Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (37 page)

After early 1942, therefore, one thing was clear to both American and British planners involved in the West’s counterattack: no assault from the sea could take place without absolute control of the air, and not just above the landing beaches themselves. Air supremacy had also to be established over the maritime approaches to the invasion theater against enemy aerial, surface, and submarine forces, and against any air-based and land-based counterattacks that might be launched upon the beachhead.

Even if they had command of the air, and even if they were not encountering German veteran units, they also still had to figure out how to land on the shore. The first Allied amphibious attack against an enemy stronghold was the ill-named Operation Menace of September 1940, an action taken by the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines to assist General Charles de Gaulle’s forces in capturing the Vichy French colony of Senegal, with its key harbor and naval base of Dakar. The results were embarrassingly bad in almost all aspects, and after a few days the Anglo–Free French forces had been forced to abandon the operation without even getting ashore. Command and control was terrible. The British commander General Noel Irwin had his HQ in the cruiser HMS
Devonshire,
which at one point had to race northward to drive off some Vichy French destroyers; he was then transferred, with staff, to a transport, and then to the battleship HMS
Barham,
which became engaged in a close-in slugging match with the guns of the Dakar fortress and those of the formidable new battleship
Richelieu
. The offshore vessels came out of it the worse for wear, and the single Vichy French submarine in the area badly damaged the second British
battleship, HMS
Resolution.
The limited air strikes from the carrier HMS
Ark Royal
made no impression at all. Perhaps it was a good job the troops did not get to fight on land, as in Evelyn Waugh’s bitingly satirical novel of this operation,
Men at Arms
. It must have been difficult for the extremely frustrated Irwin to control his language as he composed his final report on the way back to Gilbraltar, but he did manage to get in two compelling points: (1) without a special combined operations HQ ship, this type of operation would never work, and (2) ships going into a shooting match against forts was a losing game—a truth that Churchill continued to contest.
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Nelson, the boldest of naval commanders, often stated that putting warships against well-defended ports was not a wise move. This was still true a century and a half later.

The British had another try in April and May 1942 with Operation Ironclad, against the important Vichy French island possession of Madagascar, or at least against its strategic northern port of Diego Suarez, to forestall any Japanese assault. This time things went better. The French resistance in and around the main target was slight and was willing to surrender once some army and marine units got around them (the garrisons in the south held on in the jungles for a while longer). The land forces included the borrowing and deployment of an entire British Army division en route to the India/Burma theater. French air defenses were minimal, while cover from the fighter squadrons of the two British fleet carriers was ample. And there was at last a headquarters ship, converted from a liner, which was separate from the bombardment group (which only needed to fire for ten minutes), the assault forces, and the distant coverage of the Eastern Fleet.
¹⁵
Consequently, this operation was much easier than the Dakar embarrassment, and at Combined Headquarters Command there was much rejoicing at having gotten something right at last.

There was one further positive aspect to Operation Ironclad that deserves more attention than it generally gets: the landing force had sailed from the river Clyde (Glasgow and its lower ports), which meant that British sea power was projecting military units a staggering 9,000 miles to the northern tip of Madagascar. Now, it is true that by this stage of the war the rapidly expanding British Army was sending regular troop convoys with heavy warship protection from the Clyde around
the Cape to the Middle East and India, which made the overall logistics more familiar to Admiralty planners; all that was needed was to employ one of those divisions in transit (in this case, the 5th Infantry Division) to land in considerable support of the commandos, and to add a far larger than usual number of protective warships from Force H and the Home Fleet. Even so, the planning had involved orchestrating whole groups of troopships and escorts traveling at different speeds and from different ports in order to launch an ultra-long-range strike from the sea, a considerable logistical feat. (Just planning for meals at sea for 40,000 men was a massive exercise in itself.)

Combined Operations Command (COC) had been set up at Churchill’s order in June 1940 to carry out raids up and down the coasts of occupied Europe. Ironically, perhaps the fall of France created an opportunity for the revival of combined operations! With the prime minister’s encouragement, the range of targets became more ambitious and the sober-minded Chiefs of Staff had to keep reining them in. Dakar was COC’s first trial by fire, with the results described above, and some critics felt justified in their doubts. Yet, prodded on by an impatient Churchill, increasingly aware that their new American allies would insist upon large amphibious operations in Europe as soon as was possible, and impressed by the arrival in October 1941 of the youthful, vigorous, and massively overpromoted Vice Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten to head the COC and become a colleague on their committee, the British Chiefs of Staff had to swallow the fact that increased resources had to go to amphibious operations.

And so they did, though such a move placed enormous demands upon an already greatly overstrained British shipbuilding industry. Fast passenger ships were converted into very large landing ships for infantry (LS-I), a couple of Dutch ferries were adapted as troop carriers, and hundreds of smaller landing craft were laid down, many in the United States. The first, critically important landing craft for tanks went to trials. More and more personnel—naval as well as military—were recruited. Combined Operations was no longer a dead end; could one name another role that was going to be as important as the “beach master” in a landing on a hostile shore, directing the incoming troops, trucks, and tanks, moving them and their supplies farther inland, and swiftly eliminating the bottlenecks? In the next year the number of
training camps and practice beaches increased, almost all along the chilly waters of Scotland and far from Luftwaffe reconnaissance (and if one wanted to practice landings in choppy seas, that was the place). The first properly designed tri-service headquarters ships were being created and would soon be available. Mountbatten’s drive was infectious, but it really was important to have this Madagascar success.
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It was therefore all the more disappointing that these signs of promise were soon to be followed by another badly botched amphibious operation, at Dieppe. Fortunately, it was followed only three months later by the largest—and most successful—amphibious operation the Allies had attempted so far, in North Africa.

Why pay much attention in our story to a small-scale raid on a French port that lasted only one day (August 18–19, 1942) before the attackers were kicked back into the sea? By all measures of size and intention, the Dieppe Raid was nothing like as significant as Walcheren, Gallipoli, or Crete in the history of amphibious warfare; even if it had proven to be successful, it was not intended to go anywhere. Yet while it was certainly not successful, it pointed to many a lesson that British Empire planners still had to learn. It was a badly arranged operation that led to a disproportionate number of casualties, chiefly Canadian. In that setback, ironically, lay its significance: it had the same perverse utility as had the losses in Convoys HX 229 and SC 122 in March 1943 and the appalling USAAF bomber losses during the October 1943 Schweinfurt-Regensburg raids. All three heavy blows dealt by the Germans at the tactical-operational level—convoy escort, strategic air, and amphibious landing—compelled the Western Allies to rethink seriously their previous assumptions and to search energetically for new weapons, tactics, training techniques, and organization.

But Dieppe was somewhat special as compared to the convoys and the bomber raids, which were inherently strategic to begin with. It was always thought of as a
test,
a trial run against the Atlantic Wall, which
the Wehrmacht had been constructing ever since the decision to abandon Operation Sealion in late 1940. This operation was intended to produce lessons that might help preparations for later, greater actions. Many historians have used this utility argument—“the lessons of Dieppe”—as its ultimate justification, while Canadians have been outraged at the idea that the first deployment of their troops in the European theater was as a form of guinea pig in an experiment, and so badly bungled.
¹⁷

The planning and execution of the raid was urged on by Mountbatten’s Combined Operations. They would seize and hold a major enemy-defended port for a short time, gather information, and gain a chance to measure the German reaction. All this made sense militarily, and it also reflected political realities: both Stalin and Roosevelt were pressing for an early opening of a second front in France, the British public was restive at the setbacks in North Africa and the Far East, and the Canadian public was wondering whether their troops would ever be launched into battle. The original operation, code-named Rutter, was actually planned for early July, although, ominously, it was disrupted by a nighttime Luftwaffe attack upon the vessels assembling in the harbor. Renamed Operation Jubilee, it was dispatched across the Channel five weeks later, as the largest combined operation in the region hitherto. Some 6,100 troops were involved, the bulk of them in two Canadian infantry brigades. Most of the obvious features for an amphibious assault were incorporated. There would be aerial protection, a naval bombardment, and two flanking attacks as well as the main assault. The landing craft would also be carrying tanks. The convoy of 250 vessels would be preceded by minesweepers and escorted by destroyers. Specialist forces such as the commandos (plus fifty U.S. Rangers, the first American land troops to fight in Europe, and the first to die) would join in, and the central forces would hit the beaches just before dawn. On paper it looked good. Fair stood the wind for France.

In the middle of the night, the northern flank group bumped into a small German convoy going along the coast and got into a fight with enemy torpedo boats, coming off worse; the German land defenses were thus alerted. Only a small contingent from No. 3 Commando managed to get ashore, climb the cliffs, and snipe at the shore batteries. In the south, No. 2 Commando had a much easier task and carried out
its demolitions. In the center, once landed, the main force simply could not get off the beaches, the steep shingle being as much an obstacle as the iron and concrete barriers; the tanks ground to a halt in the pebbles.

The destroyers offshore made little impression upon the German defenses and could not communicate with the troops onshore. The large number of Spitfire squadrons were operating at their extreme range—the opposite of the Battle of Britain conditions—and although part of the plan was to inflict a lot of damage on the Luftwaffe, in fact the opposite happened: the RAF lost 119 aircraft, the German air force only 46. German bombs and shells sank a destroyer and thirty-three landing craft. The Canadians suffered terribly as they tried to scramble back to the sea. Of the 6,100 men dispatched, more than 1,000 were killed and 2,300 captured; many of the survivors came back seriously wounded. About 1,000 troops never had the chance to get ashore. By midmorning it was over.

The literature about the Dieppe Raid has split into two separate categories. The first consists of multiple expressions of Canadian outrage (and not just in books but in movies, songs, and poems) against British military incompetence—not unlike the ANZAC criticisms about Gallipoli, even if the casualties at Dieppe were far fewer. The second argues for the benefits of the tactical-operational analyses of the existing weaknesses in the raiding plan and thus the longer-term benefits of trying it out. Churchill certainly believed it had been worthwhile when he explained this operation in his history of the Second World War. And that unrepentant buccaneer Bernard Fergusson, of Black Watch and the Chindits, whose last amphibious operation was to be the Suez debacle in 1956, concludes his account with these words: “Out of the fire and smoke and carnage on the beaches of Dieppe emerged principles whereby many lives were to be saved, and victory to be won.”
¹⁸
A critic might observe that even without Dieppe much was going to be learned from other amphibious operations that would help the D-Day planners—after all, the North African landings were only three months away.