During August 1942, 147 (Hampshire) Regiment RAC was stationed at Worthing on the south coast of England. It was regimental practice to maintain a listening watch on its No.19 wireless sets, a boring duty which, throughout the early hours of 19 August promised little diversion. However, towards dawn, freak reception brought a spate of transmissions. The accents were Canadian, but the speakers were obviously tank crew, and the operators began to log each message. It was not easy, since the rapid speech was that of men under stress, overlaid with the sound of gunfire. The transmissions continued for several hours, but petered out by mid-morning.
It was not until the newspapers began printing reports of the raid on Dieppe that the signals logs started to make sense. They told at first hand the tragic story of 2nd Canadian Division’s decimation on the beaches in front of the town, as seen from the Churchill turrets of 14th Army Tank Battalion, otherwise known as the Calgary Regiment.
An LCT (Black smoke, farther in the water.)(Tide not yet full out)
The object of the Dieppe raid was to test the defences on a sector of enemy-held coast known to be heavily fortified, and to apply the lessons learned when the Allies returned to continental Europe at a later date. As far as the Calgary Regiment was concerned its tasks were to support the Essex Scottish Regiment and Royal Hamilton Light Infantry off the beach and into the town, following which the tanks would shoot up the airfield at St Aubyn and attack the chateau of Arques-les-Batailles, which was suspected of being a divisional headquarters.
The beach, flanked by the East and West Headlands, consisted of heavily banked and graded shingle, and was backed by a sea wall which for most of its length was too high for the Churchills to scale. Beyond lay a wide stretch of open ground that had once been ornamental gardens, the Boulevard Foch, and then a row of hotels and houses. The whole area was covered from several directions by carefully sited anti-tank and machine gun posts, and the exits from the boulevard into the town had been sealed by concrete barriers.
This is apparently the only tank to reach the strand (shore proper) intact.
The Calgarys’ Churchills had been waterproofed and equipped with deep-wading exhausts which would see them ashore from the LCTs. To counter the effect of the shingle, which would scatter and slide about under the tracks, the first tanks out of the landing craft would carry an elementary bobbin which would unroll a carpet of hessian and wooden paling strips ahead of the vehicles and up to the sea wall, along which the others would follow. Where the sea wall was too high to cross, engineer teams would blow down sections to form ramps, and then go on to demolish the anti-tank walls blocking the routes into the town; however the engineers were on foot, and terribly vulnerable.
It goes almost without saying that the overall planning of the operation demanded that the East and West Headlands should be secured before the assault on the town beach went in; but because of a combination of the most evil bad luck and a certain amount of bad management, neither headland had been taken when the Essex, Hamilton and Calgary landing craft grounded on the shingle to find themselves trapped in a natural killing ground. Cross-fire from the headlands flayed the beach, while the landing craft were raked from the buildings beyond the sea wall. Some platoons were shot down as they crossed the lowered ramps, while the survivors of others tried to scrape what cover they could for themselves among the loose stones.
Germans Examining at Captured Churchill Tank at Dieppe
It had been decided that the tanks would land in four waves, made up as follows:
- First Wave; two groups totalling nine tanks, with the infantry.
- Second Wave; one group of twelve tanks.
- Third Wave; one group of sixteen tanks.
- Fourth Wave; remainder of regiment.
The first wave included three ‘Oke’ flamethrowers, one of which left its LCT too early and drowned, while the second had a track shot away and the third erupted into an inferno when the flame gun fuel tank was penetrated. Three more tanks lost tracks or bellied in the shingle; but the three survivors, Cougar, Cheetah and Cat, successfully crossed the beach on their carpet and climbed the sea wall, to be joined by four tanks from the second wave, whose fate had been as mixed as that of the first.
The third wave was committed at the same time as the reserve infantry battalion, the Fusiliers Mont Royal, but only ten tanks reached the shore due to damage sustained by the LCTs as the covering smoke screen began to disperse. Of these seven left the beach, while one remained jammed across the wall, engaging the houses with its guns fully depressed. The Calgarys’ commanding officer, Lt.-Col. Andrews, was shot down in the shallows after extricating his crew from their tank, which had been launched prematurely into deep water.
Approximately half the tanks ashore had now crossed the wall and were engaging the defences beyond. A French tank serving as a pillbox was blow apart by Cougar, while Cheetah engaged bunkers in the gardens, cutting down the occupants when they tried to make a run for it. Other tanks succeeded in suppressing the fire coming from the houses and hotels, one building being rammed to bring it down around the defenders’ ears; but the Churchills could not break into the town because of the concrete road-blocks, since the demolition teams had either been killed or were pinned down by the murderous cross-fire on the beach.
The Calgarys’ fourth wave did not land, for by 0900hrs it was clear to the operational commander that further effort was useless, and he gave the order to withdraw. All but six of the tanks returned to the beach, where an unsuccessful rescue was attempted; but of all the crews ashore, only one man succeeded in reaching England. The regiment’s casualties amounted to 13 killed, 4 wounded and 157 taken prisoner. That evening, with a consideration rare in total war, the Luftwaffe dropped a bundle of photographs onto the Calgarys’ barracks in Seaford, showing those who had survived the raid.
For the Canadian infantry Operation ‘Jubilee’ had been a bloodbath; but the terrible price they paid led directly to the development of the armoured engineer vehicles with which the Allied armies led their assault landings on 6 June 1944, with comparatively small loss of life for such an enormous undertaking.
Additional Sources:
staff.bus.bton.ac.uk
www.ospreypublishing.com
freespace.virgin.net/shermanic.firefly
users.swing.be/tanks.tanks/complet/ www.anecdotage.com
www.jed.simonides.org
cap.estevan.sk.ca
www.sunpoint.net/~mapatsik
www.archives.ca
www.wwiivehicles.com
www.bibl.u-szeged.hu
www.jodyharmon.com
