In 1942 Joseph
Stalin began to put pressure on Winston
Churchill and Franklin
D. Roosevelt to
open a second front in Europe. They were unwilling to carry out a
large offensive but it was agreed to carry out an experiment in an
amphibious assault on the coast of
France.
In April 1942 General Bernard
Montgomery and
Admiral Louis
Mountbatten began
to plan the invasion. It was originally due to take place in July
but bad weather resulted in it being postponed until August.
On 19th August 1942 a small
mixed force of 5,000 Canadian and 1,000 British troops landed at Dieppe.
They immediately came under attack from German troops led by General
Kurt
Zeitzler. Within
a few hours 4,000 of the men were either killed, wounded or captured.
Allied commanders later
claimed that valuable military information was gained from the Dieppe
Raid. This included the need for more sophisticated amphibious
equipment and techniques. However, some historians have questioned
the purpose of the raid, claiming that this lessons learned from the
failed raid could have been predicted and the lives of brave soldiers
had been wasted for no good reason.
It was also claimed that
the use of Canadian soldiers for the raid suggested that Allied commanders
saw Commonwealth troops as more expendable than those in the British
Army.
(1)
General
Bernard
Montgomery wrote
about the Dieppe Raid in his autobiography,
The Memoirs of
Field Marshal Montgomery
(1958)
In 1942 the organization of raiding operations on enemy coasts was
one of the functions of Combined Operations Headquarters, the head
of which was Admiral Mountbatten. In April 1942 the staff of that
headquarters began work on a plan to raid Dieppe; I was made responsible
for the Army side of the planning since I was then commanding the
South-Eastern Army, from which the troops for the raid were to come.
It was decided that the 2nd Canadian Division would
carry out the raid, and intensive training was begun. The troops were
embarked on the 2nd and 3rd July, and the raid was to take place on
the 4th or one of the following days. Once embarked the troops were
fully briefed, and were then " sealed " in their ships.
The weather was unsuitable for launching the enterprise on the night
of the 3rd July,
and remained unsuitable till the 8th July - the last day on which
conditions would permit it. The troops were then disembarked and dispersed
to their camps and billets. All the troops had been fully informed
of the objective of the raid and of the details connected with it;
it was reasonable to expect that it was now a common subject of conversation
in billets and pubs in the south of England, since nearly 5000 Canadian
soldiers were involved as well as considerable numbers of sailors
and airmen. Once all this force was " unsealed " and dispersed,
I considered the operation was cancelled and I turned my attention
to other matters.
But Combined Operations
Headquarters thought otherwise; they decided to revive it and got
the scheme approved by the British Chiefs of Staff towards the end
of July. When I heard of this I was very upset; I considered that
it would no longer be possible to maintain secrecy. Accordingly I
wrote to General Paget, C.-in-C. Home Forces, telling him of my anxiety,
and recommending that the raid on Dieppe should be considered cancelled
"for all time." If it was
considered desirable to raid the Continent, then the objective should
not be Dieppe. This advice was disregarded. On the 10th August I left
England to take command of the Eighth Army in the desert.
(2)
General
Dwight
D. Eisenhower,
Crusade in Europe (1948)
The Prime Minister and some of his chief military advisers still looked
upon the Overlord plan with scarcely concealed misgivings; their attitude
seemed to be that we could avoid the additional and grave risks implicit
in a new amphibious operation by merely pouring into the Mediterranean
all the air, ground, and naval resources available. They implied that
by pushing the Italian campaign, invading Yugoslavia, capturing Crete,
the Dodecanese, and Greece, we would deal the Germans a serious blow
without encountering the admitted dangers of the full-out effort against
northwest Europe. My own staff, including its British members, and
I continued to support the conclusions reached a year and a half previously
that only in the cross-Channel attack would our full strength be concentrated
and decisive results achieved.
Because, later, the landing
in Normandy was successfully accomplished without abnormal loss, it
is easy to ignore the very real risks and dangers implicit in the
plan. Had we encountered there a disastrous reverse, those who now
criticize the concern with which some looked forward to the prospect
would have been loudest in condemning the others who insisted upon
the validity of the plan. One thing that opponents feared was a repetition
of the trench warfare of World War I. The British had vivid and bitter
memories of Passchendaele and Vimy Ridge. None of us wanted any repetition
of those experiences. Moreover, the Dieppe raid of the summer of 1942
did not promise any easy conquest
of the beaches themselves. That raid, carried out by a strong force
of Canadians, had resulted in a high percentage of losses. From it
we learned a number of lessons that we later applied to our advantage,
but the price paid by the Canadians still rankled.
(3)
Official History of the Canadian Army in the Second World War.
At Dieppe, from a force
of fewer than 5000 men engaged for only
nine hours, the Canadian Army lost more prisoners than in the
whole eleven months of the later campaign in North-West Europe,
or the twenty months during which Canadians fought in Italy.
Sadder still was the loss in killed; the total of fatal casualties
was 56 officers and
851 other ranks. Canadian casualties of all categories
aggregated 3369.
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