One Day in August

by David O'Keefe

  Harold “Tom” Baillie-Grohman is a minor figure in the Dieppe saga. Born in British Columbia to a British father and a Canadian mother, the fifty-four-year-old rear admiral had, like John Godfrey, made the Royal Navy his home for nearly forty years. Having served extensively in the Mediterranean and the Far East, he had then been captain of minesweepers in the Channel before taking command of the battleship HMS Ramillies. At one point he had even been Mountbatten’s commanding officer. First Sea Lord Dudley Pound and Admiral Cunningham both thought highly of him as a consummate naval professional with valuable experience in combined operations in the Mediterranean. He had participated in the fight to save the besieged island of Malta and, earlier in 1941, had commanded the naval end of the brilliant raid on Rhodes, where he earned the Distinguished Service Order for his part in evacuating nearly fifty-five thousand British troops from Greece—the same action that claimed Mountbatten’s HMS Kelly. However, both Mountbatten and Jock Hughes-Hallett, his lead planner for Operation Rutter, regarded Baillie-Grohman with deep suspicion—and Baillie-Grohman in turn was no fan of Mountbatten’s mounting hubris or his style of combined operations. The common feeling around Mountbatten’s headquarters was that Pound had inserted Baillie-Grohman, a stickler for tradition and procedure, into the operation to act as the Admiralty’s inside man, keeping watch on his one-time subordinate, who displayed a penchant for operating outside normal channels. More likely, it was Baillie-Grohman’s strong personality and forceful character, coupled with his highly influential voice and excellent leadership, that Pound wanted to counterbalance the maverick tendencies displayed by Mountbatten and his hand-picked staff of “inexperienced enthusiasts.” Whatever Pound’s intentions, the Chief and his naval commander were ill matched. Baillie-Grohman, as his personnel file reveals, was “obstinate, tenacious of his own opinions and inclined to be intolerant of the opinions of others. A good man to have behind you in a tight corner, provided he agrees with your reasons for getting into it.”9 Mountbatten never succeeded in drawing him fully into the spirit of the operation, nor was he ever likely to be, as Mountbatten later said, “one of us.”10

  When Baillie-Grohman arrived in England from the Mediterranean in early June, after the chiefs of staff had accepted the outline plan and Mountbatten’s staff had begun working on the detailed plan for Rutter, he was immediately skeptical about the potential for the operation and in constant opposition to the over-optimistic planning and unchecked enthusiasm surrounding the mission. He noted significant problems with Jock Hughes-Hallett and his planners, informing Mountbatten that he did not “trust the ambitious type.”11 He complained about the staff’s general lack of experience—that half of them, for instance, had no idea of the capabilities of the naval craft they were about to employ.

  Baillie-Grohman also questioned the role of a mysterious Royal Naval Reserve lieutenant commander who worked as a special liaison to Mountbatten’s headquarters and “was allowed to go on leave on several occasions and visit exercises,” meaning he was not available to handle the constant stream of requests.12 Given that Section 17 in the Naval Intelligence Division handled that portfolio, it is highly likely that the man he was referring to was Ian Fleming—who did hold a Rutter card, giving him the essential security clearance to take part in the planning for the operation.

  Baillie-Grohman’s most serious complaint, however, was about the absence of a “joint appreciation”—something that is standard procedure in any operational plan. A joint appreciation shows how all the service arms are to work together, ensures that commanders are indeed on the same page, and serves as the litmus test for the plan, reaffirming strengths, exposing potential weaknesses and allowing for amendments—or, in some cases, even the cancellation of the mission. Although Baillie-Grohman admitted that each service might have an appreciation of its own specific role in the mission, there was nothing to test the operational soundness of Rutter as a whole.

  In contrast to the dour Baillie-Grohman, the third man, the military force commander, fifty-two-year-old Canadian major general Hamilton Roberts, was exactly the type Mountbatten wanted: eager and ambitious, just like Jock Hughes-Hallett and Trafford Leigh-Mallory. Responsible for providing the detailed military portion of the outline plan for Rutter under the watchful eye of General Montgomery, Roberts, from Pipestone in southern Manitoba, would ultimately become the officer who carried the blame for the Dieppe fiasco, forever vilified for his actions on that one fateful day in August. A “gunner,” or artillery officer, by training, like most of the Canadian high command, Roberts had graduated from the Royal Military College in Kingston in 1914 and had gone straight into action in the trenches during the First World War. There he displayed conspicuous gallantry and determination, winning the Military Cross during the horrific slaughter at the Somme in 1916 and finishing the war in a training establishment after being wounded in 1918.

  Fifty-two-year-old Canadian Major General Hamilton “Ham” Roberts, commander of the Second Canadian Infantry Division, had earned the Military Cross in the mud and slaughter of the Battle of the Somme. He was given the responsibility of Military Force Commander for the Dieppe Raid, being described as “the best division commander in the Corps.” But although he garnered a commendation for his actions on the day in August, in the fingerpointing aftermath he would be vilified by his military colleagues, and then in history, for the failure of the operation and the unnecessarily high casualties incurred. He spent the remainder of the war commanding a training unit before retiring to the Channel Islands, where he remained relatively silent about Dieppe, allegedly vowing that one day history would vindicate him. (photo credits 10.1)

  Between the wars, Ham Roberts continued his career in the tiny Canadian Army Permanent Force, and by 1940 he was in command of the 1st Field Regiment of the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery, briefly committed to the fighting in France. During the hurried evacuation at Dunkirk, his enthusiastic “can-do” attitude and iron will to see a task through to the end caught the attention of his Canadian and British superiors alike. Imperilled by the quick German advance, he managed to extricate his two dozen guns to a waiting ship while under fire and, with that done, carried on and loaded several more precious British artillery pieces from the beach.

  Within two years, he had risen to the rank of major general and, in April 1942, to the command of the Second Canadian Infantry Division—not long before it was selected to make its combat debut at Dieppe. In the interim, he eliminated what he considered weak links in the division by implementing a series of rigorous physical training schemes and intensified commando-style training. Apparently this attention to detail and training is what originally caught Montgomery’s attention. Ruthlessly efficient like Roberts himself, particularly when it came to his commanders, Montgomery considered Roberts the “best divisional commander in the Canadian Corps”—an appraisal that might appear glowing but was actually faint praise.13 In Montgomery’s true opinion, Roberts was “very sound, but … not in any way brilliant.”14 Still, the Second Canadian Division commander seemed impressive in person, particularly to Admiral Sir William James, the Room 40 veteran who was now Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth: in one of his letters from the time, he noted that Roberts was “powerfully built” and “looks like a real thruster.”15

  Years after the raid, Jock Hughes-Hallett attempted to distance himself from Roberts, now the pariah. In his memoirs he recorded that the division commander’s enthusiasm had bordered on the “over confident” leading up to the raid, that he was “eager for action at all costs” and giving “the impression of being prepared to take anything on.”16

  At the time, however, that was exactly what Hughes-Hallett and Mountbatten had wanted and expected from their military force commander. In an earlier proposed raid on Alderney in the Channel Islands, Hughes-Hallett had criticized the military commander for his reluctance to “chance his arm” or to subject his troops to the hazards that are inevitable in raiding operations—the very same exploits he and Moun
tbatten now expected Roberts to undertake at Dieppe.17

  In any event, by the time the three force commanders came on board for Operation Rutter, its overall form, tone and objectives had been set by Jock Hughes-Hallett’s planning syndicate and approved by the chiefs of staff, leaving little room for any fundamental changes to the scheme. The job now facing the commanders was not to reason why, but to flesh out the plan and put it into effect. Although responsible for the detailed planning and conduct of the raid, their hands were, in fact, already firmly tied.

  Before the Dieppe Raid, Lord Louis Mountbatten’s Combined Operations Headquarters had suffered no serious setback on the battlefield and certainly no disaster to check the mounting enthusiasm and hubris that would plague the planning of Operation Rutter and, on August 19, play out in tragic fashion as Operation Jubilee. The year before, the successful raids at the Lofoten and Vaagso islands had generated significant results for the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park and clearly positioned Combined Operations as the major vehicle for signals intelligence pinch raids. Although criticism had flared up over the planning of the aborted Operation Myrmidon, especially from General Charles Haydon, Mountbatten’s chief of staff, the publicity surrounding the simultaneous brilliant raid at St-Nazaire had produced an intoxicating and irresistible confidence within the COHQ on Richmond Terrace. Even smaller raids, such as the one at Bruneval, outside Le Havre, had elevated the profile of Mountbatten’s headquarters still further among the British and American publics, with headline stories about surreptitiously snatching a top-secret radar set from the German defenders. The United States, now a major Allied partner, sought cooperation and guidance from Britain on intelligence and combined operations techniques—and Mountbatten was ready to oblige.

  On June 5, Montgomery called the three Dieppe force commanders—Trafford Leigh-Mallory, Tom Baillie-Grohman and Ham Roberts—together for a planning session in his headquarters building. General Charles Haydon represented Mountbatten, who was away in the United States showcasing his wares for President Roosevelt and the American navy. The commanders reached a set of decisions that reinforced the frontal-assault option augmented by air support. Mountbatten would later claim that the disastrous frontal assault was strictly Monty’s brainchild and that it appeared for the first time during this session. However, the reference to the formulation of two plans in the special report on Dieppe that Mountbatten requested from Admiral John Godfrey’s Inter-Services Topographical Department at the end of March, along with the later outline plan, makes it clear that the frontal-assault plan was already a fait accompli by the time of the meeting at COHQ.

  At first, the planners had considered launching the flanking and frontal assaults simultaneously, but Jock Hughes-Hallett dismissed that idea for logistical reasons: there was simply not enough sea room off Dieppe to accommodate 250 ships simultaneously delivering troops ashore and providing covering fire. More importantly, he decided, given the differing speeds of the ships in the assault force, it would be impossible to coordinate them all, from the moment they left various ports in southern England and the Isle of Wight, and deliver them all together on time and on target at Dieppe in one fell swoop under the cover of darkness.18

  The one great negative of the direct assault option was already obvious: by attacking the enemy frontally, the strategy courted disaster if the carefully crafted plan and all its elements did not come off like clockwork. Mountbatten’s planners knew that but intentionally disregarded it. They believed that, with the novel use of tanks rolling ashore in the first wave alongside the infantry (something that the British had tried during a raid on Bardia in North Africa the year before), the chances of pulling off such an audacious raid looked promising. That idea initially left Brigadier Churchill Mann, Ham Roberts’s efficient chief of staff and deputy military force commander, shaking his head in disbelief and then with a sense of wonderment. “Such a plan, on the face of it,” he wrote, “is almost a fantastic conception.”19 But in the gung-ho spirit of the times, he remained open-minded and receptive, finally viewing it as the “outstanding feature of the plan.”20

  He saw many positives in the direct assault, particularly given the force provided by sixty Churchill tanks from the 14th Canadian Tank Regiment—the Calgary Tanks. First, surprise and shock: the sight of successive waves of thirty-eight-ton tanks pouring out of landing craft and rolling towards them would no doubt have a “terrific morale effect” on the enemy. Second, the plan seemed feasible logistically: recent training exercises on chert rock beaches in England had proven most encouraging; the fist-sized boulders occasionally clogged sprocket wheels and immobilized some of the giant machines, but they did not impede their ability to roll off the beaches in sizable numbers. Third, the tanks were not alone. Aided by specially trained teams of Canadian combat engineers who would clear paths over the seawall, the tanks would proceed across the grassy promenade, where the engineers would destroy the anti-tank barriers in the tiny streets leading to the port. With that accomplished, the tanks would then rumble past the tobacco factory, down the short span of the Quai Duquesne and into the port with all guns blazing. Fourth, and most important of all, the tanks, if successful, would be “in easy striking distance of the most appropriate objectives for their employment”—delivering their massed firepower to subdue the trawlers and any other German resistance in the outer port in the vicinity of the Hôtel Moderne.21

  Air support was the other area of controversy. Originally, the planners had agreed to the frontal assault when they understood that the buildings overlooking the main beach would be pulverized by an attack from the heavy bombers of the RAF’s Bomber Command two and a half hours before the raid began. Although Churchill and the Cabinet had agreed to lift the restriction on the blind bombing of French towns—a rule that had nearly led to disaster at St-Nazaire—Leigh-Mallory now proposed that they should cancel the heavy bombardment and replace it with concentric bombing and strafing attacks by his fighters immediately before the commencement of the raid. He argued that the time lag between the heavy bombing attack and the landings was just too long and would allow the German defenders, by then fully alert, to mount a spirited defence. Ham Roberts agreed.

  Leigh-Mallory further argued that the lack of precision in heavy bombing raids—with 150 planes dropping their bombs from seven thousand feet at night—would likely result in the bombs being scattered about rather than hitting their intended targets: the headlands and the beachfront hotels. All told, he feared the result would be uncontrollable fires and rubble-choked streets. Ham Roberts in turn foresaw the debris creating anti-tank obstacles that the engineers would not be able to handle in time. So instead, Leigh-Mallory proposed a series of timed attacks on the headlands and the beachfront by attack aircraft and cannon-firing Hurricane fighters from his command, just as the first assault boats approached the beaches.22 The surprise and shock would then be reserved to the last possible moment, and the synchronized attack would overwhelm any defender with its intense ferocity.

  If the raid itself was to achieve surprise, the force commanders would have to move the largest armada so far assembled by the Allies across the English Channel in the middle of the night without the Germans catching on—or at least without them figuring out its final destination until it was too late. To confuse the German radar, Leigh-Mallory arranged to bomb the nearby airfields at Abbeville–Drucat and Crécy and to strike both sides of the city of Boulogne.* At the same time, Baillie-Grohman would put on a naval operation designed to simulate an impending raid on the giant port at Boulogne, even as the raiding forces were creeping unannounced towards Dieppe, farther down the coast.23

  In the days following the June 5 meeting, the planning staff and the force commanders rushed to complete a highly detailed two-hundred-page plan for Operation Rutter (which would later become the bible for Operation Jubilee). The mission was set for later that month. The plan demonstrated how everything should come together if all went according to plan. In many ways, Rutter was th
e amphibious version of a First World War–style “trench raid”: the English coast formed one line, the German-occupied coast the other, with the Channel as the “no man’s land.” Stealth, surprise, speed and split-second synchronization were critical to success.

  In theory, everything was contained within the pages of this highly complex document, from the composition of the raiding forces and their objectives to the sequence of events laid out in a timed play-by-play account—with numerous graphs, tables, matrices and maps to show the dispositions of troops from the approach across the Channel to the landings and re-embarkation. Tacked on at the end, more than a dozen appendices covered in great detail the tasks of the infantry and airborne battalions, the tanks, the engineers, the naval and air bombardments, and the demolitions programmes as well as the re-embarkation schedules for the ride back home to friendly shores.

  In the initial plan, Rutter was to begin on the night of June 20–21—or on any of the six nights following should bad weather or any other event prevent its launch. Late in the afternoon on June 20, close to five thousand Canadian infantrymen, including six battalions of Ham Roberts’s Second Canadian Division, accompanied by sixty tanks from the Calgary Tank Regiment and teams of Canadian combat engineers, would board more than 250 ships and boats for the journey to Dieppe. It was to be one of the largest task forces yet seen in the Second World War, and it would comprise a vast assortment of vessels, including destroyers, troop transports, torpedo boats, converted Channel steamers, rescue craft, tugs, anti-aircraft vessels (Eagle ships), anti-submarine trawlers, minesweepers, gunboats, and a collection of new tank-landing craft each hauling three Churchill tanks. Two specially refitted Hunt-class destroyer escorts—HMS Calpe and HMS Fernie—would serve as headquarters ships for the operation.