One Day in August
Page 27
At the coastal town of Dieppe, the Hôtel Moderne and the trawlers in the port offered the perfect targets.4 Right from the start, the planners knew that Dieppe had good pinch potential, and Fleming now latched on to it as the perfect opportunity for his naval commando unit to make its mark. With that in mind, Godfrey approached the Joint Intelligence Committee, hoping to gain official authorization to raise Fleming’s small commando as the nucleus of a larger inter-service intelligence commando. Perhaps not surprisingly in the partisan world of Whitehall, where the three forces—army, navy and air force—jockeyed for position and power, the response was initially lukewarm at best: the RAF already had its own shadowy pinch units, and the army viewed incursions into what it considered its domain—fighting ashore—with suspicion and jealousy.5 In addition, intelligence collection on land traditionally fell to the army’s field security forces, in conjunction with other duties such as interrogating prisoners and the prevention of looting. These security forces were quite prickly about their domain, particularly after they had been assigned this task for Operation Rutter.
The prevailing attitude in Whitehall at this time eschewed “private armies.” Fleming and Godfrey realized that official authorization for a unit like the one they proposed would take time and a good deal of bureaucratic manoeuvring, cajoling and arm-twisting to achieve. To speed up the process, they chose to adopt Blinker Hall’s long-standing advice to act first and seek sanction later. In the past (as in the adventures of Dick de Costobadie and Allon Bacon in Vaagso), boarding parties drawn from ships’ crews had provided ad hoc protection forces for the pinch personnel—a quick and easy solution, but not a viable alternative to a standing unit devoted to pinching. The new naval Intelligence Assault Unit, in contrast, would require cutting-edge training year-round. The obvious place for Fleming to turn was the newly created Royal Marine Commando, the amphibious fighting arm of the Royal Navy that Mountbatten had tried to protect. 6 This idea instantly met with the approval of Godfrey and, not surprisingly, Mountbatten. They agreed to start small, carving out one platoon, or thirty men, from the almost three hundred commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Picton-Phillips.
In late May, the Royal Marine commandos had moved to the Isle of Wight to begin training for their intended role in Operation Rutter as part of Red Ryder’s Cutting Out Force. There, the IAU conducted a series of exercises in Portsmouth harbour “in conjunction with special Naval Parties”; their “main object” was to remove “important cargo vessels” and “carry out certain other special tasks”—a euphemistic reference to the role played by Fleming’s fledgling Assault Unit.7 Tucked away in the Royal Marine Commando War Diary is a copy of a training scheme performed in this harbour in the last week of June. Its significance has never been considered in the Dieppe story before, yet it indicates what Jock Hughes-Hallett had in mind for Ryder’s Cutting Out Force in Rutter.8
This scenario called for the Royal Marine commandos to leave their billets near Cowes on the Isle of Wight and load onto HMS Locust (a flat-bottomed river gunboat designed for colonial policing on the Yangtze River) for a forty-five-minute journey to Portsmouth harbour.9 Once at the harbour mouth, the “main task” in the training scheme involved the Locust rushing into the dockyard area to berth at a specified quay, followed by the Royal Marine commandos swooping down from her decks onto the quayside to surprise the startled dockyard workers and sailors. While the majority of the platoons would spread out to destroy swing bridges and lock gates and capture vessels in the port, one platoon, known as No. 10 Platoon, would take advantage of the confusion in the dockyard area to carry out its own “special task to be detailed later.”10
It was this one platoon—No. 10—that became Fleming’s Intelligence Assault Unit. And that “special task,” according to the recently declassified Ultra Secret history of 30 Assault Unit, involved “a special section of No. 40 Royal Marine Commando, led by Lieutenant Huntington-Whiteley, R.M.… specially briefed on behalf of DNI [Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence] to attempt the capture of a certain German headquarters in Dieppe.”11 The history does not shed any more light on why Fleming chose this particular unit or why he tapped the twenty-two-year-old Huntington-Whiteley to command the first naval IAU.
Throughout the hundreds of thousands of documents currently in the public domain and the scores of books and articles written about the Dieppe Raid, the name of Peter Huntington-Whiteley rarely appears. Any mention of the young man from Fareham, Hampshire, usually focuses on his later exploits leading the Royal Marine detachment of 30 Assault Unit in North Africa, Sicily and later Normandy and concludes, in a sad irony, with his death at the age of twenty-four outside Le Havre, just over a week after the Allied liberation of Dieppe in 1944.*
With little more to go on than the mention of his name as the leader of the IAU, I reached out to the Royal Navy’s Historical Branch in Portsmouth for help. After searching through their files, to little avail, I laid out my research for the historians there—subjecting it to the ultimate litmus test. Within a few minutes the Royal Marine historian, a former lieutenant colonel who had served on active operations during the Cold War, said, “I think you may be on to something,” and disappeared into another room. He reappeared minutes later with a sheet of paper on which he had written a name and phone number. “Here, you might want to give this man a call,” he said with a big smile. “He’s the last living member of Fleming’s IAU who fought at Dieppe.”
A few days later I was on a plane bound for Edinburgh to meet Paul McGrath, a former corporal with No. 10 Platoon who had gone on to fight with 30 Assault Unit for the remainder of the war. In a small seaside town outside the Scottish capital, McGrath’s flat overlooked two of his many passions—the Firth of Forth and a wild golf course on which, in his late eighties, he still played. On the mantel were pictures of his elegantly beautiful wife, now passed on.
Conducting historical interviews is extremely difficult. Even at the best of times, not to mention seven decades later, memory is notoriously unreliable and must be cross-referenced with textual documents or other evidence. Still, oral history gives something documents cannot provide: impressions of tone, feeling and atmosphere that can bring historical research to life. And that is exactly what my interview with McGrath offered. No sooner had I knocked on his door than the famous wry, dry wit of the Royal Marines came through. As I squeezed my six-foot-five, 250-pound frame through his doorway, the six-foot, wiry octogenarian looked up and said, “Oh my! You are a big one. Okay, I’ll come quietly!”* When we sat down to talk, McGrath apologized that his memory was not what it used to be. With that, I simply asked him to describe what his role had been with the Royal Marines and the IAU. Without missing a beat, his jovial demeanour turned sombre, his intense ice-blue eyes clouded, and he said softly, “Well, old boy, I was nineteen—and I was there to kill Germans.” He explained further that he was “simply” a “minder” or “bodyguard” for those making the pinch, with orders to breach the harbour on the deck of HMS Locust and hit the Hôtel Moderne, leaving nothing and nobody standing in their wake to tip off the Germans to what had been removed.
A cheerful photograph of the men of No. 10 Platoon of X Company taken during training at Sandown, on the Isle of Wight, in May 1942, just before the Dieppe Raid. These thirty commandos were Fleming’s highly trained Intelligence Assault Unit, made up mostly of teenagers aged eighteen and nineteen, and led by their twenty-two-year-old commander Lieutenant Herbert Oliver “Peter” Huntington-Whiteley. Their job was to pinch “material and documents of the highest operational priority, the importance of which is sufficient to justify the mounting of special operations and the incurring of heavy casualties …”—meaning they were deemed expendable in achieving that goal. Jock Farmer, middle rank, 7th from left; Ginger Northern, rear, 2nd from left; John Kruthoffer, seated, 5th from left; Peter Huntington-Whiteley, seated, middle, with cap on; Ernest Coleman, seated, 1st from left, next to kneeling man; Paul McGrath, middle row, standing with
face slightly turned, 2nd from right. (photo credits 11.1)
Three months after Dieppe: the surviving No. 10 Platoon veterans from the Dieppe Raid who had formed the first cadre of Ian Fleming’s Commandos. Here, in battledress during Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa: (left to right) Marine Corporal Leslie “Lofty” Wyman, Marine Leslie “Brad” Bradshaw, Marine Ken “Jock” Finlayson, Sergeant John “Krut” Kruthoffer, Marine Corporal Paul “Mac” McGrath and Marine Jack “Spike” Watson. (photo credits 11.2)
Paul McGrath (front row, second from right) with part of his section of No. 10 Platoon, c. 1945, taken less than three years after Dieppe. A series of harrowing missions in North Africa, Sicily, Normandy, Belgium and Germany had taken its toll on Fleming’s now-seasoned looking veterans, though they were still only in their early twenties. (photo credits 11.3)
McGrath’s cold-blooded and sober reply all those years later was chilling. It reinforced the crucial imperative of the mission and the characteristic ruthlessness already demonstrated in earlier schemes inspired by Ian Fleming. Still sensitive to the Ultra Secret nature of his mission, McGrath seemed to balk when I pressed for further details, though it may have been his failing memory. I therefore turned the discussion to the mysterious Huntington-Whiteley.
McGrath described Peter Huntington-Whiteley as “softly spoken, with a languid air, his spare frame reaching a little over six feet high.”12 He was “well liked and popular with the men,” who nicknamed him “Red” for his fiery head of hair but never dared utter the word in his presence.13 He was a good officer, and the men trusted and respected him. Like his teenage charges, he too was young—yet in command of a platoon of highly trained killers. McGrath suggested that I speak to Huntington-Whiteley’s brother, Miles, who knew little of their exploits but could fill me in on the family background.
Meeting with Miles in his London flat proved very useful for me.* The authorities in England have yet to release the personnel records of individuals who served in the Second World War, so Miles was able to provide me with information that was otherwise unavailable. He told me that Peter, as the family and close friends called his brother (whose given names were Herbert Oliver), was commissioned into the Royal Marines in 1938 after he failed to attain the required results on his naval entrance exam. Never truly interested in a military or naval career as such, Peter joined out of a sense of duty, as the eldest son in a family with a long tradition of naval, military and public service. Eventually he was attracted by the daring and unique nature of the Royal Marine Commando.14 With his father and one of his younger brothers away at sea, his failure to pass the naval exam was a blessing because his posting kept him in England, where he maintained a watchful eye on his mother and youngest brother, Miles, who, nine years his junior, idolized the dashing and daring commando.15
Like Ian Fleming, Huntington-Whiteley was very much a product of his privileged background and family tradition of Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, though he never attended the university. Known as a “fine athlete and musician,” he mastered both the piano and the trumpet and excelled on the cricket pitch, playing at Lord’s for Eton against Harrow and in other big matches. Ever the stickler for formality and social etiquette, he, like many others of his station in the class-conscious Britain of 1942, kept a healthy distance from his men, despite their intense training regimen and the intimate and potentially lethal conditions in which they worked together. Always formal, he addressed the men by their full names or rank and maintained strict standards. On one occasion he threatened to discipline a man for uttering an expletive in the heat of battle.16
The central reason for the creation of Fleming’s IAU was the need to reduce the security risk associated with sending highly trained, fully indoctrinated intelligence experts who possessed intimate knowledge of the British cryptographic landscape into pinch operations. The danger was too great that if they were captured they might be broken under intense interrogation. But to do their jobs effectively, the commander of the unit and his senior non-commissioned officer would have to know what types of textual material and equipment or technologies the NID needed from the pinch. Even this partial indoctrination and familiarization with the target material produced a mammoth potential security risk, and Fleming naturally sought assurance that they had an individual to command the IAU who was both trustworthy and accountable. By the standards of the time, he found the ideal candidate in Huntington-Whiteley.
The incestuous nature of British intelligence and the closed world of Great Britain’s social and political elite probably played a large part in the young officer’s selection, as did the tight-knit world of personal connections inside the Royal Navy. Peter Huntington-Whiteley’s paternal grandfather, Herbert James Huntington-Whiteley, had served alongside Fleming’s father as a Conservative member of Parliament during the First World War. His father, Commander Maurice Huntington-Whiteley, a career Royal Navy officer, succeeded in obtaining a rare baronetcy—a hereditary rank just above that of knight that established the family’s status as part of the aristocracy. He crossed paths on numerous occasions before and during the war with Jock Hughes-Hallett. The men held the rare position of torpedo officer on different aircraft carriers in the early 1930s, meaning they would have attended the same courses, conferences and training schemes. Later, during the war, both worked under the same roof at HMS President, the “stone frigate” or shore establishment on the banks of the Thames River near Tower Bridge, though in different departments—Huntington-Whiteley in the Admiralty’s Trade Division, led by Blinker Hall’s son, while Hughes-Hallett toiled in the Local Defence Division before going off to COHQ.
But the greatest endorsement for young Huntington-Whiteley came from his mother’s side of the family, which defined the very notion of Establishment in imperial Britain. His maternal grandfather was Stanley Baldwin, the former head of the Conservative Party and three-time prime minister of Great Britain; and his grandmother, Anne Baldwin, was related to the famous painters Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Sir Edward Poynter, both of whom had headed the Royal Academy of Arts, and counted Rudyard Kipling as part of her clan—a legendary writer who expounded the glory of the Empire. Peter was as capable as any Royal Marine Commando platoon officer of taking on the responsibility of an Ultra Secret role, but being the former prime minister’s grandson gave him that extra edge: his pedigree communicated a level of trust and accountability of the highest order.
As Huntington-Whiteley and his men prepared for Rutter, they “received a careful and detailed briefing from [the] Naval Intelligence Division in particular requirements which were of extreme urgency at the time,” but their indoctrination was only partial, based on a “need to know” basis: the significance of the material they had to pinch or any information related to Bletchley Park remained above their pay grade.17 They needed only to recognize what was required: the remains of a smashed Enigma machine, samples of its wheels and wooden case, along with specimens of its code books, including damaged publications printed with soluble ink.18
In early June, Mountbatten’s headquarters sent out a call to the other intelligence agencies, aside from the NID, that might want to benefit from the Combined Operations train leaving for Dieppe in the coming weeks.19 The Special Operations Executive, which was already helping to locate targets in Dieppe, attached its agents to the raid, as did the Ministry of Economic Warfare and the Secret Intelligence Service.20 Their targets are listed in Appendix L of the Rutter plan, the “Search Plan,” which details the work to be carried out by General Ham Roberts’s 2nd Canadian Field Security Section. In conjunction with these intelligence agencies, the field security teams would follow the assault troops ashore to search the various hotels that housed barracks and headquarters, as well as other targets such as the town hall and the post office. The only caveat put on any target in Dieppe was attached to the building that Godfrey and Fleming had set their sights on more than two months earlier: the Hôtel Moderne, located at the junction of the rue Vauque
lin and the Quai Duquesne on the direct route running from the main beach to the port, and just a hundred yards from the shadow of the beachfront tobacco factory. This proviso forbade the field security teams from entering the building, with strict orders to “contact Lieut. Huntington-Whiteley, Royal Marines, and follow his instructions before searching Hotel Moderne.”21
Described as “softly spoken, with a languid air … well liked and popular with the men,” an Eton “old boy,” a relative of Rudyard Kipling and the grandson of former British prime minister Stanley Baldwin, Captain Peter Huntington-Whiteley, or “Red” as his men called him, led Ian Fleming’s Intelligence Assault Unit in the Dieppe Raid at the age of twenty-two. He did not survive the war; he was killed in action two years later on the outskirts of Le Havre, France, in September 1944, just days after taking part in the liberation of Dieppe with Paul McGrath and the rest of his No. 10 Platoon veterans. (photo credits 11.4)
Part of Appendix L of NID’s search plan for Dieppe, which subsequently fell into German hands. On this page is a clear stipulation that required the Canadian Field Security Section to seek permission and guidance from Lieutenant Huntington-Whiteley before searching the Hôtel Moderne, located at 21 rue Vauquelin, marking the hotel and its contents as a target of prime importance to Naval Intelligence. (photo credits 11.5)
This key piece of evidence ties Fleming’s IAU to the NID’s most desired targets and confirms that a pinch component designed to solve the four-rotor crisis was indeed part of Operation Rutter. Once the raid at St-Nazaire and the aborted raid at Bayonne had failed to produce gold for the cryptographers at Bletchley Park, it became essential for the next sizable raid to contain a pinch element somewhere in its makeup. So the question is straightforward: was the plan for Dieppe a pinch by opportunity or a pinch by design?