HAMILTON — On the morning of August 19, 1942, Allied troops took part in Operation Jubilee, an amphibious assault on the French port of Dieppe. Along with 237 ships and landing craft, more than 6,000 soldiers — 4,963 of them Canadian — attacked from the beach, on foot, and in tanks. The goal was to take Dieppe from German forces, hold a perimeter, and destroy the harbour. It did not go as planned.
In nine hours, enemy fighters killed 907 Canadians, wounded 2,460, and captured 1,946.
The Allied force (which totalled about 6,000) included 582 soldiers from the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry — close to 300 were wounded or captured, and 197 died. On Friday, Hamilton’s Dieppe Veterans Memorial Park is holding a memorial service to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the battle.
Historians say the Allies’ strategic failure at Dieppe resulted from a late arrival on the beach, a lack of air support, heavy fire from the water, and an overestimation of their tanks’ manoeuvrability and firepower. Though its place in history is much-debated, Dieppe is often described as a learning experience that taught the Allies how better to stage amphibious assaults, leading to the eventual success of D-Day.
TVO.org speaks with Alex Fitzgerald-Black, the executive director of the Burlington-based Juno Beach Centre Association about Dieppe’s legacy, some of its lesser-known ripple effects, and what his team is doing to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the battle.
Alex Fitzgerald-Black, executive director of the Juno Beach Centre Association. (Courtesy of Alex Fitzgerald-Black)
TVO.org: How would you summarize the Dieppe raid to someone just learning about it?
Alex Fitzgerald-Black: The Dieppe raid happened kind of halfway through the Second World War. It was at a time when the Allies were very much in a precarious state. It wasn’t a certainty that Nazi Germany would be defeated. The raid was put on for a whole bunch of potentially controversial reasons that historians can’t quite agree on. There’s talk about some intelligence-gathering to be able to read German codes to help with the war at sea. There was the war on the Eastern Front between the Soviets and the Nazi forces and trying to give the Red Army a breather. There were the Americans, who had just gotten involved in the war and were pressuring the British and Winston Churchill to get involved on the continent again to help the Soviets. Some also say it was to learn lessons for the eventual actual invasion. I don’t think we definitively know what all the reasons were.
For Canada, our generals were quite interested in getting involved, because other than the incidents in Hong Kong in December 1941, the Canadian Army had not really seen action during the war and hadn’t really seen any action against Germany.
So the Canadian generals who were veterans of the First World War — and very proud of the role that Canada had played — wanted to see us get involved. Unfortunately, the planning for the raid just wasn’t adequate. They relied mostly on surprise rather than on firepower to get the force ashore. And it was a deadly first blush with the German military for the Canadian Army, with about two-thirds of the force of Canadians killed, wounded, or captured in less than 10 hours.
TVO.org: You mentioned something that I thought was particularly interesting when researching this, which is that people in Canada seemed generally excited to do this. The troops were eager to get involved. The public was keen on this. There’s also that infamous comment from Major General J.H. Roberts, who told his troops, "Don’t worry men — it’ll be a piece of cake." Did the disaster temper the public excitement for fighting in Europe?
Fitzgerald-Black: It’s interesting, because it depends on what part of society you’re talking about. There were some people who didn’t necessarily support the war as readily as others. I don’t really want to point out Quebec too much, but the reality is that they were less interested, perhaps (there was a battalion, Les Fusiliers Mont-Royal, recruited and raised in Montreal and French-speaking, that went willingly into this war).
Troops in landing craft preparing to go ashore during Operation Jubilee. (Library and Archives Canada/Department of National Defence fonds/a183767)
I would say the reaction of the Canadian Army overseas was a bit weird, because what happened was that combined-operations headquarters had two PR plans set up: one in case of failure and one in case of success. The one in case of failure was that they would talk up the lessons learned, aspects of the raid and the heroism displayed by the forces involved. What ended up happening was that they originally went with the success PR plan, even though the raid had failed.
Then the casualty lists start coming out. Suddenly, people are seeing these pages-long casualty lists in newspapers, and it was just like, “Oh, my God. What’s happened here?”
Over in the United Kingdom, interestingly enough, the Canadian Army (which had been sitting there training) actually had a bit of a morale boost — perhaps not among the units that were involved, because they would return having lost, in some cases, two-thirds or more of their numbers. But, generally, their morale didn’t really sink. It actually went up because they had finally seen action. They were excited for the opportunity to get back at the Germans again and to succeed in the next operation. So there’s a bit of a nuance there.
Canadian dead on the Dieppe beach among ruined and abandoned tanks, circa 1942. (Library and Archives Canada/William Lyon Mackenzie King fonds/c017291)
TVO.org: You mentioned that idea of lessons learned. I know, for example, that, in high-school history class, I learned it was this disastrous raid that had provided valuable lessons for D-Day at the cost of a great many Canadian lives. You’ve got information on the Juno Beach Centre website about how narratives were different depending on who you asked. Is there anything missing from that dominant narrative of “lessons learned at great cost”?
Fitzgerald-Black: You have to understand there are a couple of reasons for people writing in that way or talking in that way. General Harry Crerar, who was the commander above General Roberts, was commander of the Canadian Army in action from 1944 to 1945. And on the eve of D-Day, he issued a statement to his officers saying that the Second Canadian Infantry Division had paid in blood to get those lessons that proved so successful when we took Juno Beach on D-Day. So he had a stake in the game. He helped push the Dieppe raid forward, and he wanted it to mean something.
And there were careers at stake. Lord Louis Mountbatten, who was the chief of combined operations, had a mandate to learn lessons and to put in amphibious operations like this so that the air force, the navy, and the army could learn to work together. He maintained to the day he died that Dieppe saved lives on D-Day.
Infantrymen of The Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders of Canada going ashore during the raid on Dieppe. (Library and Archives Canada/Department of National Defence fonds/a113245)
There’s evidence that certain tactical lessons were learned because of the Dieppe raid. The issue is that every military operation is always a chance to learn lessons. You don’t necessarily launch a military operation just to do that.
The other thing you have to look at, though, is that there were almost two years between the Dieppe raid and D-Day. There were other amphibious operations that occurred, especially in the Mediterranean theatre, that also gave the opportunity to learn lessons. And they were not as deadly and served other purposes to win the war. It’s not as simple as drawing a straight line between Dieppe and D-Day. The question it comes down to is: Did you need such a cost to learn those lessons when they could have been learned in other ways, perhaps at a smaller cost?
TVO.org: Speaking of cost: more Canadian soldiers were captured in nine hours at Dieppe than in 11 months of fighting in northwestern Europe near the end of the war. Most were held over 30 months. What happened to them?
Fitzgerald-Black: Their ordeal only got started on August 19, 1942. Many of them spent years in prisoner-of-war camps. We did an exhibition at the Juno Beach Centre on Dieppe, and we wanted to ensure that we didn’t just talk about the raid itself. We wanted to also talk about the ripples of the raid, if you will, and what happened to all these people. Those prisoners of war were a huge part of that.
Many of them were wounded and had to be cared for. The Canadians were eventually marched deeper into France and then put on trains and sent to Germany and even as far as modern-day Poland.
Canadian prisoners of war being lead through Dieppe by German soldiers, in August 1942. (Library and Archives Canada/William Lyon Mackenzie King fonds/c014213)
Life in a prison camp wasn’t the easiest thing — that’s for sure. The food the Germans provided was not nearly what the Canadian military would have provided. There was loneliness, having to figure out what to do with yourself. We have a note in our exhibition from one of the senior officers to another senior officer back in Canada: he indicates that the older generation of officers who were there were generally fine, but that the younger ones were kind of going out of their mind with boredom. There just wasn’t enough for them to do.
Many of them would actually make attempts to escape. Some of them succeeded; some were caught and returned. In some cases, they were shot while escaping.
Members of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry photographed at the Hamilton Cenotaph on the Dieppe anniversary in 1946. (Courtesy of Hamilton Public Library’s Local History & Archives)
TVO.org: Why did survivors sue the federal government in the 1970s?
Fitzgerald-Black: What ended up happening was there were not enough veteran benefits or support for those who had endured those prisoner-of-war experiences, according to Dieppe and Hong Kong veterans’ groups. There was a lot of psychological and physiological trauma that had resulted from those experiences, which, in some cases, prevented certain men from reintegrating into society. They sued the government, and they did receive very good support. The Canadian government, in the early 1970s, passed some of the most forward-looking and best support for former prisoners of war in the Western world. It took too long for them to get those benefits. But those who survived and were still around at that time did receive them.
It also took far too long for the Canadian government to recognize the Dieppe raid with a medal. It took until 1991 for a Dieppe bar to be added to the Canadian Volunteer Service Medal. That way, veterans felt they could receive recognition, because if you had been captured at Dieppe, you didn’t really have any campaign medals.
At Dieppe in September 1944, members of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry kneel at the graves of Canadian soldiers killed in the raid. (Library and Archives Canada/Department of National Defence fonds/a176696)
TVO.org: What do you know about the legacy of Dieppe in Hamilton?
Fitzgerald-Black: We did a lot of research to come up with a list of Canadians who were killed during the raid — around 800 names. And then we tried to go through their service files and attestation papers to pull out an address. We then put that in the spreadsheet and tried to compare it with Canada Post to see if that address or a similar address nearby still existed today.
We were able to do that for 400 names; in the Hamilton area, we ended up with 70 names and 70 addresses. We sent postcards out because we wanted to give Canadians the opportunity to learn a little bit about somebody from their community who fought at Dieppe and to give Canadians a sense of just how widespread the impact of that single day in August 1942 was.
A map of Hamilton marking the addresses of some men who fought at Dieppe. (Juno Beach Centre)
TVO.org: What did it do to a city like Hamilton to lose so many men in one day?
Fitzgerald-Black: The Royal Hamilton Light Infantry committed 582 troops to this operation, and 82 per cent of them became casualties [killed, wounded, or missing]. Most of that battalion was raised in Hamilton and the surrounding area. So the impact was huge. I’m sure at the time, just about everybody knew someone who had a family member or a friend who was involved in some way. And there must have been a lot of angst in the first few weeks after the raid, waiting to find out about your loved one, your friend, your family member.
Did he survive? Was he captured? Was he wounded? There must have been a lot of anxiety waiting for that news. Some of the first news to come back was from war correspondents, including Canada’s Ross Munro, who went on a tour to various communities that were involved in the Dieppe raid and gave speeches to try to inform people about what had happened.
People also would have received letters, hopefully, through the Red Cross, if their loved ones had been captured, telling people, “I’m okay, but I’m in a prison camp. Please send me a Red Cross package, so that I can supplement my diet, because the Germans don’t really give us great rations.” Those Red Cross packages and that link to home through the mail was incredibly important for these people.
In this 1943 photo, two women whose husbands were prisoners of war in Germany, contribute to the Red Cross. One of the women’s hubands had at that point never seen their daughter. (Courtesy of Hamilton Public Library’s Local History & Archives)
TVO.org: What do you personally see as the legacy of Dieppe?
Fitzgerald-Black: Wow. That’s a big question. It’s interesting, because for many, many years, Dieppe was actually the kind of battle Canadians thought about when it came to the Second World War. Increasingly, the Canadian role at Juno Beach — and other victories like the Battle of the Scheldt in late 1944 and the liberation of the Netherlands in 1945 — displaced Dieppe from the foremost part of our narrative.
I think the legacy of Dieppe is that there are so many unanswered questions. We’re always going to be looking for the why. There’s a really great quote that we use in our exhibit from Brian Loring Villa [author of Unauthorized Action: Mountbatten and the Dieppe Raid]: “Disasters bring us face to face with the limits of our abilities to offer explanations.” There are certain aspects of this that are not entirely knowable, and that’s part of the compelling story about Dieppe as well. We’re always searching for the reason why.
The legacy will also always be related to the lessons-learned arguments and the success on D-Day. That’s always going to stick in people’s minds because, again, they want it to have meant something. And there may be some truth to it. But I’m a little bit skeptical.
TVO.org: Can you tell me a little bit more about your organization’s 80th-anniversary programming?
Fitzgerald-Black: So I’ve already alluded to the postcards that were sent across the country. Now that we’re eight decades on, there are very few Second World War veterans left, and there are even fewer Dieppe raid veterans left. The ability to share those stories is somewhat diminishing as we lose that generation.
Our association in Canada supports our museum in France on the D-Day landing beaches, and they have a new temporary exhibition that launched back in March of this year called “From Dieppe to Juno: The 80th Anniversary of the Dieppe Raid.”
What we want people to do is to take a moment to reflect and remember those who signed up for a war that was half a world away. In spite of the fact that this particular operation was a failure, their intent in signing up was to help usher in a better world. And, eventually, Canada was part of that, and the war was won. Unfortunately, peace in the world seems to be on a bit of a teetering point more recently, with the war in Ukraine, but certainly the veterans back in the Second World War gave us the chance to build a better world.
This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.