Building for Battle: Hitler's D-Day Defences

TO A SECOND FRONT

By summer 1942 there was war all over the world; it was not a good year for the Allies and everywhere British and Commonwealth troops fought they lost. Russia was on its heels as Adolf Hitler’s Nazi forces were advancing in the Caucasus, and the Americans were still reeling from their losses in the Philippines and at Pearl Harbor. Allied prospects seemed to range from bleak to hopeless. And there was a wide-spread belief among the British people, their military leaders, and the U.S. military Chiefs of Staff that the development and launch of a second front in Europe was both essential and urgently required. Since June 1941 the Russians had been pressing the Western Allies for that new front. The Russian Ambassador to Great Britain, Ivan Maisky, began campaigning for it, urging the British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden to do something. Josef Stalin, the Russian leader, took up the case in July asking the Allies to mount a new offensive in northern France. His objective was to divert some of German Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s invading army divisions from their activities on the Eastern Front in the Soviet Union, to take some of the pressure there off the Russians. Or, in lieu of implementing such a new front, he implored the British to send at least twenty-five fighting divisions to join the action on that Eastern Front. It was there that the Allies were facing perhaps their greatest challenge to that point in the war. The gigantic armies of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were engaged in a savage fight to the death, with the Russians seemingly unable to reverse the Nazi offensive. Stalin, together with the Western Allies, feared the possibility (some thought probability) of a Russian military collapse which would bring down the entire Allied war effort.

In July British Prime Minister Winston Churchill pointed out a few harsh realities to the Soviet Premier, "… that the German enemy had positioned forty divisions in France … that Britain had more than 400,000 soldiers involved in combat against Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps in the Western Desert … and that the entire Channel coast line of France bristled with cannon, barbed wire, pillboxes and beach mines making such an attempted landing a bloody repulse. Stalin was unmoved by those facts. Even the American President Franklin D. Roosevelt was applying pressure on Churchill in March 1942. Roosevelt said he was becoming more and more interested in the establishment of a new front this summer on the European continent. In somewhat more than a thinly-veiled threat / promise, Roosevelt and the senior American naval and military chiefs indicated that unless the Allies quickly developed and launched a new offensive in the West, the U.S. would have to refocus the bulk of its war effort on the Pacific war against the Japanese. At that point the general public in both Britain and the United States strongly favoured a new offensive in support of the beleaguered Russians, staging mass rallies in London and New York in April to express that support. The cry was A Second Front Now."

foreground, left to right: U.S. Generals George Patton, Omar Bradley, and British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.

A Focke-Wulf Fw-190 fighter on a French airfield;

German Chancellor Adolf Hitler.

Churchill would later write in his war memoirs: I thought it most important that a large-scale operation should take place this summer, and military opinion seemed unanimous that until an operation on that scale was undertaken, no responsible general would take the responsibility of planning the main offensive … In discussion with Admiral Mountbatten it became clear that time did not permit a new large-scale operation to be mounted during the summer (after Rutter had been cancelled [initially]), but that Dieppe could be remounted (with the new code-name ‘Jubilee’) within a month, provided extraordinary steps were taken to ensure secrecy. For this reason no records were kept but, after the Canadian authorities and the Chiefs of Staff had given their approval, I personally went through the plans with the C.I.G.S., Admiral Mountbatten and the Naval Force Commander, Captain J. Hughes-Hallett.

What resulted from that pressure exerted upon the British PM was Operation Jubilee, which was to be a sort of mini-invasion exercise in advance of an eventual full-scale invasion on the European continent. It was planned to be an armed reconnaissance, a test of the capability of British amphibious forces supported by Royal Air Force fighters, to capture and briefly hold a French port on the English Channel coast. The objective was Dieppe and the raid was scheduled to launch during the night of 18-19th August, having been postponed from 7th July due to unfavourable weather conditions, and then deferred indefinitely following a German fighter-bomber attack on the troopships and other vessels of the supporting fleet assembled mainly in the Solent. After that attack it was thought by the Allied commanders that, having lost the element of surprise on which the success of the operation had depended, with two of the troopships having been damaged and not readily repairable, and the entire operation facing unsettled weather, it was decided to again postpone the operation and disperse the men and ships.

Dieppe is a bit more than sixty miles across the Channel from the English port of Newhaven in Sussex. It would also be an initial test—a probing of the vaunted Atlantic Wall defences that Hitler had been building from the North Cape south to Spain, with heavy emphasis on the Channel and Brittany coasts of France.

The objectives of the operation were minimal and limited. The entire effort was to be completed within nine hours, including five hours occupying the beach and a four-hour withdrawal period. It would require a personnel strength of about 6,000 infantrymen and their ammunition, food and medical supplies, and some 3,000 sailors to transport the troops to and from France. The landing force would include 5,000 Canadians, 1,000 Britons, and fifty U.S. Army Rangers. The invaders would land and assault six beaches within a ten-mile stretch of coastline. British paratroopers would be required to attack and neutralize two large gun batteries on the headlands to either side of the Canadians, who would be launching a frontal assault from the sea. In an effort to improve the overall plan, make the operation less weather-dependent and re-launch it at the earliest possible date, the parachute operation was later cancelled and replaced by a commando attack from the sea. They were to take the port, destroy the St Aubin airport and reconnoiter the Pourville radar site, with the possibility of destroying it as well. The revised and ‘improved’ plan—which was accepted by all three services and the Chiefs of Staff—called for assaults on eight separate locations around Dieppe, with extensive air bombing and naval fire support.

The German Enigma machine was an electro-mechanical rotor cipher developed between the 1920s and 1940s, initially for commercial use and later adapted for military and government use, by Nazi Germany to send and receive coded information in WWII. British cryptologists decrypted intelligence called ‘Ultra’ which helped turn the tide of the war for the Allies.

In the run-up to the planning of the operation, Mr Churchill was feeling considerable pressure from the Canadian leader, William Mackenzie King, to bring the substantial force of the Canadian 2nd Division soldiers then stationed in Sussex, into action as quickly as possible. Their lack of involvement in the war to that point was creating significant political trouble for King in the Canadian press.

On the morning of the 18th, the Canadian, British and American troops of Operation Jubilee were activated. They had been put through intensive training at a camp on the Isle of Wight and felt they were ready for whatever the operation held for them as they travelled by truck convoy to the warships awaiting them in the English ports of Newhaven, Portsmouth and Shoreham. Their assignments early the next morning involved the seizure and holding of a major French port for a brief period and gathering intelligence while occupying it; and the destruction of enemy coastal defences, port structures and strategically important buildings. If they were successful it was anticipated that Allied morale would be boosted by their efforts in an impressive demonstration of commitment on the part of the United Kingdom towards the opening of a second front in Europe.

But—for many reasons—they were not successful. One important example was that the final plan failed to include the ample aerial bombardment ahead of the main force frontal assault on Dieppe. The rationale for that change of plan was apparently based on British and Canadian concerns about the use of air and naval bombardment and the desire to strictly limit French civilian casualties in the port city. Some of the Canadian commanders believed too that the combination of speed in the assault, the surprise factor, and the shock to the German defenders in seeing tanks actually coming ashore with the Allied infantry would be enough to enable the plan to succeed.

The assault landings were planned for six Dieppe beaches, four of them directly in front of the town, codenamed Yellow, Blue, Red, White, Green, and Orange. The main landings were to be on Red and White beaches and were to be supported by the armour of fifty-eight Churchill tanks of the 14th Army Tank Regiment (The Calgary Regiment), with all of the tanks having been adapted to operate in the shallow water near the beaches. Some 237 ships and landing craft were to be operated by the Royal Navy, but there would be only limited naval gun support (from eight Hunt-class destroyers) due to First Sea Lord Sir Dudley Pound’s reluctance to risk the involvement of capital ships which he believed vulnerable to attack by the German Air Force. In the planning, Mountbatten had asked Pound to provide Jubilee with a battleship for heavy fire support in advance of the landings. But in light of the disastrous loss of the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser HMS Repulse to Japanese air attacks off Malaya in December 1941, Pound felt he could not risk sending any capital ship into an area where the Allies did not have absolute air superiority, even with the RAF providing seventy-four squadrons of aircraft, with sixty-six of them operating fighters.

Another preparatory failing of the Allies was in Intelligence. Early assessment of the landing beaches, their gradients and suitability for tank operations was largely limited to a study of holiday snapshots and very little was known about the German gun positions on and in the cliffs around Dieppe. The planners had no aerial reconnaissance photos of the enemy gun defences. This led to a deadly underestimation of the enemy defences in the area as well as the nature of the terrain. A planning conclusion was that: intelligence reports indicate that Dieppe is not heavily defended and that the beaches in the vicinity are suitable for landing infantry and armoured fighting vehicles … As for German Intelligence, information provided to the Germans in Dieppe by French double-agents indicated the British interest in the area. The Germans there would also detect an increase in British military and naval radio traffic and a concentration of landing craft in various British southern ports. German defences emplaced along the beaches of Dieppe and nearby towns were actually substantial and Dieppe was defended by a garrison of 1,500 German infantry troops. Cave positions within the flanking cliffs around the town housed heavy guns for the protection of Dieppe and its port. German defenders were also positioned in