30

A Canadian Bloodbath

PRESSED BY GENERAL MARSHALL and Admiral King on their visit to London in July to mount Sledgehammer that year, Churchill had wisely refused. Yet he had also bristled at the accusations of British faint-heartedness—an accusation that in part explained why he allowed himself to be persuaded by his chief of Combined Operations, Vice Admiral Mountbatten, to go ahead with an operation that had already been canceled once evidence revealed the Germans were aware of it: a landing by an entire Canadian infantry brigade, with tanks, on the beaches of Dieppe, a small French fishing port south of the Pas-de-Calais, where Winston had once courted his wife, Clementine.

Churchill had hoped the “reconnaissance in force,” as it was termed, would help convince not only Marshall and King but Stalin, too, that the British—which was to say, Canadians—were not lacking in courage. In a few days, Churchill had told the Russian leader, the operation—a sort of exploratory, miniature version of the full-scale Second Front landings planned for 1943—would be mounted across the Channel on a selected target with “8,000 men with 50 tanks.” They would “stay a night and a day, kill as many Germans as possible and take prisoners.” The landing, as Churchill had described, could “be compared to a bath which you feel with your hand to see if the water is hot.”¹

Stalin had shaken his head at such military and political naiveté. Whatever happened on the day—whether successful or not—once the troops were withdrawn the Nazis would simply trumpet their withdrawal as “the failure of a British attempt at an invasion” or retreat—which would help no one, he sniffed.²

Launched on the early morning of August 19, 1942, the “Dieppe Raid” had proven Stalin’s prediction tragically correct. The water had been scalding, the raid a “fiasco,” as even Churchill acknowledged.³ The Germans, whose troops occupied the entire Atlantic coastline of Europe as far as the Pyrenees, were not only waiting, but had even been conducting an exercise the day before to rehearse repelling just such an assault.⁴

As Stalin had predicted, the master of Nazi propaganda was over the moon when hearing of the operation. Goebbels had just landed in the Ukraine and been driven to the Führer’s “idyllically concealed” new advance headquarters at Vinnitsa on August 19 when the news was given to him that at “6.05 in the morning a major invasion attempt had been made at Dieppe.”⁵ The Allies had landed “more than a division, and had established in one place a small bridgehead. The RAF had thrown large forces into the battle. The English had brought 20 panzers”; moreover, a huge number of vessels were reported to be waiting at Portsmouth to “reinforce the landings if successful.” In other words, as Goebbels dictated for his diary, “under pressure from Stalin the British have clearly undertaken the attempt to establish a Second Front.”

The Reich minister of propaganda had been contemptuous. “Not for a single second does anyone in the Führer’s headquarters doubt that the British will be given a resounding whack and sent home.”⁶

Goebbels was proved right. In an eight-hour interview with the Führer, the propaganda minister recorded Hitler’s complete unconcern about Dieppe. In March that year the Führer had already stationed a top panzer division in the Pas-de-Calais area, with two further motorized divisions in reserve. They were not even needed—for by 2:00 P.M. on August 19 the invasion attempt had been “liquidated.”⁷ Sepp Dietrich, commanding the Führer’s SS Life Guard motorized division, would surely be swearing blue murder, the Führer chuckled, that he hadn’t even had the chance “to enter the fray.”⁸ Churchill must have ordered the landing as a sop to Stalin—the Russian leader a veritable giant in comparison to little Churchill, who could only boast a “few books he’d written, and speeches in Parliament,”⁹ while Stalin had re-created a nation of 170 million and prepared it for a huge military challenge, as Hitler conceded. In fact, if ever Stalin fell into German hands, Hitler told his propaganda genius, as Führer he would out of respect spare the Russian premier, perhaps banishing him to some beach resort. Churchill and Roosevelt, by contrast, would be hanged for having started the war “without showing the least statesmanship or military ability.”¹⁰

Flying back to Berlin to direct the Nazi propaganda response to the Dieppe invasion, Goebbels could only mock at how Churchill then sought to cover up the “true catastrophe,” censoring and concealing in the press the huge casualties the Canadians had suffered. The Prime Minister had tried to parlay the attack into an “experiment”—but if it was such, it had achieved the opposite effect, Goebbels crowed. Not only had it shown how devastatingly effective were German defenses in the Pas-de-Calais and nearby region, but it had made the Führer decide to further fortify the entire Atlantic coast against invasion: a “full-blown defensive line in the same manner as the Atlantic Wall.” “If the British mount a real invasion next spring, where they’re planning, they are going to be battering against reinforced castle gates,” the Führer had assured him. “They’ll never set foot again on European soil. The Atlantic coast and the Norwegian coast will then be one hundred percent in our possession, and we will no longer be threatened by invasion, even if mounted on the most massive scale.”¹¹

The Führer had then turned to other, more important matters: his decision to seize Leningrad that very year, but to spare Moscow until the next year—though both cities were in due course to be completely “erased”¹² as part of the complete destruction of any kind of Russian national heritage or pride. Plus the thorny problem of the German churches, which were to be threatened with the same solution as was being meted out to the Jews, given their Christian leanings toward Bolshevism and their failure to support Nazism wholeheartedly. . .¹³

 

Churchill might ask the British and Allied press not to reveal the true extent of the Dieppe fiasco, but it proved impossible to conceal it from the Canadian prime minister, a thousand of whose soldiers had been killed in cold blood on the beaches of the harbor town, with further thousands wounded and taken into German captivity for the duration of the war—their feet even manacled, after an Allied operational order was intercepted and translated, detailing how manacling of captured German troops was to be carried out by the assault troops.

Mackenzie King had opposed the idea of a major cross-Channel landing that year, as long as the Allies lacked preponderant naval and air forces, as well as experienced soldiers. Nevertheless, his defense minister had gone along with the revived operation—and was the first to hear reports that night of the catastrophe. “While [War] Council was sitting,” King recorded, “the first authentic word of its extent and probable extent of our losses”—completely contradicting a mendacious press release put out by Lord Mountbatten. In truth, the Canadian premier noted, “casualties were heavy. Number of Canadians taken prisoners but also many killed and wounded. One felt inclined to question,” he added, “the wisdom of the raid unless it were part of the agreement reached when Churchill was with Stalin.”¹⁴

Stalin, to be sure, was blameless—having argued against such an operation. Well over half of the sixty-one hundred troops who had taken part in the fiasco had been killed, wounded, or captured.

Two days later King’s heart sank still further, as more news of the fatalities came in. “Reports received of raid make one very sad at heart for losses, which have been considerable,” he noted again in his diary—German newsreel footage, bruited across neutral countries by Goebbels’s propaganda team, making it impossible to maintain Mountbatten’s fiction. How much better, Prime Minister King reflected, would it have been “to conserve that especially trained life for the decisive moment. . . . It makes me sad at heart.”¹⁵

And on August 24, 1942, King lamented: “I keep asking myself was this venture justified, just at this time?”¹⁶

In Washington, the President felt deeply for his Canadian ally: aware that, had Stimson, Marshall, and King gotten their way and launched Bolero that year, it would have been Americans who perished at the hands of the waiting Germans.