Allies At Dieppe

The German part in the 19 August 1942 Dieppe raid has largely been ignored. Launched by Winston Churchill to appease his Soviet counterparts, Operation JUBILEE was one of the Allies’ greatest debacles of the war. The majority of the 6,100 soldiers and marines dispatched by Lord Louis Mountbatten were captured or killed. Just 2,211 of the 4,963 Canadians involved returned to England. Two years later the Canadian Army fought from Normandy into Germany with fewer men captured than at Dieppe. By exploring the German experience, this superbly researched book provides answers to previously unasked operational questions. How well were the Nazi occupiers prepared for an attack on Dieppe? What threat did the raid pose to the Germans’ defense of mainland Europe? What lessons did the Wehrmacht learn, and did their High Command use the Dieppe experience when preparing for the inevitable Allied invasion of ‘Fortress Europe’? How did Hitler and his henchmen respond to the Western Allies' failure to break down their defenses in occupied western Europe? The book also addresses how Goebbels’ propaganda machine exploited the victory, and the reaction of the German people. Drawing on extensive German source materials, the Wehrmacht's role in defeating Operation JUBILEE is comprehensively examined in fascinating detail, adding a new dimension to the history of this poorly-planned and under-resourced adventure.

With its trademark "you are there" style, Mark Zuehlke's tenth Canadian Battle Series volume tells the story of the 1942 Dieppe raid. Nicknamed "The Poor Man's Monte Carlo," Dieppe had no strategic importance, but with the Soviet Union thrown on the ropes by German invasion and America having just entered the war, Britain was under intense pressure to launch a major cross-Channel attack against France. Since 1939, Canadian troops had massed in Britain and trained for the inevitable day of the mass invasion of Europe that would finally occur in 1944. But the Canadian public and many politicians were impatient to see Canadian soldiers fight sooner. The first major rehearsal proved such a shambles the raid was pushed back to the end of July only to be cancelled by poor weather. Later, in a decision still shrouded in controversy, the operation was reborn. Dieppe however did not go smoothly. Drawing on rare archival documents and personal interviews, Mark Zuehlke examines how the raid came to be and why it went so tragically wrong. Ultimately, Tragedy at Dieppe honors the bravery and sacrifice of those who fought and died that fateful day on the beaches of Dieppe.

*Includes pictures *Includes online resources and a table of contents for further reading "I thought it most important that a large-scale operation should take place this summer, and military opinion seemed unanimous that until an operation on that scale was undertaken, no responsible general would take the responsibility of planning the main invasion." - Prime Minister Winston Churchill The invasion across the Channel came in the early morning hours of June 6, 1944. That day, forever known as D-Day, the Allies commenced Operation Overlord by staging the largest and most complex amphibious invasion in human history. The complex operation would require tightly coordinated naval and air bombardment, paratroopers, and even inflatable tanks that would be able to fire on fortifications from the coastline, all while landing over 150,000 men across nearly 70 miles of French beaches. Given the incredibly complex plan, it's no surprise that General Eisenhower had already written a letter apologizing for the failure of the invasion, which he carried in his coat pocket throughout the day. D-Day would turn out to be a remarkable success, but it wasn't the first time the Allies tried to land in France after the Nazi conquest of Western Europe. On the 19th of August in 1942, Allied troops launched a raid on the port of Dieppe in German-occupied France, but this attack, codenamed Operation Jubilee, was a disaster. Of the 6,000 ground troops deployed, two-thirds were killed, captured, or wounded, and among the raid's objectives, only one could have been considered a success. Britain proved it was committed to a campaign to drive the Nazis out of Western Europe, but making that one point came at a huge cost in lives, most of them Canadian. Top British officials later claimed the lessons learned in the failed raid were applied to D-Day a few years later, with Churchill asserting, "My Impression of 'Jubilee' is that the results fully justified the heavy cost. Not surprisingly, the Canadians begged to differ. Why was this raid launched? What happened on the day? And how did it all go so horribly wrong? The Dieppe Raid: The History and Legacy of the Allies' Failed Operation to Land on the French Coast during World War II looks at how the plans were formed, and what happened as a result of the raid. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about Dieppe like never before.

In 1942, a full two years before D-Day, thousands of men, mostly Canadian troops eager for their first taste of battle, were sent across the Channel in a raid on the French port town of Dieppe. Air supremacy was not secured; the topography of the town and its surroundings - hemmed in by tall cliffs and steep beaches - meant any invasion was improbably difficult; the result was carnage, the beaches turned into killing grounds even as the men came ashore, and whole regiments literally decimated. Why was the Raid ever mounted? Was the whole thing even, as has been darkly alleged, expected and even intended to fail, a cynical conspiracy to prove to the Americans, at the expense of so many Canadian lives, the impracticability of staging the Normandy landings for another two years? Robin Neillands goes behind the myths to tell what really happened, and why.

On the night of August 19, 1942, a force of five thousand Canadians launched an attack on the Nazi-held French port of Dieppe. When the disastrous raid was done, and the Allies were forced to retreat, nearly a thousand Canadian troops lay dead. Almost two thousand were taken prisoner. Some called it "the bloodiest nine hours in Canadian military history." For years, defenders of the raid claimed that the Allies learned valuable lessons from Dieppe that were put to use later in the war. Others, including prominent leaders of the time, believed that the Canadian soldiers had been used as cannon fodder. Through meticulous research and interviews with veterans both in Canada and at Dieppe, Hugh Brewster has created a fascinating and haunting historical tour of the planning and execution of this tragic raid and its aftermath. Included aresections about the evacuation and the POW experiences.

As dawn was breaking on the morning of 19 August 1942, Allied troops leapt ashore to the east and west of the French port of Dieppe. These were British commandoes accompanied by U.S. Rangers, tasked to silence the German gun batteries that flanked Dieppe. Other troops – the men of the 2nd Canadian Division – landed closer to Dieppe to capture the German positions that overlooked the port while, minutes later, the main body of the predominantly Canadian assaulting force began clambering from landing craft that had run onto the beach along Dieppe’s seafront. This was the start of Operation Jubilee, the Allies’ most ambitious assault upon Hitler’s so-called Fortress Europe – it quickly became a bloodbath. The early months of 1942 had been difficult ones for Prime Minister Churchill. Stalin was demanding action in Western Europe to lessen the pressure of the 280 German divisions that were bearing down upon Stalingrad. Roosevelt was insisting that U.S. soldiers must start fighting the Germans in Europe, and Mackenzie King, the Canadian Prime Minister, desperately needed Canadian troops to become involved in the war to keep his politically divided nation together. Churchill’s response to these measures was to authorize a ‘super-raid’ upon German-held territory, and the target selected by the planners was Dieppe. Apart from the notable success of No.4 Commando, the raid was a disaster with more than 50 per cent of the 6,086 men who landed being killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, plus all the Churchill tanks landed in support of the infantry suffered mechanical failure or were shelled into smoking wrecks. Yet amid the scenes slaughter, of confusion, and communication breakdown, were acts of almost unimaginable heroism, ingenuity, determination, and self-sacrifice to which the awarding of two Victoria Crosses paid a worthy tribute. There were also special missions associated with the raid, the details of which remained a closely guarded secret until long after the war. This book opens a window on Operation Jubilee, allowing the reader a rare insight into the death and destruction inflicted upon the Allied force during just a few hours, and of the damage done to Dieppe itself, with many of the photographs being taken by the victorious German defenders. The raid saw the heaviest casualty figures experienced by Canadians in the Second World War, and the photographs in this book are a stark reminder of that fateful day in late summer of 1942.

In wartime, capturing the hearts and minds of the citizenry is arguably as important as victory on the battlefield. The Information Front explores the Canadian military’s use of public relations units to manage news during the Second World War. These specialized units were responsible for providing sufficient and positive news coverage to Canadians at home. This fascinating study traces the transformation of an emergent PR organization into an efficient publicity machine. It also scrutinizes news coverage and PR activities during major Canadian operations at Dieppe, Sicily, and Normandy to reveal how the military used censorship and propaganda to rally support for the war effort.

'A lively and readable account' Spectator 'A fine book ... well-written and well-researched' Washington Times In less than six hours in August 1942, nearly 1,000 British, Canadian and American commandos died in the French port of Dieppe in an operation that for decades seemed to have no real purpose. Was it a dry-run for D-Day, or perhaps a gesture by the Allies to placate Stalin's impatience for a second front in the west? Historian David O'Keefe uses hitherto classified intelligence archives to prove that this catastrophic and apparently futile raid was in fact a mission, set up by Ian Fleming of British Naval Intelligence as part of a 'pinch' policy designed to capture material relating to the four-rotor Enigma Machine that would permit codebreakers like Alan Turing at Bletchley Park to turn the tide of the Second World War. 'A fast-paced and convincing book ... that clears up decades of misinformation about the ignoble raid' Toronto Star