The Dieppe Raid - What the Hell Were They Thinking?

Great Debates
1

On August 19, 1942, Allied forces, many of them Canadian, attacked the French port of Dieppe with the intent to take it to show it could be done and, later, give it back to the Germans, having demonstrated a couple years before their skill in evacuating a beach with the Panzers bearing down on them. It was never expected that they could hold it for long and it was, basically, the modern equivalent to counting coup.

The main proponent of the raid was Louis Mountbatten, whose later assassination was surprisingly by the IRA, not pissed off Canucks.

It was an unmitigated disaster. Nearly 60% of the Allies who landed were killed, wounded, or captured and some units suffered 95% casualties, about what a sober person might expect, given that Northern France was completely under the control of the Germans, who, not generally being idiots, had fortified all of its ports, especially those in easy air support range of England.

In conclusion, the raid was doomed from the moment of its conception and, while I, too, am a big fan of “We have to do something,” there were softer targets than Dieppe and better plans than, “We’ll go in, mess up the joint, wag our dicks at Hitler, and bug out.” So what the hell were they thinking?

2

Possibly they were remembering the minor raids that the British carried out against the French during the Napoleonic wars. Which afaik weren’t disasters, although they achieved little of concrete value. Maybe they thought that if they could demonstrate the ability to carry out raids with impunity, they could force the Germans to spread their forces out to every possible target of attack. Maybe they thought that raids would be a way of training green troops for the eventual invasion, probing the German defenses, etc. In one way the attack served a purpose: it taught the British “don’t even consider landing troops on the continent until you’re ready for the Big Push”.

3

Every war basically has a pyschological component to it. The point where you shift from the defensive to the offensive and gear everyones mind to that mental thrust.

The Battle of Britain had ended, Sealion was not going to be a workable plan for the Germans and the USA had entered the war. The population needed to see that we were striking back, and that meant boots on the ground and not just bombers over Berlin and the occupied countries needed to know that we were coming back and to keep the faith.

Declan

4

I saw films of one of their Commando raids on a fishing village in northern Norway. Virtually unopposed by the Germans They torched a vital cod-liver-oil plant (it burned up REAL good) and it was perfectly adorable by warfare standards. Dieppe was nothing like that.

5

The Russians were begging for anything. But the Brits had a lot of goofy ideas, such as invading a Mediterranean island. To which American Chief of Staff Marshall said “not one American boy is going to die on that goddamned rock.” Perhaps at the time of Dieppe Churchill was still listening to his generals because the Americans were not involved as much. Remember that Churchill was the genius who thought that Gallipolli was a masterstroke, and then later the 10 year plan for disarmament.

6

I’m proud to know a guy who was there, namely the Honorary Lt-Col. of my military unit, David Lloyd Hart. He talks about it occasionally during his speeches at mess dinners.

Great guy. I picked him up at the airport when he got back from one of the reunions and he said he met two fellow veterans, both of which recalled hearing Hart’s radio order to bug out. One made it back, the other was a guest of the Germans until the end of the war.

7

It was not an unmitigated disaster, it was mitigated by the knowledge and experience that arose from it, which went to make the real D-day the success that it was. The big lesson learnt was, you can’t amphibiously attack a major defended port, which was why the Allies ended up on the beaches of Normandy rather than say Cherbourg or Calais.

The whole point was to hit a hard target, not a soft one. I agree it could have been much better done, with a viable backout plan once it was clear it was not going to work, but those lives were not lost completely in vain - they may well have saved more lives in Normandy than they lost there.

8

It was just one of a series of raids along the North Atlantic French coast by the British. Operation Chariot had successfully put the dry dock out of service at St. Nazaire just a few months before, which was a major setback for the German Navy, albeit at the cost of hundreds of lives and POWs. This, combined with the Canadians wanting to see some action, probably encouraged the idea of the Dieppe raid.

Also, these raids were having a major psychological effect on the Germans. It was this backdrop, that led Hitler to make the “Commando order”, where any captured commando would be shot (IIRC, there was one raid where the Germans nearly mutinied after hearing commandos had landed). The St. Nazaire raid also put the German garrison into mass confusion, when delay-timed torpedoes, designed to destroy the lock gates, went off. They ended up shooting at each other and at local civilians, thinking they were being raided again.

9

Yeah, you’re right. We were just sat around waiting for the Americans to come and show us how to fight.

10

My uncle was transport officer for the South Saskatchewan Regiment. He didn’t get to to go to Dieppe - instead, he had the job of checking off all the names of the guys who made it back, and those who didn’t. He didn’t like to talk about it much. RIP, Sandy.

11

We were there already and didn’t know how to fight yet.
From DropZone’s wiki link:

If I had a son who was killed in this raid I’d have assassinated Mountbatten myself.

12

Near as I can tell the main push for such a raid was to open a second front for Germany. IIRC the Soviets were quite vocal that something needed to be done to relieve pressure on them and, possibly, Great Britain and the US may have been happy to let those two bloody each other badly before seriously getting engaged (not sure of the politics of that). Only be serious griping and a worry about the Soviets capitulating if they saw no relief GB and the US had to get in there (somewhere).

Now, the raid itself may have been ill-conceived and/or poorly planned but I think the pressure was on to do something. Certainly the Germans got serious about building/fortifying the Atlantic Wall so I guess it did relieve some pressure on the Soviets.

13

I don’t know if Slapton Sands gets much mention in the US but that was also part of the process - the learning curve - leading to the largest amphibian assault in history. Over 700 US personnel died at Slapton Sands in April 1944:

Fwiw, my grandfather was a pub landlord right by a Canadian camp in Sussex at the time of the Dieppe raid. The night before they left for the raid all his regulars came in and gave him their watches to look after. He had 12 left over when they came back.

14

Also known as Exercise Tiger. Your link didn’t mention that the tragedy of the E-boat attack was compounded by an even more egregious mistake during the actual (practice) landings – the troops had been told they were issued blanks for practice, but a later decision to switch to live fire was not widely explained, and some units came ashore shooting up other allied units with real bullets.

This is why staff work, boring as it may sound, is damned important.

15

I had always equated the Dieppe Raid with Doolittle’s raid – very little actual effect, probable disaster, but potential huge psychological effect. I hadn’t considered until this thread that Dieppe might have been for any other reason.

16

Mountbatten’s fingerprints were all over this one, despite his attempts to distance himself from the responsibility in subsequent years. Churchill was away meeting Stalin at the time the decision to remount RUTTER as JUBILEE was taken and Montgomery, notionally in charge of the troops, was cut out of the loop altogether. The Germans themselves were puzzled by the raid. It was too big to be one of the butcher-and-bolt raids with which they were already familiar, and too small to be an invasion.

Afterwards Captain Hughes-Hallett, R.N., who devised the operational plan, circulated a paper entitled Lessons Learned From The Dieppe Raid. Admiral Baillie-Grohman, who had been removed from the naval command after protesting about the plan, commented privately that it could have been better entitled ‘Lessons Learned By Hughes-Hallett’, and that almost all of them could have been absorbed by reading the various pamphlets published by Combined Operations .

Ultimately it seems, despite the lack of documentation laying out the reasoning for mounting it in the first place, to have been devised to show Stalin that we were doing something at a time when the Russians were throwing many more lives into the struggle every day and never losing a night’s sleep over it.

17

As an aside, I recall reading (I think in one of Granatstein’s books) that the Canadians were chosen for the raid because there was considerable pressure from the Canadian government to have the troops do something. Apart from a brief excursion to Dunkirk and back, the Canadians had been marching around the UK for three years. I suspect the government was eying the expense of garrisoning overseas troops for (to this point) little utility and decided to issue an ultimatum to the UK. A “use it or lose it” situation, maybe.

18

A full explanation of why Dieppe happened and why it was a fiasco could take a whole book. To boil it down, though, you need to separate it into those two concepts; why it happened, and why it was a fiasco.

Why it happened:

The concept of briefly taking a port city was, as has been pointed out, not a new one. In fact, you could argue it predated WWII; British Army doctrine had long been that in situations where full scale offensives were not possible, the enemy should still be subject to harrying raids and minor attacks. (The British turned “Trench raids” into an art form in the First World War.) Minor raids on France took place all the time, so conceptually Dieppe was not a big jump; it was just a jump in scale.

And yes, there was considerable pressure from various parts to do something, anything. This was not so much Soviet pressure as it was political pressure within the UK; at that time the campaign in North Africa had embarassed a lot of people, including Churchill himself, and of course the Pacific campaign was a catastrophe. A victory of some sort was needed to call off the political dogs.

The use of Canadian troops was in part due to pressure by Canada, who were beginning to question why they had so many troops in the UK that weren’t doing anything, and also because, well, they were handy.

Then everything went to hell.

Why it was a Fiasco:

The reason it was a fiasco is simple; the Germans knew it was coming. It is absolutely, flatly impossible to achieve an amphibious landing of substantial size while under fire from an equally matched and determined opponent. It can’t be done. In every case an amphibious landing worked, it was either by taking an enemy unawares (Singapore) through ridiculously overwhelming force (Iwo Jima) or both (Normandy.)

The plan to raid Dieppe was blown ten ways from Sunday prior to the raid occurring. The raid had initially been planned for 5 July and was bombed by the Luftwaffe before departing, so the Germans either knew beforehand or were made aware on that day. Intelligence fathered after the raid eventually occurred on 19 August indicated that they had been preparing for weeks.

This is where Mountbatten comes in. The raid wasn’t his idea originally, but after the failure of the July 5 raid, it certainly WAS his idea to go ahead with the second version of it (Jubilee, as opposed to the original Rutter.) A full in-depth accounting of how this happened would take pages and pages of explanation of how the British command was structured, but suffice to say that Mountbatten went ahead and planned an attack that high command had no intention of carrying out; if that sounds bizarre, it is, but that’s what happened.

Whatever the pros and cons of the raid MIGHT have been, the fact that it was being planned only from Mountbatten down brought inherent flaws into the mix; since nobody above or lateral to Mountbatten was adequately involved, inter-service and inter-functional communications broke down. The intelligence branch was not made aware of the need for updated intelligence on Dieppe, so the raid went ahead with outdated intel. Units were switched out at the last minute, making the planning a bit ad hoc. No battleships were committed to provide heavy fire support, in part because the Admiralty quite rightly pointed out that a battleship sitting off the French coast would almost certainly be swarmed by German bombers.

One point that is important to note: it is popular belief in Canada that the RAF did not support the mission, which is a scurrilous and terrible lie; the RAF supported it in substantial force but got the snot kicked out of them. They lost 104 planes; (by way of comparison, on no day during the Battle of Britain did the RAF lose that many aircraft) and the nature of support provided was ineffective.

And to be perfectly frank, the Canadian forces committed were green as hell. The Second Division commander was not experienced and made several errors, and by all accounts small unit leadership was not good.

Combining all these things, you’ve got a recipe for disaster. The attack couldn’t possible have been successful even if it was perfectly prepared and led by Chuck Norris; as it was, it was poorly prepared and so was even more of a disaster than it would have been.

19

They having learned the same lesson that there was no profit in attacking a port directly and that to be successful the attacker needed to land elsewhere and take the port from behind. I wonder how many Allied lives were lost on D-Day because the beaches in Normandy were better fortified than they had been before Dieppe.

20

No they didn’t. The troops’ state of readiness was based solely on the favourable conditions of moon and tides at the time of the month. Good soldierly precautions, in other words. The coastal convoy which the raiding force blundered into proves it. It would hardly have been there if they knew the raid was coming.

Most of the concrete continued to be poured into the Pas-de-Calais area. Normandy remained neglected until Rommel arrived very late and put some vigour into the works.