We Landed At Dawn; The Story Of The Dieppe Raid

By Alexander B. Austin

The only war correspondent who accompanied the Allied Dieppe raid tells the story of the brave, heroic but ultimately futile assault landing which would lay the foundation for the success in Normandy two years later.

Alexander Berry Austin was a noted war correspondent who worked for the London Herald during the Second World War. He was exceptionally dedicated and would often “embed”, to use a modern term, with Allied units during the most dangerous and demanding fighting including the Battle of Britain, the Dieppe raid, the Allied landings at Bizerte and the Salerno landing during which he lost his life to a German landmine. During the preparation for “We Landed At Dawn” he trained extensively with the elite Commando units that were due to make the ambitious invasion attempt.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lucknow Books
• Release date: Nov 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781786253132

Alexander B. Austin

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91

PREFACE

THIS is the story of a landing on Hitler’s France, of the men who made the landing, and of how they planned and trained for many months.

The battles that follow each landing vary in tactics and results, but the strange experiences that precede and accompany the sea crossing, the actions and emotions leading up to the supreme moment when the assault boats ground on the enemy coast, are always the same, or nearly the same.

Therefore I have tried in this book not merely to tell the story of a particular raid, but to describe events common to all those assault landings which will become so vital a part of the United Nations’ plan for victory.

It is a piece of straight reporting, not a work of fiction, but in order to avoid embarrassment I have altered the names of all officers and men mentioned in the narrative except those who are well known, or who have been named in the Dieppe decorations lists.

I have also, in order to avoid repetition, telescoped one or two incidents. Otherwise events are described in chronological order from my own experience, or from first-hand information.

A. B. A.

CHAPTER ONE—ONE-WAY TICKET TO. . .?

WHEN you go on a raid, the War Office buys you a one-way ticket from London to the coast.

Sensible, if you think of it. You may not be coming back from the same port. You may not be coming back from the same county. You may not be coming back at all.

When I was handed the one-way ticket for the first time, my spirits as a taxpayer rose a little. Here was this great spending department pouring out its millions on munitions and men, and prudently remembering to save the few shillings on my return journey. It had asked itself, Is his journey really necessary? and had answered, Half of it may not be.

But my spirits as a war correspondent sank for a moment. I had been excited, though I knew little—only that I was one of a short list of war correspondents liable to be called up for any real or practice raid or invasion, that I had been told, at short notice, to be present in battle dress at Waterloo Station at eleven on Sunday morning, to say nothing to anybody, and to be prepared for an indefinite absence.

It was as if my distinguished aunt, the War Office, had raised her forefinger (on the command One) from the seam of her khaki skirt, and had said, No schoolboy enthusiasms. This is serious.

After this very slight, and very short, depression, I found myself seeing and smelling the English spring from the open railway carriage window with a quickness of eye and a sensuous keenness that I had not known for weeks. It was one of those moist, clear mornings in late spring. The lilac, gorse, buttercups, and hawthorn were out. The first rain for weeks had fallen the night before. There might be more rain later. Meanwhile it was a morning without cloud, when the tender grass springeth out of the earth by reason of much shining after rain.

Thinking about the great enjoyment such mornings had given me for many years, at many seasons, and in many places from the Highlands to the Pyrenees, from Donegal to the Carpathians, I slid out of London, out of any kind of life I had known since the war began, and into a new war world, a world hidden, at that time, even from the majority of men in the Army, a small, secret, vivid world within the Army.

We had all heard about the Commandos, the raiding shock troops of the British Army, the hand-picked, disciplined guerrillas of our war, volunteers from every famous regiment trained together for jobs which needed fast movement on foot, physical endurance, and quick thinking by every man. We had heard of the Vaagsö, Lofoten, St. Nazaire, and Boulogne raids, all of them carried out by comparatively small Commando forces, and we supposed there would be more raids of the same sort, perhaps bigger ones.

But beyond that most of us had not, at that time, thought much about the practical problems of raiding on a scale large enough to amount to a second-front diversion, or even of establishing a more permanent second front. We knew that a Combined Operations headquarters had been set up, in which a planning staff of Army, Navy, and RAF officers worked under the newly created Chief of Combined Operations, Vice-Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten.

We had a sort of rough notion that when he wanted to start something on the German-occupied coast line, Lord Louis Mountbatten just chose the spot, picked a Commando Force, and told them to get on with the job with the kind assistance of the Navy and, if possible, the RAF. If we had thought more about it, we should have realized that, admirable though Commando forces are for single, limited, tough tasks, you can’t do much on a very large scale with Commandos alone.

If you are going to land a force of any size on the enemy coast and hold a beach head even for half a day, you need, not highly specialized task troops but the flower of your infantry battalions, men trained not only in the difficult job of landing on a hostile beach, but thoroughly grounded in the normal infantry tactics of modern mobile warfare, men who would be able to carve out a slice of enemy country and hold it until the armored reinforcements could arrive.

Paratroops alone cannot do it. The fiercest bombing will not push a determined enemy away from a corner of his own coast. Intensive naval bombardment is not enough.

All these forms of attack used together have their place, but even if you do use them all, you still need the assault infantry, the beach-head battalions. You need, in fact, the PBI (Poor Bloody Infantry).

We have heard in this war, and rightly, a great deal about the fighter pilot and the bomber crew. We have marveled at the endurance, inside their jolting, baking or freezing, petrol-stinking armor, of the tank drivers and gunners and wireless operators. We have been excited, in our salty island way, by stories of the submarine men and the small-boat men, the crews of the convoy corvettes and the Channel-darting motor launches, motor gunboats, and motor torpedo boats.

Now it is time to acknowledge the place in this war of the PBI, the British infantry of the centuries, the load-carrying footsloggers, the old regiments of foot guards, the English county regiments, the Highland regiments with names that have become as much part of the story of Canada as of Scotland. Without their crack assault battalions, their storming parties, their beach-head forces, we can never hope to beat the enemy on his own soil. They have made a beginning. Having seen them fight, I know that they will make an end.

The Germans have always been good at inventing whiplash names to make the world think that they have invented a new type of unbeatable, superhuman soldier—the panzer regiment, the storm trooper, the paratrooper. It is worth remembering that there is nothing in the German Army quite like our beach-head troops. The German spearhead assault has always been made on land by the tank and in the air by the glider or parachute soldier. The mass of German lorry-borne infantry have always been looked upon as holding troops, follow-up forces. We have our own air-borne troops, who are an essential part of future combined operations, but when we land on the enemy coast, our assault infantry, fighting on their own feet, supported at first only by the weapons and ammunition they can carry in their own hands and on their own shoulders, are the spearhead.

That Sunday morning, as the train ran south from Waterloo I was not thinking of all this. I was thinking to myself, Suppose it’ll be another Commando raid. Wonder where. Hope it’ll be a big one.

So when we had left the train, and had been taken to the local yacht club turned headquarters mess, I was surprised to be told You’ll be attached to the Argylls.

It seemed that scattered round the coast, as members of an assault infantry group, there were Grenadiers and Coldstreamers, as well as men of the Hampshires, the Argylls and Sutherlands, some Royal Engineers, light artillery, a tank unit, and a couple of Commando forces.

We sat lunching by the yacht-club windows and looked at the bay. It was full of craft. Someone whispered, Look at all those parent ships—and the assault landing craft running in and out.

Parent ships? Assault landing craft? Must be big stuff. Wonder if. . .wonder where. . .

But you kept that sort of wondering in your own mind. The worried but sane security officer for the district said that rumors were inevitable. You couldn’t stop them. The only thing you could hope for was that they’d be as nicely mixed as possible. But I didn’t care to make any contribution to rumor myself.

I just sat and listened to the talk in the mess for a time, glancing over his shoulder, as I left, at the book a subaltern was reading by the bay window. It was Vanity Fair, and he had reached the chapter Sunday after the Battle. Climbing into the truck that was to carry me to the Argylls’ headquarters, I wondered whether that was prophetic. It was, but not for nearly four months.

The truck-driver was a Hampshire, newly returned from Scotland, where his battalion had been training with the Grenadiers, Coldstreams, and Argylls. His home was in Reading, but he wanted to get back to Scotland.

I wish we could have stayed there, he said, pushing his cap back on his head and easing the truck round the bends on the clifftop roads. Coming south it was jugs of tea from the folk every time we stopped until we got as far as the border. Then there was no more. A fish and chips up in Scotland was sevenpence. Down here it’s one and tuppence. They seem to think we’re holidaymakers here—just mugs to be stung.

But when I reached the Argylls, they said: None of us want to go back north—except on leave, of course. Our lads have a great time down here in the south of England. Up home they were just part of the scenery.

If that is the general experience in the Army, the troops who are strangers to every part of this island, Poles, French, Belgians, Norwegians, Canadians, and Americans, should be feeling more at home than the county regiments in their own counties—like the Lancashire man who dressed as a Polish officer because It’s the only way to meet a girl in Blackpool.

The Argylls were quartered in the empty hotels of a war-deadened holiday resort, a small place of steep streets that suited their quick climbing step and the swing of the Campbell tartan kilts they wore off duty.

Their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel George Macalpine, shy, sensitive, but warmly good-natured West Highlander, had fought in the last war, and in France with the famous 51st Division before Dunkirk, though he was not much over forty.

I knew my fellow Scots, and I took my time with them. Mentally, when we first met Colonel Macalpine and I walked round each other at a distance for a while, summing each other up, searching for a common topic which would tell something of the other man’s ways.

He did not treat me like a newly joined subaltern, though I was disguised as one, but I think he was slightly embarrassed. Never before had a uniformed war correspondent been placed, so to speak, under his command, one able to return to civilian life, free to describe or criticize in print, within the limits of security, when his immediate period of training or warfare was ended. And this had happened at a time when his men were in the last stages of their very vital and very secret training.

As long as I was with him, neither of us mentioned the real purpose of my visit, though each of us was aware that the other knew. Even his Intelligence officer, Lieutenant Neil Strachan, tall,