WW2TV
Published 19 Aug 2021One Day in August — Dieppe Anniversary Battlefield Event (Operation Jubilee) With David O’Keefe, Part 3 — Anniversary Battlefield Event.
David O’Keefe joins us for a third and final show about Operation Jubilee to explain how the plan unravelled and how the nearly 1,000 British, Canadian and American commandos died. We will use aerial footage, HD footage taken in Dieppe last week and maps, photos, and graphics.
In Part 1 David O’Keefe talked about the real reason for the raid on Dieppe in August 1942. In Part 2 David talked about the plan for Operation Jubilee. The intentions of the raid and how it was supposed to unfold.
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August 19, 2023
One Day in August – Dieppe Anniversary Battlefield Event (Operation Jubilee)
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Dieppe Raid – 19 August, 1942
The History Chap
Published 15 Aug 2021The Dieppe Raid (codename Operation Jubilee) was a disastrous amphibious landing by the allies in France during World War 2. Nearly 4,000 allied soldiers (mainly Canadians) were killed, wounded or captured during the Battle of Dieppe.
1942 was turning out to be a bad year for the allies. The Nazis were sweeping forwards in Russia, the Japanese were sweeping though South East Asia. The British commonwealth troops were being pushed back by the Germans & Italians in North Africa and the Americans were still reeling from the attack on Pearl Harbour.
The British wanted to show that they were still willing to take the offensive in the war and were were being urged by Stalin to take some pressure off the Soviet Union. A plan was hatched to conduct a “smash & grab” raid on the port of Dieppe in northern France. The aim was to seize Dieppe and hold it for a limited time before evacuation, during which time the allied troops would collect intelligence and destroy German military infrastructure.
The Canadian government were keen to have their own troops play a role in the war and so the majority of the raiding force was made up of their troops. Initially planned for early July, Operation Jubilee was delayed for over a month due to bad weather and the need for a high tide at dawn. Eventually the Dieppe Raid took place just before 0400 on the 19th August 1942. 5,000 Canadians, 1,000 British and 50 US Rangers were to land at five different points along a 16km (10 mile front) either side of the port of Dieppe itself.
The result was a complete disaster. No major objectives were achieved, poor intelligence had not identified the strength of the German defences and the Germans were on high alert for a possible attack after the firefight at sea and the fact that there was high tide. Within less than 6 hours of the landing starting the order had been given to evacuate and by 1400 hours what remained of the allied force had been successfully removed.
The Dieppe Raid lasted 10 hours. They left behind 4,000 killed, wounded or prisoners of war — over 80% of whom were Canadians. The Royal Navy lost a destroyer and 33 landing craft whilst the RAF lost 106 planes.
The raid had sent a signal to the Germans that the Atlantic shoreline was not secure. That eventually they would have to fight the war on two fronts. It also raised morale within the population of occupied France. They were not alone. The best that can be said for the raid was that it taught the allies valuable lessons which were successfully implemented in the D-Day landings in Normandy in 1944. Maybe the sacrifice of the young men at Dieppe saved many more young men on D-Day.
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August 18, 2023
One Day in August – Dieppe – Part 2 – The Plan
WW2TV
Published 17 Jan 2021Part 2 – The Plan With David O’Keefe
David O’Keefe joins us again. In Part 1 he talked about the real reason for the raid on Dieppe in August 1942. In Part 2 we talk about the plan for Operation Jubilee and David will share his presentation about the intentions of the raid and how it was supposed to unfold.
A final show sometime in the summer will come live from Dieppe to explain how the plan unravelled and how the nearly 1,000 British, Canadian and American commandos died.
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August 17, 2023
Dieppe – One Day in August – Ian Fleming, Enigma and the Deadly Raid – Part 1
WW2TV
Published 29 Nov 2020In less than six hours in August 1942, nearly 1,000 British, Canadian and American commandos died in the French port of Dieppe in an operation that for decades seemed to have no real purpose. Was it a dry-run for D-Day, or perhaps a gesture by the Allies to placate Stalin’s impatience for a second front in the west?
Canadian historian David O’Keefe uses hitherto classified intelligence archives to prove that this catastrophic and apparently futile raid was in fact a mission, set up by Ian Fleming of British Naval Intelligence as part of a “pinch” policy designed to capture material relating to the four-rotor Enigma machine that would permit codebreakers like Alan Turing at Bletchley Park to turn the tide of the Second World War.
In this first show we will look at how the raid has been written about in previous books and the research David undertook and as importantly why he did it. In a future show, we will look at filming in Dieppe itself and explain the sequence of events.
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June 3, 2023
Why Was Normandy Selected For D-Day?
Real Engineering
Published 28 Mar 2020In the debut episode of the Logistics of D-Day we explore the logic and planning that resulted in Normandy being chosen as the location for the largest amphibious invasion in the history of human kind.
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October 15, 2021
Nazis “Restore” Law and Order – WAH 044 – October 1942, Pt. 1
World War Two
Published 14 Oct 2021Resistance against occupation starts rising in the Autumn of 1942. It faces opposition not only from the occupiers, but also from collaborators killing their own countrymen.
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August 23, 2021
Swastika Raised on Highest Point in Europe – WW2 – 156 – August 21, 1942
World War Two
Published 21 Aug 2021The Axis advance in the Caucasus takes Mt. Elbrus, and the one on Stalingrad continues, and there are several raids of note this week- a Japanese one on Guadalcanal is destroyed, an Allied one on Dieppe is badly savaged, and an American one at Makin Atoll is successful in the short term, but with bad long term ramifications.
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August 19, 2020
Dieppe 1942 – Slaughter on the Shingle
Mark Felton Productions
Published 14 Mar 2020Find out how and why the Dieppe Raid was launched in 1942 and why is went so disastrously wrong.
Visit my new audio book channel ‘War Stories with Mark Felton’: https://youtu.be/xszsAzbHcPE
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August 19, 2018
The Dieppe Raid, from Canada at War, 1962
piddflicks
Published on 19 Aug 2012An excerpt from the brilliant 1962 series Canada At War by the National Film Board of Canada focusing on the disastrous raid on Dieppe, 19 August 1942, where more than two-thirds of the 6,000 soldiers were killed, wounded or taken prisoner.
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June 7, 2018
D-Day – II: The Secret War – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 13 Jun 2017The Germans expected the Allies to invade France to re-open the Western Front, but they did not know when or where the invasion would start – thanks largely to the operations of MI5, British intelligence services, who staged an elaborate deception called Operation Bodyguard designed to make the Germans think they would be invading Pas de Calais instead of their real target: Normandy.
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August 31, 2017
The Dieppe raid and the failure of the Churchill tank
Published on 15 Oct 2010
The Dieppe Raid, also known as the Battle of Dieppe, Operation Rutter and, later, Operation Jubilee, was a Second World War Allied attack on the German-occupied port of Dieppe. The raid took place on the northern coast of France on 19 August 1942. The assault began at 5:00 a.m. and by 10:50 a.m. the Allied commanders were forced to call a retreat. Over 6,000 infantrymen, predominantly Canadian, were supported by a Canadian Armoured regiment and a strong force of Royal Navy and smaller Royal Air Force landing contingents. It involved 5,000 Canadians, 1,000 British troops, and 50 United States Rangers.
Objectives included seizing and holding a major port for a short period, both to prove that it was possible and to gather intelligence. Upon retreat, the Allies also wanted to destroy coastal defences, port structures and all strategic buildings. The raid had the added objectives of boosting morale and demonstrating the firm commitment of the United Kingdom to open a western front in Europe.
Virtually none of these objectives were met.
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August 23, 2017
One definite success from the Dieppe raid
The allied attack on Dieppe in August, 1942 was an operational failure: nearly 60% of the raiding force were killed, wounded or captured and the tactical objectives in the harbour area were not achieved. I’ve mentioned the speculations on an Enigma side-operation (which does not seem to be given credence by most historians), using the main Canadian attack as cover for an attempt to snatch the latest German encryption device from one or more high-security locations within the target area. A second side-mission was also conducted to capture one of the newest German radar stations at Pourville, just down the coast from Dieppe:
Aerial reconnaissance photos indicated that one of these new Freya radar sets had been installed at Pourville-sur-Mer, near Dieppe. A military raid on Dieppe, to test British and Canadian plans for an amphibious invasion, was already being planned. Senior officers immediately added a sub-plan to the Dieppe raid: a small force would be detached to attack the Pourville radar station. There, a radar expert would dismantle the station’s vital equipment and transport it back to the UK for analysis.
Nissenthall, a Jewish cockney who had a lifelong fascination with electronics and radio technology, had joined the Air Force as an apprentice in 1936. By the outbreak of the war in 1939 he was assigned to RAF radio direction finding stations (RDF, the short-lived original term for radar) and rapidly built up a reputation as a competent and technically skilled operator. Before the war he had also worked directly with Robert Watson-Watt, widely regarded today as the father of radar.A German FuMG 401 “Freya LZ” radar station of the type installed at Pourville. (US National Archives and Records Administration image, via Wikimedia)
[…]
More than 5,000 soldiers of the First Canadian Division set off from the south coast of England in the early hours of 19 August 1942. Embedded with A Company of the South Saskatchewan Regiment, Nissenthall’s 11-man bodyguard landed on French soil – but on the wrong side of the Scie River from the radar station.
After finding their way to their intended starting point, the team ran into stiff German resistance. Casualties soon mounted up as they probed the area, looking for a way into the radar station.
Thanks to the Bruneval raid six months previously, the Germans had beefed up their defences around coastal radar stations. This, combined with the naivete of the Allied planners back in Britain, had left the Canadians exposed and vulnerable. Though Nissenthall’s team had just about reached the radar station, there was no hope they would be able to get inside it, much less examine it, dismantle it and take away the most valuable parts of the Freya set inside.
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August 19, 2017
Dieppe Raid 19 August, 1942 – Assault, escape and aftermath
Published on 22 Mar 2009
The Dieppe Raid was one of the costliest days for the Canadian Army in the entire Second World War. 907 Canadians were killed, in addition more than 2,500 were wounded or captured, all on August 19 of 1942.
At the BBC site: Julian Thompson’s summary of the Dieppe Raid.
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October 26, 2015
Going price for a working Enigma machine – $365,000
Lester Haines reports on a recent record auction price for an Enigma machine:
A fully-functioning four-rotor M4 Enigma WW2 cipher machine has sold at auction for $365,000.
The German encryption device, as used by the U-Boat fleet and described as “one of the rarest of all the Enigma machines”, went under the hammer at Bonham’s in New York last night as part of the “Conflicts of the 20th Century” sale.
The M4 was adopted by the German Navy, the Kriegsmarine, in early 1942 following the capture of U-570 in August 1941*. Although the crew of U-570 had destroyed their three-rotor Enigma, the British found aboard written material which compromised the security of the machine.
The traffic to and from the replacement machines was dubbed “Shark” by codebreakers at Bletchley Park. Decryption proved troublesome, due in part to an initial lack of “cribs” (identified or suspected plaintext in an encrypted message) for the new device, but by December 1942, the British were regularly cracking M4 messages.
I recently read David O’Keefe’s One Day in August, which seems to explain the otherwise inexplicable launch of “Operation Jubilee”, the Dieppe raid … in his reading, the raid was actually a cover-up operation while British intelligence operatives tried to snatch one or more of the new Enigma machines (like the one shown above) without tipping off the Germans that that was the actual goal. Joel Ralph reviewed the book when it was released:
One Day in August, by David O’Keefe, takes a completely different approach to the Dieppe landing. With significant new evidence in hand, O’Keefe seeks to reframe the entire raid within the context of the secret naval intelligence war being fought against Nazi Germany.
On February 1, 1942, German U-boats operating in the Atlantic Ocean switched from using a three-rotor Enigma code machine to a new four-rotor machine. Britain’s Naval Intelligence Division, which had broken the three-rotor code and was regularly reading German coded messages, was suddenly left entirely in the dark as to the positions and intentions of enemy submarines. By the summer of 1942, the Battle of the Atlantic had reached a state of crisis and was threatening to cut off Britain from the resources needed to carry on with the war.
O’Keefe spends nearly two hundred pages documenting the secret war against Germany and the growth of the Naval Intelligence Division. What ties this to Dieppe and sparked O’Keefe’s research was the development of a unique naval intelligence commando unit tasked with retrieving vital code-breaking material. As O’Keefe’s research reveals, the origins of this unit were at Dieppe, on an almost suicidal mission to gather intelligence they hoped would crack the four-rotor Enigma machine.
O’Keefe has uncovered new documents and first-hand accounts that provide evidence for the existence of such a mission. But he takes it one step further and argues that these secret commandos were not simply along for the ride at Dieppe. Instead, he claims, the entire Dieppe raid was cover for their important task.
It’s easy to dismiss O’Keefe’s argument as too incredible (Zuehlke does so quickly in his brief conclusion [in his book Operation Jubilee, August 19, 1942]). But O’Keefe would argue that just about everything associated with combined operations defied conventional military logic, from Operation Ruthless, a planned but never executed James Bond-style mission, to the successful raid on the French port of St. Nazaire only months before Dieppe.
Clearly this commando operation was an important part of the Dieppe raid. But, while the circumstantial evidence is robust, there is no single clear document that directly lays out the Dieppe raid as cover for a secret “pinch by design” operation to steal German code books and Enigma material.
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August 21, 2015
Allocating the blame for “Operation Jubilee”
In a BBC post from a few years back, Julian Thompson looks at the Dieppe raid:
On 19 August 1942, a disastrous seaborne raid was launched by Allied forces on the German-occupied French port of Dieppe. Why was such a raid ever undertaken? Because, with Germany operating deep in the Soviet Union, the Russians were urging the Allies to relieve the pressure on them by opening a second front in north-west Europe.
At the same time the British Chief of Combined Operations, Rear Admiral Louis Mountbatten, was agitating for a practical trial beach landing, against real opposition, for his troops. In the face of this pressure, Churchill decided that Operation Rutter, a ‘hit and run’ raid on Dieppe, should go ahead.
[…]
Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff — the heads of the Navy, Army and Air Force, who met daily to discuss strategy and advise Churchill — were responsible for this disastrous misjudgement. But, because no written record exists of the Chiefs of Staff approving the raid in its final form, it has sometimes been suggested that it was really Mountbatten who remounted it without authorisation. This is almost certainly nonsense.
The Chiefs of Staff disliked Mountbatten, regarding him as an upstart foisted on them by Churchill, so any unauthorised action on his part would have given them the ammunition to recommend his removal. Since Mountbatten was not removed, and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Alan Brooke, in his frank and detailed diary, makes no mention of his having exceeded his authority, it seems unlikely that Mountbatten can be accused of mounting the raid without authority.
General Brooke was in the Middle East from 1 August 1942, returning on the 24th, after the event. This was unfortunate, for, as the most forceful and intelligent of the Chiefs of Staff, had he been in Britain in the days preceding the raid, he might have persuaded Churchill to call it off.
Much has been said since about the fact that the Dieppe raid was a necessary precursor to the great amphibious operations that were to follow, in terms of the lessons learned and experience gained. Mountbatten pursued that line all his life. But as Chief of Combined Operations, he did bear some of the responsibility for mounting the operation, so one can only comment, ‘he would say that, wouldn’t he?’
The disaster did point up the need for much heavier firepower in future raids. It was recognised that this should include aerial bombardment, special arrangements to be made for land armour, and intimate fire support right up to the moment when troops crossed the waterline (the most dangerous place on the beach) and closed with their objectives.
However, it did not need a debacle like Dieppe to learn these lessons. As judged by General Sir Leslie Hollis — secretary to the Chiefs of Staff Committee and deputy head of the Military Wing of the War Cabinet with direct access to Churchill — the operation was a complete failure, and the many lives that were sacrificed in attempting it were lost with no tangible result.
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