World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF EUROPE: Rehearsal

The attack was scheduled for daybreak. In the close-packed boats moving toward the Continent, men loaded the magazines of their Bren guns and checked equipment. It was a hot, muggy night on a lifeless Channel.

Before dawn His Majesty’s destroyers, transports and launches, chasseurs of the Fighting French Navy, a Polish destroyer and a mile-long string of invasion barges laden with troops and tanks were off Dieppe, hidden in the night’s retreating skirts.

The strategy, long planned, was comparatively simple. The Commandos were to land by stealth and distract German forces in Berneval, four miles to the east, and Varengeville, five miles to the west. Major General John Hamilton Roberts’ Canadians would carry the main show, with flanking attacks against the chalk cliffs on both sides of Dieppe and a frontal assault on Dieppe’s beaches.

In his headquarters aboard a destroyer, grizzled “Ham” Roberts, whose close-cropped mustache makes him look as though he has merely forgotten to shave, led the attackers in. They had a tough job ahead of them. Batteries of German cannon and machine guns, perched on the cliffs and hidden in caves, could turn an enfilading fire on the beaches, which bristled with barbed wire. From deep fortifications further inland artillery could lay down a curtain of fire offshore. Along new military roads and railways German reinforcements could be swiftly concentrated against the attackers (see p. 29). After the assault and occupation would come the problem of withdrawal—for this was a raid, not an invasion. Dieppe was a nest of German strength, as General Roberts well knew. A little after 4 a.m. the attackers closed in on the shore.

The Commando barges, carrying also a detachment of U.S. Rangers, moved shoreward. Along the French coast anti-aircraft guns barked fretfully. R.A.F. bombers, sent ahead, were softening up inland positions. But the Nazis might not have guessed what was brewing, if ill luck had not overtaken the raiders groping into Berneval.

German E-boats, patrolling the coast, intercepted them. The E-boats opened fire. The startled German shore batteries awoke belching.

A U.S. Ranger said afterward: “They met us with everything—mortar fire, machine guns, rifles, anti-aircraft guns and finally bayonets.” The Commandos got ashore, but they had to withdraw, cut to pieces.

At Varengeville to the west the Commandos were more successful. They reached the shore, carried and destroyed a battery of 6-inch naval guns, which erupted on the lightening coast like a volcano. It was time for the Canadians.

Ham Roberts’ soldiers had been in training for the job for months, chafing for this opportunity. They were a cross section of Canada’s Army Overseas, drawn from the Royals of Toronto, the Hamilton Light Infantry, the Essex Scots, the Camerons of Winnipeg, the Fusiliers Mt. Royal of Montreal, the South Saskatchewans and a Calgary tank regiment. Not so many months ago they had been office workers, factory workers, students, wheat farmers, fishermen, lumbermen. Many of them were French Canadians, many of them volunteers from the U.S. In boxlike barges and new secret tank-landing vessels they headed for shore. The Germans reported afterward that from 300 to 400 craft were in the attack, while reserve transports and warships hovered behind.

As they came in, the Germans raked them. Many a Canadian never reached shore. Many a Canadian died in the sand where English honeymooners once frolicked, or fell on Dieppe’s pretty esplanade.

Canadian Correspondent Ross Munro, one of 22 newsmen on the raid (see p. 63), was in a landing boat with a detachment of Royals. “By the time our boat touched the beach the din was at a crescendo. I peered out at a slope in front of us, and it was startling to discover that it was covered with fallen forms of men in battle dress. The Royals ahead of us had been cut down as they stormed the slope.” The Germans poured their fire into the craft. Munro’s boat finally backed off, filled with wounded.

But in other sectors Canadians in tanks and afoot cut their way through barbed wire; stormed into the city; occupied the casino, which the Germans had turned into a fortress; blasted snipers out of boarded-up hotels and resort buildings; destroyed gun emplacements and a radio-locator station; hour after hour through the hot morning stalked Dieppe’s defenders; bloodied their bayonets; rounded up Nazi prisoners; died in Dieppe’s narrow streets; staggered, wounded, back to the shore.

Destroyers and the lighter craft of the Allied Navy darted in & out of smoke screens with which British planes shrouded the coast. German batteries pounded at them. German planes showered them with their wrath. Calmly naval gunners fired point-blank into the fortified hotels on the waterfront, into German emplacements on the cliffs. Aboard one destroyer a flabbergasted newsman heard a 23-year-old lieutenant remark to his gunner: “Albert, yours are falling short on the cliff’s face. It may be your idea to bring down the enemy with the cliff, but I think it’s rather a long-term policy.”

Fortunately for both naval and land forces, Allied planes ruled the air. Swarms of Stukas, Dorniers and Focke-Wulfs attacked, tried to strafe and bomb convoys and land forces. Not even with the raids on Essen and Cologne had the British succeeded in drawing so many of the Luftwaffe into a single mass combat. Estimated to be engaged: 200 Nazi bombers and 300 fighter planes (see p. 29), drawn from points as distant as Holland. Shorter refueling trips enabled the Nazis to make more sorties per plane engaged. But throughout the whole chaotic morning some 1,000 planes, flown by British, U.S., Czech, Polish, Canadian, New Zealand, Norwegian, Belgian and Fighting French flyers, fended off the Luftwaffe, dropped more than 200,000 Ib. of destruction on enemy positions.

From headquarters aboard his destroyer surrounded by the complexity of modern warfare, General Roberts watched the battle’s progress, directed land, sea and sky operations by radio. Three aides listened with earphones, relayed his orders to warships, to tank drivers pounding along Dieppe’s beach, to Spitfire pilots high in the summer sky, to the air command 77 miles away in England, upon whom he depended for air reinforcement.

At last it was time to evacuate. Some tanks had to be blown up by their own operators, who then hotfooted it for the shore front. Under the umbrella of the R.A.F., exhausted soldiers re-embarked. After nine hours the Canadians and their Allies backed off the flaming coast of France, turned tail and headed for England.

Gain & Loss. This week the Canadians licked their wounds. Losses in manpower were known to be high—probably two to three thousand. The Allies confessed that they had met unexpected resistance. From the Germans, who first claimed that they had repulsed a full-fledged invasion, came claims of “very high casualties” among Allied soldiers in killed and wounded. They also claimed 1,500 captured. Probably more than 5,000 Allied forces were engaged.

In the air, said the British communiqué: “Ninety-one German aircraft are known to have been destroyed and about twice that number have probably been destroyed or damaged”—from one-third to one-half of the estimated German operational strength in Western Europe. British losses in the air: 98 planes, of which the pilots of 30 were saved.

Said the British: “The raid was a reconnaissance in force, having a vital part in our agreed offensive policy.” That offensive policy presumably was an eventual second front, for which the Canadians had staged a costly rehearsal. What had been learned from it, what had been accomplished beyond the probable diversion of more of the Luftwaffe to the west and the destruction of some military installations, the High Command kept to itself.