Dieppe: Operation Jubilee - Channel Ports Read online

  Focke Wulf 190. German aircraft were still able to range across Southern Britain and attack opportunity targets in early 1942.

  The basic plan remained similar, but with the obvious change of substituting commandos for paratroopers for the attack on the flanking coastal batteries. Mountbatten’s report goes on to explain why:

  ‘It was decided that the attacks on the extreme flanks, to capture the batteries at Berneval on the east and Varengeville on the west of Dieppe, should be made not by airborne troops but by commandos of the Special Service Brigade. The chief reason for this change was that, though the weather might be suitable for the Naval passage and for the landing of infantry and tanks and their re-embarkation, it might not be possible to use airborne troops, who have to depend for success on conditions different from those of a Naval operation. . . In point of fact, on the day of the operation, the weather conditions, though satisfactory from the Naval point of view, would have made the employment of airborne troops impossible... In fact, had airborne troops not been excluded, the operation would not have taken place.’

  Commandos with their distinctive ‘cap comforters’ taking part in boat training in Scotland.

  In the revised Jubilee plan there were, however, other crucial but less obvious changes. These included some elements of the original Rutter plan on which the entire raid had been predicated. The most important change was that of air support. The Navy had turned down Mountbatten’s request for naval gunfire support from capital ships: ‘Battleships in the Channel! Are you mad, Dickey?’ Thus with only eight Hunt Class destroyers in close support, each mounting four or six of the smallest naval gun; the four-inch firing only a thirty-six pound shell, the plan relied on the effect of an intense air bombardment with 150 bomber sorties striking the town and the headlands to the east and west of Dieppe. However, during the planning process the ‘overpowering’ bombing raid was cancelled. Various reasons have been advanced, including political dislike of bombing a French town, Bomber Command’s reluctance to be diverted from its offensive against Germany, and the fact that the bombing would not have been ‘overwhelming,’ as a high-level attack would have been too inaccurate to be effective. Conversely, it was also suggested that bombing would create too much rubble in the streets, and finally, that the preliminary raid may have alerted the enemy. In the event, the vast majority of the sorties mounted by the air forces were by fighters and fighter-bombers, with only sixty-two being launched by medium bombers. Despite the lack of bomber support, the arguable need for additional naval gunfire support does not appear to have been reviewed.

  An RAF Boston medium bomber flying during Operation Jubilee.

  RAF ground crew prepare bombs for the Dieppe Raid.

  In great secrecy, Operation Jubilee was prepared. The troops had completed the necessary training and were already familiar with their tasks and, therefore, final preparations would be minimal. It will be remembered that the troops detailed to take part in Operation Rutter had been kept sealed on board the landing craft for five days before its cancellation, but according to COHQ:

  ‘It was decided when the operation was remounted as “Jubilee” that the troops should be kept in ignorance of what was required of them until the last moment and not be briefed until a few hours before sailing.’

  The US Rangers

  Before concluding, it is worth expanding on the presence of the US Rangers amongst the Jubilee Assault Force. In the Official History Grand Strategy series, in the meeting of 9 June 1942:

  ‘Mr Roosevelt, he said, had stressed the great need for American soldiers to be given the opportunity of fighting (in the west) as soon as possible.’

  An American Brigadier General attached to COHQ readily agreed, and provided fifty members of 1st US Rangers, who had been raised from among the first US units to cross the Atlantic, thus reviving a great American military tradition. The volunteers had been trained at the Commando Training Centre alongside Royal Marine and Army commandos at Achnacarry House in the Highlands of Scotland, and were consequently familiar with British and Canadian methods. The four officers and forty-six men were to be allocated in small groups across the raiding force. Other groups of American officers were present as observers, mainly at the various HQs.

  On 18 August 1942, the force, with all its component parts of various nations representing Combined Operations, and all three Services, was assembling. By the following day, the force was reported ready, and final authorisation was given. Briefings were underway and Operation Jubilee was set to go.

  President Roosevelt.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE DEFENDERS OF DIEPPE

  At the very outset of planning the raid, two of the vital prerequisites that were agreed were that Dieppe could only be attacked if it were lightly held by the enemy, and that the raiders would achieve ‘total surprise.’ Despite repeated assurances by the Headquarters of Combined Ops, Home Command and the Canadian Forces, neither of these prerequisites was to be met on the beaches of Dieppe.

  The Germans had arrived on the northern coast of France in the last days of May 1940. Their focus had initially been on preparing for the invasion of Britain (Operation Sea Lion), but latterly they had increasingly concentrated on defence of the coastline. British intelligence assumed that it was 110th Division that was playing this defensive role in the Dieppe area, with its Headquarters at Arques-la-Bataille on the south-western outskirts of Dieppe. Details of an Operation Rutter intelligence briefing held on 25 April 1942 were recorded in the COHQ report:

  ‘all available intelligence at that time showed that Dieppe was lightly held by a single low-category battalion supported by ten AA guns, three or four light anti-aircraft guns, one four-gun dual-purpose battery and four coast defence batteries. Furthermore, the troops in Dieppe, numbering, it was thought, not more than 1,400 all told, could not be heavily reinforced for some time. After five hours the total number of reinforcements which could reach them would not, it was considered, exceed 2,500 men; only from the eighth hour of the attack onwards might important reserves begin to arrive, mainly from Rouen and from the east. Thus, at the end of fifteen hours, the maximum number of enemy troops which might, in the most favourable circumstances, be brought into action, would be in the neighbourhood of 6,500 men.’

  Much of the intelligence was, however, incorrect: for example, in the summer of 1942, 110th Division was fighting on the Eastern Front. The division at Dieppe was in fact 302nd Infantry Division, which had been raised during the autumn of 1940 in Bavaria as a low-category formation. Hauptman Lindener, staff adjutant of 571 Infanterie Regiment commented on the quality of the division, ‘The coastal-defence divisions were second class. This is a hard word but essentially true.’ Not only were men of a low physical grade being called up, but men from the newly-captured territories that had been annexed into Germany were already being conscripted into the Wehrmacht. The 6,000 soldiers of 302nd moved to France in April 1941 with a slim establishment and little equipment, particularly vehicles. After a year, Generalmajor Conrad Haase moved his headquarters from Arques-la-Bataille to Envermeu, some seven miles from Dieppe. This was at about the same time Allied intelligence was assembling information on potential targets. Not only did intelligence identify the wrong division and an incorrect HQ location, but they also failed to identify the Germans’ true strength in Dieppe, which was greater than anticipated. The cumulative effect of these and other errors led to Admiral Mountbatten’s comment that ‘the intelligence was woefully inadequate.’

  A map showing the Allied intelligence assessment in early 1942, which proved to be incorrect in most detail.

  Across the Channel, events such as the Bruneval and St Nazaire raids earlier in the year had prompted the Germans to strengthen their coastal defences. In addition, as his campaign in Russia prospered, Hitler realised that the Allies were bound to take some action in the west to help relieve the pressure on the Red Army. If he was in any doubt, the political necessity of Allied action in the west was confirme
d by reports of Molotov’s visit to London in May 1942, and by the widely reported pressure for ‘A Second Front Now’ (Operation Sledgehammer). The Führer concluded that he needed to reinforce the west. In March 1942, he issued Führer Order Number Forty. The important section read:

  ‘The coastline of Europe will, in the coming months, be subject to the danger of enemy landings in force... Even enemy landings with limited objectives can seriously interfere with our own plans if they result in the enemy gaining a toehold on the coast... Enemy forces that have landed must be destroyed or thrown back into the sea by immediate counter attack.’

  Adolf Hitler – Political and de facto military leader of the Third Reich.

  Allied intelligence failed to identify the resulting moves of units and formations in the late spring and summer of 1942. As Rutter gave way to Jubilee, there was little demand for up-to-date intelligence, and such information that was available, unlike that supplied for D-Day, was rarely detailed below battalion level.

  Feldmarschall von Rundstedt

  During the early spring, Commander-in-Chief West Feldmarshall von Rundstedt saw his strength in combat formations gradually growing until he had thirty-six divisions under command, most of which were concentrated along the Dutch, Belgian and the French coastlines. The new arrivals were nearly all infantry divisions, but they were supported by a number of panzer and SS divisions. The problem was that these reinforcements were either low-category, such as 302nd at Dieppe, or had returned from the Eastern Front as little more than a cadre, to be built up and retrained. As the pace of the campaign in Russia increased, there were continuous demands on formations in the west to provide drafts of battle-casualty replacements. It was no surprise to von Rundstedt that Hitler’s OKH inspecting officers found that, by summer 1942, many of the units manning defences in the Dieppe area were under strength, and often missing whole companies from their order of battle. However, as Hitler became increasingly aware of the threat to the Channel and Atlantic coasts, under-manning started to be addressed, especially as the Luftwaffe had noticed a marked increase in shipping in the south coast ports. Air photography sorties provided confirmation of an increase in small naval ships and landing craft, from 1,146 on 3 June 1942 to a total of 2,802 on 23 July. The Germans were not, however, totally convinced, as it is recorded that they were ‘struck above all by the apparent neglect of any attempt at camouflage or concealment, suggesting a double bluff or deception.’ However, German Army staff officers erroneously calculated, from the air photography information, that the British could land 300,000 men on the northern coast of France between the Pas de Calais and Normandy in just three days. Consequently, Hitler continued to reinforce the west and put his forces on state of high alert, reinforced by a series of directives and special orders to commanders and the soldiers defending the coastline.

  The defences overprint map issued to the raiding force for intelligence briefing. It was mainly based on air photography.

  The Dieppe Esplanada: Allied intelligence relied heavily on prewar picture postcards of Dieppe for briefing the raiders.

  While troops were disengaged and transported from the Russian Front, von Rundstedt and his staff tried to identify the target for what they correctly assessed would be an operational-level raid rather than a full invasion. Options included the U-boat bases on the western coast, the Brittany Peninsular, or ‘an attack to capture a strong point or to disrupt air or naval operations for some time.’ The lack of a unified intelligence system, and the tendency of the German Services and special interest factions to talk up intelligence to their own ends, prevented a coherent picture of Allied intentions from being developed. This was to be a consistent factor in the west, which the Allies increasingly exploited to their own purposes through the Bletchley Park code breaker’s descriptions of German signal traffic and double agents.

  The Defences of Dieppe

  In 1942, Allied intelligence lacked the detailed information that it subsequently developed in the period before D-Day. Much of the detail listed below was therefore unknown to Allied operational planners, but it is important to include it here if we are to make sense of the German reaction to the raid.

  302nd Division had its right or eastern boundary on the River Somme at Abbeville, and held fifty miles of coast west to a point about ten miles beyond Dieppe. In practice, this was not the impossible task that it seemed, because much of the coastline was high chalk cliffs, with only a few ways up onto the farmland beyond. This allowed the Germans to concentrate their forces at important locations along the coast and at key points such as Fortress or ‘Festung Dieppe,’ which they expected, at this stage of the war, to be subject to a large raid rather than an invasion. The German report after Dieppe specifically noted that their tactics were not to defend every defile through the cliffs and every beach, but just those near an objective that could be used by an enemy raiding party.

  The Todt Organisation had, with the aid of slave labour drafted from every corner of occupied Europe, started in the autumn of 1941 to construct Festung Dieppe. The town and most of its defences were surrounded by a high barbed wire fence made up of several roles of concertina wire along its length. Along the sea front, reinforced concrete pillboxes, gun casemates, shelter bunkers, and strong points, some built into existing buildings, were beginning to replace field fortifications. Meanwhile, on the two headlands, gun positions dominating the beach below were tunnelled out of the chalk. For the Allies, construction of pillboxes was easily picked up on vertical air photographs, but the enhancements to and use of the existing tunnels in the cliffs below the headlands were missed. However, the existence of tunnels in the cliffs was known to generations of British ferry visitors to Dieppe. Churchill himself recounted how:

  ‘One night when I was talking about this business beforehand to Mrs Churchill [who had lived for several years in Dieppe in the Twenties], she spoke about those caves and said what a help they would be to the enemy. I have seen them myself when landing at Dieppe. The whole cliff is pockmarked.’

  RAF air photograph interpreters using a stereoscope.

  The presence of guns in the mouths of caves in the cliff might well have been revealed by sufficiently oblique air-photography sorties, but few were authorised, and little information on the cliffs was gained. Although great strides had been made in developing photo-reconnaissance, there were still insufficient RAF air-photo interpreters, and skill levels were still developing but were still well short of the standards reached by 1944. Even so, lack of information on the cliffs was a significant failure, and many veterans believe that the presence of German observation officers, guns and machine guns positioned in the caves did the most to halt the frontal attack on Dieppe. However, it should be noted that the Germans had mounted their guns so that they could be drawn back into the cliff to avoid both observation and enemy fire, and it is reasonable to assume that new embrasures in the chalk were well camouflaged.

  Photographed after the battle a German gun crew pose by their 75mm in the mouth of a cave in the Western Headland.

  An air photograph used for briefing, showing the ‘cave’ positions dug into the Eastern Headland overlooking the entrance to the Avant Port.

  The COHQ report records that holding the immediate Dieppe area was Oberstleutenant Hermann Bartelt’s 571 Infanterie Regiment:

  ‘. . .with two battalions forward and one in reserve, to a depth of about seven miles. In general, the defences were sited in an anti-raid role as opposed to an anti-invasion role, and the greater part of the available firepower was concentrated to cover the landing beaches. The II Battalion, holding the town itself, west of the river, occupied a position of about 1,500 yards deep, and the landward defences were sited to deal only with an attack from the rear by paratroops.’

  Bartelt’s forward or tactical headquarters was located in some newly built concrete bunkers on the hillside to the west of the town. From here he could look out across the seaward approaches to Dieppe and downward to Red and White Bea
ches and the Esplanade.

  It has been consistently suggested that with general concern about a raid, Bartelt redeployed his forces in Dieppe, first increasing the defenders to two battalions on 10 July, and then to all three of his battalions in early August 1942. This allegedly brought the number of troops in the town to 3,500. This is incorrect, as it is now apparent that there was a single battalion of infantry in Dieppe. However, there were supporting troops, particularly Kriegsmarine gunners and Luftwaffe anti-tank gunners who may have been reinforced to a certain extent. The reinforcement that was made by Oberstleutenant Bartelt was to move the centre of gravity of his flanking battalions closer to Dieppe, which thinned the defences along the rugged coastline to the east and west.

  Defensive preparations around Dieppe had been considerable, and the amount of concrete used in their construction, though nothing like as heavy as port defences were to become over the following two years, still gave the coastal infantry garrison a significant advantage. Post-operational intelligence described the pillboxes that the Canadians encountered along the seafront:

  ‘One pillbox containing machine guns was built of concrete about 6 ft 6 ins high, with only 4ft showing above the ground. The walls and the roof were about 1½ ft thick, and the door was about 2 ft thick. This pillbox was circular with an internal diameter of 10 ft, and only had one horizontal fire slit. Another pillbox, which contained a 4.7cm anti-tank gun, was of a similar construction but square instead of round. The roof and walls were estimated to be 3 ft thick.’