One Day in August Read online

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  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2013 David O’Keefe

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2013 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

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  Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  The Photo Credits constitute a continuation of the copyright page.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  O’Keefe, David R., 1967–, author

  One day in August : the untold story behind Canada’s tragedy in Dieppe / David O’Keefe.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-345-80769-4

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-345-80771-7

  1. Dieppe Raid, 1942. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Cryptography. 3. World War, 1939–1945—Military intelligence. 4. Canada. Canadian Army—History—World War, 1939–1945. I. Title.

  D756.5.D5O54 2013 940.54’21425 C2013-901551-5

  Maps and cover design by Andrew Roberts

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  “For those who never knew”

  Private Ron Beal, photographed in 2012 holding a picture of himself as a young soldier before embarking for Dieppe.

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  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Note on Sources

  Prologue

  ONE

  The Canadian Albatross

  TWO

  A Very Special Bond

  THREE

  A Ruthless Start

  FOUR

  Annus Mirabilis

  FIVE

  Swimming with Sharks

  SIX

  Fade to Black

  SEVEN

  Kick at the Darkness

  EIGHT

  “Authorized Looters”

  NINE

  Darkness to Daylight

  TEN

  All the King’s Men

  ELEVEN

  Dieppe by Design

  TWELVE

  All Essential Features

  THIRTEEN

  The Crossing

  FOURTEEN

  All In on the Main Beach

  Epilogue

  Abbreviations

  Glossary

  Endnotes

  Acknowledgements

  Photo Credits

  Permissions

  About the Author

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  NOTE ON SOURCES

  AN ODE TO C.P. STACEY

  “No respectable historian would dream of writing a Naval history of the late war unless he was given access to our sources of information,” mused John Godfrey at the end of the Second World War. His successor as Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear Admiral Edmund Rushbrooke, elaborated on the system adopted in the United Kingdom. “The Head of the Historical Section (Royal Navy) had been indoctrinated into Special Intelligence,” he wrote, and “it may be found necessary to indoctrinate others of the Historical Staff, such as the writer of any history of the U-Boat Campaign which was influenced in a dominating way by Special Intelligence.”

  The British realized that skilled historians would question the multitude of inconsistencies, open-ended questions and all-encompassing excuses for various events—including Dieppe. Fearing that their curiosity would lead to unintended revelation of the source—one that continued to be used in the Cold War—both the British and the Americans adopted a hybrid approach: historians would be indoctrinated into Ultra, but the use of the material would be severely restricted. Official army, navy and air force historians were then instructed to use this knowledge to sidestep any historically dangerous areas—a process similar to the way the Admiralty used Ultra to reroute convoys from the clutches of U-boat wolf packs. This privilege was not made available to the official historians in Canada, although Canadians took part in Ultra-inspired missions, worked at Bletchley Park, and were indoctrinated in and used the material in the field.

  When the brilliant patriarch of Canadian military history, Colonel Charles P. Stacey, set his official historical team to work on Dieppe in the days following the raid, he was fighting a historical battle with one hand tied behind his back. The story line fed to the war correspondents to protect the true intent of the raid spilled over into the historical realm, creating an impenetrable fog. Forced to rely on the personal testimonies of men sworn to secrecy to lay the cornerstone for our understanding of the raid—sanitized after-action reports, official communiqués, war diaries and snippets of message logs—Stacey lacked the essential ingredients and contextual knowledge to achieve a firm understanding of Dieppe. But Stacey was no fool: as the war went on, he realized that the Allies did have something up their sleeve, but he had no clue at that time about the nature of Ultra, how pervasive it was, how it was used, or the sources and methods used to maintain the flow. Regardless, he was able to cobble together a truly accurate “human” account of the battle—one that will never fade from history.

  After the revelation of Ultra in the late 1970s, the initial expectation that it would rewrite the history of the Second World War soon faded as the British government released only a tiny portion of the perhaps billions of pages of material created under that security stamp during and after the war. On the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end, in 1995, both the British and the American governments embarked on a protracted release of these documents, which continues to this day. Although I began my research that same year, the story has emerged slowly over the past two decades. I had no single “eureka” moment that suddenly allowed me to fit all the pieces of the puzzle into place. Rather, it was the painstaking assembly of minuscule pieces of evidence—balanced, sorted and weighed against other evidence—that has finally allowed me to tell the “untold” story of Dieppe. New technologies such as the Internet, the microchip and digitization—ones that would have delighted Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, Frank Birch and Ian Fleming—have allowed me to consult more than 150,000 pages of documents from archives on two continents and over 50,000 pages of published primary and secondary source material for this book.

  The methodology I employ is straightforward, based in large part on the sage advice of a multitude of mentors in the historical realm and, perhaps rather ironically, on the musings of Colonel Peter Wright, the man who served as General Ham Roberts’s intelligence officer aboard the Calpe. After the Dieppe fiasco, Wright went on to become the highly respected and Ultra-indoctrinated intelligence master at General Harry Crerar’s First Canadian Army throughout the battles in Normandy and northwest Europe. On his return from the war, he resumed his legal practice and was eventually appointed a judge on the Ontario High Court of Justice. He believed that the primary job of the intelligence officer is first to assess what the enemy is doing and then what he should be doing—sage advice I adopted as my general approach to historical inquiry. In other words, the evidence must drive the story. In this case, because there is much “white noise” surrounding the Dieppe saga, I placed greater weight on the documents created before or during the raid than on those written later. Because the Dieppe scholarship is vast, much of this material had to be left on the “cutting-room floor,” though I used it during my research phase to eliminate possibilities, myths and conjecture, and to balance and shape my analysis. A full bibliography is available on m
y publisher’s website for further consultation: see http://www.randomhouse.ca/onedayinaugust.

  On the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, one historical commentator proclaimed that nothing more could be said about this war and that it was time to move on to the history of the Cold War. The remarkable revelations in this account are but one example of the short-sighted nature of that comment. As long-classified materials on Ultra and on other conflicts make their way into open archives around the world, we realize that the book never closes on history and that only now can the real history of the Second World War begin to be written.

  Although this new interpretation answers many of the old questions about Operation Jubilee, it also raises new ones that emerge from our unfolding understanding. Essentially, it provides a firm foundation from which to build a more complete picture of the Dieppe Raid and the reasons behind it. In the coming years, more information will undoubtedly grace the vast wealth already available. The various agencies responsible for SIGINT material—the Government Communications Headquarters in England, the National Security Agency in the United States and, to a lesser extent, the Communications Security Establishment Canada—along with the respective arms of the ministries or departments of defence—continue to release documents into the public domain year after year.

  Like the generations of skilled historians who passed the torch to me many years ago, I turn this interpretation of Dieppe over to a new generation of young scholars. I hope they will be as inspired as I have been to dive into the realm of historical research—regardless of the subject or the challenge.

  PROLOGUE

  August 19, 1942, 0347 hours, English Channel off Dieppe, Normandy, France

  Moving swiftly across the slick deck of the drab grey British destroyer HMS Fernie and up onto the bridge, a peacoat-clad Royal Naval Voluntary Reserve officer from Special Branch discarded his hand-rolled cigarette and pressed his binoculars to his eyes, adjusting the focus wheel to account for the darkness. In the distance, a series of fire-red mushroom-shaped explosions merged with the silver glow of bursting star shells and a carnival of red, orange and green tracer fire that darted back and forth just above the ink-black waterline. Then came the echo of staccato machine-gun and high-powered cannon fire, punctuated at irregular intervals by the whiplash crack of larger-calibre naval gunfire.

  Straining to discern friend from foe, Commander Ian Fleming stood among a group of Allied journalists, broadcasters and photographers and American military observers expecting to witness the successful execution of the largest amphibious raid of the war to date, known as Operation Jubilee. But it was now clear to all aboard that something had gone wrong, and that the carefully synchronized raid, planned by Lord Louis Mountbatten’s Combined Operations Headquarters and involving a largely Canadian force, had begun sixty-three minutes prematurely.

  Ian Fleming—who a decade later would write Casino Royale and launch his immortal James Bond dynasty—was listed innocuously on the ship’s manifest that day as a “guest.” For years, historians and biographers have asserted that the normally desk-bound member of the British Naval Intelligence Division played no role other than that of observer, and that Fleming’s natural desire for action and adventure, fused with an innate talent for bureaucratic machination, had landed him a prize seat on the Fernie, the backup command ship.

  But this “guest” was in fact present in an official capacity—to oversee a critical intelligence portfolio, one of many he handled as personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear Admiral John Godfrey. He was on board to witness the launch of a highly specialized commando unit that had been created specifically to carry out skilled and dangerous operations deemed of the greatest urgency and importance to the war effort. Fleming’s crack commando unit was set to make its debut under cover of this landmark raid on the coast of German-occupied France.

  With the dawn, however, came the sober realization that the raid had gone off the rails in truly epic fashion. As the sky lightened, Fleming could see heavy German fire coming from the hotels that lined the beachfront and ribbons of flame flaring out from the towering clifftops. Below, the main beach—which had hosted generations of English vacationers, including Fleming himself, who had won and lost at the tables of its seaside casino before the war—had become a killing field for the assaulting troops. Catching quick glimpses of the scene through the swirling smokescreen, he could make out small black, motionless dots on the rocky beach where countless Canadian soldiers now lay dead and wounded, and scores of tanks and landing craft sitting abandoned or burning alongside them. Above the town hung an ominous black, acrid cloud, periodically pierced by German and British fighters swooping down to search out quarry, while rapid-firing anti-aircraft guns from both sides swept the sky with bright yellow and orange tracer fire. The roar of aircraft engines, the sounds of machine-gun and cannon fire, and the explosion of artillery and mortar shells shook the air, as British destroyers attempted to assist the men pinned down on the beach, and now holding on for dear life.

  Just seven hundred yards offshore, Fleming watched helplessly as his fledgling commando unit headed through the heavy smokescreen in their landing craft towards the deadly maelstrom. Tragically, what was about to occur was not simply the final act in the darkest day in Canadian military history but the beginning of one of the most controversial episodes of the entire Second World War. This one day in August—August 19, 1942—would haunt the survivors and leave the country struggling to understand why its young men had been sent to such a slaughter on Dieppe’s beaches.

  But what was known only to the young Commander Ian Fleming and a few others was that the raid on this seemingly unimportant French port had at its heart a potentially war-changing mission—one whose extreme secrecy and security ensured that its purpose would remain among the great mysteries of the Second World War. Fleming’s presence on board the Fernie connected the deadly Dieppe Raid with the top-secret British intelligence-gathering operation dubbed “Ultra,” one of the most closely guarded secrets of wartime Britain. And understanding exactly why Ian Fleming was on board the Fernie that day was a key that helped me finally to unravel the mystery behind the raid.

  Over almost two decades I combed through nearly 150,000 pages of historical documents and interviewed participants in the raid (as well as filming them for the documentary Dieppe Uncovered, aired simultaneously in England and Canada on August 19, 2012). The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are at last largely in place.

  Locked away until now in dusty archives, the story unfolded and took shape over time as intelligence agencies and archive facilities in Britain, the United States and Canada released long-classified documents withheld for seven decades from public view. Slowly, each piece was added to the puzzle until, at the end of my journey, I found a story that rivalled a Tom Clancy or a James Bond thriller—although this saga was all too true. And this stunning discovery, kept under wraps until now, necessitates a reconsideration of this phase of the Second World War and a reassessment of the painful legacy of Dieppe.

  As Ron Beal, a Dieppe veteran, said to me after I laid out the story for him: “Now I can die in peace. Now I know what my friends died for …”

  ONE

  THE CANADIAN ALBATROSS

  This was too big for a raid and too small for invasion: What were you trying to do?

  —GERMAN INTERROGATOR TO MAJOR BRIAN MCCOOL, AUGUST 1942

  During his intensive interrogation in the days following his capture, the exhausted prisoner, Major Brian McCool, the Principal Military Landing Officer for the Dieppe Raid, was subjected repeatedly to one burning question from his German interrogator: “What were you trying to do?” Still at a loss, the bewildered McCool lifted his head and replied, “If you could tell me … I would be very grateful.”

  For nearly three-quarters of a century, that same query has remained unanswered despite numerous attempts by historians, journalists and politicians to explain the reasons behind the deadl
iest amphibious raid in history. The veterans of that fateful day have themselves never understood the abject failure they experienced and the staggering loss of life their comrades suffered on the blood-soaked beaches of Dieppe. Over the decades since, a pitiful legacy of sorrow, bitterness and recrimination has developed to frame the collective Canadian memory of an operation seemingly devoid of tangible purpose and intent.

  The cost to Canada of Operation Jubilee, as the Allies’ raid on Dieppe on August 19, 1942, was code-named, was appalling: 907 men killed—roughly one man every thirty-five seconds during the nine-hour ordeal—a rate rivalled only by the charnel-house battles on the Western Front in the First World War. To place that number in current perspective, Canadian losses from over a decade of combat in the Afghan war would fill one row in the Dieppe military cemetery, where twenty rows of dead, all lost in just one morning, now lie. Adding to that sobering toll, a further 2,460 Canadian names filled the columns of the wounded, prisoners of war and missing in the formal casualty returns. By nightfall, a total of 3,367 men—68 percent of all the Canadian young men (mostly in their teens and early twenties) who made the one-day Channel crossing to France—had become official casualties in some form. Units such as the Royal Regiment of Canada from Toronto, which suffered 97 percent casualties in less than four hours of fighting on Blue Beach at Puys, virtually “ceased to exist.”1 To varying degrees, the same was true of the other units of the raiding force: bodies of men from army regiments in Quebec, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba fell in piles alongside men from the east and west coasts who toiled in the signals, medical, provost, intelligence or service corps.

  The catastrophe would strike a deep chord throughout Canada, seared into the country’s psyche as both our greatest historical mystery and our supreme national tragedy. For decades, Dieppe has been Canada’s albatross.