August 19, 1942

Dieppe

Landing craft head towards beach

Royal Navy ship laying smoke screen

Dead Canadian soldiers and stuck tanks on beach

Tanks stuck on Dieppe beach

German officers inspect Canadian dead and damaged tank

Canadian soldiers taken prisoner lead through Dieppe village

Raid on DieppeRaid on the morning of August 19,

1942. Raid had 3 objectives:

Capture and hold port of Dieppe briefly

Prove invasion of Europe was possibleGather intelligenceDestroy German defenses and radar buildings

PlanningThe raid was originally called ‘Operation

Rutter’ and was supposed to be a large attack in July that aimed to attack and hold the territory for 2-3 months while destroying German defenses. This was cancelled and plans were changed to a smaller attack

The Germans were still in the Soviet Union in the last stages of Operation Barbarossa. Soviet leader Josef Stalin demanded that the Allies start a Western Front to make the battle easier for the Soviet Red Army

PlanningNew plan called

Operation Jubilee.Canadian government

pushed for Canadian troops to be involved.

Decided against bombarding town first because of the likelihood of French civilian deaths.

Army regiments to land on 6 beaches in front of Dieppe.

PlanningAllied landing force

was just over 6000 men: 5000 Canadians, 1000 British Commandos and 50 American Rangers.

Troops were supported by 6 Royal Navy destroyers and 74 Royal Air Force squadrons, mostly Canadian pilots.

The Allied commanders decided to use the brand new Churchill tank that had not yet been used in operations.

Planning“Intelligence reports indicate that Dieppe is not

heavily defended and that the beaches in the vicinity are suitable for landing infantry, and armoured fighting vehicles at some.”

Planners didn’t study intelligence photos enough to see several German machine-gun positions. They also used old vacation photos to judge the condition of the beaches for tanks to land.

The Germans had 1500 men in Dieppe village and other troops in nearby towns. 200 Luftwaffe fighters and 100 bombers were nearby.

The RaidThe raid left England the night before, and arrived off shore at

Dieppe at 5:00am on August 19, 1942. Bombers and Navy Destroyers began to bombard the beach

and lay down a smoke screen for cover as landing craft brought troops and tanks to shore.

The Germans were prepared for the attack and slowed the raid down immediately. Troops were cut down by machine gun fire and halted by mortars before they got halfway up the beach.

Example: Blue Beach. Landed after another beach began to attack. The smoke screen was gone by the time the troops landed. The tanks landed after the troops instead of before; many of them sank in deep water or got stuck on the beach. Tanks that landed successfully were blocked and couldn’t get up the beach. Toronto’s Royal Regiment of Canada was annihilated: from 556 men 200 were killed, 264 captured. (83%)

The Story of Arthur Philip Fraser

http://www.thememoryproject.com/stories/184:arthur-philip-fraser/

“August 19, 1942, we land at 7:00 in Dieppe, in France. We were the last battalion to land at Dieppe. It was a raid. A raid is that you attack and then when the raid is finished, you’re supposed to come back. But we never came back because the raid was finished at 11:30 in the morning and the one that survive were caught prisoner of war for the duration of the war...

“We were all on small boat, all our battalion was, there was 500 some odd people on small yacht. When we landed at Dieppe, we landed in a straight line. And when I landed, I pass one officer and the officer told me that, I asked the headquarters on the boat, they’re not sending you because this raid is lost. But at the time, we didn’t know why, probably they didn’t get the message. I’ve read books saying that the German were blocking the zone. So of course, whatever it was said on the beach, never reached the headquarters on the boat...

“So we landed and when I jump off the boat and look around, and I saw so many dead soldier or wounded, I was really surprised to see that. I was in a three inch mortar, three inch mortar is a barrel that you put the palm of the mouth of the barrel and it goes down and then it explode and it goes up to the direction that you’re facing the canon. So I had three bomb and I would go through my three bomb, that was it. On the raid like that goes so fast on the front that you see one thing and the fellow next to you sees the other things. It was all mixed up. There was Churchill tank that landed, that the tank landed after us. They should have land, according to me, they should have land before us but they’ve landed after us...

“These was big Churchill tank that weigh 70 tons. And some sunk in the channel, that was what we cross, it was English channel. And one of these boat landed on the beach. I went on that boat and I saw so many wounded on that. And then the Germans artillery started to shoot at us but it didn’t last too long. And the commandos were supposed to destroy the German artillery but they did succeed in destroying some of the guns but not all of them...

“11:00, the raid was finished, the destroyer came forward, they brought down the flag half mast and everybody on the boat saluted to us on the beach and they raised the flag and all the cannon on that destroyer shoot in Dieppe and they went away. A lot of our boys tried to, to reach that destroyer but they could not, they didn’t have a chance to be picked up. So they came back to the ground and of course, they had no clothes on. They only had their underwear. And they were caught of course prisoner of war like we were...

“And the next day, we took car. It was marked on the side of the car, 40 men or 8 horses. There was straw on the floor and a pail and a bottle of water. We took that boxcar, it was, we landed about 40 kilometres from Paris and after three days, you put it back on the train. It took us three days to camp. We were at the camp Stalag VIII B in Lamsdorf. It was a small village. It was a big camp, I think there was about 10,000 prisoner of war there, because there was a working party, some of them were working outside the camp and the other inside. And this camp opened in 1940 after France fell...

“But we went into a building, five by five, and they tied our two hands, cross-wise and the front, with a piece of string. That was 24 hours a day. This tying job was 55 days and then the Red Cross International came and visit us and our hand with all blistered and the officer said to the German, they have to think of something else and take these strings away. Oh yes, to go to the bathroom, we have to get 10 together and then they would send a first aid man with us to go to the bathroom, to pull up our trousers. After 55 days, he came out with these chain and we were chained up 14 months. And the chain was better because we were dressed in summer and when winter came, it was very cold but with the chain, we could put our hands in our pocket, which we did...

“I could never turn the page. And even this morning, at 3:00 in the morning, I waked up, souvenir of the war came back. Often these things, yeah, coming back to me. I could never turn the page. Oh no, I shouldn’t say that. When I was working, my job came first and then I never thought of the war, only on the 11th of November. I used to go to the parade but otherwise, even the fellows, where I worked, never knew I was a veteran. But after two years, when I took my pension, my mind cleared up of my work and then the war souvenir came back. And it still does, it still does, after so many years. I went back to Dieppe 10 times. And the reason I went back to Dieppe, it was on account of the, I lost three friends on the beach at Dieppe and that’s the reason I went back.”

OutcomesDead, wounded or captured:

3367 Canadian247 British591 German

106 RAF planes shot down, 48 Luftwaffe. The fierce battle was heavily lopsided because the RAF planes could only stay in battle for a few minutes because of range.

550 Royal Navy ships lostSome success: at Orange beach a commando group

succeeded in their mission to destroy a German gun and withdrew as planned. They became a model for future landings. Another group disabled German communications, forcing them to use radio which let the Allies learn of German radar stations on the coast.

OutcomesThe raid is credited as a very costly learning

experience that allowed the Allies to succeed in later invasions in North Africa and on D-Day.

Commander Lord Mountbatten: “For every man who died in Dieppe, at least 10

more must have been spared in Normandy in 1944”

Winston Churchill:My impression of Jubilee is that the results fully

justify the heavy cost . . . A Canadian contribution of the greatest significance to victory.

Dieppe became the textbook of what not to do.

Was Dieppe a bad idea and a failure, or a valuable learning

experience?