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Originally posted by Snowtractor
...didn't the admiralty and air marshall also have some responsibility? IE the refusal to send a coule of battleships for shore bombardment /support and the same for heavy bombers, the lack there of. Though, Fighter support was fierce as I recall were they withdrawn after losses mounted?
Sean
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Sean, the two most significant elements of the Dieppe raid are the following, both falling under Mountbatten's purvue as the chief of Combined Operations.
The original operation was designated RUTTER and scheduled for early July. The plan incorporated heavy air and sea bombardment in support, this being deemed critical to success. The troops trained for it, were briefed for it, and were actually aboard ship when the raid was cancelled due to foul weather in the Channel. The soldiers were then released to their normal encampments/duties, RUTTER forgotten as just one more op the staff wallahs couldn't make happen.
Incredibly, within a month, the original plan was reconstituted almost verbatim as JUBILEE. Despite security concerns, as the troops had had a month to talk about it freely. Interestingly, although some postwar research has unearthed unconfirmed reports that the Germans were "expecting us", that has never been established beyond the shadow of a doubt, although it's not beyond one's imagination to suggest it true as the original mantle of secrecy had been wiped away.
Regardless, JUBILEE was RUTTER, with very little modification, and therein lies the second point: the few mods to the original plan were those you mentioned. First, the First Sea Lord declined to send his big ships into the Channel, for two reasons. First, their vulnerability in limited sea-space, and second, removing their potential as 'Tirpitz-stoppers' should that great ship have sallied forth from her Norwegian fjord. What was made available to the raid was a group of elderly destroyers instead.
The raid as designed should have been cancelled there and then, but no.
Compounding that error in judgement was the decision to withdraw the heavy bombers tasked with softening up the port prior to landing. The rationale went that as this was just a raid, not an invasion, they wished to minimize French civilian damage and casualties.
The raid DEFINITELY should have been cancelled at that point, regardless of the prior security and sea support issues. But no. The troops would go into a strongly defended port, without adequate support, and with a good chance that security had ben compromised.
Some say it was Churchill himself who insisted on JUBILEE, as a way of showing the Russians we were actually doing something to harass the Germans in the west. Others believe, as I do, that Mountbatten simply wanted to make a name for himself, to impress the higher-ups that he was accomplishing great things in Combined Ops.
And of course, we all know what happened. It was a fiasco which virtually destroyed a well-trained Canadian infantry division.
To be fair to all, the Canucks have to take a proportion of the blame themselves. McNaughton approved the operation in principle (the original) as it was seen necessary to blood the Canadians who for the most part had been training in England for more than two years already. General Crerar, however, had the final right of approval, and it is suggested that he gave such under pressure from MacKenzie King; I suggest he was, like Mountbatten, playing a political game instead, gambling that casualties would be minimized and the operation termed a success (kind of like buying lottery tickets). In his memoirs, Simonds roundly criticized Crerar for this faulty judgement, and Montgomery himself, while initially in favour of RUTTER as designed, quickly distanced himself as well.
The operation's overall commander, Roberts, KNEW this would not work, but to decline to lead his troops accordingly would simply have resulted in his dismissal; he elected to stay with his men as he knew them and felt he was in the best position to support them himself. At the end of the debacle, he was made the scapegoat by Crerar, Mountbatten & co. That wasn't fair, and I'm sure he would have preferred to die on the beaches with his men.
Finally, the fighter battle over Dieppe was one of the biggest in the entire war, but with the RAF coming out a poor second. Fighter support was NOT pulled, though, and the pilots preformed with great courage; it's just that they were of little help to the poor pongos being slaughtered on the beaches.
It has often been said that what the Allies learned from Dieppe was what guaranteed success at Normandy almost two years later. Nonsense. That was a statement designed to deflect responsibility. The original plan
concept, even before RUTTER, acknowledged that a heavily defended port was virtually impregnable to frontal assault...