War Office

An official “after action” report, meaning that it’s as about as immediate and exciting as the parts list for a vacuum cleaner. Nevertheless, if you can wade through the bureaucratic prose, there’s some noteworthy stuff.

The Dieppe Raid was conceived as practice for an eventual full scale invasion and as a way to indicate to the Soviet Union that the West was trying to do something. It had mixed results; successful as a “learning experience”, not successful anyway else. The plan was to land troops in the French seaport of Dieppe, destroy several coast defense batteries defending the area, occupy the town, drive inland and seize a German divisional headquarters and an airfield, and “cut out” a number of light craft in the inner harbor. Then everybody would retreat to the landing craft and sail back to England.

As it happened, very little went as planned. Reconnaissance failed to locate all the defensive gun positions and thus the landing beach was subject to enfilade fire. German troops were more numerous and of higher quality than expected. Only one of the artillery batteries was destroyed. The troops barely made it a few streets into the town, much less occupied it, and none of the craft in the harbor were “cut out”. All the tanks that landed broke down, often because the shingle beach jammed their tracks. Naval gunfire support was inadequate.

As mentioned, the actual accounts of the battle are pretty dry. Landing craft approach, are engaged by gunfire, make it to the beach, or are sunk. Troops on shore are mostly pinned down by fire; some are able to make small advances and one German gun battery is destroyed. There’s a lot of fighting in the air. Eventually the force commander gives up, but many troops are unable to withdraw and are captured. One thing I noticed is the only people mentioned by name are officers; “other ranks” are all anonymous.

The bulk of the book – maybe two-thirds – is appendices. These include full lists of every ground, naval, and air force unit taking part in the raid; most of the ground troops involved were Canadian (there were some British commandos and Royal Marines, and a small contingent of American Rangers); the naval forces were almost all Royal Navy, with one Polish destroyer and some Free French light craft; the air force units were a polyglot mix, with British, Polish, Czech, Belgian, Norwegian, Canadian, Free French, Eagle, and American units. More than half of the Canadian units involved ended up casualties, leading to some tension between Ottawa and London with whispered accusations that Canadians had been sacrificed needlessly.

An interesting appendix is the German reaction to the raid; apparently a German report was captured from the Italians. At first, the Germans thought the raid might be a full-scale invasion. They were surprised that no parachutists were involved, noting that their use at some critical points might have resulted in more success. The Germans noted that the Canadian troops were “young, fresh and intelligent” and “fought well” and attributed their failure to lack of artillery support and to strong counterattacks.
Although all the commentary from the Allied sides puts a brave face on things, it’s pretty clear the operation was a disaster. Only one of the objectives was gained, and a single German coastal battery destroyed didn’t even remotely make up for more than 3000 troops and a destroyer lost. To be fair, there were some lessons learned; it was going to be impossible to capture a major port – or even a minor port – by direct invasion; this led to the development of the “Mulberry” floating harbors. The failure of the tanks led to the development of various special armored vehicles that could deal with antitank obstacles and difficult terrain. Naval units assigned to an invasion should train together well in advance, rather than being pulled together ad hoc just before the attack. The best that could be said for Dieppe was failure there contributed to later success in Normandy.

Good maps and a good photograph section. For another raid that didn’t end well, see Storming St. Nazaire.… (mais)