Dieppe august 19 1942

My Uncle (my he rest in peace) was there 70 years ago today. I've been told he didn't enjoy the experience of having his ear lobe pierced with an 8mm bullet.
 
Last edited:
Grizzly Adams said:
Dad was on the other side :D, but none the less I hate historical revisionism. Program coming up on the History channel and the producer came up with the mind boggling revelation, object of the raid was to secure an Enigma machine. The Brits got an original machine from the Poles, during the early days of the war, as well a capturing a couple of others along the way. Lot of questions if the raid was justified or simply one of Mountbatten's whims. Now, THAT should start an argument. :)

Grizz
Click to expand...

For sure the Brits had an Enigma machine, given to them by the Poles early in the war.

But...that was a 3 rotor machine, the failed raid on the Hotel Moderne was to secure a 4 rotor machine.
 
cigar_man said:
add Douglas "Butcher" Haig and we got a deal!
Click to expand...

Haig had a simple plan, keep repeating frontal attacks untill the germans ran out of machine gun ammunition. Unfortunately the germans never did.
One of his assenine quotes post WW1 was
"there will always be a place for the horse in modern warfare":rolleyes:
I am amazed that he recieved honours after the war for his STUPIDITY
 
"The Greatest Air Battle"

That's how the fight in the air over Dieppe was characterized.

I'm certain that my Father and all troops on the ground, would have thanked the Airmen above them. Had they been able to do so.

I am personally very grateful for your Father's valiant effort.
He may well have been instrumental in my Father's return alive, from the Hell of Dieppe's beaches.

cheers Eh!:canadaFlag::cheers:
shooterman said:
My father was there flying cover with the RCAF. He was wounded by flak but managed to fly back across the channel. ( glad he did,lol)
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
Grizzly Adams said:
Dad was on the other side :D, but none the less I hate historical revisionism. Program coming up on the History channel and the producer came up with the mind boggling revelation, object of the raid was to secure an Enigma machine. The Brits got an original machine from the Poles, during the early days of the war, as well a capturing a couple of others along the way. Lot of questions if the raid was justified or simply one of Mountbatten's whims. Now, THAT should start an argument. :)

Grizz
Click to expand...

I watched the History TV show and found it to be a reasonable explanation. In WW1 trench raids started off as squad sized shows and soon turned into multi-battalion sized ones. Dieppe was a raid in the tradition of Bruneval and other small shows. And Bruneval was solely about grabbing German radar gear. So Dieppe being a mask for grabbing a 4 wheel Enigma machine is completely plausible.
 
To quote Mountbatten in the aftermath; "The total lesson learned from Dieppe was unquestionably that you cannot in fact capture a port by frontal assault without having such heavy bombardment and bombing as to destroy the port facilities which you are trying to capture". He neglected to include a number of other compelling lessons such as;

- Have full intelligence of both the terrain and the enemy before the fact

- Don't try to script an operation as complicated as this down to the last detail and timing. Things ALWAYS come unstuck once you pass H hour

- Don't attack an alert enemy where he is the strongest

- Establish overwhelming air superiority ASAP once the operation begins. Have enough air and naval gunfire support available on call by trained fire controllers with communications and established procedures to call for supporting fires to neutralize strong points once they are identified. Air and naval fire suppport can also be used to isolate the battlefield and prevent enemy reinforcement

-Use troops appropriate to the task. This was a Commando raid, not a conventional aphibious operation. The experienced Brit Commandos who participated did well and came out with comparatively light casualties. The conventionally trained Canadians went into a full frontal attack for their initial baptism of fire and predictably failed.

-Have enough reliable communications so as to be aware of the dymamics of the tactical situation and respond to it

A lot of the above was intuitively obvious to a 2nd Lt and could have been incorporated into planning without paying such a high butcher's bill.

There were a lot of other drivers at play here incl:

- a political gesture to show the hard-pressed Russians that something tangible was being done to open a second front

- Mountbatten's wish to show that his Combined Operations HQ could actually do something

- a wish by Cdn politicians and the Cdn Army to get the troops into combat after 21/2 yrs of marching and counter- marching around the UK. It was becoming embarrassing to them. To that point the RCAF was doing most of the fighting and dying by the Cdn military.

The 2 greatest failures by the Cdn Army in WW2 were at Hong Kong and Dieppe. Failure in both cases was largely due to inept political and military decisions which put troops into an impossible situation which was doomed to failure, no matter the troops best efforts on the ground. Many of us saw loud echos of both of these disasters in our Cold War plans to re-inforce Norway and/or Denmark against the Russians. Funnily enough, niether of these failures were studied at the Cdn Army Command and Staff College, probably because they were of political, rather than military, making. By contrast, we studied a number of the US Army's greatest modern f**k-ups when I attended the US Army Command and Staff College, incl the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest, the Battle of the Bulge, the Rapido River/Cassino and Anzio operations in Italy, and The Battle of the Naktong in Korea.
 
Last edited:
purple said:
To quote Mountbatten in the aftermath; "The total lesson learned from Dieppe was unquestionably that you cannot in fact capture a port by frontal assault without having such heavy bombardment and bombing as to destroy the port facilities which you are trying to capture". He neglected to include a number of other compelling lessons such as;

- Have full intelligence of both the terrain and the enemy before the fact

- Don't try to script an operation as complicated as this down to the last detail and timing. Things ALWAYS come unstuck once you pass H hour

- Don't attack an alert enemy where he is the strongest

- Establish overwhelming air superiority ASAP once the operation begins. Have enough air and naval gunfire support available on call by trained fire controllers with communications and established procedures to call for supporting fires to neutralize strong points once they are identified. Air and naval fire suppport can also be used to isolate the battlefield and prevent enemy reinforcement

-Use troops appropriate to the task. This was a Commando raid, not a conventional aphibious operation. The experienced Brit Commandos who participated did well and came out with comparatively light casualties. The conventionally trained Canadians went into a full frontal attack for their initial baptism of fire and predictably failed.

-Have enough reliable communications so as to be aware of the dymamics of the tactical situation and respond to it

A lot of the above was intuitively obvious to a 2nd Lt and could have been incorporated into planning without paying such a high butcher's bill.

There were a lot of other drivers at play here incl:

- a political gesture to show the hard-pressed Russians that something tangible was being done to open a second front

- Mountbatten's wish to show that his Combined Operations HQ could actually do something

- a wish by Cdn politicians and the Cdn Army to get the troops into combat after 21/2 yrs of marching and counter- marching around the UK. It was becoming embarrassing to them. To that point the RCAF was doing most of the fighting and dying by the Cdn military.

The 2 greatest failures by the Cdn Army in WW2 were at Hong Kong and Dieppe. Failure in both cases was largely due to inept political and military decisions which put troops into an impossible situation which was doomed to failure, no matter the troops best efforts on the ground. Many of us saw loud echos of both of these disasters in our Cold War plans to re-inforce Norway and/or Denmark against the Russians. Funnily enough, niether of these failures were studied at the Cdn Army Command and Staff College, probably because they were of political, rather than military, making. By contrast, we studied a number of the US Army's greatest modern f**k-ups when I attended the US Army Command and Staff College, incl the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest, the Battle of the Bulge, the Rapido River/Cassino and Anzio operations in Italy, and The Battle of the Naktong in Korea.
Click to expand...


Your posts are always a good read Purple:cheers:
 
After the raid Captain Hughes-Hallett, who had devised the operational plan and commanded the naval force after the original Senior Officer Designate, Admiral Baillie-Grohman, was removed for protesting too much about the plan, circulated a paper entitled Lessons Learned From The Dieppe Raid. Baillie-Grohman commented privately that it could have been better entitled Lessons Learned By Hughes-Hallett, and that most of them could have been absorbed beforehand from reading the various pamphlets published by Combined Operations.
 
It was my privilege to know John W. Foote, VC socially in the late 1960s. He was awarded the Victoria Cross as a result of his actions at Dieppe while serving as the chaplain of the RHLI. He spent the remainder of the war as a POW and didn't really want to speak of his experiences.

I also served with a fine NCO who had been a young soldier in the Royal Rifles of Canada at Hong Kong. As a POW he did slave labour in the coal mines and shipyards of Japan and survived by the skin of his teeth. He had nothing good to say about the Japanese.

The sacrifices of these men and many others who were involved in the unsuccessful Hong Kong and Dieppe operations need to be remembered if only to avoid such military catastrophes in the future. Both of these operations were engineered and approved by military and civilian politicians who had no grasp of how their political "gestures" and big ideas would actually play out in their implementation. History is full of this kind of flawed decision making, like Winston Churchill's Dardanelles operation in WW1 and Hitler's simple command "Take Russia".
 
We were there in May, 2012. Quite a somber time to reflect upon the battle. Walking the streets, some buildings and the castle still bear the impact holes where the bullets struck.

Perhaps the most memorial part of the visit was a little old lady passing beside my wife as she was taking pictures of the memorial near the castle. She spoke a few soft words in French, but we indicated we did not understand. We remarked we were Canadian and she smiled warmly at my wife, shook her hand and stepped out of the way. She said that she hoped our pictures turned out great for us thanked us for stopping by. Unremarkable, yet remarkable at the same time. We then stopped by the Cemetery and quietly took in the scope of our nations young sacrifices. Quite somber indeed.
 
As it happens I have ties to the Royal Rifles of Canada.

I joined the Regiment in 1957.
At that time commanded by Major MacMillan. He was respected, and well loved, by all who served under him.
Major MacMillan, later promoted to Lt.Colonel before retirement.
As a Lieutenant, and member of "D" Company, he fought and was taken prisoner at the Battle of Hong Kong in Dec. 1941.

The Royal Rifles were based out of Quebec Qc., many Regiment members were Veterans of Hong Kong, and former POW inmates in Japan. where they endured the UN-endurable, from Dec. 1941 until the war ended in 1945.
Fighting against impossible odds.
The troops were badly equipped, and could not be re-supplied.

I don't recall any of these brave men talking of their POW experiences very much.
All had suffered irreparable damage to their health.
It was indeed a great honor to have served with them.
The Regiment served as a Reserve unit until Taken Off Strength.


I was once a Rifleman! :)


purple said:
It was my privilege to know John W. Foote, VC socially in the late 1960s. He was awarded the Victoria Cross as a result of his actions at Dieppe while serving as the chaplain of the RHLI. He spent the remainder of the war as a POW and didn't really want to speak of his experiences.

I also served with a fine NCO who had been a young soldier in the Royal Rifles of Canada at Hong Kong. As a POW he did slave labour in the coal mines and shipyards of Japan and survived by the skin of his teeth. He had nothing good to say about the Japanese.

The sacrifices of these men and many others who were involved in the unsuccessful Hong Kong and Dieppe operations need to be remembered if only to avoid such military catastrophes in the future. Both of these operations were engineered and approved by military and civilian politicians who had no grasp of how their political "gestures" and big ideas would actually play out in their implementation. History is full of this kind of flawed decision making, like Winston Churchill's Dardanelles operation in WW1 and Hitler's simple command "Take Russia".
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
My ex father in law was there. Lost a track off The tank shortly after landing. His tank was featured in a postage stamp, number 9 I believe. After being captured he was marched across France into A fine German pow camp, escaped once, was recaptured and life wasn't so good for him after that until the war ended and he returned home to a boy he didn't know and a wife who never loved him. Stayed together and had a few more kids one of whom I regrettably married. Sad story from beginning to end. He never spoke much about it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom