Category: History
The Battle of Borodino and the Fires of Moscow
When the French Army crossed the Nieman River and invaded Russia in June 1812, Emperor Napoleon I had 300,000 troops under his direct command. 3 months and 600 miles later, he had half that due to casualties, desertion, starvation, Cossack raids, and detachments to guard his overextended supply lines. General Kutuzov, the Russian commander opposite Napoleon used scorched earth tactics as he retreated and wouldn’t allow his army to be caught and destroyed by Napoleon’s superior numbers and skill. But after judging Napoleon’s strength in late summer 1812, Kutuzov decided it was time to make a stand with his 120,000 men. On 9 September, the Russians would make build a defensive position just outside the small village of Borodino: a bare 70 miles from Moscow. Napoleon was ecstatic that he could finally destroy the Russian Army. He launched his combined French, Polish, Italian and German Army in a series of bloody frontal assaults against the Russian redoubts. It was the largest battle of the Napoleonic era and by the end of the day, the bloodiest. The French had 35,000 casualties and the Russians had 45,000 men killed, wounded and missing but the Kutuzov managed to escape with the remains of his army when Napoleon wouldn’t commit his Imperial Guard to finish the job. Napoleon won the battle, but his hesitance would eventually cost him his empire.
On 14 September 1812, Emperor Napoleon I and his La Grande Armee triumphantly marched into Moscow… only to find it abandoned and deserted. The vast majority of the population took all of the food in the city and evacuated ahead of the French. Napoleon fully expected Tsar Alexander to surrender once Moscow was occupied but now he couldn’t find anyone to entreaty with. Two days later, on the night of 16 Sep, Russian patriots snuck in and set the city ablaze. For the next several days the French attempted to put out the fires but eventually ¾ of Moscow would be a smoldering ruin. Napoleon was now not only short of food for his army but also short of shelter for the coming Russian winter. He would wait around for the Tsar’s surrender for a month before he accepted that his troops must retreat or starve and freeze to death. On 19 October 1812, Napoleon and his Grande Armee began the long retreat back to Poland and East Prussia. Over the next several months, the Russian winter, Cossack raids, peasant guerrillas, and the scorched earth would contribute to Napoleon’s defeat in the campaign, but it was Kutuzov’s Army that escaped Borodino that would eventually throw Napoleon out of Russia and drive him back to Paris. Of the 690,000 troops Napoleon started the invasion of Russia with, only 63,000 would re-cross the Nieman River.
Blood and Iron
In the mid nineteenth century, Germany was still fractured in a loose confederation of almost 40 states, with Bavaria, Austria, and Prussia vying for leadership. In the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848 and 1849, Germany attempted to unite under Austria. However, “The Greater or Lesser Germany Question”, that is whether Austria would enter the union with Hungary and its empire, was very divisive. Most German states wanted a union with Austria, but not its multicultural empire in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. And Austria refused anything less than complete integration. Neither side could come to a compromise and the Frankfurt Parliament dissolved.
A decade later, Otto von Bismarck determined that the only way Germany would unite was by force of arms. However, in the summer of 1862, the Prussian parliament balked at Kaiser Wilhelm’s request for a significant spending increase for the Prussian Army. On 20 September, 1862, Bismarck, the newly appointed Prussian chancellor, spoke before the parliament. He concluded with,
“Germany is not looking to Prussia’s liberalism, but to its power; Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden may indulge liberalism, and for that reason no one will assign them Prussia’s role; Prussia has to coalesce and concentrate its power for the opportune moment, which has already been missed several times; Prussia’s borders according to the Vienna Treaties [of 1814-15] are not favorable for a healthy, vital state; it is not by speeches and majority resolutions that the great questions of the time are decided – that was the big mistake of 1848 and 1849 – but by iron and blood.”
The parliament passed the Kaiser’s budget, and over the next eight years, Bismarck, now known as “The Iron Chancellor”, united Germany.
The Battle for Edson’s Ridge
Throughout early September, 1942, the Japanese 17th Army at Rabaul ferried thousands of troops down New Georgia Sound, better known as “The Slot”, to Guadalcanal in a nightly ritual the Marines referred to as “The Tokyo Express”. Because of the aircraft on Henderson Field and the carriers USS Hornet and Wasp, the Tokyo Express would speed down the Slot at night, unload troops and cargo on Guadalcanal’s north tip, shell Henderson Field, and depart before they could be sunk by Allied aircraft in the morning.
By the second week of September, the Japanese were ready to attack. On the evening of 11 September, 6000 men of MG Harukichi Kawaguchi’s reinforced 35th Brigade (of which Ichiki’s Regiment was the vanguard) began the 17 mile approach march through the jungle to Henderson Field. At dawn on the 12th, they attacked the Marine perimeter.
LtCol Merritt Edson, commanding 900 Marines of the 1st Marine Raider battalion and the remnant of the 1st Marine Parachute Battalion, fought off Kawaguchi’s relentless assaults over the next two days. The Japanese launched waves of banzai charges and the Marines engaged in brutal hand to hand combat to stop them. Nonetheless, Edson’s men were forced back along the length of “Bloody Ridge”. In several instances the Japanese broke through to Henderson Field’s flight line where support personnel had to throw them back, or were turned back by Marine gunners firing over open sights at the charging Japanese. In the end though, the Battle of Edson’s Ridge shattered Kawaguchi’s brigade.
On 15 September 1942, LTG Harukichi Hyakutake, commander of the Japanese 17th Army, received the news of the defeat and after receiving concurrence from Yamamoto and the Imperial General Staff, suspended all other offensive operations in order to reinforce Guadalcanal. Yamamoto was seeking the “Kantai Kessen” or decisive battle, with the Americans specifically the US Navy. Yamamoto felt that the battle for Guadalcanal would draw the US Navy into the open where it could be destroyed in a single epic confrontation. Once the bulk of its navy was sunk, America would surely sue for peace, just as the Russians did after Tsushima 40 years before. Japanese operations in the Pacific for rest of the war can be characterized as the search for the Kantai Kessen with the US Navy.
1500 miles away, the Japanese on New Guinea were within sight of Port Moresby (and almost certain capture of the island), when Yamamoto’s order gave the Australians some very much needed time to reorganize. The Japanese would never threaten Port Moresby and the Australian mainland, again.
The Battle of Brandywine Creek
The British grand strategy for subduing the troublesome New England colonies was to seize the Hudson River valley and cut them off from the middle and southern colonies. To this end, Gen. John Burgoyne attacked from Canada while Gen. William Howe was supposed to do the same from New York City. However, Howe unilaterally decided to sail his army into the northern Chesapeake and march on Philadelphia. On 9 September 1777, Howe’s British, Loyalists, and Hessians landed, and Washington planned to meet them at Chadd’s Ford along the Brandywine Creek.
Unfortunately for the Americans, a Philadelphia loyalist informed Howe of series of smaller fords on the East and West Brandywine Creek some miles to the north of Washington. On the morning of 11 September 1777, Howe marched the bulk of his army around Washington while he sent his Hessians to fix the Continental Army at Chadd’s Ford. Washington learned of the maneuver fairly early in the day, but didn’t act on it for several hours. He decided to go look for himself.For several hours, Washington conducted his own personal leader’s reconnaissance of the battlefield, accompanied only by the newest brigadier general in the Continental Army, Casimir Pulaski. Pulaski was a former colonel in the Bar Confederation, a Polish revolt against the Russians, who fled to America after the First Partition of Poland. Pulaski was by far and away the most experienced cavalryman in North America at the time, and about noon on 11 September 1777, Pulaski was showing Washington the finer points of mounted reconnaissance when they both were nearly killed.
Waiting in a copse of trees, was Maj Patrick Ferguson, a light infantry pioneer in the British Army. With him was a company of light infantry armed with breech loading marksman’s muskets specially designed by Ferguson himself. Washington and Pulaski rode to within thirty yards of Ferguson and his men. Ferguson ordered them killed but stopped his men after the duo turned their backs to them. Ferguson called to Washington and Pulaski, and they both rode off. Ferguson stated later that he alone could have put four rounds into each before they were out of range, but it was ungentlemanly to shoot the “well dressed hussar and his august companion in the back”. Ferguson never regretted his decision to spare the two.
By mid afternoon, Howe’s army appeared on the flank of the Continental Army, but Washington re-positioned. He sent Sullivan with three divisions to make a stand on a small hill topped by the Birmingham Meeting House. However, as Sullivan was conferring with the division commanders, the British emerged from the wood line and surprised Sullivan’s own division as it was forming. The line broke and the rest withdrew from the hill. Sullivan reformed at Dilworth, and as Washington confirmed he was facing the bulk of Howe’s army to the north, re-positioned Lafayette and his reserve under Greene. The Continentals stopped the British advance, and the fighting degenerated into a slug fest with American and British troops firing volleys point blank at each other, followed by bayonet charges. Nonetheless, the Continentals held.
At Chadd’s Ford, the Hessians also attempted to force the American position with little success. However, a British column from the north got lost in the forest attempting to flank Washington’s position at Dilworth, and appeared on the flanks of “Mad” Anthony Wayne’s defense of the ford. Though fiery and eccentric, Wayne was not stupid, and retreated. Washington recognized that he was now out maneuvered, and withdrew the army back to Philadelphia to fight another day. Greene and Lafayette provided a skillful rear guard.
Though a defeat, the Battle of Brandywine Creek showed that the Continental Army was beginning to mature. For the first time, they fought the British regulars and Hessian professionals toe to toe on ground of British choosing and gave as well as they got. Furthermore, the Continental leadership showed that it too could execute complicated and demanding maneuvers, none more so than a withdrawl while in contact. The Continental Army was not a professional force by any means in 1777, but it began to act like one.
The Continental Congress abandoned Philadelphia a little over a week later. They would flee to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which would have the honor of being the country’s capital for a single day, 21 September 1777, and then on to York, PA.
Howe marched into Philadelphia on 28 September thinking he had just won the war. However, the seizure of the enemy’s capital as a means of victory is a distinctly Western European construct. In Europe, the capital was the center of a nation’s culture, industry, and state bureaucracy, without which a nation can no longer fight. In the late 18th century it was unthinkable for a Briton to continue a war if London fell, or Frenchman to continue if Paris fell. But the ideals laid out in in the Declaration of Independence, and later the U.S. Constitution, are not tied to a piece of terrain. If an American capital falls, it just moves to another spot. You can’t occupy an idea.
Howe might have won Philadelphia, but he lost the war.
Pigeon Roost and the Battle of Fort William Harrison
After the fall of Ft Detroit to the British on 16 August 1812, Indians all along America’s western frontier began raiding in earnest. On 3 September 1812, a Shawnee war party descended upon the small settlement of Pigeon’s Roost (in modern day Indiana just across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky). The attack was a complete surprise and many inhabitants were killed before they could make it to the Collings family blockhouse. The scalps of 15 children (including 2 infants), 6 women and 3 men from Pigeon’s Roost were eventually presented to the British commander at Ft Detroit.
Most of the men from Pigeon Roost were away in the militia, including some at Fort Harrison, in present day Terra Haute, Indiana.. On the same day Pigeon Roost was attacked, 600 Miami and Potawatomi Indians approached the fort demanding its surrender. Captain (and future President) Zachary Taylor asked for a parley in the morning which the Indians agreed to. CPT Taylor had 50 soldiers and militiamen, but unfortunately 30 were ill and bedridden. During the night, one Indian scout set fire to the blockhouse, and while the healthy members of the garrison tried to put out the fire, the Indians attacked. The situation looked grim and two of the garrison immediately deserted.
Taylor quickly assessed the situation and left three able-bodied defenders to fight the fire, including one woman who lowered herself into a well to fill buckets faster. Once he dispelled the confusion through sheer force of will, Zachary l shouted “Taylor never surrenders!” and then led the other 15 healthy defenders and every invalid who could walk in a charge to clear the palisade. After brutal hand to hand fighting along the wall, the Indians broke off the attack and settled into a siege. The defenders lost all of their food in the fire but fortunately COL William Russell was at nearby Vincennes with the 7th US Infantry, a ranger company, and a company of militia including a few Pigeon Roost men. They lifted the siege on 12 September and gave America its first victory on land in the War of 1812.
The Battle of Alam Halfa
Rommel needed to attack. Every day he was getting weaker and the British were getting stronger. The ships and planes of Malta were wreaking havoc on his convoys and he was beginning to regret the decision not to invade the small island after his victory at Gazala (the supplies for Operation Herkules, the invasion of Malta, were pushed to him to continue his pursuit further into Egypt). A thousand miles from his ports in Libya, the very trucks delivering the fuel were using the bulk of it. Nevertheless, he had defeated a succession of Eighth Army commanders, Cunningham, Ritchie, and Auchinleck, and now it was the turn of the newest Eighth Army commander, LtGen Bernard Montgomery.
Monty wasn’t the first choice for the next Eighth Army commander. After Auchinleck fired Ritchie and took command himself, LtGen William Gott was chosen to succeed Ritchie. However, he was killed when his plane was shot down on his way to the front. Montgomery was the next choice.Montgomery might have been an arrogant martinet that was difficult to deal with, but he was a master planner, first class trainer of men, and he wasn’t afraid to sack an incompetent officer. Most importantly, he had an unshakable conviction in inevitable victory. Monty despised defeatism in all its forms, and this included even prudent measures in case Rommel broke through at El Alamein. As soon as he took tactical command of the Eighth Army from Auchinleck , the first thing he did was order worked ceased on defensive positions around Alexandria and Cairo. Rommel would be stopped at El Alamein, or they would die trying. In a popular story at the time, Monty said of his appointment, “After having an easy war, things have now got much more difficult.” A friend tried to encourage him, but Montgomery stopped him and said, “I was talking about Rommel”.
The British defenses were strengthened along the coast road but gradually thinned the farther south Rommel went. There was an obvious gap far to the south where it was clear the British intended Rommel to attack. But he had no choice. If he couldn’t have the element of surprise as to the location, he would have it with the speed and tempo of his breakthrough. Rommel planned to be through the minefields before the British could react. This would allow him time to establish a hasty defense with his 88mm anti-tank guns and easily defeat the inevitable British counterattack. Once the British tanks were destroyed, he would breakout into their rear areas and then isolate and begin systematically destroying the British defensive boxes. Once that happened, the British would withdraw, as they always have. On 30 August 1942, Rommel struck, and he quickly broke through the minefield. He brought up his long range anti tanks guns and awaited the British armor.
But they never came.
Rommel continued his advance, confident that he would soon come upon British rear area units and supply depots. What he ran into was massed dug in armor and anti-guns on Alam Halfa Ridge, far behind the British main line of resistance.
In previous engagements in the Western Desert, Allied reconnaissance would identify Rommel’s panzers, and the British armoured brigades would charge forth in the grandest tradition of the Scots Greys and Household Cavalry of yore. And they would be massacred by Rommel’s 88s. The number of times in the past 18 months that a few panzers were used as bait for waiting 88s were almost too many to count. But cavalry “attacks”, that’s what it does. At least until Monty came along.
Much to the disgust of his armour and cavalry officers, Monty forbade them to attack, and ordered them to dig in on Alam Halfa Ridge and wait for the Germans. The defensive boxes along the frontier were in strong positions and could survive isolated for a few days. As the Afrika Korps and the Italian XX Corps through the south, they were extending their vulnerable supply lines to air and artillery attack. The battle proceeded just as Monty predicted.
The Germans and Italians saw themselves for the first time on the receiving end of long range anti-tank fire, and as they got closer to Alam Halfa Ridge, massed tank fire in a well-rehearsed engagement area. Furthermore, the Eighth Army was the beneficiary of Roosevelt’s pledge to reinforce Egypt after the fall of Tobruk, so the British sported more American tanks in the form of Honeys (Stuarts) and the newer Grant tank with its hull mounted 75mm gun and turret mounted 37mm guns (known as the Lee in America. The only real difference was the shape of the turret). German and Italian infantry assaulted the Commonwealth positions in order to expand the gap and take pressure off the fight at Alam Halfa, but although there was some hard fighting, they were unsuccessful.
Rommel was saved from being cut off and destroyed by an unfortunate turn of events. After Rommel was decisively engaged on Alam Halfa Ridge, Montgomery gave orders to limit tank losses so as to not jeopardize the upcoming decisive counteroffensive. However, the 4/8 Hussars (the combined 4th Queen’s Own and 8th Royal Irish Hussars) saw an opportunity to raid Rommel’s supply lines and did so to great effect: they shot up and destroyed almost 57 trucks and lorries. This unfortunately forced Rommel to send the Italian XX Corps back to secure his extended line of logistics. This act and the lack of fuel eventually forced Rommel to withdraw completely the next day. However, it also saved him when Montgomery’s counterattack to cut him off on the east side of the frontier minefields ran into the Italians, who were thus in position to throw back the British and Kiwi attack. They did so handily.
By the evening of 4 September, 1942, Rommel was back in his start positions, prepared to defend. However, the Eighth Army didn’t attack. As Auchinleck had discovered the year before, the only way to assure Rommel’s defeat was to have an overwhelming preponderance in supplies. Otherwise, the offensive would fall just short, and then Rommel would be in position in Libya to mass supplies more easily. This is exactly what happened to Operation Crusader. It was better to keep a starving and thirsty Rommel in Egypt where his fuel and ammunition had to endure Malta’s, the RAF’s and the LRDG’s raids, not to mention his own trucks guzzling his tanks’ fuel, before it arrived at the front. All the while American lend-lease equipment poured in to Haifa and Alexandria, a short drive away.
Montgomery estimated he’d need another month.
America’s Forgotten Carrier Battle: The Battle of the Eastern Solomon Islands
The Battle of Stalingrad
German General Frederick Von Paulus’ Sixth Army was finally within striking distance of Stalingrad. Throughout late July and early August of 1942, General Wolfram Von Richthofen ‘s 4th Air Flotte, the most powerful air formation in the world at that time, was isolating Stalingrad as they approached. Richthofen’s bombers sank every ship and ferry on the Volga that connected the city to the outside world.
On 23 August 1942, those bombers turned Stalingrad into rubble in preparation for Sixth’s Army attack and created a firestorm that killed thousands of civilians and turned the rest homeless. Many civilians had evacuated Stalingrad in the previous weeks but on Stalin’s the order most were stopped and put to work strengthening the defenses of the city, or continued to work in the factories, in particular the Volograd Tractor Plant which was retooled to produce T-34 tanks.
Across the city, the commander of the Soviet 62nd Army, Lt Gen Vasily Chuikov, deployed support personnel and civilian militias as the first line of defense against the Germans in order to preserve his Soviet regulars. After the bombing, the German’s attacked and ran into fierce resistance, particularly from an anti aircraft regiment made up exclusively of women and girls, supported by brand new T34 tanks manned by workers from the tractor factory. Once the Germans broke through the first line of defense, Chuikov ordered his units to stay close enough to the Germans to hug them, thereby mitigating the Germans superior firepower. By the end of the day, the Soviet soldiers were contesting every street, alley, sewer, house and room of Stalingrad.
The Rattenkrieg, “Rat’s War”, had begun.
The Tokyo Express and the Battle of Alligator Creek (Tenaru)
Although the Marines didn’t appreciate it at the time, Fletcher’s carriers prevented the Japanese from landing transports full of Japanese troops and supplies, because the slow and heavy transports couldn’t make the trip to Guadalcanal and be back out of range of Fletcher’s aircraft before dawn. So instead of transports, the Japanese used the fast destroyers of Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka’s 2nd Destroyer Squadron. They couldn’t carry a fraction of what the transports could, but they could make the trip and be back before they were inevitably strafed and bombed by American planes, that ironically appeared over the Solomon’s with the rising sun. On the evening on 18 August 1942, Tanaka made the first of many nightly runs down the Slot to deliver men and material to Guadalcanal from Rabaul, soon dubbed by the Marines as “The Tokyo Express”.
The Tokyo Express’s first passengers were the 917 men of Kiyanao Ichiki’s 28th Infantry Regiment. The Japanese 17th Army (similar to a American army corps) was committed to the fight along the Kokoda Track in New Guinea, so troops from the Philippine’s had to be detached and sent south piecemeal. The first to arrive was Ichiki’s men.
The 28th Infantry Regiment suffered from “victory disease”, in Ichiki’s own words, as if it was a good thing, and they weren’t going to wait for Tanaka to bring more men. Ichiki was going to attack as soon as possible – the 11,000 men of the 1st Marine Division dug in at Lunga Point around Henderson Field be damned.
Ichiki’s confidence, though foolhardy, was not entirely misplaced. The 28th was a veteran outfit of the war with China, the Soviet Union in 1939, and Philippines’ campaign. The Marines on the perimeter had no experience beyond dealing with the harassing attacks by the labour and construction battalion that had fled into the jungle as they landed.
But the Marines were fast learners, and the aggressive and persistent harassment by the construction battalion had taught them nighttime noise and light discipline the hard way. Furthermore, the coast watchers had warned of Ichiki’s landing, and on the evening of 19 August, Ichiki’s reconnaissance patrol was ambushed and destroyed. The Marines knew first line Japanese assault troop were on the island and prepared accordingly. They didn’t, however, expect Ichiki to attack so soon.
As soon as Ichiki landed, he quickly led his men to the north coast of the island to the east of the American lines. Just after midnight on 21 August, Ichiki’s men blundered into the Marine lines as they attempted to cross the Ilu River, dubbed by the Americans “Alligator Creek” (There are no alligators in the Solomon’s, only crocodiles.) The Marines were waiting for them.
Ichiki was surprised at contact with the Americans so far from Henderson Field, but decided to attack anyway. The Marine position was strong, but furious banzai charges starting about 4am threatened to overwhelm the defenders and break through nonetheless. That they did not, was almost entirely due to six heavy machine guns and a 37mm anti-tank gun firing canister rounds from the battalion weapons company attached to the defenders the evening before. For four hours these guns massacred wave after wave of Japanese crossing the shallow river. Even so, it was a near run thing as accurate covering fire raked the American positions as the swarming Japanese consistently got within hand grenade range, and even overran several before being pushed back by counterattacking Marines.
One water-cooled Browning .30 Cal was crewed by PFC Al Schmid after his gunner was wounded, and the other assistant gunner killed. The wounded Schmid continually loaded and fired the heavy gun himself under the tutelage of the badly wounded gunner who couldn’t move to help and broke up several assaults. An hour before dawn, Schmid was struck by grenade fragments in the face, and was blinded. Despite not being able to see Schmid continued to fight: the blind Schmid pointed and fired the gun at the gunner’s directions, who had painfully managed to position himself to observe the attacking Japanese. They continued this until the sun came up. 200 Japanese bodies were found in and around their machine gun.
At dawn, a Marine battalion counterattacked down Alligator Creek and pinned the remainder of Ichiki’s regiment against the coast and the Ilu River lagoon. There they were systematically destroyed by the assaulting Marines, assisted three Stuart tanks, whose obsolescence mattered not against the trapped Japanese. A four plane flight of Wildcat fighters, newly arrived to Henderson Field the day before, joined in with their combined 16 .50 Cal machineguns. Ichiki, watching from the bank and recognizing the magnitude of his failure, calmly stood up, straightened his uniform, and walked toward one of the tanks.
790 of the 805 attacking Japanese were killed, just 15 were captured. The starving and haggard remainderof the 28th Regiment, left behind as a rear guard, would shock the rest of Ichiki’s brigade spreading tales of the American’s defensive firepower, when they arrived via Tanak’s Tokyo Express eight days later. Upon learning of Ichiki’s and his men’s fate, the astonished Admiral Yamamoto ordered a proper reception for the Marines on the Solomon Islands.
Admiral Fletcher would get his battle with the Japanese aircraft carriers.
The Raid on Dieppe
With America’s entry into the war, Admiral Doenitz’ sent all of his available long range Type IX U-boats to sink merchantmen along the unprepared and nearly undefended East Atlantic coast. The British knew this was happening through the Ultra intercepts, but the Americans ignored them. So began the “Second Happy Time”, as U-boat captains sank ships off the American coast and in the Caribbean Sea with impunity.
The German Kriegsmarine’s (Navy) Happy Time of the first eight months of 1942 wasn’t necessarily destined to be so happy just because of American arrogance and laxity; the Battle of the Atlantic got exponentially more difficult for the Allies on 1 February 1942. On that day, the Kriegsmarine switched from a three rotor to a much more secure four rotor Enigma machine for their U-boats’ operational communications. When Alan Turing and the boys and girls of Hut 8 at Bletchley Park woke that morning, they found they could no longer read the Germans’ mail. Undetected U-boats went about slaughtering the vital merchantmen needed to keep Britain in the war.
Turing needed a four rotor Enigma machine, or at least as much German cryptographic material as possible, such as code books or old messages (these were a source of “cribs” or known plaintexts with their corresponding ciphertext, that dramatically reduced the time needed to decode messages) if Britain and America were going to go back to evading the U-boats and attacking them, instead of chasing them around by following the trail of sunken ships they left behind.
The task to “pinch” i.e. steal, a four rotor Enigma machine fell to the commandos of Lord Louis Mountbatten’s Combined Operations Headquarters. Mountbatten’s normal targets for enemy cipher material were German weather trawlers in the North Atlantic, but they dried up when the Germans established their secret weather stations in Spitsbergen Islands in the Arctic Ocean. The commandos came to rely on sensitive material they captured on various raids to fill the void, such as the Loften and Vargas Islands in Norway, and St Nazaire in France, but none produced what Turing needed, including several other operations planned specifically to pinch a machine but were aborted for various reasons.
In early April 1942, Britain’s clandestine secret service, MI6, and its research arm, the blandly named Inter Service Topographical Department (ISTD) identified a four rotor machine and a veritable treasure trove of cipher material in the Moderne Hotel at the French port of Dieppe. The Moderne housed a Kriegsmarine port headquarters, a headquarters for a squadron of minelayers, and most importantly, a detachment from the Kriegsmarine Special Purpose Signals Regiment 618. MI6 even pinpointed the location of the Enigma machine: locked in a safe in a storage room in the basement.
Mountbatten gave the operation to raid the Moderne Hotel at Dieppe to the “Authorized Looters of the Admiralty”, Ian Fleming’s (author of the James Bond novels) 30 Intelligence Assault Unit. 30AU was a covert intelligence gathering formation that “cleaned up” after, or during, regular and commando operations, and then went out of their way to hide the fact that they did so, so as to preserve the integrity of the information they acquired. Combined Operations planned Operation Sutter using 30AU supported by 40 Royal Marine Commando for June. But several attempts in June and July failed due to bad weather. Sutter was scrapped, and Mountbatten was told to pinch another machine somewhere else.
However, the plan was resurrected in late July by Winston Churchill. Mountbatten considered Churchill his direct superior, much to the General Staff’s dismay. Churchill was fascinated by commandos, cryptanalysis, cloak and dagger stuff in general, and even by Mountbatten, whom he considered a younger version of himself. Operation Sutter was the combination of all of these and Churchill couldn’t resist. Furthermore, Mountbatten was “growing his empire” with the Prime Minister’s support and his operations were getting progressively larger. He still wanted, and needed, to execute Sutter, but the security risks caused by aborted attempts meant that it had to change. So instead of just 30AU and 40 RM Commando, he’d use a whole division. Mountbatten wanted to “crack a nut with a steam hammer” to cover up the true objective in the Moderne Hotel.
Mountbatten wanted the Royal Marine Division but Churchill was under intense political pressure to get the 2nd Canadian Division into the fight. They arrived in Britain just after the evacuation at Dunkirk and had been training for almost two years and had not seen any action. Operation Sutter was renamed Operation Jubilee and the 2nd Canadian Division would provide the steam hammer.
Operation Jubilee was the first Allied large scale division-sized amphibious operation in the European theater. As the US Marines were finding out at that moment in the Solomons, it was much more difficult and complicated than at first realized, especially since the Canadians and commandos weren’t assaulting mostly unoccupied beaches, but a heavily fortified port. The plan called for independent commandos to first clear heavy gun emplacements on the flanks of Dieppe. The next wave of Canadian infantry was to clear machine gun nests and pillboxes overlooking the main assault beaches. The Canadian main body would follow on with a frontal assault supported by tanks on Dieppe itself. While the engineers accompanying the main assault were wrecking the port facilities (the stated cover objective for the raid) 30AU and 40 RM Commando was supposed to secure the hotel and seize the Enigma machine. For the job, 30AU even recruited a former cat burglar and safecracker, given amnesty for his previous crimes, specifically for the mission. In addition to an entire division, this single individual was supposed to be supported by copious amounts of naval gunfire and RAF bombers. However, the bombers were called off as they were too inaccurate and they couldn’t risk damaging the hotel. The supporting battleships and cruisers were also called off in the name of security: the Germans would certainly wonder what they were doing when they entered the English Channel.
At 3 am on 19 August 1942, the invasion force left the south of England to raid Dieppe to “help relieve the pressure on the Soviets and open the second front against the Germans in the West”, which we know now was complete bullshit. Unfortunately, the invasion force didn’t even get across the English Channel before things started to go wrong.
The landing craft of No 3 Commando, charged with silencing the coastal battery at Berneval to the east of the main landings, ran into a small German coastal convoy, whose armed trawler sank or scattered most of their landing craft. However, a handful of the indefatigable commandos managed to land and prevent the guns from firing by sniping at gunners. They accomplished their mission but it was an inauspicious start to the operation.
Further west was the only bright spot of Jubilee. No 4 Commando under the indomitable Lord Lovat, and accompanied by 40 Americans of the newly formed US Army Rangers, “in a classic operation of war” seized and neutralized the battery at Varangeville. The rest of the operation was a disaster.
When the next wave of Canadians came ashore to clear the German positions covering the main assault beaches, the Germans were already alerted and waiting for them in previously unidentified caves and firing positions. The Canadians were massacred and accomplished none of their objectives. Shortly thereafter the main assault landed directly into the teeth of the German defenses. Naval gunfire by destroyers off shore and air support by fighters and fighter bombers was completely inadequate. The few tanks that made it to shore were either stuck in the sand or stopped by roadblocks from getting into town. The engineers needed to blow the barriers were easy targets for German machine gunners. Few Canadians reached the town, much less the hotel. Maj Gen John Roberts, the commander of the 2nd Canadian Division, ordered in his reserve and then 30AU and 40 Commando to force their way in. But after three unsuccessful and very costly assaults, the order went out to evacuate.
Of the 5000 men, mostly Canadians, that took part on the Raid of Dieppe, 900 were killed, 600 wounded, and almost 2000 were captured. Dieppe was a national disaster for Canada. The Germans were genuinely confused about why the Allies would try to force a division sized landing against two full regiments in a fortified city, or even conduct an operation that was “too large for a raid and two small for an invasion”.
They wouldn’t know the answer for seven decades until a curious Canadian historian came across a single recently declassified signals intelligence document from the ISTD that simply stated, “Dieppe Objective Not Realized”, and then unraveled from there.
Mountbatten and Churchill would both maintain the fiction til the day they died that the Raid on Dieppe was a large scale rehearsal for the future amphibious invasion of France. To that end, Dieppe did provide plenty of lessons learned in large scale amphibious operations, in particular naval and air fire support, beach composition and reconnaissance, simplicity of concept and simultaneity of concurrent objectives, among many others. These lessons would be directly incorporated into and instrumental in the success of the Operation Torch landings in North Africa in November of 1942. But the cost for those lessons, and that fiction, was high: in addition to the casualties, Roberts would be made a scapegoat, and the Germans would bask propaganda value of the Allied defeat for months.
As for the original objective of the Dieppe Raid, the four rotor Enigma machine? Turing would have to wait another two months when one fell into the figurative Allied lap after a chance capture of sinking U-boat off Egypt in October.
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