From: tedrick@whistle.Berkeley.EDU (Tom Tedrick)
Newsgroups: soc.history,alt.war,soc.culture.canada
Subject: Re: Dieppe (Montgomery and others quoted)
Followup-To: soc.history
Date: 26 Aug 1992 07:54:30 GMT
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
NNTP-Posting-Host: whistle.berkeley.edu

In article <17d2noINNo36@agate.berkeley.edu> sachs@lhasa.berkeley.edu (Rainer Sachs) writes:
<In article <1992Aug24.143555.7764@compu.com> fr@compu.com writes:

<<Yet, I'm still bewildered by the rationale for this raid. 

<For centuries one result of British control of the seas
<was to keep the over-all initiative, by being able to
<start a fight at almost any location world-wide. The opponent
<was in principle forced to defend every port heavily if
<any one of them was at risk. As in chess, the threat could be
<stronger than its execution. Churchill was very acutely
<aware of (not to say obsessed with) this aspect of sea
<power. So was the admiralty. In part the Dieppe raid was 
<intended to make the threat more real. Whether it actually did
<so I don't know. Its attempt must have made the Germans more
<uneasy about their defenses but its failure presumably had the 
<opposite effect.

According to Fuller ("A Military History of the Western World, Volume 3, 
page 527):

"the situation [for the Russians on the eastern front] was so critical that the
Kremlin ... launched a frenzied propaganda campaign in which the immediate 
opening of a second front in the west was demanded. In August this led to the 
abortive British landing at Dieppe, which nevertheless so startled Hitler that
he ordered two of his best divisions to be transferred to the west."

General von Thoma mentioned that the Dieppe raid (after the heavy casualties 
suffered by German parachute units during the invasion of Crete) helped 
convince Hitler that the day of parachute troops was over. "He would not believe
reports that the British and Americans were developing airborne forces. The fact
that none were used in the St. Nazaire and Dieppe raids confirmed his opinion. 
He said to me 'There, you see! They are not raising such forces. I was right.'
He only changed his opinion after the Allied conquest of Sicily in 1943. 
Impressed by the way the Allies had used them there, he ordered an expansion of
our own airborne forces. But that change came too late." (pages 160-161 of "The
German Generals Speak" by Liddell Hart).

According to General Blumentritt (page 229) "The German Command was not sure
whether it [Dieppe] was merely a raid, or whether it might have been followed up
by larger reinforcements if it had been more successful at the outset."

Finally, here is what Bernard Montgomery has to say (pages 65-67 of "The Memoirs
of Field-Marshall Montgomery"):

"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 on 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 cancelled and 
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 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 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."

"The raid was carried out on the 19th August and we received the news about it 
that night, when the Prime Minister was staying with me at Eighth Army H.Q."

"The Canadians, and the Commandos working with them, fought magnificently, so 
did the Navy. But the Canadians lost heavily. The official history of the 
Canadian Army has the following remarks: 

   '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 campaigns in North-West
    Europe, or the twenty months during which Canadians fought in
    Italy. Sadder still was the lost in killed; the total of fatal
    casualties was 56 officers and 851 other ranks. Canadian
    casualties of all categories aggregated 3369.'

"Nearly 2000 of the total casualties were prisoners of war. Certain 
modifications had been introduced into the revived plan. The most important 
were--first, the elimination of the paratroops and their replacement by 
commando units; secondly, the elimination of any preliminary bombing of the 
defences from the air. I should not myself have agreed to either of these 
changes. Commando units, if thought necessary, should have been an addition to,
and not a replacement of, the paratroops; the demoralisation of the enemy
defence by preliminary bombing was essential (as was done in Normandy in 1944)
just before the troops touched down on the beaches."

"My own feeling about the Dieppe raid is that there were far too many 
authorities with a hand in it; there was no one single operational commander
who was solely responsible for the operation from start to finish, a Task Force
Commander in fact. Without doubt the lessons learnt there were an important
contribution to the eventual landing in Normandy on the 6th June 1944. But the 
price was heavy in killed and prisoners. I believe we could have got the 
information and experience we needed without losing so many magnificent Canadian
soldiers."
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