a stranded LCT. Over and over again, Foote darted out to carry back casualties then helped to dress their wounds. The LCT was hit by shellfire which set off the ammunition on board. There were ‘bullets flying back and forth and ricocheting all over the place and it eventually got red hot and we had to take the men out’, he remembered.7 They moved the casualties into the lee of the LCT but several of their charges were dead. Throughout it all he stayed calm and even cheerful and ever afterwards made light of his actions, as if ministering to his flock in the middle of a battle was normal behaviour: ‘Everybody did the same thing. They carried their wounded, they bound them up and they did what they could.’
Bob Labatt was beside the casino where he had set up his dual headquarters as CO of the Rileys and acting 4th Brigade commander. If they were to hold out before the evacuation began at 11.00 it was ‘essential to keep pressing…and to plaster West Cliff and the buildings across the esplanade with everything available’.8 Over the one barely functioning radio he made repeated requests for aircraft to lay smoke and bombard the positions.
The Calgary Tanks were doing their utmost to support their comrades. Most of those which reached the promenade had returned to the beach, reckoning it was safer and offered better scope for spotting and hitting targets. As long as they had shells left they would fire them. The Churchills’ tracks may have been vulnerable but their armour was not and artillery and anti-tank rounds seemed to bounce off. Trooper Elmer Cole’s Mark I ‘only had a two-pounder gun on it and it didn’t have much firepower but we were pretty safe in it’.9
The sight of them cheered the 130 or so troops, most of them Rileys, sheltering in the casino. Wounded and prisoners were collected on the ground floor on the north-eastern side and at least some of the latter had their thumbs bound. It was impossible to get the casualties across the beach to the RAP and the uninjured applied what first aid they could to friend and foe alike. They were sharing the same hell and it brought them together. Sapper W. Price, one of the engineer party which had earlier entered the town, spoke German. He got into conversation with a prisoner wearing a metal badge awarded for athletic prowess. The prisoner told him he was a 100-metre sprint champion and had represented Germany at the 1936 Olympics. He also confirmed ‘that the enemy knew we were coming but didn’t know when’.10 That was now believed by everybody, with a minority convinced that the defenders also knew the time and place.
The Germans showed no signs of counter-attacking. The tanks on the beach were a deterrent but for the moment there was no need to take risks. Labatt was alerted to an astonishing sight by Company Sergeant Major Harris who handed him his field glasses. He looked towards the west headland to see ‘a large group of German officers, some in white summer tunics…these people were standing right in the open obviously out to see the fun. Some were smoking cigars.’ He ordered two Brens to open fire and they disappeared ‘in split seconds’.
Shortly before 11.00 he sent runners out to tell the men to start moving to the water. It was a sunny day, the visibility perfect. Just as they prepared to run two aircraft swooped in trailing smoke that magically cloaked the beach from one end to the other. All enemy guns turned on the aircraft and the soldiers took their chance, rushing gratefully into the fog.
The withdrawal was taking place as the air battle reached a new height of intensity. The Luftwaffe was slow to act at first but by 10.00 was launching continuous bombing raids on the fleet. As Leigh-Mallory had calculated, the enemy would have to throw every asset into repelling the attack, and by the end of the day all units within reach had been in action. The fighter air umbrella shielded the troops from the added trauma of air attacks, and of the many horrors recorded in their accounts, strafing and bombing are hardly mentioned.
It was at sea that the danger felt closest. On board Garth Goronwy Rees watched the German bombs falling ‘slowly downwards, turning in the air like beer bottles, so slowly that it seemed impossible that they should not hit [us]’.11 He was on the bridge when bomb splinters ‘ricocheted madly [a]round’. Standing beside him was ‘a tall, fair-haired young artillery officer…He turned to me with a look of surprise on his young serious face, a look so intense that at first I could not understand what had so profoundly startled him. Then slowly he tumbled to the deck…’
The man was Derek Turner, the bombardment liaison officer for Blue Beach. ‘I felt an extraordinary numb bang on my fingers on my left hand and heard the loudest noise I’ve ever heard – a short sharp scream of metal,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I looked at my fingers. My index finger was hanging nearly off and I felt no pain. I then felt the back of my left leg with my right hand and felt nothing but hot rawness but again, no pain.’ He lay down. To his surprise he was not frightened. Instead ‘the shock made me feel very collected and natural.’ His gaze fixed on the side of the bridge. ‘It was splattered with blood and there was a piece of meat about the size of a large mouthful sticking to some woodwork and sliding down. I looked around to see if anyone else had been hit – they hadn’t and that meat was a bit of me!12
Thanks to the fighters none of the larger ships were sunk in the first hours of attacks, though the sheer weight of the bomber assault suggested that the Luftwaffe’s luck was bound to change. The withdrawal would stretch the RAF’s abilities and resources to the maximum. The squadrons would have to simultaneously shake up the defences with bombs and cannon attacks and blind them with smoke, while all the time fending off the bombers and engaging the fighters sent to protect them.
The precision smoke-laying on the Dieppe beach that so impressed Labatt was one of numerous coordinated sorties being flown at that minute. The airmen were an international motley, drawn from America, Canada, Norway, France, Belgium and every corner of the British Empire. The assault on the headlands was opened by several squadrons flying Hurricane Mark II ‘Hurribombers’. No. 174 Squadron hit the east headland while 32 Squadron attacked the west cliff. After they dropped their 500 lb bombs two more squadrons, 3 and 43, delivered cannon attacks. This operation cost 174 Squadron three aircraft. Turning over the town, Pilot Officer Raymond Van Wymeersch of the Free French was hit by flak and wounded but survived to be taken prisoner. An Australian, Flight Sergeant C. B. Watson, was shot down into Dieppe harbour and was rescued by the Germans. Sergeant Charles James did not survive.
The Hurricanes were followed by smoke-laying runs on the headlands by Bostons from 226 Squadron. It was two aircraft from 226 which trailed the carpet of smoke from fifty feet for a mile along the beach. All were braving German fire that was as lethally effective as ever. They were also frequently at the mercy of the fleet gunners whose poor ability to identify their own aircraft was painfully revealed that day.
Their long experience of raiding over the French coast had taught the fighter squadrons to fear the Focke-Wulf 190s and respect the skill of their pilots. As they twisted in the tight airspace over the battlefield, searching for that instant of advantage that decided a dogfight, they found that weight of numbers alone did not tip the balance in their favour.
Wing Commander Myles Duke-Woolley was leading 232 Squadron who were ‘new to the scene’ on a patrol over the fleet when ‘one German fighter dived out of the sun from a great height, attacked us head-on, and I did not see him until he was maybe 600 yards away and firing. Our…closing speed was probably around 800 mph, say 400 yards a second, and I failed to react in the second or second-and-a-half at my disposal.’13 The FW 190 shot down two Spitfires, killing both pilots, but ‘the squadron most commendably did not waver.’
Duke-Woolley was enormously experienced. So too was Wing Commander James ‘Johnnie’ Johnson, a superb air fighter and consummate tactician. In an early dogfight over the town he had some desperate minutes shaking off an FW 190 which got on his tail and he counted himself lucky to survive. The day proved to him the ‘all-round superiority of the Focke-Wulfs over our Spitfire Vs’ and he judged later that ‘the Luftwaffe bested us in the air fighting’.14 In general, the episode demonstrated how much the Allies had to learn about the tactical use of aircraft to support forces in close-locked combat.
The presence of controllers on Calpe made no difference to Johnson for he ‘could never establish communications with it on the four times we flew that day…we never heard a thing from them’.15 There was little to show for all the RAF’s enormous efforts. The imperviousness of the batteries to air attack was witnessed by an expert, George Browne, the forward artillery observer on Blue Beach who, having climbed the cliff with Colonel Catto’s party, spent hours watching the anti-aircraft battery on top of the east headland in action. The team manning it ‘served its guns magnificently’, he reported later.16 Between 10.00 and 16.00 ‘it was low-level bombed at least four times and machine-gunned oftener by our fighters with us as witnesses and each time the guns were back in action within a matter of a few seconds, firing upon the departing aircraft.’
The evacuations called for another great effort of will from the crews of the landing craft. They had sailed into the hecatomb once and were being asked to do so again. The original idea had been to take most of the troops off in LCTs but they had proved to be too big and too vulnerable and the LCAs would have to do the job. Their chances of success were tiny. The operation required mustering the available landing craft grouped in the boat pool and somehow directing them to the right beaches. The wireless networks were in tatters and ships had now to resort to signal lamps and loudhailers to communicate with one another. The Luftwaffe roared overhead, their bombs flinging up great geysers of spray and disrupting and discouraging all movement except flight. The smoke that from time to time masked the boats from the guns and planes also brought confusion and disorientation, greatly increasing the risk of putting ashore in the wrong place. Finally there was the question of courage. It was a finite commodity. Every boat commander knew what the order to close the shore entailed. They would have to reach deep inside themselves to find the resolve needed to go forward again as death advanced towards them, bony hands outstretched.
The boat-pool officers rounded up what craft they could and the roughly assembled force moved towards the smoke- and flame-wreathed shore. Five destroyers fell in behind them, belching smoke and pumping shells: Slazak, Brocklesby, Berkeley, Fernie and Calpe herself. The onshore wind pushed the smokescreen before them, providing relief from the guns but the Luftwaffe and the artillerymen knew that anything they landed in the murk was likely to hit something.
As the beach approached, the barrage thickened making landing an all but suicidal prospect, and the decision not to press on was an act of sober sanity rather than cowardice. The officer in charge of the boat pool, Commander H. V. P. McClintock, was frank about his reactions as he closed the eastern limit of Red Beach in a motor launch. ‘I got as far as abreast the end of Dieppe breakwater when a bombing and cannon attack developed and I rather think that we were also under fire from the shore but am not sure,’ he told the post-operational inquiry. ‘At any rate I retired very hurriedly to seaward, followed by quite a few landing craft.’17
Only half of the thirty-six or so craft available attempted to touch down on the main beaches.18 The Canadians were waiting, crouched beside beached and burned-out landing craft. They looked out to sea, urging onwards the craft that were their only way home. Captain McGregor of the Essex was crouched alongside the principal military landing officer Major Brian McCool, squinting through the haze at the approaching LCAs: ‘A Stuka bomber would dive on them and a great spray of water would go up. When it went down there would be no landing craft.’19 The few that arrived were overwhelmed and the boats sagged under the weight of desperate men. One flotilla officer who reached the shore described how ‘the boats…were literally swamped by sheer weight of numbers of troops trying to embark. Sub Lieutenant Lonnon’s boat was hit by heavy gun fire whilst on the beach and capsized. The remaining three boats of the 10th flotilla succeeded in getting off with approximately seventy troops each on board and only by going full astern.’20
The sanctuary offered by the craft was illusory. Private Provencal of the Fusiliers Mont-Royal was hit by shrapnel as he scrambled aboard an LCA. It began to sink and after baling for a while with their steel helmets everyone on board slipped back into the sea.
Only eight landing craft arrived at the Essex Scottish end of the beach, and six of those were sunk. Some cruised parallel to the shore rather than facing almost certain annihilation if they touched down, trailing ropes over the side for the men to wade out to.
Bob Labatt managed to get aboard a ‘frightfully crowded’ LCA with a group of his men. He was surprised to see that ‘only ten to twelve…had come in and none on the Essex beach’ as far as he could see. He was ‘no sooner aboard than the smoke cleared completely’, catching ‘most of the LCAs either backing away or in the act of turning. Every German weapon turned upon them and all hell let loose.’ What they had experienced before ‘was nothing to this furious hurricane of fire. In no time the sea was littered with the wreckage of shattered LCAs and dotted with heads and waving arms. A shell burst inside the crowded boat next to us with ghastly results.’21
He could feel the boat being hit but ‘was not conscious of anything amiss until I saw the naval crew jump overboard and found that I was standing in water up to my knees’. He ordered his men to inflate their Mae Wests and swim out to meet incoming boats or head back to shore. He struck out in the direction of an LCT half a mile distant. ‘Hundreds of men were swimming around, some out, some towards shore. I tried to keep clear of groups as they presented tempting targets and the sea about them was lashed into foam by machine guns, mortars and artillery.’ As he neared the LCT he saw that it had been hit and was settling by the stern. He kept on swimming, ‘however when there was nothing left to be seen but the bows sticking vertically out of the water, I realised that she wasn’t in very good shape.’ Neither was he. He was tired and very cold and now ‘turned reluctantly back towards the shore’. By 12.20 the flotilla had withdrawn, battered and listing and crammed with dead and wounded. Behind, the hundreds who had not made it watched them go, wondering if they would ever return.
The naval effort was not quite exhausted. The craft that McClintock had turned back were still intact. He had decided that any further effort was impossible. After leaving some wounded men on Alresford he came across several landing craft returning from a bid to evacuate Blue Beach. News that the Royals had in fact landed had finally reached Calpe and Hughes-Hallett gave orders to the man who had organised their landing, Lieutenant Commander Goulding, to try to get troops off. When Goulding approached Blue Beach he chose not to proceed. The report he sent to Calpe, logged at 11.45, stated: ‘Could not see [the position of] Blue Beach owing to fog and heavy fires from cliff…’22 Some craft did attempt to get in, including LCP 159 commanded by Michael Bateson. ‘What a sight!’ he wrote in a personal account a few days later. ‘Overturned craft, half-submerged craft, floating craft with apparently no living thing aboard and at the foot of the cliff a fairly large number of Canadians with Jerry at the top of the cliff quite visible.’23 The Germans seemed so close that Bateson started shooting at them with his revolver while the crew engaged with Lewis guns, but ‘the stuff coming back at us was nobody’s business, everything but the kitchen stove! Jerry was not going to let us get in and the Canadians waved a white flag to us and they were shooing us away…’ They were ‘pleased to get the hell out’.
Bateson’s craft would appear to be one of those that McClintock crossed coming from Blue Beach. Hearing their news he ‘came to the conclusion…that it was not possible to evacuate from Blue, White or Red Beaches’. He ‘told such landing craft as had followed me to form up on a course for home’.
He now set off for Calpe to seek instructions from Hughes-Hallett but was unable to find her in the smoke. By McClintock’s account he then sent a radio message to Hughes-Hallett’s deputy David Luce, asking what to do. Luce replied saying, ‘if no further evacuation possible, withdraw to four miles from shore’. Somehow this was received as ‘no further evacuation possible, withdraw’. This McClintock did at about 12.30 but ‘foolishly…made no reply to this signal so left the force commander in the dark as to what I was doing…’
According to Hughes-Hallett the signal from Calpe originated from himself in response to a request from Ham Roberts who had asked ‘that a further effort be made’.24 Though he feared that this would only result in more losses he thought it right to leave the choice to McClintock – hence the conditional wording of the message. Even if it had arrived ungarbled the decision was McClintock’s and he had long since made up his mind.
At about 12.50 Hughes-Hallett decided to make a last approach in Calpe for ‘a final personal view’. Until now her four-inch guns had stayed silent for fear of disrupting the communications kit on board, but now as she headed for the eastern end of Red Beach she opened fire ‘from the foremost guns at the breakwaters on which machine-gun posts were reported to be preventing the troops…reaching the water. When about two cables from the beach [roughly a quarter of a mile] Calpe came under heavy fire and no sign of troops or landing craft, other than derelicts, could be seen on the beach.’ The destroyer sought cover in smoke and Hughes-Hallett now ‘felt convinced that any further attempt to take off troops would be unlikely to succeed’.
The decision to abandon the brave men onshore clashed with every instinct. Before taking it, he set off to find the gunboat Locust whose shallow draught allowed it to get closer in and whose commander Robert Ryder might have a better appreciation of the situation. As he did so Roberts informed him of a signal from Bill Southam’s 6th Brigade headquarters on the shore. Messages were still getting through and they told with tragic brevity the story of the final minutes:
13.05 Give us quick support. Enemy closing in on beach. Hurry it up please.
13.07 We are evacuating.
13.08 There seems to be a mass surrender of our troops to the Germans on the beach. Our people here have surrendered.25
There was nothing more to be done. Withdrawal was ordered and as the fleet turned for home the shield Fighter Command had raised above them finally cracked. The destroyers were ordered to make smoke and regroup around Calpe four miles offshore. At the rendezvous, three Dorniers dodged in and scattered bombs through the fog. At 13.18 two hit the Berkeley, on the starboard side just forward of the bridge, breaking her back. The order was given to abandon ship and a gunboat went alongside to take off all the crew. Then a torpedo from HMS Albrighton sent her to the bottom.
As they turned away the Luftwaffe closed in. Messerschmitt fighters swooped in a cannon attack on Calpe’s bridge injuring several and severely wounding Air Commodore Cole. It did not deter her from leaving the cover of the air umbrella to pick up a fighter pilot who was spotted in the sea.
The smoke-fringed shore dwindled behind them and the cacophony of battle faded until it was just a ringing in the ears. Occasionally a German aircraft would appear but was soon chased off by the RAF. The destroyers had become hospital ships. The decks were covered with wounded and the cliché of scuppers running with blood became a reality. The medics worked with the same quiet intensity they had shown all day. When a man died they pulled his shirt over his head to save others wasting time when there was nothing more to be done.
Goronwy Rees had studied the eager faces of the Canadians before they went ashore that morning. He studied them again as landing craft unloaded survivors on Garth. They ‘were not the same men’, he wrote. They ‘looked as if they had learned some terrible lesson that was still too vivid for them to express it clearly either to themselves or to anyone else.’ Many were badly wounded and all shocked and exhausted. ‘They had the grey, lifeless faces of men whose vitality had been drained out of them; each of them could have modelled a death mask.’ As they came aboard he heard ‘the oaths and blasphemies, the cursings and revilings, with which men speak of leaders by whom they feel that they have been betrayed and deceived. I thought that this is what a beaten army looks like…’
Rough men schooled to hide emotion showed an unexpected softness. The navy crew treated them with ‘tenderness and gentleness…soothing the hysterical with words like women’s, comforting the exhausted with cups of hot sweet tea’.26
Was Rees right to see defeat in those faces? The big picture was the concern of generals and politicians. For the men who had survived the battle the outcome turned first on a simple consideration. As Marcel Swank sat in a gangway, sipping a mug of rum-laced tea, he began to believe at last that the ordeal was over. The terrors and dangers of a lifetime had been distilled into the space of a few hours, and as he started to examine what he had been through the bigger significance of it all was the last thing on his mind. ‘You’re not really interested in the success or failure of something,’ he reflected later. ‘I was just happy to be alive.’27
But there was a scale on which every man weighed their experience. They first asked themselves: did I let myself and my comrades down? It was the actions of you and your section, your platoon, your company and your battalion that mattered and what happened beyond that was so remote as to be barely relevant. What concerned Swank and his comrades was their small corner of the battlefield. It was in that space that ‘whether you won or lost [was] important. Most of the men I talked to felt they had won their fight. This to them was the important thing. This to the rifleman is the important thing…’
There was a nobility in defeat that in its way was as profound as the glory of victory. For Jack Poolton, the stoicism of the Royals on Blue Beach was a source of great pride. ‘We took our licks,’ he said long afterwards. ‘We didn’t ask for any quarter…We didn’t beg. We didn’t crab. We didn’t bellyache. We knew we’d been licked and we knew the Germans had licked us and we were going to take it like men, like soldiers.’28
If the venture failed it was not their fault. The task they had been given was immense and unrealisable but they gave everything they had in trying to make the impossible happen with so many acts of courage that they could never properly be counted. It came in many forms.
There were the moments when men abandoned all thoughts of safety in their zeal to get to the enemy, the cases of individuals running into streams of fire to silence machine guns, usually dying in the process. When Colonel Ménard of the Fusiliers tried to analyse this kind of heroism he decided it was formed of many impulses, among them ‘a blind anger, a violent thirst for revenge and also a certain fatalism, when you tell yourself “oh what the hell…” ’29 But there were other sorts of heroism on display that had nothing to do with fighting spirit, those times when compassion overwhelmed self-preservation and led men to step out of cover and into spaces filled with red-hot flying metal to drag back casualties. Then there was the indomitable spirit shown by those who refused to accept the crushing logic of their situation and stripped off their uniforms and plunged into the waves, ready to risk death by drowning rather than to raise their hands and be marched off to prison.
There were many others whose courage was of a quieter sort. Quentin Reynolds noted the discreet heroism of Joe Crowther, a Yorkshireman and the wardroom steward on Calpe who through unquenchable cheeriness and endless cups of tea and tots of brandy kept dread at bay among the wounded stuck below decks as the ship was shaken by explosions. ‘Occasionally a bomb fell fairly close, and down below the waterline we were never sure whether we had received a direct hit or not,’ he wrote. ‘We’d hear an explosion and the ship would creak and list a bit, and we’d be quiet and then Joe Crowther would laugh and say, “Hell, that was half a mile away.” ’30
Of the 6,000 soldiers who set off, just over half were returning. Of those left behind, 980 were dead or would die of their wounds. In the end the landing craft evacuated 975 men – 601 off Green Beach, 368 off Red and White and a mere six from Blue Beach.31 Over the afternoon the 2,010 left behind became prisoners.
Surrender was a yearned-for relief for some, a bitter acceptance of failure for others. After swimming back to shore Bob Labatt had arrived just before all resistance ceased. He came across Bill Southam, limping from a wound in the leg, gathering Bren-gunners and riflemen to try to suppress the snipers, still preying on the pathetic, defeated figures scattered below them.
Labatt had lost all his equipment and half his clothes in the swim and now kitted himself out in ‘a poor dead tank chap’s socks, boots and overalls and an ex-naval rating’s duffel coat’. He organised a party to carry casualties into a derelict LCT and with an NCO started to pull casualties back from the waterline. He saw a man run out from cover waving a white flag only to be shot dead, ‘whether by our people or the enemy I do not know’, but ‘probably by both for he had not orders to do it and a stranded tank was in action not twenty yards from him’.32
The tankers had made their decision to stay and fight until their ammunition was exhausted, even if it meant inevitable capture. Enemy fighters were flying over at a hundred feet now not even bothering to bomb or machine-gun. Labatt believed he had to have orders from above to surrender but he had no way of communicating with Southam or anyone else. As acting 4th Brigade commander it was in his hands. Whatever the protocols, individuals were anyway making their own decisions. Another white flag was flying from the LCT medical post, apparently on the instructions of the medical officer.33 At just before 15.00 he ‘made the most unpleasant decision of my life’. The Rileys had captured a downed German airman and he was now sent forward waving a white towel. ‘Firing died down, mortar shells ceased to fall.’ Thirty or forty Germans had advanced across the promenade and they ‘leaped up on the sea wall and covered us with tommy guns, light machine guns and rifles’. To his disgust some stick grenades were thrown but then it was over. The Canadians came forward with their hands behind their heads, and were searched and their remaining weapons and steel helmets removed. They filed through the barbed wire and onto the promenade to join the many other prisoners already there.
This was the first time the Germans had seen their enemy up close. The fight had been an impersonal affair with the raiders catching only rare glimpses of those trying to kill them, and the defenders operating at distances that gave the slaughter a clinical remoteness. Lieutenant Titzman who commanded a battery on the west headland descended to inspect the carnage to which his guns had contributed. ‘It was a terrible sight,’ he said. ‘I remember the driver of an armoured car who had made it on to the beach. He was killed and he sat in his car, burned to a skeleton.’34
The beach was a vision from a nightmare. After getting the order to abandon his tank, and leading Lieutenant Bennett who was now completely blind to the promenade to surrender, Archie Anderson managed to slip away and resume retrieving some of the many wounded scattered along the water’s edge. ‘It was almost impossible to step between all the bodies they were so crowded in the water,’ he remembered. ‘Their arms would float on the waves and flop around in such a way as to wrap around the legs of anyone who came close to them.’ One man had lost both legs. He told Anderson, ‘ “There’s no point in taking me. Leave me here.” But I said my mother always told me, where there’s life there’s hope so we’ve got to try. I took one arm over each shoulder and carried him that way. I was amazed that a man…could be so light.’35
The only Canadians still at large were the band of twenty led by Colonel Catto who were sheltering in the woods behind the east headland. They were surrounded on all sides, with no effective means of fighting and the men he had left on the beach were dead or captured. Those who felt fit enough slipped away, armed with the escape kits with which everyone had been issued. At 16.20 Catto came forward to make his formal surrender. It was taken by the local commander, Hauptmann Schnösenberg. They shook hands and the German led him off to his command post. Later the division would leave France for the Eastern Front. Schnösenberg would remember this day as ‘the last knightly encounter with the enemy on the field of battle’.36
In the streets of Dieppe, civilians emerged from their houses to inspect the shattered streets. Georges Guibon, the former hotelier and meticulous diarist of the occupation, paused at the corner of the rue Pasteur to watch a column of prisoners, guarded by a handful of Germans with machine guns. ‘They were very close to me and as each one passed I murmured “Thank you! Thank you!”,’ he wrote that night. ‘They looked at me and smiled. Some of them wore overalls. Others were just left with a shirt or a pair of pants. One was naked. Some had wrapped sacking tied up with string around their feet to protect them. There were 200 or 300 of them. It was appalling and desperately sad.’37
Pierre Delvallé left his flat in the rue de la Barre and went down to the promenade. The ground behind the casino was littered with cartridge belts, bayonets, rifles and empty ration tins. Propped up against the low wall around the garden were five wounded French Canadians.38 They begged him for water and he collected some from a broken pipe flowing into the gutter. They drank it gratefully. One gave him a letter addressed to someone in Le Havre, covered in blood.
As the ships neared England those on board savoured the sight of home. ‘Shall I ever forget Beachy Head and the Seven Sisters showing through the evening haze? No,’ wrote Michael Bateson as he nursed LCP 159 towards Newhaven.39 At the docks tea wagons waited and YMCA volunteers handed out mugs by the hundred to the ragged, dirty and exhausted arrivals. They were the lucky ones, capable of walking. There were more than 600 wounded scattered through the fleet. The original plan had been for casualties to be landed at Newhaven but to get them to hospital quicker Hughes-Hallett diverted the destroyers carrying most of the serious cases to Portsmouth.
To preserve security, the medical services were not told of the operation until 05.30 that morning. That left only a few hours to improvise arrangements in the five military hospitals in the area, and the numbers arriving far outstripped the optimistic predictions on which plans had been based.
The wait at the quayside for an ambulance was agonisingly long for Derek Turner whose leg and hand had been shattered when Garth was bombed. The one that eventually picked him up ‘bumped roughly along – then stopped. What ages it took!’ When he reached a dressing station there were ‘nurses, doctors, padres – hundreds of ’em – and bodies and corpses sprawling everywhere’. He was placed on a stretcher, ‘face downwards gazing at the drain which ran around the room, full of Jeyes Fluid’. He felt a ‘great relief’ that he would soon be treated. Such was the pressure of more urgent cases that it was not until three days later that he was operated on.40
Later that evening the staff in the COHQ cafeteria at Richmond Terrace were surprised to see their chief at one of the tables, interrogating officers who had clearly come straight from the battlefield. Among them was Peter Young of 3 Commando who after getting back to Newhaven from Yellow 2 had headed straight to London to make his report. ‘I was received by Mountbatten himself,’ he remembered. He was taken off to the staff mess where he was served a sandwich and ‘they all sat round the table while I was eating – Mountbatten, Robert Henriques, General Haydon and all the top brass, all peppering me with questions.’41 The operation was over but a pressing new task had arrived, one that had great public and personal implications. Since eight o’clock that morning the news had been carrying reports of the operation presenting it as a major success. That fiction could not be maintained for long. But on no account could the world be allowed to believe that the Dieppe raid had been a bloody and pointless failure.