For all the subsequent debate—mentioned earlier—over less bloody alternatives, the main landings at Dieppe were an essential preliminary to the invasion of Europe. In the late spring of 1942, COHQ planning staffs considered the capture of a major port or ports would be essential for the sustained supply of invading armies. The Canadians, whose 2 Division provided the main landing force, accepted the plan for a frontal assault on the town’s beaches, holding it for the morning of Wednesday 19 August 1942, while the port’s defences, a radar station, and the aerodrome at St Aubin (south of Dieppe) were destroyed. There were about 60 German landing barges in the port and capturing these, along with information in the German divisional headquarters and from prisoners’ interrogation, would assist the Allies in their invasion preparations. There were also plans for an air battle into which the German fighters might be drawn from their defensive attitudes inland. The port was not thought to be heavily defended.
Copies of the original operation orders have manuscript alterations changing the proposed bombing support for the laying of smoke-bomb cover. Several reasons have been put forward for the change, but fear of killing French civilians and of rubble-strewn streets becoming impassable to tanks are the most likely. Whatever the reasons, there is evidence suggesting that bombing would not have necessarily led to a successful landing, for the Germans had guns hidden in cliff positions that were unseen on aerial photographs. The beaches east and west of Dieppe are backed by cliffs, except for a narrow gap at Puys (also called Puits), a small beach further east at Pourville, and two beaches west of the town near and at the mouth of the Saane River.
Covering the sea approaches to Dieppe were two batteries, each with 150mm (5.9in) guns—thought to be four in the east, six in the west—that could traverse through 360 degrees, and with a range of nearly 12 miles (20km). These would have to be knocked out before the main force carrier ships were off the beaches, and so 3 Commando was chosen to land against the eastern Berneval battery and 4 Commando against the one at Vasterival. Their targets lay behind high cliffs and in each case would have to be approached over rocky beaches to gulleys, or up the Saane river estuary. Landing at high water (0455 hours) in the dark, the commandos would later have to make a difficult withdrawal as the tide fell and their craft moved further offshore where cliff-top defenders had a clear shot, which they would not be able to get at craft on high water under the cliffs. With the main force were 40(RM) Commando who, if they had not first been committed from their role as a floating reserve, would cut out the German landing craft.
The force sailed from Southern English ports on Tuesday 18 August on a fine summer’s evening, with John Durnford-Slater’s 3 Commando in 25 LCP(L)s (see Appendix 4) as the most easterly of the assault convoys. They move in four columns with Steam Gunboat No.5 in the van and LC Flak No.1 and ML No. 346 astern. The Flak craft had two twin 4-inch guns that could be used for beach bombardment or anti-aircraft fire. The voyage of nearly 70 miles (112km) was covered by two escort destroyers under the command of the Polish captain of Slazak. These escorts were four miles north-east of the convoy when it ran across five German ships, including armed German trawlers escorting a tanker. Several of the frail wooden LCP(L)s were damaged and all were scattered in the blaze of 20mm fire concentrated on the SGB as the reeled out of action with John Durnford-Slater aboard, her bridge a ‘collapsed rugger scrum of wounded and dead’. From the craft scudding away into the night, only four made their target beaches Yellow 1 and 2.
Major Peter Young—2 i/c 3 Commando—with 18 men was in the solitary craft to reach Yellow 2, west of the Berneval battery, at 0450 five minutes before their H-hour. Off the beach he briefly debated the point of making a landing, for the intended Troops had not reached the beach, but the orders were clear: ‘The battery guns should be engaged by fire at the earliest possible moment and continually harassed by snipers if sufficient commandos get ashore for the planned attack.’ Lieutenant-Commander Buckee RN took the craft ashore and promised to wait: he even offered to bring his four-man crew ashore, but at the Major’s request they stayed with the craft off the beach.
Under covering fire from ML No.346, five other craft came near Yellow 1 beach, and three got their commandos ashore with at least one commando steering his craft, most of the crews being either dead or wounded. Some 50 men from Nos. 2,5, and 6 Troops then followed Captain R.L Wills ashore. With them were four French marines of 10 Commando. They fought their way through the beach defences of wire and several machine-gun posts, one being taken in a lone bayonet charge by Corporal ‘Banger’ Halls. The craft had landed half an hour late, and in the strengthening daylight were seen on their run-in, giving Germans time to deploy their reserve platoon and to eventually hem in Richard Will’s assault in a small perimeter as the Commandos tried to fan out from the road topping the gulley. Richard Wills was wounded in the neck and Lieutenant Loustalot of the US Army Rangers was killed, the first American serviceman of World War II to die in land warfare on the European mainland. Sergeant-Major Montailler of 10 Commando, wearing his red pompom French marine cap, was in the van of this spirited attack. When the enemy counter-attacked in strength, the commandos were forced back to the beach, only to find that under heavy fire, the tide had ebbed from the rocky shore and that the craft were caught on rocks or holed. The only commando to be brought off was a signalman with the naval beach party. The French Sergeant-Major, gravely wounded, was taken prisoner along with Richard Wills, and others.
The action by Dick Wills’s men drew off some of the battery’s defenders, an estimated 350 men although apparently without mortars in this area. At first they were seemingly unaware of Peter Young’s landing and he and his men hauled themselves up the steep cliff gulley, using the anchor pegs of German wire as footholds. After 20 minutes they were at the top in daylight, reading a convenient signpost Achtung Minen. They moved cautiously around this minefield and forward towards the battery which, as it opened fire, they ran ‘to engage it at the earliest possible moment’. They had gone down the village street of Berneval and reached the church when a burst of machine-gun fire, and not the expected support of Dick Wills’s men, greeted them. Casting around for sniping points, Peter Young found there were no steps up the church tower, so they moved towards a wheat field. The men—18 of them—were so well spaced that the rear flank could fire through gaps in the front, but their view was limited because the battery was on the same level as the wheat field in which riflemen and one bren gunner had to kneel to aim shots, shifting their positions after every two or three rounds. They remained a couple of hundred yards or less from the gun positions which had fired about 20 rounds, and the commandos—firing steadily to conserve ammunition—were irritating the gunners sufficiently for one gun to traverse 180 degrees. A great orange flash followed by clouds of black smoke and a 40kg (90lb) shot winged its way into France. Three more followed it but the gun could not be depressed for a 150-yard (140m) range, and the rumble of blast on each firing was just far enough away not to hurt the commandos, even though it deafened them. A few small arms in the right place at the right moment had defeated the battery, for when Peter Young looked towards Dieppe there was a great bank of smoke hiding the ships.
With their ammunition getting low and German reinforcements likely to arrive any minute, Peter Young’s men shot up a German observation post on the cliff-top before withdrawing to the beach, to where Lieutenant-Commander Buckee brought the LCP(L) back as three or four men under Lieutenant John Selwyn formed a rearguard through which the others withdrew down a gulley in the classic tactic for disengaging from an enemy. This manoeuvre is simple enough when practised in a field as the rearguard’s fire draws the advancing enemy’s attention. At the top of a gulley in the likely confusion of even a well-rehearsed withdrawal, the rearguard can come unstuck. Their fire should at least unsteady the advancing enemy’s aim, but where are their own commandos out front? Have they all gone through? When should the covering (rearguard) party pack up and move? At the gulley to
p, all went to plan, the other dozen or so men moved past John Selwyn’s bren team and riflemen before they picked up the bren and in turn withdrew.
This gulley was mined, unlike the one they had climbed some three hours earlier, and L/Cpl H.A.R. White was wounded in the foot when one exploded. Nevertheless, he got back to his 3-inch (76mm) mortar down on the beach, firing four rounds as the advance party of Major Blücher’s assault engineers from 181 Division reached the cliff-top. ML No.346 also gave covering fire as the commando including the mortar team waded out to the landing craft and a safe evacuation, although some men were carried 300 yards (270m) out to sea on the craft’s life-lines before being hauled aboard.
Peter Young has described his own trait of ‘inborn stubbornness or bloody-mindedness’ as one aspect of his determined leadership, but the Major (later Brigadier) had shown a masterly touch for his military good sense is one of the golden threads of this story. Few commanders, however, had Peter Young’s acumen. Many as brave as him would have rushed the battery and experienced certain failure, but the Major’s cool calculation in action engaging 200 Germans with a tenth of their number achieved certain victory, for as far as is known no hits were scored by the battery that morning.
The westerly battery near Varengeville-sur-Mer had six 150mm (5.9in) guns set 1,100 yards (1,000m) inland behind high cliffs, the battery being some 400 feet (120m) above sea level. Three sides of its defences were wired with a double-apron fence protecting heavy machine-gun posts facing the sea, and behind it was a flak-tower. The cliffs appeared too steep to scale quickly and the only direct approach from the beach was up two gulleys (Orange 1 beach). A mile and a half (2.4km) further west, the cliff line was broken where the river Saane runs into the sea (Orange 2 beach) by the village of Quiberville. This beach was covered by machine-guns in two pill-boxes and some wire.
Lieutenant-Colonel the Lord Lovat, at 31, was commanding ‘No.4’ and prepared his plan for this assault, with rehearsals during late July and early August in eight practice runs over measured ground at Lulworth Cove on the Dorset coast. He used only four Troops, preferring 250 men for a quick action rather than all six Troops in his Commando, who would require a larger force of craft or possibly two flights (or lifts) in their carrier’s craft. Group 1, with 88 men, under Major Derek Mills-Roberts, a fine soldier (a Liverpool solicitor before the war), would land on Orange 1 beach, move up one of the gulleys, and engage the battery with small arms and mortar fire from a wood about 300 yards in front of the battery. This provided the covering fire in a tactic of fire-and-movement. Group 2, with 164 men led by Lord Lovat, would land on Orange 2 and sweep behind the battery to positions where they could launch a charge—the movement element of this tactic, and a plan they executed to perfection.
Sailing on the HMS Prince Albert (cf. Appendix 4), this western flank force was called for breakfast at 0130 hours on 19 August. The craft were launched in a calm sea and ran towards the beach with the lighthouse at Pointe d’Ailly, halfway between the two Orange beaches, flashing its correct signal at least until the craft were a mile offshore, when it went out and star shells were fired from its observation post. The light had provided an accurate navigation beacon and dispels any notation that the raid was expected. Lieutenant David Style spotted the cleft of the eastward gulley and landed, dry-shod on the full tide in the dawn’s half-light. Although the LCAs were overloaded, mainly because each man carried two mortar bombs, they landed at 0453 within minutes of their H-hour. To save weight the men did not wear tin hats and carried neither water bottles nor rations.
Running quickly under the lee of the cliffs where an enemy would have difficulty firing on them, the cleared the craft in less than a minute, proving their expertise in this amphibious technique. The left-hand gulley proved impassable without an hour’s work clearing chalk rubble and possibly mines, so the Major ordered a gap blown in the right-hand gulley’s wire with bangalore torpedoes (see Appendix 3). The first blew a smallish gap which the men could widen through the concertina coils. At the second wire barrier another bangalore torpedo was set. After a longish pause—moments of frustration: was the fuse dud?—the charge went off with a relieving explosion that created a gap through which David Style led his Section in single file.
Behind this leading Section came the C Troop commander, Captain R.W.P. Dawson, and the Major (who was second-in-command of ‘No.4’). By now it was full daylight, and although the Major thought they may have been discovered ‘like thieves in an alley when the policeman’s torch shines’, the noise of 3 Commando’s action seven miles away had drowned the explosions of the bangalore torpedoes: equally fortuitously, four Allied light bombers flew overhead as the commandos climbed the gulley. The battery defences were manned by men of 110 Division, Germans who had seen action in Russia but not all of whom appeared to realise the urgency of their plight; one cook, in his white cap, stood watching developments, and no enemy—the Major learnt later—occupied the shuttered houses of Vesterival-sur-Mer. As the commandos moved through these, Derek Mills-Roberts saw the carrier ships arrive ahead of time; and as the battery fired he pressed forward taking a calculated risk on the Germans (if any) in these houses not interfering with the action. Meanwhile Lieutenant Knyvet Carr led a fighting patrol from A Troop to cut the lighthouse OP’s telephone cable, before joining the rest of this Troop, under Captain B.W.S. Boucher-Myers, astride the double cross-roads. There, as well as firing into the battery, they prevented a possible counter-attack by the German company believed to be in Sainte Marguerite. C Troop and Derek Mills-Roberts had meanwhile crashed through the waist-high undergrowth in a wood until they saw the battery across a clearing. The Major and his mortar officer, Lieutenant J.F. Ennis, worked their way further forward some 50 yards to a patch of scrub beyond the wood, where the commando mortar’s fire could be directed into the battery. However, radio contact was not established with the mortar at this time. They could, however, clearly hear the orders given to the guns, which fired six salvos over their heads, before the Major moved back to a barn, where he had a ‘splendid view’. C Troop’s three snipers, their faces and hands painted green, were in the area of the barn, ‘taking their time with the first pressure on their triggers’ before the final squeeze, took a rising toll of Germans. The bren gun teams were silencing several machine-gun posts. However, the Germans, with their professional soldier’s tenacity, replaced the machine-gun crews three times on the flak tower, although this could no longer rotate after some 60 hits from the commandos’ Boys anti-tank rifle (see Appendix 3). Six Rangers were among those firing into the battery from near the barn, and Corporal Koons was sniping through a slit over a manger in a small stable. He was probably the first American soldier to kill a German in a land action during World Warr II, although this ‘first’ might go to one of the Rangers with 3 Commando that Wednesday morning—Corporal Koons was awarded, the MM.
Shots fell among the commandos from at least one of seven German machine-guns. Some 20mm shells and mortar bombs fired from farm buildings on C Troop’s extreme left also fell among them. The snipers, by shifting their positions, remained elusive targets, fortunately for them, as a shell from the battery later blew a hole in the barn you could drive a cart through. Sergeant Garthwaite RAMC was killed by a mortar fire as he attended to a casualty on the edge of the wood, and Derek Mills-Roberts had most of a tree brought down on him by another mortar bomb. The 3-inch mortar was still not in contact with the forward OP; C Troop’s 2-inch (51mm) mortar was firing from the edge of the wood, and although the first shot fell short, the second set off a stack of cordite charges by the battery’s No. 1 gun. The shouts of men caught in this great burst of flame could be heard above the noise of battle, and the fire spread. No more rounds were shot by the battery after this fire.
There were few civilians about, but one middle-aged Frenchman watched with Gallic indignation as his cabbages were trampled underfoot by several commandos. He went off to change from his nightshirt and returned as the Major was passin
g, offering him a glass of wine. The Frenchman’s pretty daughter, watching Derek Mills-Roberts refuse the hospitality, asked ‘Are you going to shoot Papa?’ But the Major had no such thought: the need to press on with sustained fire that would keep the enemy occupied precluded even a momentary pause for a drink. At about 0600, he sent a situation report by runner to the beach, where it was passed to an officer of the Phantom Group. These observers were in touch with Combined Operations Headquarters’ through RAF Uxbridge, near London, and—like Wellington’s roving staff officers at Waterloo—kept their respective headquarters informed on all major British operations. The Phantom message was passed over the carrier ship’s radio to Lord Mountbatten’s staff, but Derek Mills-Roberts had no news of Group 2, and his own Group’s casualties were mounting. With the German fire getting more accurate as the minutes went by, Group 2 came on the air at 0615: they were forming up for the assault. At the same moment the mortar OP established contact with the team in the wood and the accurate 3-inch mortar fire, directed from this post a hundred yards from the battery wire, continued throughout the rest of the action until Group 2’s assault went in. Already the supporting fire from positions of both C and A Troops were having the right effect, as any movement in the battery area brought an instant response.
Lord Lovat’s Group 2 landed on the Orange 2 beach on time at 0430 hours, their five landing craft putting them ashore in battle formation as their small support craft’s machine-guns engaged the German pill-boxes. This converted landing craft carried one or two 5-inch (13mm) and two other machine-guns and was able to give some covering fire while the commandos moved ashore: nevertheless, four men were wounded as the leading Section slithered over rabbit wire they had flung across the barbed wire defences. Lieutenant A.F.S. Vesey’s section from A Troop poked their tubular ladders (see Appendix 3) up the steep bank west of the landing point and rushed the two pill-boxes, killing their machine-gunners with hand-grenades, before setting off to join the rest of A troop. The German mortar fire—no doubt shooting along pre-set lines—was hitting the beach, and eight more men were wounded before the mortar crews extended their range and fired at the landing craft moving offshore to join the boat pool. The Allied aircraft that had passed over Group 1 also distracted the defenders, drawing their fire as the planes flew over.
Commandos and Rangers of World War II Page 13
