Analyses German at Dieppe The capture of a copy of the Dieppe plan allowed the Germans to analyse the operation. Rundstedt criticised the plan's rigidity, saying that "the plan is in German terms not a plan, it is more a position paper or the intended course of an exercise." Other senior German officers were equally unimpressed; General
Konrad Haase considered it "incomprehensible" that a division was expected to overrun a German regiment that was supported by artillery, "...the strength of naval and air forces was entirely insufficient to suppress the defenders during the landings". General
Adolf-Friedrich Kuntzen could not understand why the Pourville landings were not reinforced with tanks where they might have succeeded in leaving the beach. The Germans were unimpressed by the Churchill tanks left behind; the armament and armour were compared unfavourably with that used in German and Soviet tanks. The Germans were pleased with their successful defence whilst noting faults in their own communications, transport and location of support forces but recognised that the Allies were certain to learn some lessons from the operation and set about improving the fixed defences. The Dieppe raid also provoked longer-term strategic decisions. In October,
Hitler's high command produced a "Memorandum Regarding Experiences in Coastal Defence", which was provoked in large part by Dieppe. This document provided a framework for German commanders to plan coastal defence in the future. It laid down, amongst other principles, that air superiority was the key to a successful coastal defence strategy. Despite criticism concerning the inexperience of the Canadian brigades, scholars have noted that even seasoned professionals would have been hard-pressed under the deplorable conditions brought about by their superiors. The commanders who planned the raid on Dieppe had not envisaged such losses. The Allies changed their view that capturing a major port was necessary to establish a second front; the damage inflicted on a port to capture it and by the Germans firing demolition charges would make it useless afterwards. Prefabricated
Mulberry harbours were to be built and towed to beaches during the invasion. While the RAF were generally able to keep German aircraft from the land battle and the ships, the operation demonstrated the need for air superiority as well as showing "major deficiencies in RAF ground support techniques" and this led to the creation of an integrated
tactical air force for army support. On 21 December 1942, Churchill wrote in a memo to
Hastings Ismay, the Cabinet Military Secretary, where he stated "although for many reasons everyone was concerned to make this business look as good as possible, the time has now come when I must be informed more precisely about the military plans". Churchill was highly critical of the Operation Jubilee plans, writing "it would appear to a layman very much out of accord with the accepted principles of war to attack the strongly fortified town front without first securing the cliffs on either side and to use our tanks in a frontal assault on the beaches". Ismay's reply, dated 29 December 1942, included a detailed report written by Mountbatten which completely acquitted himself of any responsibility for flaws in the Operation Jubilee plan and largely blamed Montgomery who as GOC of Southeastern Command "was the senior Army Officer concerned with the Raid from about the end of April onwards".
Myths Preliminary naval and aerial bombardments were already common strategy by the Allies. "There was a cursory examination in the Combined Report [...] which amounted to little more than statements of the obvious." The British used preliminary and aerial bombardments during Operation Ironeclad, while the Americans used it during their landings at Guadalcanal. The Churchill tanks did not get stuck on the beach. Many made it off only to be blocked by tank obstacles and due to the engineers being pinned down on the beach the tanks were unable to get through. The tank commanders then turned around and returned to the beach to act as cover for the infantry. "[...] Major Allan Glenn ordered all tanks able to move onto the beach to provide covering fire [...]". The concept for the Mulberry Harbours were "well developed" before the Dieppe Raid. "Hugh-Hallet is often credited with proposing the "mulberrie" [...] but he himself said they were Churchill's idea, posed months before Dieppe." The real lessons that helped secure victory for the Allies on D-Day were the landings conducted during Operations Torch, Husky, Avalanche and at Tarawa. These landings helped the D-Day planners to better move logistics and come up with weapons and strategies to combat heavily fortified positions.
Casualties Of the nearly 5,000-strong Canadian contingent, 3,367 were killed, wounded or taken prisoner, an exceptional casualty rate of 68 per cent. The 1,000 British Commandos lost 247 men. The Royal Navy lost the destroyer (on the return crossing, it was hit by bombs from a Fw 190 and then scuttled by ) and 33 landing craft, suffering 550 dead and wounded. The RAF lost 106 aircraft.
RAF Air Sea Rescue Services picked up around 20 pilots at the loss of three of Dover's five
High Speed Launches. Among the RAF losses, six RAF aircraft had been shot down by gunners on their own side, one Typhoon was shot down by a Spitfire and two others were lost when their tails broke off (a structural problem with early Typhoons), and two Spitfires collided during the withdrawal across the Channel. The British historian
Robin Neillands wrote that the Canadian regiments that took part in the raid were virtually destroyed. The Essex Scottish regiment had a 90% casualty rate as only 52 men out of the 553 men of the Essex Scottish who landed at Dieppe beach returned to England safely with the rest all killed, wounded or captured; the Fusiliers Mont-Royal regiment had 459 out of the 584 men who landed becoming casualties; and the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry regiment had 372 casualties out of the 582 men who landed with half of the survivors who returned to England being seriously wounded. Of the 31 officers of the Fusiliers Mont-Royal who landed at Dieppe, 27 were casualties, a loss that was especially crippling owning to the shortage of French-Canadian officers. Other regiments who landed elsewhere suffered similarly with the Royal Regiment of Canada which landed at Blue Beach had a 94% casualty rate while the South Saskatchewan Regiment and the Cameron Highlanders regiment who landed at Pourville had 685 casualties out of the combined 1,065 men who landed. The Germans suffered 591 casualties, 322 fatal and 280 wounded, 48 aircraft and one patrol boat. Of the 50 US Army Rangers serving in Commando units, six were killed, seven wounded and four captured. The losses at Dieppe were said to be a necessary evil. In direct response to the raid on Dieppe, Churchill remarked that "My Impression of 'Jubilee' is that the results fully justified the heavy cost" and that it "was a Canadian contribution of the greatest significance to final victory." To others, especially Canadians, it was a major disaster. The exception was the success gained by the battle-hardened British commandos against the coast artillery batteries near Varengeville. Of the nearly 5,000 Canadian soldiers, more than 900 were killed (about 18 per cent) and 1,874 taken prisoner (37%). General
Denis Whitaker of the Royal Light Hamilton Infantry who fought as a captain at Dieppe in a 1989 interview stated: "The defeat cleared out all the dead weight. It was the best thing that ever happed to the regiment." German
Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and his press chief
Otto Dietrich oversaw a propaganda campaign which sought to highlight the raid's failure as a sign of German strength and also to reassure the German domestic population that they need not worry about an attack in the West while most German forces were committed in the East. Many of the photos taken by the Germans were staged with either POWs posing as dead bodies or removing German dead. The propaganda value of German news on the raid was enhanced by British foot-dragging, Allied media being forced to carry announcements from German sources. These attempts were made to rally the morale of the German people despite the growing intensity of the Allied
strategic bombing campaign on German cities, and large daily casualties on the Eastern Front. Other sources suggest that up to 28 bombers were lost and that the figure for destroyed and damaged Spitfires was 70. The suffered 48 aircraft losses, 28 bombers, half of them Dornier Do 217s from KG 2; JG 2 lost 14 Fw 190s and eight pilots killed, JG 26 lost six Fw 190s with their pilots. The RAF lost 91 aircraft shot down and 64 pilots; 47 killed and 17 taken prisoner, the RCAF lost 14 aircraft and nine pilots and 2 Group lost six bombers. The in France was back to full strength within days of the raid. The Canadian historian
Terry Copp wrote that Dieppe failed to inflict the knockout blow against the that the RAF sought. For the rest of 1942, the output of fighters by the United States, Britain, and Canada, combined with better Allied pilot training, led to the gradually losing the war of attrition in the skies above France. Copp concluded that "the battle for air superiority was won on many fronts by continuous effort and Aug. 19, 1942, was part of that achievement." Leigh-Mallory considered the Dieppe a huge success as it finally forced the Luftwaffe to fight a major air battle on the French coast and on 22 August 1942 wrote to Mountbatten demanding another such raid as the best way to trigger another air battle like the one fought over Dieppe. Citing the fact that it was standard German policy to assume that any attempt to seize a French port was the start of an invasion, Leigh-Mallory stated it was simply a mere matter of landing troops on the French coastline somewhere near a port as the best way of triggering decisive air battles that would he argued lead to "the destruction of the Luftwaffe". Leigh-Mallory was apparently ignorant of the fact that the Luftwaffe had changed its policy after Dieppe once the Germans discovered that Operation Jubilee was a raid rather than an invasion. The general feeling within the Luftwaffe was it had "over-reacted" to the Dieppe raid by throwing most of the Luftwaffe fighter squadrons in northern France into battle in a place that favored the Allied aircraft, and henceforward if the Allies landed in France again, the policy was to wait and see if the action was a raid or an invasion. Mountbatten approved Leigh-Mallory's request, but was prevented by a shortage of landing craft from carrying it out. The plans of Leigh-Mallory and Mountbatten for more such raids also encountered massive opposition from the War Office and the British Army which objected to the use of British and Canadian soldiers as essentially bait to bring out the Luftwaffe. In March 1943, one British Army brigadier wrote bitterly that in the RAF "there was a school of thought which considers Dieppe a howling success because we were able to bring the GAF [German Air Force] into the air and shoot down 200 German aircraft at the expense of 100 of our own (plus of course 5,000 odd good soldiers)".
Prisoners of war Canadian Brigadier William Wallace Southam brought ashore his copy of the assault plan, which was
classified as a secret document. Southam tried to bury the copy under pebbles when he surrendered, but was spotted doing so by German forces who retrieved it. The plan, later criticised by senior German commanders including Rundstedt for its size and complexity, contained orders to shackle prisoners. The
Special Service Brigade tied the hands of prisoners taken on raids and the practice had been ordered for the Dieppe Raid "to prevent destruction of their documents". Roberts had objected to this with Mountbatten. After capturing Southam's plan, the Germans threatened on 2 September to shackle Allied prisoners captured at Dieppe. The War Office announced that if an order existed it would be rescinded and the Germans withdrew the threat on 3 September. On 7 October, the Germans revived the controversy after more information emerged about the Dieppe Raid and
Operation Basalt on 4 October, in which German prisoners captured on
Sark were alleged to have been tied. British and Canadian prisoners of war were tied in reprisal on 8 October, which led to counter reprisals. Supposed violations of the Geneva Convention committed by Allied commandos against German prisoners of war at Dieppe and Sark was cited by Hitler in his
Commando Order of October 1942, which instructed German forces to summarily execute all Allied commandos they captured.
Civilians Civilians were handed leaflets by the Canadians telling them it was only a raid and not to get involved; despite this a small number of civilians provided help to the wounded and later passed clothing and food to Canadian prisoners.
German preparedness The fiasco has led to a discussion of whether the Germans knew of the raid in advance. Since June 1942, the
BBC had been broadcasting warnings to French civilians of a "likely" action, urging them to quickly evacuate the Atlantic coastal districts. Indeed, on the day of the raid itself, the BBC announced it, albeit at 08:00, after the landings had taken place. First-hand accounts and memoirs of many Canadian veterans who documented their experiences on the shores of Dieppe remark about the preparedness of the German defences as if they were warned. On touching down on the Dieppe shore, the landing ships were immediately shelled with the utmost precision as troops disembarked. Commanding officer Lt Colonel Labatt testified to having seen markers on the beach used for mortar practice, which appeared to have been recently placed. The belief that the Germans were forewarned has been strengthened by accounts of German and Allied POWs. Major C. E. Page, while interrogating a German soldier, found out that four machine-gun battalions were brought in "specifically" in anticipation of a raid. There are numerous accounts of interrogated German prisoners, German captors and French citizens who all conveyed to Canadians that the Germans had been preparing for the landing for weeks. Much of the belief that the Germans had been forewarned was due to the 1942 film
The Next of Kin, which had been made mandatory viewing to British and Canadian forces starting with the film's release in May 1942. The plot of
The Next of Kin featured a commando raid into France very much like the Dieppe raid that was sabotaged by a German spy operating in Britain who was able to learn of the raid beforehand due to sloppy security. In the immediate aftermath of the Dieppe raid, many of the Canadian soldiers who survived the raid cited
The Next of Kin as evidence that there had been a German spy who learned the secrets of Operation Jubilee. Captain Stephen Roskill, Britain's
official naval historian, wrote an article for the prestigious Royal United Services Institution arguing the opposite case in 1964. Roskill's article relied on German documentary evidence to show that any warnings of an Allied raid on Dieppe were purely coincidental. In his 2023 study of the battle from the German point of view, James Shelley concluded that there was no evidence to support the view that the Germans had any specific intelligence that a raid was planned against Dieppe. The German convoy that bumped into the Allied ships failed to get messages to shore due to damage to their radio aerials in the fire fight; however, the operator of the long range Freya 28 (Radar) at Pourville correctly identified five columns of stationary ships at 03:45 at a range of 35 km. An alert was given to the Navy command who did not believe the warning, but when the ships started to head to shore a further warning was given at 04:35. Troops along the coast had heard gun fire out to sea and some units went to alert. It was 05:05 before German orders came from Le Havre for artillery to open fire. Within an hour the extent of the attack was being understood by German command and reserves were notified to prepare to move to the coast. The War Office suspected that the crossword had been used to pass intelligence to the Germans and called upon
Lord Tweedsmuir, a senior intelligence officer attached to the Canadian Army, to investigate. Tweedsmuir later said, "We noticed that the crossword contained the word 'Dieppe', and there was an immediate and exhaustive inquiry which also involved
MI5. But in the end, it was concluded that it was just a remarkable coincidence – a complete fluke". A similar
crossword coincidence occurred in May 1944, prior to D-Day. Multiple terms associated with
Operation Overlord (including the word "Overlord") appeared in the
Daily Telegraph crossword (also written by Dawe) and after another investigation by MI5, it was concluded that it was another coincidence. Further to this, a former student identified that Dawe frequently requested words from his students, many of whom were children in the same area as US military personnel.
The Hinge of Fate In 1950, Churchill was writing
The Hinge of Fate, the fourth volume of his memoirs/history entitled
The Second World War.
The Hinge of Fate covered the events from January 1942 to June 1943. On 2 August 1950, Churchill sent
Hastings Ismay (who was now serving as a researcher and a ghostwriter for Churchill's book series) a memo where he noted that the original plan for a raid on Dieppe codenamed Operation Rutter had been cancelled on 7 July 1942 and that Montgomery had advised against relaunching it. Churchill noted that Operation Rutter was launched under the new codename of Operation Jubilee on 19 August 1942, a decision that he did not remember approving at the time. Churchill wrote to Ismay that he wanted to know "who took the decision to revive the attack after it had been abandoned and Montgomery had cleared out". In particular, Churchill wanted to know "...what the facts were – namely: did the Chiefs of Staff, or the Defence Committee or the War Cabinet ever consider the matter of the revival of the operation [a] when I was in England, [b] when I was out of England, or was it all pushed through by Dickie Mountbatten on his own without reference to higher authority?". Churchill's references to being out of England in August 1942 were to his summit with Joseph Stalin in Moscow followed up by a lengthy trip to the Middle East. On 14 August 1950, Ismay wrote back to Churchill saying he could not answer his questions because there was a complete lacuna in the documentary record. In an attempt to excuse the absence of any documentary record, Ismay added "in the vital interests of secrecy nothing was put on paper. Indeed, I can now recall the fury of General Nye then V.C.I.G.S [Brooke was with Churchill on a visit to Egypt in August 1942 and Nye was serving as the acting CIGS] who had no idea that the operation was on until reports started to flow in from the scene of the action". Ismay concluded that Churchill must had given his approval to Jubilee, but that there were no records to either confirm or deny that assertion. Ismay stated he consulted Mountbatten's deputy, Admiral
John Hughes-Hallett, who remembered discussing the plan for a raid on Dieppe with Churchill sometime in the summer of 1942, but Hughes-Hallett was not certain if that was before Operation Rutter was cancelled or after. In the early drafts of
The Hinge of Fate, Churchill wrote that it was Mountbatten who revived the plan for raiding Dieppe and that there was "no written record of the revived plan being further examined nor of any decision to launch it being taken by the Chiefs of Staff or the Defence Committee of the War Cabinet". Churchill's draft strongly implied that Mountbatten had launched Operation Jubilee on his own authority and complained that was no record of the Jubilee plan ever being examined by the Chiefs of Staff or the Defence Committee, which he felt was a failure of the system as he believed that either body might have pointed out the flaws in the Operation Jubilee plan. He wrote that because he was abroad on visits to the Soviet Union and Egypt in August 1942 that he was unaware of the Operation Jubilee plan and would have submitted it to the Chiefs of Staff for review had he been in Britain that August. Churchill added that the Dieppe raid caused much shock and grief in Canada "whose gallant men had suffered such devastating losses" and that the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division "lost seventy percent of the five thousand embarked". On 1 September 1950, Churchill submitted his draft to Mountbatten, who objected strenuously to what was written and demanded that it be rewritten. Mountbatten objected to publishing the memo of 29 December 1942 written by Ismay which in turn quoted from his memo in where he blamed Montgomery, wrongly saying it would violate copyright laws (the memos were government property and were held in Crown copyright, meaning neither Ismay nor Mountbatten held any copyright). Mountbatten also objected to the statement that 70% of the Canadian 2nd Division became casualties under the grounds that only 18% of the 5,000 men who landed at Dieppe were killed, writing that this was "the most pessimistic possible view to take and surely not one which our side should stress". About Mountbatten's way of calculating casualties, the British historian
David Reynolds noted that listing all of the dead, wounded and those taken prisoner is the normal way of counting casualties and if one counts in all those Canadian killed, wounded or taken prisoner then 2nd Division did indeed suffer a 70% casualty rate at Dieppe instead of a 18% rate. Mountbatten also demanded that Churchill delete all the references to the Chiefs of Staff not giving approval to Operation Jubilee and asserted that the Chiefs of Staff had given "verbal approval" with the absence of a documentary record being due to reasons of security. Mountbatten also wanted all references to the wave of grief that swept Canada after Dieppe removed under the grounds that mentioning that ordinary Canadians were thrown into the deepest despair as a result of an operation he had launched was libelous and injurious to his reputation. Finally, Mountbatten demanded that Churchill write that he had informed him personally about the plan for Operation Jubilee sometime in the summer of 1942 with the absence of a documentary record again being explained away by reasons of security, adding that it was not his fault that Churchill could not remember the alleged meeting. Ismay wrote to Churchill in support of Mountbatten that "I admit – with shame – that I have no recollection of the meetings that he had with you on the question of remounting Dieppe, but I am sure, having regard in the weight of evidence that his story is substantially correct". Ismay also asked that Churchill not include his minute of 21 December 1942 where he criticised the Jubilee plan in
The Hinge of Fate, saying that Mountbatten did not want it published. Churchill largely gave in to Mountbatten and rewrote his account of the Dieppe raid in the manner that Mountbatten had wanted. The final published version in
The Hinge of Fate omitted any mention of the immense wave of sorrow and sadness in Canada caused by the raid, changed the 2nd Division from suffering a 70% casualty rate to having 18% killed, and praised the raid as a "costly, but unfruitful reconnaissance in force" and stated there was "honour to the brave who fell. Their sacrifice was not in vain". Reynolds wrote it remains unclear if the Dieppe raid was an "unauthorised action" or not. The anger expressed by General Nye, the acting CIGS in August 1942, strongly supports the conclusion that Mountbatten had launched the raid without informing the Chiefs of Staff in advance. However, this may not have been a case of Mountbatten exceeding his authority as revised procedures no longer required Mountbatten to obtain authority to relaunch a cancelled raid, and the plan for Operation Rutter had been approved by the Chiefs of Staff on 13 May 1942. Regardless if the raid was an "unauthorised action" or not, it is clear it was primarily Mountbatten who was responsible for the decision to go ahead with the raid on 19 August 1942. Reynolds noted that Churchill was the one most responsible for Mountbatten's rise, writing that it was "thanks to him that this egregious social climber had been so absurdly over-promoted. Mountbatten was a mere forty-one with previous experience only of destroyers, and lacked the clout to obtain the essential support from the Navy and the RAF. He probably pressed on with the flawed plan because the only way to consolidate his fragile position was by inflicting dramatic damage on Hitler's Fortress Europe. That is what the Prime Minister asked him to do. Whether or not there had been meetings or records, Mountbatten was basically following the brief he had been given. When Churchill dropped his post-mortem in September 1950, lack of time and energy were probably only part of the reason. It was not prudent for him to examine the Dieppe raid too closely – like many events in that dark tunnel between the surrender of Singapore and the victory at Alamein".
The Enigma pinch Research undertaken over a 15-year period by military historian
David O'Keefe uncovered 100,000 pages of classified British military archival files that documented a "
pinch" mission overseen by
Ian Fleming (best known later as author of the
James Bond novels), as the main purpose of the Dieppe Raid. O'Keefe states that
No. 30 Commando was sent to Dieppe to capture one of the new German 4-rotor
Enigma code machines, plus associated codebooks and rotor setting sheets. The
Naval Intelligence Division (NID) planned the "pinch" to pass such items to
cryptanalysts at
Bletchley Park to assist with Ultra decryption operations. According to O'Keefe the presence of other troops landing at Dieppe was to provide support and create a distraction for the commando units ordered to reach the German admiralty headquarters and capture the Enigma machine; they were a cover for the Enigma target. No. 30 Commando was formed, as the Special Intelligence Unit, in September 1942 (a month after the raid), composed of 33 (Royal Marines) Troop, 34 (Army) Troop, 35 (RAF) Troop and 36 (Royal Navy) Troop. It was later renamed 30 RN Commando (Special Engineering Unit). Later research identified the unit in the Dieppe raid as
No. 3 Troop of No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando, known as the X-Troop. In August 2017, naval historian
Eric Grove described 'Enigma Pinch' as "more a reflection of the contemporary fascination with secret intelligence rather than the reality of 1942." Leah Garret in her 2021 book
X-Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War Two, found new evidence to support O'Keefe's conclusion that Dieppe was a cover for a pinch on naval headquarters. A British unit was created made up of anti-Nazi Germans who had fled the
Sudetenland; a five-man team from X Troop was to break into the Enigma machine's room at Dieppe and take the machine and code books. (German speakers were needed to identify the relevant code documents, and possibly, to interrogate prisoners taken.) Garret found a formerly classified after-action report written by "Maurice Latimer", the Anglicised name of the one Sudeten German who returned from the mission, who reported that his orders were "to proceed immediately to German General HQ in Dieppe to pick up all documents, etc of value, including, if possible, a new German respirator" (almost certainly a code word referring to the Enigma machine). The mission failed, with one member killed, another seriously wounded, and two taken prisoner. ==Commemoration==