Dan Snow's History Hit - Operation Jubilee: Disaster at Dieppe

Episode Date: October 9, 2021

In August 1942 the Allies launched a daring raid across the Channel to capture the port town of Dieppe and hold it for 24 hours. It ended in disaster and death with nearly two-thirds of the attackers killed, wounded or captured. In the aftermath, commanders were quick to try and justify the carnage claiming that the raid was necessary to learn lessons in advance of future large scale amphibious operations in Europe and to show the Soviets that the Western Allies were serious about opening a second front. But, as you'll hear in this podcast, this was a calamity that was all too predictable. Dan is joined by Patrick Bishop, author of Operation Jubilee - Dieppe, 1942: The Folly and the Sacrifice, to explore what went wrong during the ill-fated mission, whether any lessons were learned and the hard truth about the myths that surround Operation Jubilee.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. On the 18th of August 1942, a flotilla of ships and boats moved across the flat waters of the Channel

towards the coast of occupied France. They're there to seize the German help port of Dieppe, try and hold it for 24 hours, in a mission with slightly unclear aims, but probably above all to show the Soviets that the Western Allies were serious about getting a second front opened and doing the necessary information gathering to support a full-scale invasion of Western Europe. But as you may know, the operation turned out to be a massacre, a military disaster. Nearly two-thirds of those who attacked ended up dead, wounded, or captured. It is a great pleasure, it's a privilege in fact, to interview the best-selling

author Patrick Bishop on the podcast today to get his account of this doomed endeavor and tell us some pretty painful truths about this operation and how it's been mythologized ever since. If you want to watch documentaries about World War II, well, we've got them on History Hit TV. It's like Netflix for history. This year, my documentary series on Bismarck,

on the anniversary of the destruction of that great naval vessel proved very popular so you can go and watch that or you can watch our discovery of the D-Day shipwrecks. We found two survivors of the amphibious assault on D-Day rotting away in Pool Harbour in southern England. Just a huge pleasure to make those documentaries. They're up there now lots and lots of people watching. Please go and subscribe, historyhit.tv. You get 30 days free if you subscribe today. What's not to like? In the meantime, though, here's an account of a very different kind of amphibious assault on Europe.

It's the Dieppe Raid of 1942 with Patrick Bishop. Enjoy. Patrick, thank you very much indeed for coming on the podcast. Thanks for asking me. It's a great honour to have you on. As a Canadian, this is a story that we're all very much aware of. What was the idea? Why did Britain launch this enormous amphibious assault in 1942?

Well, this was a kind of hiatus in the British war effort. They've managed to extract themselves from Dunkirk, etc. Things are not going terribly well in North Africa, in the Western desert. So the basis of gathering their strength, and now combined, of course, with the strength of the Americans, for an eventual invasion or the start of the process that will drive the Germans back from occupied territory in Western Europe. So in the meantime, you know, for all sorts of reasons, the British have got to be seen to be doing something. So in a way, the kind of impetus for the raid is a political impetus. And it comes at the end of a long series of raids that start really at the turn of the year 1941, 1942. So they kind of gather in scale and impact.

And so this is the biggest one thus far when it's finally launched. There are several delays in August. So the reason behind it, I would say in simple terms, is to show, for the British to show to the Americans and the Russians who are terribly important in all this, that they're serious. There's a lot of pressure on them to invade Europe early.

They don't want to do that for very good reasons. They think it could end in disaster until they're absolutely ready to go. It's showing intent. It's saying, look, we are serious about this. So we're going to mount a big spectacular raid that will convince you all that we mean business. In the Ostend raid, there's a Brugge raid of World War I.

There's a very particular thing. They want to try and stop U-boats entering the Channel of the North Sea. Was there a specific purpose to this raid in the spirit of that earlier raid? So in that sense, there wasn't so much of a military purpose to the raid. In fact, it's quite hard to find any military significance in it at all in terms of actually inflicting damage on the Germans. If you look at the array of targets, they're all kind of things like port installations, military supplies, utilities. And you think, well, you know, was all that effort worth it simply to blow up a few ammunition dumps?

And from another perspective, if you're blowing up the gas works or the electricity works or something, you're hurting the local population, your allies, supposedly, as much as probably more than you are the Germans. So there's nothing there. And reading through all the mounds and mounds of papers there were on the preparations for the raid, there's nothing that stands out as saying why this was a particularly good military target. And lots of reasons were advance afterwards saying, oh, well, actually, you know, there was a higher purpose to all this.

I think we'll come on to that. But there's nothing there that suggests that there was a kind of overriding military objective in their sights. It sounds to me like a little bit like those raids that they launched during the Seven Years' War. The young James Wolfe was involved in some of them. And I think it was Pitt who used to say, you're breaking France's windows with golden guineas. Anyway, so let's get on to it. How big was the force that Mount Batten was able to deploy? Well, he put together a very mixed force. The infantry were predominantly Canadian. They came from the Canadian troops who had been pouring across the Atlantic since the beginning of the war, really,

and who had been kicking their heels in southeast England with endless training exercises but no real military action at all. They were supported in two flank attacks on either side by two commando units. So it was a big, complicated operation, landings on six different beaches, many, many moving parts, and of course, a huge naval operation as well to get them there, and a huge air operation to supposedly soften up the defences, and also to obviously protect the fleet once battle was joined. So what was the plan? Were they going to land, secure the town, then leave? Was it like sort of Drake singeing the King of Spain's beard?

The idea was that basically it was what they call a coup de main, which is you go in, you smash the place up, and then you get out again. But as I was saying, all this great effort and the great cost of life, that's the thing that really is the central point about the Diak Raiders, and the casualties were absolutely staggering. I mean, of,000 odd Canadians who took part nearly a thousand didn't

come back or rather were killed and then something like nearly 2,000 were taken prisoner and then you had a huge number of casualties as well so it was by any standards a very, very bloody and costly day. So that's the reason why subsequently so much effort went into trying to give it some reason and some purpose. And that effort was largely led by the man who I suppose there was many hands in the making of the plan and in the execution of the plan. But the man who really bears most responsibility was Lord Mountbatten, who was the head of combined operations. Now Mountbatten was a very complicated and interesting character. At one level, he was a great man and he was a brilliant organiser, he was very

inspirational, etc. He was also tremendously vain, tremendously jealous of his own reputation. So up until now, things have by and large gone pretty well for him. And this was a big setback. He was always thinking about himself as a historical figure and thinking, how is this going to look to future generations? And so when it was clearly and unanswerably a disaster, he had to say, no, no, it may look like this, but there's actually a real benefit. It may seem hard to see at the moment, but just wait say, no, no, it may look like this, but there's actually a real benefit. It may seem hard to see at the moment, but just wait. And his argument was, we had to do this. We had to launch a big cross-channel raid on a port in order to find out how you did it. And so it's a

learning process. It's a very painful learning process. You learn by your mistakes, and then you don't make the same mistakes when you launch the real one. Now, that all sounds kind of plausible. And indeed, many people went along with it and accepted it. It's still kind of swallowed wholesale today by large chunks of those with a memory of Dieppe. My view is that this is nonsense, and that if that was the case, if it really had been a sort of military laboratory experiment, there would have been lots of stuff in the order saying, when you're doing this, make sure that the metrics are being observed, that you're actually measuring what you're doing against some kind of military scientific measure.

There's nothing there at all. There's nothing like that at all. It was only subsequently that they started to think, oh, we learned these very, very valuable lessons. Most of the lessons they supposedly learned, there was a paper produced afterwards that says lessons learned from the D.F. Raid, but they're sort of glaringly obvious to anyone who knows anything about the basics of military operations. So I think it was really a kind of back-covering exercise by Mountbatten and those around him, there were lots of other people around him who went along with it and between them they kind of massaged history

thereafter in order to get a version of events that suited their concerns and it was pretty much accepted really right down to today. I mean one of the things that Mountbatten always said was that D-Day, although many people died on D-Day, many many more would have died if it hadn't been for the lessons learned at Dieppe. And he even comes up with a mathematical formula for it, which is completely plucked out of thin air. Like I say, I think a sort of junior staff officer would be able to work out what to do and what not to do when you're launching a cross

channel invasion without having to send 6,000 men into the jaws of death to prove a few simple basic points. So, Patrick, how do the landings go? The landings are one of the most ghastly events in the Allied war. It all went spectacularly wrong almost immediately. So you have this decision made before that they're not going to go with flank attacks and attack Dieppe from the side there will be flank attacks but the main attack is going to go in from the front directly onto the beaches in front of Dieppe

tanks are being landed for the first time so you've got this concentration of landing ships carrying troops and landing ships carrying tanks, all funneling into this quite narrow front at dawn on the 19th of August 1942, and straight into this very well-worked-out field of fire that the Germans have had plenty of time to organise, which is pumping machine guns, mortars, artillery into the landing zone. So the chances of them getting off the beach were pretty much zero. And it's incredible that some of them did actually manage to get into the town. A couple of parties made it into the town. But basically, the attack literally died on the beach. On the flank beaches, things didn't go

much better. On the one slightly to the east of the blue beach one of the great massacres of the ally war took place there where the troops just floundered off the landing craft and straight into the teeth of these very well-sighted german machine guns they just literally mowed them down so there were some pretty painful images of stacked up bodies which haven't even got off the beach they they're still below this sea wall. You might ask yourself, why was it that they didn't know all this? And the answer is, well, actually, they did know all this. And even though they didn't have perfect intelligence about where the German defenses were sighted,

they had a pretty good idea of where they were. And if you read the intelligence reports, it's pretty accurate. Initially, there was going to be a heavy air bombardment, which was meant to suppress these defences. And that was called off. There was an air attack before the initial landing went in. Plus, there was some naval gunfire to suppress the defences. But what you really needed was heavy naval gunfire, which is reasonably accurate. I don't think a heavy air bombardment would have done much good because that was notoriously inaccurate and would probably flatten the air and not necessarily hit the enemy defences. But the heavy naval support would have

had to been supplied by a battleship and the Admiralty were not prepared to risk the loss of another battleship that already lost plenty up to this point in the relatively narrow waters of the Channel at that point. It would have been a huge target for the Luftwaffe and they probably would have managed to hit it. So they said, no, no, all we're going to give you is six destroyers. And the guns on a destroyer are puny compared to those on a cruiser or a battleship. So they really made very little impact on the

defences. Knowing all this they still went ahead and one of the themes of the book is how decisions are made and how plans get a momentum of their own. People are invested, people at a high level are invested in the plan and they just sort of steam on and I think another problem is that even though the flaws in the plan are pretty glaringly obvious, no one actually has ownership of the whole project. So everyone, I think, when they're reflecting on this could go one way or it could go the other, they think, well, if it goes wrong, then I can say it wasn't me, Gov. You know, my responsibility was this and it was down to the other guy. So you can't point the finger at me and if it goes well i could say yeah i did play a large part in this and so claim your it's the

old thing of victory has many fathers but defeat is an orphan and this was very much the case with diep the other thing you have to remember is that the germans knew we were coming not specifically that we were coming at dieppe, but ever since the start of the year, Hitler had been issuing these warnings about the political situation makes it inevitable that the Allies will launch some sort of big cross-channel operation. Maybe the invasion will come this year. So there are constant exhortations to be on the alert, to keep going over your defensive plan.

At the same time, the defense is being built up all along that coast, all the way down that Channel Coast, to reinforce gun positions. New guns are coming in. Workers from all over occupied Europe are being drafted in to build the Atlantic Wall, reinforce the Atlantic Wall. So they didn't really need to know they were coming specifically at Dieppe. The defences were very stout all the way down there. Wherever you chose, it was going to be a tough nut to crack

until you got all the way down to Lower Normandy, where things are so spread out that it's difficult to create a defensive line that is as impregnable as the one that they built around Dieppe. If you listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking Dieppe. More coming up. Hello, if you're enjoying this podcast, then I know you're going to be fascinated by the new episodes of the history hit warfare podcast. From the polionic battles and Cold War confrontations to the Normandy landings and 9-11, we reveal new perspectives on how war has shaped and changed our modern world.

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