Allan Mallinson

Can the fiasco of the Dieppe Raid really be excused?

Patrick Bishop is sceptical about Mountbatten’s claim that without the painful lesson of Operation Jubilee, D-Day might have failed

Wounded Canadian soldiers photographed by a German military photographer after their capture at Dieppe in 1942. [Getty Images]

In my mother’s final days we had a long conversation about the second world war. I asked if she’d ever thought we might lose. ‘No,’ she snapped. ‘I knew we were too clever for them.’

The chief of the imperial general staff, Sir Alan Brooke, had been less sanguine. On 31 March 1942 he confided to his diary: ‘During the last fortnight I have had, for the first time since the war started, a growing conviction that we are going to lose.’ His concern, besides the army not fighting very well — witness Hong Kong and Singapore — was that Britain’s new allies, the Soviet Union and the United States, were for different reasons clamouring for a second front. The Russians believed the war would be decided that year, and wanted the western Allies to ease pressure on the Red Army. The Americans hoped to end the war in Europe as fast as possible by the direct route to Berlin, with no stratagems of evasion in the Mediterranean, especially not ones tied to British imperial interests.

‘This universal cry to start a western front is going to be hard to compete with,’ wrote Brooke. ‘And yet what can we do with some ten divisions against the German masses?’ He was referring to the landing being planned in the Pas de Calais — with perhaps the least appropriate code name in the whole war, ‘Sledgehammer’ — to draw off German troops and aircraft from the eastern front.

The idea of diversionary landings wasn’t new. Pitt the Elder had been inordinately fond of them in the mid-18th century, rather than committing to action in decisive strength. But they could never divert enough French troops to make the inevitable losses worthwhile. Opponents at the time described Pitt’s tip-and-run tactics as ‘breaking windows with guineas’.

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