The Dieppe Raid of Aug. 19, 1942 has always been one of Canada’s darkest days and it’s greatest mystery, and the truth, finally revealed after 70 years, is “a story that rivaled a Tom Clancy or a James Bond thriller – although this saga was all too true,” according to historian and author David O’Keefe.
For seven decades, Canadians – and the rest of the world for that matter – believed the raid, described as a “reconnaisance in force,” had been designed to test Nazi defenses, draw German troops and resources from the Eastern Front, test new equipment and theories and even placate Stalin to show that 1942 was not the time for a second front.
None of those reasons resonated and many questions always remained as many people attempted to rationalize, explain or place appropriate blame as to why 907 Canadians died on that August day.
O’Keefe, author of One Day in August: The Untold Story Behind Canada’s Tragedy at Dieppe, discovered the truth after going through 150,000 pages of declassified documents between 1995 and 2013. But the story that began to form as he painstakingly went through those documents was so fantastic he initially sought to debunk it.
The more he dug through the documents, however, the more he realized he had to revise his approach and that, in fact, Canadians killed during the failed raid died while participating in a highly secretive mission, known as a “pinch raid.” The 5,000 Canadians were, in effect, to create a significant distraction necessary to allow a shadowy group of commandos known as Intelligence Assault Unit or 30 Assault Unit to pinch vital intelligence material, including a four-rotor Engima machine used by the Germans to encrypt messages.
It was a “sledgehammer to crack a nut,” according to O’Keefe, but raid planners knew they had to over-compensate to ensure the Germans did not realize what had occurred.
Without the four-rotor Enigma machine and its corresponding codebooks, England and her allies were in grave danger. British naval intelligence had cracked the three-rotor codes early in the war and had been using the information to their advantage, including directing trans-Atlantic convoys away from German submarines. But it was imperative the Germans did not know the British had cracked their codes. The German navy, or Kriegsmarine, then introduced the four-rotor machine, plunging British intelligence into darkness.
It was, as a result, essential to snatch a four-rotor Enigma machine and Dieppe became the target.
O’Keefe began down his path in 1995 when he happened across a declassified intelligence report with an attention-grabbing line: “As regards captures, the party concerned at Dieppe did not reach their objective.”
It was information he immediately keyed onto. What was to be captured? What party? And just what was their objective?
“Here you have a document about a mysterious unit that was raised to pinch materials and created one of the greatest secrets of the Second World War and was directly connected to our darkest day and our greatest national mystery and of course, value added, it was raised by Ian Fleming,” O’Keefe said, referring to the creator of James Bond.
When the British Government Communications Headquarters released policy papers, O’Keefe learned a policy had been put into effect to create the specific units (the IAU commandos) and methods specifically needed to pinch intelligence material at Dieppe.
“That’s when it started to fall into place. This was not a question of an ad hoc unit thrown into place at the end. It was carefully thought out and this is indeed what they said, they were planning to pinch under the cover of a larger operation,” O’Keefe said.
O’Keefe begins his book with an examination of Ultra: the organization responsible for interception and decoding enemy transmissions (Ultra Secret was the British designation for top secret). As part of that, he introduces the major players in Ultra, including Fleming, and then moves on to the importance of the pinch raids and how they started quite small and grew in scale and scope and why the British were so desperate to gain the German’s codebooks and Enigma machines.
These remarkable machines were invented before the war and used in the financial sector to transmit sensitive information. The German army, navy and air force then began using Enigma machines to send encrypted and secure transmissions.
For anyone familiar with the raid, O’Keefe’s book offers one “a-ha!” moment after another and by the end of the book, for the first time in 70 years, Dieppe makes sense. The feeling is much like being let in on a secret when you’re a child. There’s a rush of excitement and the satisfaction that you’re in the know.
But given the complexity, the intrigue and how the raid has affected Canadians, it’s a book worth reading twice. Once is not nearly enough to catch all of the intricacies of this larger-than-life story that answers the single-most important question of why Canadians were at Dieppe: To capture a four-rotor Engima machine.
If the raid had succeeded, Ultra would have been able to end the intelligence blackout and stop the severe number of merchant ships in the Atlantic convoys being sunk by German U-boats.
O’Keefe writes that the situation in the first two months of 1942 were described as “dangerous” and “severe” and that the losses in the spring brought “near panic,” leaving England in the precarious position of having less material for the war effort than what was needed.
By the summer and fall of 1942, the tonnage of ships sunk had become a “full blown crisis” with the peak months being March and April with a total of nearly 1.5 million tons of shipping lost. The monthly average from summer through winter was 685,000 tons sunk.
It was this backdrop that hung behind the raiders, which included 1,000 British troops and 50 U.S. Rangers, as they steamed towards Dieppe early in the morning of Aug. 19, 1942.
O’Keefe said he has found that his discovery is “transforming Dieppe and it’s transforming our understanding and memory of Dieppe, which is really fascinating. To be honest, as a historian I never expected that my work and my research would ever have that type of impact.”
With the true intent of the Dieppe raid now known, O’Keefe was able to deconstruct the myths, excuses and controversy that developed around the failed raid. O’Keefe replaces all of that with a highly detailed and well laid out argument backed by impeccable research.
Lessons were learned, however, but not the ones that over the years veterans, historians, politicians and citizens have argued over, including that lessons learned at Dieppe informed the landing at Normandy on D-Day in 1944.
O’Keefe said that is over-attributing the result of the raid.
“A one-day raid wasn’t going to accomplish that. They knew that. A one-day raid will not do it,” he said, adding a larger landing and establishing a bridgehead on the continent would have been required.
“The fascinating part is all the other excuses given. When I took at look at them there were other operations in the planning or about to be launched that would have accomplished those objectives or imperatives,” he said.
“Dieppe has never been explained, so it just opens up a Pandora’s box for the imagination. People start attributing anything and everything they can find without actually going back and looking at the hard evidence. And that is one of the big problems of the Dieppe historiography for many years,” he said.
Two months after Dieppe, the British did capture a four-rotor Engima machine from a floundering German U-boat allowing Ultra to end the intelligence blackout.
But one question certainly remains: if the raid had succeeded, would the cost have been worth the price?
That is one question O’Keefe is unable to answer, but despite that, his research has yielded the most important work on the raid since it occurred in 1942.
