Wed 19th August 1942 - Canadians set up in Dieppe raid?

[TonyGosling]

Interesting take on Operation Jubilee...
D Day was not done to assist the Soviets, but to prevent the Soviets from winning the war on their own

ALSO: The author describes watching the Dieppe raid of 1942 fail as he stands with German officers on the cliffs above the carnage on the beach below and how he gave the Nazis the information on the raid taking place.He claims the establishment in England authorised the contact with Berlin and the book expalins this.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Op-JB-Christopher-Creighton/dp/0671855654

The Allies Second Front in World War II: Why Were Canadian Troops Sacrificed at Dieppe?
August 19, 1942, 70 Years Ago
By Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels
Global Research, June 03, 2014
Global Research 18 August 2012
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-allies-second-front-in-world-war-ii-w hy-were-canadian-troops-sacrificed-at-dieppe/32403
This article was first published by GR in August 2012

The tide of World War II turned in early December 1941, when a counter-offensive of the Red Army in front of Moscow signalled the failure of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg strategy. That setback doomed Nazi Germany to lose a war it had to fight without the benefit of Caucasian oil and other resources it had hoped to gain through a speedy victory over the Soviet Union. The war was far from over, however, and for the time being the Red Army continued to do battle with its back to the wall, so to speak. Material help from the United States and Great Britain was forthcoming, but what the Soviets really needed from their allies was effective military assistance. And so Stalin asked Churchill and Roosevelt to open a second front in Western Europe. An Anglo-American landing in France, Belgium, or Holland would have forced the Germans to withdraw troops from the Eastern Front, and would therefore have afforded the Soviets much-needed relief.

In Great Britain and in the USA, which had entered the war only recently, in December 1941, political and military leaders were divided with respect to the possibilities and the merits of a second front. A number of British and American army commanders – including the American chief of staff, George Marshall, as well as General Eisenhower – wanted to land troops in France as soon as possible. They enjoyed the support of President Roosevelt, at least initially. He had promised Churchill that the United States would give priority to the war against Germany, and would settle accounts with Japan later; this decision became known as the “Germany First” principle. Consequently, Roosevelt was eager to deal with Germany right away, and this task required opening a second front. In May 1942 Roosevelt promised the Soviet minister of foreign affairs, Molotov, that the Americans would open a second front before the end of the year.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, on the other hand, was an outspoken opponent of a second front. He may have feared, as some historians suggest, that a landing in France might lead to a duplication of the murderous warfare associated with the battlefields of northern France in the First World War. But it is more likely that Churchill liked the idea that Hitler and Stalin were administering a major bloodletting to each other on the Eastern Front, and that he believed that London and Washington would benefit from a stalemated war in the East. Since he already had nearly three years of war experience, Churchill had much influence on Roosevelt, a newcomer to the war in Europe. It is therefore understandable that the opinion of the British leader ultimately prevailed, and that plans for opening a second front in 1942 were quietly discarded. In any event, Roosevelt himself discovered that this course of action – or rather, inaction – opened up some attractive prospects.

For example, it allowed him, in spite of the “Germany First” principle, to quietly commit a high proportion of manpower and equipment to the war in the Pacific, which was very much “his” war, and where American interests were more directly at stake than in Europe. He and his military and political advisors also started to realize that defeating Germany would require huge sacrifices, which the American people would not be delighted to bring. Landing in France was tantamount to jumping into the ring for a face-off with a formidable German opponent, and, even if ultimately successful, that would be a bloody and costly affair. Was it not far wiser to stay safely on the sidelines, at least for the time being, and let the Soviets slug it out against the Nazis?

With the Red Army providing the cannon fodder needed to vanquish Germany, the Americans and their British allies would be able to minimize their own losses. Better still, they would be able to build up their strength in order to intervene decisively at the right moment, like a deus ex machina, when the Nazi enemy and the Soviet ally would both be exhausted. With Great Britain at its side, the USA would then be able to play the leading role in the camp of the victors, to act as supreme arbiter in the sharing of the spoils of the supposedly common victory, and to create a “new order” of its liking in Europe. In the spring and summer of 1942, with the Nazis and Soviets locked in a titanic battle, watched from a distance by the “Anglo-Saxon” tertius gaudens, it did indeed look as if such a scenario might come to pass. (Incidentally, the hope for a long, drawn-out conflict between Berlin and Moscow was reflected in numerous American newspaper articles and in the much-publicized remark already uttered by Senator Harry S. Truman on June 24, 1941, only two days after the start of the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union: “If we see that Germany is winning, we should help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we should help Germany, so that as many as possible perish on both sides.”)

Of course, the Americans and the British could not reveal the true reasons why they did not wish to open a second front. Instead, they pretended that their combined forces were not yet strong enough for such an undertaking. It was said then – and it is still claimed now – that in 1942 the British and Americans were not yet ready for a major operation in France. Allegedly, the naval war against the German U-boats first had to be won in order to safeguard the required transatlantic troop transports. However, troops had been successfully ferried from North America to Great Britain for quite some time, and in the fall of that same year the Americans would experience no trouble whatsoever landing a sizable force in distant North Africa, on the same side of the admittedly dangerous Atlantic Ocean. (These landings, known as Operation Torch, involving the occupation of French colonies such as Morocco, did not force the Germans to transfer troops from the Eastern Front, did not provide any relief to the Soviets, and can therefore not be construed as the opening of a second front.)

In reality, it was already possible in the summer of 1942 to land a sizable force in France or elsewhere in Western Europe and open a second front. The British army had recuperated from the troubles of 1940, and large numbers of American and Canadian troops had joined them on the British Isles and were ready for action. Furthermore, it was not a secret that the Germans only had relatively few troops available to defend thousands of kilometres of Atlantic coast, and these troops also happened to be of considerably inferior quality compared to their forces on the Eastern Front. On the Atlantic coast, Hitler had about 60 divisions at his disposal, which were generally deemed to be second-rate, while no less than 260 German divisions did battle in the East. It is a fact, furthermore, that on the French coast in 1942 the German troops were not yet as strongly entrenched as they would be later, namely, at the time of the landings in Normandy in June 1944; the order to build the fortifications of the famous Atlantic Wall was only given by Hitler in August 1942, and the construction would drag on from the fall of 1942 until the spring of 1944.

Stalin, who knew that the German defences in Western Europe were weak, continued to press London and Washington for a landing in France. Churchill also experienced considerable domestic pressure in favour of a second front, for example from members of his own cabinet, such as Richard Stafford Cripps, and particularly from the side of the trade unions, whose members were sympathetic to the plight of the Soviets. Thankfully, relief from this relentless pressure came suddenly to the British Prime Minister in the form of a tragedy that appeared to demonstrate conclusively that the Western Allies were not yet able to open a second front: on August 19, 1942, a contingent of Allied soldiers, sent on a mission from England to the French port of Dieppe, seemingly in an effort to open some sort of “second front,” were tragically routed there by the Germans.

Of the total of 6,086 men who made it ashore, 3,623 – almost 60 percent – were either killed, wounded, or captured. The British Army and Navy suffered approximately 800 casualties, and the RAF lost 106 aircraft. The 50 American Rangers who participated in the raid had 3 casualties. But the bulk of the losses were suffered by Canadian troops, with nearly 5,000 men the bulk of the entire force; no less than 3,367 of them – 68 percent! – became casualties; about 900 were killed, nearly 600 were wounded, and the rest were taken prisoner. Of losses such as these, it is traditionally considered that they were “not in vain”; but unsurprisingly, the media and the public wanted to know what the objectives of this raid had been, and what it had achieved, especially in Canada. However, the political and military authorities only provided unconvincing explanations, though these duly found their way into the history books. For example, the raid was presented by Churchill as a “reconnaissance in force,” as a necessary test of the German coastal defences. But did one really have to sacrifice thousands of men to learn that the Germans were strongly entrenched in a seaport surrounded by high cliffs, in other words, in a natural fortress? In any event, crucial information such as the location of pillboxes, cannon, and machine gun positions could have been gleaned through aerial reconnaissance and through the services of local resistance fighters.

Talking about the Résistance, the raid was also purported to boost the morale of the French partisans and the French population in general; if so, it was unquestionably counterproductive. Indeed, the outcome of the operation, an ignominious withdrawal from a beach littered with abandoned equipment and corpses, and the sight of exhausted and dejected Canadian solders being marched off to a POW camp, was not likely to cheer up the French. If anything, the affair provided grist for the propaganda mill of the Germans, allowing them to ridicule the incompetence of the Allies, boast of their own military prowess, and thus dishearten the French while giving a lift to Germany’s own civilians, who were very much in need of some good news on account of the constant flow of bad tidings from the East.

Last but not least, Operation Jubilee was also claimed to have been an effort to provide some relief to the Soviets. It is obvious, however, that Dieppe was merely a pinprick, unlikely to make any difference whatsoever with respect to the fighting on the Eastern Front. It did not cause the Germans to transfer troops from the East to the West; to the contrary, after Dieppe the Germans could feel reasonably sure that in the near future no second front would be forthcoming, so that they actually felt free to transfer troops from the west to the East, where they were desperately needed. To the Red Army, then, Dieppe brought no relief.

Historians have mostly been happy to regurgitate the official rationalizations of Jubilee, and in some cases they have invented new ones. Just recently, for example, the Dieppe raid was proclaimed to have been planned also, if not primarily, for the purpose of stealing equipment and manuals associated with the Germans’ Enigma code machine, and possibly even all or parts of the machine itself. But would the Germans not immediately have changed their codes if the raid had achieved that objective? (The argument that the plan was to secretly steal the Enigma material, and that that the raiders would have blown up the installations prior to withdrawing from Dieppe, thus destroying evidence of the removal of Enigma equipment, is unconvincing, because it presupposes a high degree of naivety on the part of the Germans.)

After the June 1944 allied landings in Normandy, code-named Operation Overlord, an ostensibly convincing rationale for Operation Jubilee was concocted. The Dieppe Raid was now triumphantly revealed to have been a “general rehearsal” for the successful Normandy landings. Dieppe had supposedly been a test of the German defences in preparation for the big landing yet to come. Lord Mountbatten, the architect of Jubilee, who was – and continues to be – blamed by many for the disaster, thus claimed that “the Battle of Normandy was won on the beaches of Dieppe” and that “for every man who died in Dieppe, at least 10 more must have been spared in Normandy in 1944.” A myth was born: the tragedy of Jubilee had been the sine qua non for the triumph of Overlord.

A very important military lesson had allegedly been learned at Dieppe, namely, that the German coastal defences were particularly strong in and around harbours. It was for this reason, presumably, that the Normandy landings took place on the harbourless stretch of coastline north of Caen, with the Allies bringing along an artificial harbour, code-named Mulberry. But was it not self-evident that the Germans would be more strongly entrenched in seaports than in insignificant little beach resorts? Had it really been necessary to sacrifice thousands of men in order to learn that lesson? And one must also wonder whether information, obtained from a “test” of the German coastal defences in the summer of 1942, was still relevant in 1944, especially since it was mostly in 1943 that the formidable Atlantic Wall fortifications had been built. If Dieppe was a “general rehearsal,” why was the main event not staged until two years later? Is it not absurd to proclaim Jubilee as a rehearsal for an operation that had not even been conceived yet? Finally, the advantage of lessons learned at Dieppe, if any, were almost certainly offset by the fact that at Dieppe the Germans had also learned lessons, and possibly more useful lessons, about how the Allies were likely – and unlikely – to land troops. The idea that the tragedy of Jubilee was a precondition for the triumph of Overlord, then, is merely a useful myth.

Even today, then, the Dieppe tragedy remains shrouded in disinformation and propaganda. But perhaps we can catch a glimpse of the truth about Dieppe by finding inspiration in an old philosophical conundrum: If one seeks to fail, and does, does one fail, or succeed? If a military success was sought at Dieppe, the raid was certainly a failure; but if a military failure was sought, the raid was a success. In the latter case, we should inquire about the real objective of the raid, or, to put it in functionalist terms, about its “latent,” or hidden, rather than its “manifest” function.

There are many indications that military failure was intended. First, the town of Dieppe happened to be, and was known to be, an eminently defensible site, and therefore necessarily one of the strongest German positions on the Atlantic coast of France. Anyone arriving there by ferry from England sees immediately that this port, surrounded by high and steep cliffs, bristling at the time with machine guns and cannon, must have been a deadly trap for the attackers. The Germans could not believe their eyes when they found themselves being attacked there. One of their war correspondents, who witnessed the inevitable slaughter, described the raid as “an operation that violated all the rules of military logic and strategy.” Other factors, such as poor planning, inadequate preparations, inferior equipment (such as tanks that could not negotiate the pebbles of Dieppe’s beach), make it seem more likely that the objective was military failure, rather than success.

On the other hand, the Dieppe operation, including its bloody failure, actually made sense if it was ordered for a “latent” non-military purpose. Military operations are frequently carried out to achieve a political objective, and that seems to have been the case at Dieppe in August 1942. The Western Allies’ political leaders in general, the British political leadership in particular, and Prime Minister Churchill, above all, found themselves under relentless pressure to open a second front, were unwilling to open such a front, but lacked a convincing justification for their inaction. The failure of what could be presented as an attempt to open a second front, or at least as a prelude to the opening of a second front, did provide such a justification. Seen in this light, the Dieppe tragedy was indeed a great success, even a double success. First, the operation could be, and was, presented as a selfless and heroic attempt to assist the Soviets. Second, the failure of the operation seemed to demonstrate only too clearly that the western Allies were indeed not yet ready to open a second front. If Jubilee was intended to silence the voices clamouring for the opening of a second front, it was indeed a great success. The Dieppe disaster silenced the popular demand for a second front, and allowed Churchill and Roosevelt to continue to sit on the fence as the Nazis and the Soviets slaughtered each other in the East.

The political motivation for Dieppe would explain why the lambs that were led to the slaughter were not American or British, but Canadian. Indeed, the Canadians constituted the perfect cannon fodder for this enterprise, because their political and military leaders did not belong to the exclusive club of the British-American top command who planned the operation, and who would obviously have been reluctant to sacrifice their own men. Our hypothesis likewise explains why the British were also involved, but in much smaller numbers, and why the Americans sent only a token force.

After the tragedy of Dieppe, even Stalin stopped begging for a second front. The Soviets would eventually get one, but only much later, in 1944, when Stalin was no longer asking for such a favour. At that point, however, the Americans and the British had urgent reasons of their own for landing on the coast of France. Indeed, after the Battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, when Soviet troops were relentlessly grinding their way towards Berlin, “it became imperative for American and English strategy,” as two American historians (Peter N. Carroll and David W. Noble) have written, “to land troops in France and drive into Germany to keep most of that country out of [Soviet] hands.” When a second front was finally opened in Normandy in June 1944, it was not done to assist the Soviets, but to prevent the Soviets from winning the war on their own.

The Soviets finally got their second front when they no longer wanted or needed it. (This does not mean that did they did not welcome the landings in Normandy, or did not benefit from the belated opening of a second front; after all, the Germans remained an extremely tough opponent until the very end.) As for the Canadians, who had been sacrificed at Dieppe, they also got something, namely, heaps of praise from the men at the top of the military and political hierarchy. Churchill himself, for example, solemnly declared that Jubilee had been “the key to the success of the landings in Normandy” and “a Canadian contribution of the greatest significance to final victory.” The Canadians were showered with prestigious awards, including no less than three Victoria Crosses. The hyperbolic kudos and the unusually high number of VCs probably reflected a desire on the part of the authorities to atone for their decision to send so many men on a suicidal mission in order to achieve highly questionably political goals.

Jacques R. Pauwels is author of The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War, James Lorimer, Toronto, 2002

[TonyGosling]

Stealthily By Night (1995)
by Ian Trenowden

BEST BOOK EVER WORLD WAR 2 SECRET OPERATIONS
By John Ainsworth-Davis on 3 August 2007

Review. Stealthily by Night.

Ian Trenowden is to be heartily congratulated not only on his historical accuracy and his feeling for technical details both attained in many months of scholarly study and brain busting research and interviews with COPP veterans. Usually this can result in very interesting but boring prose - not so with this author. He has brilliantly captured the spirit of these incredibly courageous, dedicated, but fun loving young men and women - he has made himself one of them. His elegant, powerful masterly and deep understanding of a large part of what went on at COPP Depot Sandy Point on Hayling Island and in places far a field, clearly tells the story of these gallant young men who won the secret war of D-Day and were responsible for the safe landing of thousands of soldiers and their equipment.

COPP had two meanings then. `Combined Operations Police Party' & `Combined Operations Pilotage Party'. The first was a cover and the second the real one. But it is also known by a host of cover names and book titles: Party Inhuman; Operation Mermaid; The Secret Invaders; Stealthily by Night; and after the war, Mountbatten's Private Navy. This unit was the forerunner for all Allied invasions, from North Africa, through Sicily, Salerno and Anzio, to D-Day in Normandy. The job was to reconnoitre beaches in enemy occupied territory chosen for possible invasion. To slip in at night, always in twos, one officer, one rating, either by canoes from MTBs [Motor Torpedo Boats], MGBs [Motor Gunboats] or submarines, and later (for D-Day) swimming in Sibi Gorman diving suits from Midget Submarines, X-20 and X-23, HM Submarines Exiphias and Exemplar.

The general area for a proposed landing would be given in great secrecy to Nigel Willmott who would dispatch units ashore on favourable beaches. The men would bring back vital information about beach gradients, types of sand, whether suitable for track or wheeled vehicles, or for neither; about shoals off-shore, and defences like mines and obstacles. And all of this carried out at night right under the noses of the German or Italian sentries, with the ever-present possibility of tripping over a booby trap and being blown to kingdom come. No wonder that it was one of the most highly decorated units in all three services. One thing was for sure; if COPP reported favourably on a beach, it was odds-on invasion would follow.

Only the very cream of the Royal Navy and Combined Operations got into COPP. You couldn't apply to join, it was an invitation-only club. There were experts in every field; they abounded in courage, enterprise, loyalty, discipline, strength, skill, self-control, mutual respect, honour and humility. There was great sense of fun, if not the ridiculous. Bearing all that deeply in mind, I wondered how I had got in, how I was one of them. Even if I was very lucky, I could only lay claim to a couple of those virtues, but I was very proud and honoured to be one of them.

My time in COPP, about a year and a half, was the happiest of my young life; I met and lived with a lot of people, many of whom became close friends. I was from Royal Naval Intelligence where I was never able to relax and be myself and be normal. At COPP it was quite different. I felt free to be my own real self and all the things that go with that. Everyone was a character and a decent guy otherwise he wouldn't have passed Wilmott's high standards and that included the Wrens. Kitten, who married one of the unit's Sub Lieutenants, Robin Harbord; Pam Glencross, who was quite round and infectiously friendly; and finally Prue Wright, tall, blonde and elegant, who married Nigel Willmott and early in 1944, we all trooped up to London as guests at their wedding at the Holy Trinity Brompton (where one day I too would be married) and thence to the Rembrandt Hotel.

And it's all wonderfully portrayed in this stunning book, where to my absolute amazement, I found myself in a photo of the D-Day group opposite page 147 - back row - fifth from left, and by some almighty co-incidence, on the back of that page, a photo of Admiral Mountbatten rests behind mine.

Buy this book before it sells out - it is sans pareil!

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/the-disastrous-dieppe-ra id.html

3350 dead
The Disastrous Dieppe Raid That Cost Thousands of Canadian Casualties
May 29, 2018 Andrew Knighton

Canadian POWs, Dieppe.
Canadian POWs, Dieppe.

On the 19th of August 1942, the Allies launched a raid on the port of Dieppe in Nazi-occupied France. Though the operation was run by the British armed forces, most of the troops involved were Canadian. It would become one of Canada’s most disastrous experiences of the war.


Why Launch the Raid?

The main reason for raiding Dieppe was to test the German defenses. The Germans had started building up strong defensive positions along the Channel coast. Though the Allies weren’t planning on invading France any time soon, they knew that they would have to sooner or later. A raid in force would let them do some damage to the German defenses, understand how those defenses were set up, and it would also provide valuable experience for future planning.

Churchill with Roosevelt and Stalin in Yalta -1945
Churchill with Roosevelt and Stalin in Yalta -1945
There was also a political factor. The British were under pressure from the Americans and Russians to commit to an invasion of occupied Western Europe. Prime Minister Winston Churchill believed that the time for this had not yet come. Avoiding this invasion risked making Britain look less committed to the Allied cause. The Dieppe raid was a way of demonstrating that commitment.

With Canadian forces having recently arrived to serve under the command of the British army, the resources were available for such a raid.

Initial Landings

The Royal Navy during the Dieppe Raid.
The Royal Navy during the Dieppe Raid.
The raid began before dawn, as waves of landing craft headed out from a small fleet off the French coast.

The first waves consisted of British commandos, targeting headlands to the east and west of Dieppe. Their goal was to take out the German batteries of heavy guns covering the main beaches.

One group reached their target on time and took out a battery in a textbook assault. They were in and out without trouble.

Naval craft covering Dieppe Raid.
Naval craft covering Dieppe Raid.
The other group ran into armed enemy trawlers on the way to shore. Their craft scattered. Most never reached the shore. The men who made it didn’t arrive in enough numbers or the necessary equipment to take out their target. They harassed the German battery, reducing its ability to intervene in the main landings, but did little lasting damage.

Meanwhile, in the pre-dawn gloom, the Canadians were heading in.

The Main Assault

The Canadian troops landed on a series of beaches at Dieppe and to either side. The infantry went in first, with tanks joining them in a later wave.



Dieppe’s chert beach and cliff immediately following the raid on 19 August 1942. By Bundesarchiv – CC BY-SA 3.0 de
Dieppe’s chert beach and cliff immediately following the raid on 19 August 1942. By Bundesarchiv – CC BY-SA 3.0 de
From the moment they landed, the Canadians found themselves in trouble. The element of surprise that was supposed to keep them safe was gone. The initial landings had told the Germans that something was coming and now they were prepared.

The Germans were well equipped to deal with an infantry landing. Barbed wire along the top of the seawall made it difficult for the Canadians to get off the beach. Accurate bursts from heavy-firing German machine-guns cut them down as they emerged from their landing craft. The batteries overlooking the beaches, most of which remained intact throughout the day, pounded both the men on the beaches and the boats bringing in reinforcements.

British landing attempt (“Operation Jubilee”), German soldiers with machine guns. By Bundesarchiv – CC BY-SA 3.0 de
British landing attempt (“Operation Jubilee”), German soldiers with machine guns. By Bundesarchiv – CC BY-SA 3.0 de
The nature of the beaches made things even tougher. British intelligence gathering had failed to identify that these were steep beaches made of large diameter shingle, making them difficult to ascend.

In most places, the men became trapped. They dug in in the shingle or took shelter beneath the sea wall. Those who couldn’t reach shelter were easy targets for the Germans.

Churchill VI Tank
Churchill VI Tank
The tanks didn’t fare any better. The enemy batteries destroyed many of them before they reached shore. Only 28 managed to land and few of those that made it were able to get off the beaches. Six got into Dieppe, and of these, only one made it back to the beach after doing what damage it could.

There were several incidents of courage and daring in which small bands of infantry made it through the wire and harassed the Germans, but these were nowhere near what the planners had envisaged.

The only substantial advances were made west of Dieppe, where the South Saskatchewan Regiment and the Queens’ Own Camerons landed at Pourville. These regiments fought their way inland, capturing an important bridge. Before they could reach their objectives, they saw that the rest of the raid had failed and that if they kept advancing they would have no way out. They therefore retreated to the coast ready for evacuation.

In the Air

Operation JUBILEE, the Combined Forces raid on Dieppe.
Operation JUBILEE, the Combined Forces raid on Dieppe.
In the skies above Dieppe, the Royal Air Force (RAF) was pursuing a different objective. Its pilots had come out to support the landings, but also to try and tear a chunk out of the Luftwaffe. It was hoped that the German air force would be unable to resist the target offered by the raiding fleet, giving British fighters a chance to destroy large numbers of enemy planes.

The outcome of this element of the plan has been disputed, in part because the RAF tended to over-estimate its successes. Though there was a significant aerial battle, it didn’t have a lasting impact on either side.

Withdrawal

By 0900, the Allied commanders had thrown in the last of their reserves without success. It was clear that the raid was doomed. At 1022 they began a rescue mission, abandoning their complicated withdrawal plan and hastily forming a new one to save as many men as possible.

The Dieppe Raid, 19 August 1942 Commandos returning to Newhaven in their landing craft .
The Dieppe Raid, 19 August 1942 Commandos returning to Newhaven in their landing craft .
For the next three hours, the survivors clung to the coast while all available boats made dangerous rescue journeys back and forth under German fire. But for many, there would be no escape.

In total, the Allies lost 494 officers and 3,890 men, either killed, injured, or captured. Three-quarters of these casualties were Canadians from the main landing force. More Canadians were captured that day than in the whole campaign from D-Day to the fall of Germany.

The raid had been a disaster from the start. Almost none of the targets were destroyed, and the loss of men was far higher than expected. Valuable lessons were learned, lessons which saved many lives on D-Day. But they came at a heavy cost.

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