The Canadians in Dieppe

On the morning of 1 September 1944 armoured cars of the 8th Reconnaissance Regiment (14th Canadian Hussars), the leading unit of the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division, drove into the outskirts of Dieppe. The Canadians had expected the Germans to defend the port and had a plan ready for an assault preceded by heavy bombing. Instead they found the town empty: the German rearguards had left the previous day. The air raid was called off at the last moment, and in the course of the day the main body of the division entered the town to an enthusiastic welcome from the inhabitants.

War chronologies record the event as “the capture of Dieppe by Canadian troops”. The word “capture” needs qualifying: according to the Canadian official history by Colonel Charles P. Stacey, there was no fighting for the town, and the Canadians simply occupied it. For the 2nd Division, however, it was a very particular return. Two years earlier, on 19 August 1942, this same division had landed on the beaches here in the Dieppe Raid, in which, of nearly 5,000 Canadians, 3,367 were killed, wounded or taken prisoner.

The pursuit beyond the Seine

By the end of August 1944 the Battle of Normandy was drawing to a close. In the Falaise pocket the German Seventh Army and Fifth Panzer Army had lost most of their heavy equipment, and their remnants were hurrying back across the Seine. On 26 August General Bernard Montgomery, commander of the British and Canadian 21st Army Group, issued a directive for the continued pursuit. The army group’s objective was to destroy the German forces in the Pas-de-Calais and Flanders and to capture Antwerp. The British Second Army was to drive inland towards Belgium, and General Harry Crerar’s First Canadian Army along the Channel coast. The directive gave the Canadians three tasks: to secure the port of Dieppe, to capture Le Havre, and to destroy all enemy forces in the coastal belt as far as Bruges.

On 30 August General Guy Simonds’s II Canadian Corps entered Rouen. The next day its divisions pushed rapidly north and north-east. The 4th Canadian Armoured Division took Buchy, the reconnaissance of the 3rd Infantry Division reached Saint-Saëns, and the 8th Reconnaissance Regiment, moving ahead of Major General Charles Foulkes’s 2nd Division, halted at Tôtes, halfway from Rouen to Dieppe. Meanwhile the British I Corps, under Crerar’s command, was advancing into the peninsula at whose tip lies Le Havre.

II Canadian Corps also included Brigadier General Stanisław Maczek’s Polish 1st Armoured Division, which after heavy fighting at Falaise had crossed the Seine and at the turn of August and September rejoined the pursuit on the Canadians’ right, heading for the Somme and on towards the Belgian border. All these formations were tired and under strength – Canadian infantry battalions were often fighting with three companies instead of four – yet they were now advancing several dozen kilometres a day, because the enemy was no longer putting up organised resistance.

Operation Fusilade, which proved unnecessary

Dieppe was the first sizeable port on the First Canadian Army’s line of advance. After the 1942 raid the Germans had accelerated the building of their coastal fortifications, known as the Atlantic Wall, concentrating them precisely around the ports, and the experience of two years before had shown that a frontal attack on such a port could end in a massacre. The Canadian command therefore prepared a detailed plan, Operation Fusilade: first a heavy bombardment from the sea and a raid by RAF Bomber Command, then an assault – this time from the landward side rather than from the beaches.

On the morning of 1 September the leading vehicles of the 8th Reconnaissance Regiment reached the edge of the town and found that the German rearguards had gone. The news was passed back at once so that the air raid could be cancelled. According to Stacey, this was done twenty minutes before the bombers were due to release their loads over the town. The Germans, who had received no order to defend Dieppe to the last, had blown up some of the port installations and withdrawn eastwards. The Canadian historian later observed that had Hitler hit upon the idea of defending the Channel ports as fortresses a few days earlier, Dieppe would probably not have been taken without a fight.

During the day the main body of the 2nd Division drove into the town. The inhabitants, after four years of occupation, gave them – as Stacey writes – a “frenzied” welcome. Many of them remembered the August morning in 1942 when soldiers of the same division had died on the beaches in front of the promenade and columns of prisoners had been marched through the town’s streets. Now the same regiments – the Essex Scottish, the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry, the Royal Regiment of Canada, the South Saskatchewan Regiment, the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders of Canada and Les Fusiliers Mont-Royal – were returning as victors, although few veterans of the raid were still serving in their ranks.

In those same days the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division reached the sea further to the north-east, around Le Tréport, and the next day the Scottish 51st (Highland) Infantry Division of the British I Corps occupied Saint-Valery-en-Caux without opposition. It was in this small town in June 1940 that most of that division had been forced to surrender to the Germans. For the British and Canadians, the first days of September on the Normandy coast were thus a time of symbolic revenge.

A parade over the graves of 1942

The commander of the 2nd Division invited General Crerar to ceremonies set for 3 September. In the morning services were held at the cemetery at Hautot-sur-Mer, on the southern edge of Dieppe, over the graves of the soldiers killed in the raid. The Germans had buried them there in 1942 in their customary manner, in double rows set back to back – a layout that the cemetery, later taken over by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, has retained. In the early afternoon most of the division’s units paraded through the town, with Crerar taking the salute.

The army commander’s presence at the ceremony led to a quarrel with Montgomery, who on 1 September had received his field marshal’s baton and at the same time ceased to command all the ground forces in Normandy – their direction had passed to General Dwight Eisenhower. On 2 September Montgomery summoned Crerar to a meeting at British Second Army headquarters at 1 p.m. the following day. Crerar replied that, unless the operational situation required it, he would ask for the meeting to be moved to 5 p.m., since from the Canadian point of view he ought to be present at the ceremonies in Dieppe; he assured Montgomery, however, that he would abide by his superior’s decision. By the time he flew to Dieppe he had received no answer and assumed that his request had been granted. Only at about 2.40 p.m., as the troops were forming up for the parade, was he handed a message saying that his attendance at the 1 p.m. meeting was essential. It was already too late. Crerar saw the ceremony through and then flew to Second Army headquarters, but the meeting – which turned out to have been a formal conference between Montgomery and General Omar Bradley with the commanders of the US First Army and the British Second Army – had long since ended.

In the conversation that followed, the field marshal accused him of failing to obey an order and declared that they must part company. Crerar, according to his own note of the conversation, replied that as a Canadian commander he was also responsible to his government and his country, and that he had had “800 reasons” to be in Dieppe – the number, he said, of Canadian dead who lay in the cemetery there. He stated that if the matter were taken higher, he would himself inform the government in Ottawa. At that, to Crerar’s surprise, Montgomery declared the incident closed. The Canadian general noted that he had the impression the field marshal wanted to knock out of his head any idea of obligations other than those to Montgomery himself. The official history describes the episode as a “tiff”, but it shows clearly the tension between the British command and the commanders of the Dominion armies who fought under it as national forces.

A port for the pursuit

For the Allies, Dieppe mattered above all as a port. At the end of August the Allied supply lines still ran from the beaches and ports of Normandy, while the armies were moving several dozen kilometres further away from them every day. The Americans carried fuel and ammunition to the front in the truck convoys of the Red Ball Express, but it was not enough: at the turn of August and September George Patton’s tanks ground to a halt for lack of petrol. Every port closer to the front meant hundreds of kilometres less on the road.

The Germans had not managed to destroy the port installations at Dieppe completely. British engineers immediately set about clearing the damage and sweeping the approaches. According to Stacey, the first ships entered the port on 7 September, and by the end of the month it was handling 6,000–7,000 tons of cargo a day. An earlier study by the Canadian historical section (Report No. 183) gives 6 September for the first unloading and 9 September for the departure of a fuel train from here to Brussels, and estimates that Dieppe met about a quarter of the needs of 21st Army Group.

Place in the war

The bloodless occupation of Dieppe proved to be the exception. On 4 September, as British tanks rolled into the almost intact port of Antwerp, Adolf Hitler issued a directive that Boulogne, Dunkirk, the Calais area, the island of Walcheren and the mouth of the Scheldt were to be held as fortresses at all costs; Le Havre was already on the list of fortresses. As a result, the task Montgomery had given the First Canadian Army changed from a pursuit into a series of sieges. Le Havre fell only on 12 September, after heavy bombing and an assault in Operation Astonia; the Canadians took Boulogne and Calais in the second half of the month; and Dunkirk remained in German hands until the end of the war. Antwerp, the largest port in Western Europe, could receive its first ships only at the end of November, after the gruelling Battle of the Scheldt, fought largely by the First Canadian Army, with Maczek’s Polish division taking part.

In these circumstances Dieppe was for several weeks one of the most important ports supplying the British and Canadian forces. At the same time, the supply problem became one of the main arguments in the dispute over future Allied strategy: Montgomery demanded that all resources be concentrated on a single narrow thrust in the north, while Eisenhower held to an advance on a broad front. A partial concession by Eisenhower to Montgomery was the great airborne operation in the Netherlands that began in mid-September.

For Canada, the return to Dieppe was above all symbolic. The 1942 raid had been the Canadian army’s bloodiest day of the entire war, and its victims lay in a cemetery a few kilometres from the parade ground. The 2nd Division’s entry into the town without a shot fired did not change the verdict on that operation, but it did close a chapter: the division that had bled on the beaches in 1942 returned to Dieppe as part of a victorious army, and the town itself became one of the most important places of remembrance of this war for Canadians.