23rd – 24th August 1942 – Dieppe – Operation Jubilee – Part II – The First Step
The landing zone for Operation Jubilee was broken down into six beaches. Running from east to west these were simply codenamed, Yellow, Blue, Red, White, Green, and Orange. Yellow and Orange were on the flanks, outside of the town, and the remaining four were in front of Dieppe. The main body of the Canadian division would land at Green and Orange, while the Americans landed at Yellow and Blue. Elements of the Commandos and US Rangers would attack at points along the frontage of Red and White, helping pin down the defenders and sow confusion as to where the main weight of the assault was aimed. The battle opened at dawn on the 23rd of August when the Royal Navy task force, led by
HMS Warspite began a bombardment of the town and the shore installations, while Bomber Command carried out a raid on Cherbourg to help draw off Luftwaffe fighters. The naval bombardment created chaos for both the citizens of Dieppe and the German defenders. The bombing attack on Cherbourg was far less effective as many of the bomber missed their targets or arrived late, meaning the Luftwaffe was already on alert for Dieppe before the bomber struck [1].
The chaos caused by
Warspite and rest of its bombardment group prevented any co-ordinated response as the first Canadian and American troops began landing
. This was just as well because problems were already emerging even before the first soldiers set foot on the beaches. The operational plan called for the troops landing at Yellow and Orange beaches to envelop the town and cut off the movement of reinforcements into the town. A serious failure of navigation meant that most of the American soldiers meant to land at Yellow ended up on the periphery of Blue beach, creating something of a traffic jam and meaning that the troops who did reach Yellow were unable to advance in the face of German opposition and instead had to defend their positions and were unable to link up with the rest of the landings until after 1400 hours [2].
At the same time the, distinctly lacklustre assessment of the condition and gradient of the beaches came back to haunt the Allies as many of the tanks struggled to get off the beaches, most notably the new A22 Black Prince. A number of these had been equipped with a variety of devices intended to help in getting off the beach and clearing obstacles, so it was somewhat ironic that many of them never made it off the beach that day, instead the Canadians would have to depend on their home-grown armoured support. The men of the 14th Tank Regiment had been reluctant to give up their Wolverines in favour of the Black Prince, so less than half the regiment had been reequipped, which proved fortuitous as the Wolverines were able to take advantage of the efforts made by the A22s to utilize their special equipment, much to the chagrin of the crews of the newer and supposedly more capable tanks who remained stuck on the beaches.
Many of the Wolverines, along with the few Black Princes that did escape the soft shingle, were able to push into the town and the 75mm gun of the Wolverine proved considerably more useful at removing anti-tank obstacles than the supposedly purpose-built equipment mounted on the Black Prince.
It was no comfort to the Canadians that their American counterparts also struggled to get their tanks off the beach and again the lighter M3 Stuart fared better than the M3 Lee [3]. Nonetheless the soldiers landing at Orange did succeed in getting some of their armour into action and managed to advance as per the original plan, extending around the western flank of Dieppe and blocking several critical junctions leading towards the town. This was particularly important as reports from the defending Wehrmacht troops were sufficiently confused that the initial efforts to send reinforcements were directed towards the positions strongly held by the American rather than towards the routes left open by the misdirected landing at Yellow beach. The forces landing at Blue and Green had some success penetrating the town and the port facilities, aided by the fact that the force at Blue was now somewhat larger than intended. By midday the German troops had regrouped and repeatedly counterattacked at the port, with the fighting becoming almost hand to hand at some points. The Germans feared the Allies would try and use the docks to land their own reinforcements, a fear that was not without merit given that there was a contingent of transports waiting to deploy the divisional reserves and further armour if the docks could be taken. These were stood down around 1630 hours as it finally became clear that even if the port could be taken the dock facilities would be unusable owing to a combination of battle damage and German sabotage [4].
One detachment of troops at Green beach, consisting of elements of the South Saskatchewan Regiment, Commandos and a small group of American Rangers escorted a radar engineer, RAF Flight Sergeant Jack Nissenthall, in an attempt to seize the German radar station at Pourville. The escorting troops had orders to shoot Nissenthall to prevent his capture if things went badly, he had even been supplied with a Cyanide capsule as a last resort. Fortunately for Nissenthall the attack was a success, though not without heavy casualties as only eight of Nissenthall’s bodyguards made it back to the beaches with him. While Nissenthall was able to examine the equipment and remove several manuals it was cutting the phone lines connecting the radar station and forcing it use radio for communications that arguably had the greatest effect. This radio traffic was intercepted and decoded by the British, providing a wealth of information about the operation and capabilities of the German radar system, all of which greatly assisted future RAF operations and planning for D-Day itself [5].
The success at Pourville was almost certainly the high point of Operation Jubilee. RAF efforts to gain air superiority over the town were frustrated by the presence of the Fw 190 fighter in considerable numbers. This fighter proved more than a match for the Spitfire Mk V as well as the P-40s and P-38s being used by the USAAF. This failure to suppress the Luftwaffe meant that the Allies efforts to bomb the reinforcements advancing towards Dieppe largely failed, compounded by the fact that co-ordination between ground attack aircraft and the troops they were supposed to be supporting was still poor. At the same time the town was proving to be far more heavily defended than anticipated and by 1600 hundred hours much of the armour supporting the Allied troops had been destroyed or broken down, reducing some to functioning as pillboxes covering road junctions and others to simply blocking streets, something that the bulk of the A22 proved quite effective at, regardless of how humiliating it might have been for the crews. With Allied troops deep in the town the naval fire support also had to be curtailed, a serious problem given the paucity of other artillery support. As mentioned the fighting in the port itself had been fierce and in the words of one Canadian soldier, ‘everything that hadn’t been blown up was on fire’. This was an exaggeration but an understandable one given the circumstances. Between the Allied attacks and German determination to prevent the allies taking the port intact it had been put completely out of action for the foreseeable future, which would later be spun as one of the successes of the raid, though in reality aerial reconnaissance pictures of the damage done had a sobering effect on those who were charged with planning the Normandy landings [6].
If the RAF wasn’t able to prevent the movement of German reinforcements, they were able to report on them at least. By 1600 hours it was obvious that further attacks by the Allied troops were pointless and instead they began to withdraw to a hastily prepared series of defensive positions to await their evacuation after dark, with the final withdrawal on the American flank delayed until 1700 to allow the troops who had been successfully landed at Yellow Beach to fall back into the defensive perimeter. The Germans were unable to prevent this withdrawal as they had also suffered heavily in the fighting and as the Allied troops fell back the Royal Navy was once again able to bring its guns to bear and suppress German efforts to harry the withdrawing troops. Night did not fall until 2130 hours and the evacuation was not completed until just before dawn on the 24th, with some of the rear-guard element who were unable to disengage being isolated and forced to surrender by 0900 hours. Almost all the armour and other heavy equipment that had been deployed was left behind and troops losses were significant. The Americans suffered around a 20% loss rate and the Canadians suffered about 15% losses, killed, and captured. These were certainly bad, though still far lower than the worse projections before the battle, and the Germans had also suffered heavily during the fighting. The question that has been asked frequently in the years since is whether the gains from the raid justified those losses?
Perhaps inevitably Mountbatten thought that they did, claiming that valuable lessons had been learned about amphibious operations and that the Germans did deploy divisions in the west at the expense of the fighting in the USSR. Alanbrooke and others were far more scathing in their assessment, pointing out that many of the so-called lessons of Dieppe, such as the vital necessity of air superiority and detailed intelligence about the landing grounds, should have been obvious without the loss of so many men and so much equipment. It is also questionable how much of the German forces sent west were in direct response to the Dieppe raid, in fact more troops were drawn off by the perceived threat of Italy trying to exit the war than went to France. The one indisputable benefit of the raid was that any idea of mounting a landing in 1942 was finally squashed, as were any suggestions of trying to seize a port on the first day of the evolving plan for Operation Millennium. The Allies would have to depend on moving men and equipment across the landing beaches for days if not weeks, an operation even more daunting than the initial landings and one that would exercise the ingenuity of the planners [7]. If some of the other lessons should have been obvious beforehand it is not unusual in war to find that it takes the harsh experience of battle to drive the seemingly obvious home and force those in command to change and adapt. The RAF and USAAF were certainly chastened by their struggle against the Luftwaffe and new aircraft models that could counter the Fw 190 were soon rushed into service. Some in the USAAF even raised fresh doubts about the wisdom of the plans for large scale unescorted air raids into German, alas these concerns were still not taken seriously, and once again a price in blood would have to be paid to learn the folly of that plan [8].
On the German side much propaganda was generated from the images of destroyed tanks, captured Allied soldiers, and the devastation wrought on Dieppe by the ‘callous English who cared nothing for the suffering of the French people’, though the latter had to be carefully edited to avoid showing just how much damage had been wrought on the defenders. Beyond this short-term propaganda gain however the battle of Dieppe did lead the Wehrmacht into drawing several erroneous conclusions, which were probably as valuable as any of the lessons the Allies may, or may not, have learned from Operation Jubilee. For one thing it affirmed their belief that any major landing would be aimed at taking a port, and probably one in northern France, with Calais being regarded as the most likely target. Though attempts to mount such an operation in Norway, or Italy were also seen as likely candidates, at least by Hitler, which meant the Wehrmacht also had to continue taking them seriously. This resulted in the decidedly limited resources available in 1943 to build what came to be called the Atlantic Wall being spread thin and in France would be concentrated on fortifying the major ports, leaving the defences in areas such as Normandy far weaker. Likewise, the reserve divisions of the Heer would be positioned for a rapid response in the Pas de Calais, a move that Allied intelligence did everything in its power to encourage [9].
The other area in which the Germans thoroughly misjudged the Allies was in the quality of their armoured forces, which the General staff now regarded as ‘second rate’. They believed, despite interrogation of Canadian soldiers providing contradictory evidence, that the Wolverine was a hasty reworking of the Valentine that indicated that the British were struggling to produce more modern designs, a belief compounded by their low opinion of the effectiveness of the Black Prince, this being hardly surprising since so few got into action and those that did proved as vulnerable as any tank will when operating in urban combat. They were equally dismissive of the M3 Lee, though there were some favourable comments made about the M3 Stuart, comments that did not find their way into the reports presented by the General Staff to Hitler. The last thing they wanted was a fresh set of demands for yet more expensive upgrades and new tank models that were clearly unnecessary. The official position of the Wehrmacht was that the British had made little progress in armour development since the conclusion of the fighting in North Africa and that Americans were likewise struggling to produce an effective medium tank and doubtless by extension any heavy tanks. This conclusion also played into the desire to send as many of the Heer’s latest armour models to the east as possible, meaning a much lower priority for the likes of the Tiger and the Hetzer to be assigned to units intended to counter any Allied attempts to breach the Atlantic Wall. The Germans remained completely unaware that both the Black Prince and the Lee were regarded as intermediate vehicles by their respective countries, with the far more capable A24 Churchill and M4 Sherman already in production and in the case of the Sherman entering service, with the even more powerful M4A5 Thomas variant following in the latter half of 1943. This false assumption would prove costly the Germans when the Allies did return to France [10].
As far as the troops who took part in the battle, they were regarded as heroes, especially the Canadians. In their homeland Dieppe was regarded as the battle that made D-Day possible and opened the road to Berlin. It had already been accepted that the Wolverine was obsolete, but its service at Dieppe confirmed their view that they should focus on a new generation of infantry support vehicles rather than copying the A22, A24 or even the A27 cruiser tank [11].
If Dieppe was indeed as Mountbatten argued a valuable learning experience it was not the only such opportunity in 1942 and in many respects the invasion of Sicily would be a far more painful, and embarrassing, lesson for the US Army [12].
[1] Obviously this is quite different from OTL, with the attacks aimed at the flanks of the town and much, much heavier naval fire support.
[2] So things are not going smoothly, which was all but inevitable.
[3] So yes, they got more armour into the battle but there are still a lot of tanks stranded on the beaches, probably about the same numbers as OTL owing to their being more armour in the battle to begin with.
[4] And the Allies are going to get it rammed home that trying to secure a working port in an assault is all but impossible, which finally kills any ideas that Dieppe can become a beachhead for a 1942 D-Day.
[5] OTL only one of the bodyguards made it out and the raiders didn’t do much damage besides cutting the phone lines. Here the Germans having a lot more to cope with made things a bit easier on the radar team.
[6] The Allies still fail to get air superiority, which is major reason this is not going well.
[7] There is still a place for the ‘funnies’ and some creative solutions to bypass the need for a harbour.
[8] A topic that will be discussed in far more detail once we reach the sequel and 1943.
[9] The Germans are spreading themselves thin, which is good for the Allies.
[10] The M4A5 Thomas is the result of a discussion with
@marathag. It is in effect an all-American Firefly.
[11] Not sure what the next Canadian vehicle will be, might even be an assault gun.
[12] Yeah, a couple of famous/notorious US Generals will be making their appearance shortly.
