1000 Men, 1000 Stories : Passages: Writers on World War II (Part 2)

An Anthology, Edited and With a Forward

By Mordecai Richler, 1991

Illustration as found In Combined Operations,

by Londoner Clayton Marks (in photo below)

Introduction:

The book is over 30 years old now, but for those readers, researchers of WWII who want details regarding the experiences of various people on various fronts, one would do well to look for this book. The forward alone by Mordecai Richler is worth the price of admission.

A few excerpts, items I would call poignant passages, from a few of the 100 or so books highlighted in Writers On World War II, are provided below:

DIEPPE: Only Trivial Damage was Done

David Astor says that the affair

was definitely misrepresented in the press

and is now being misrepresented in the reports

to the PM and that the main facts were:

Something over 5,000 men were engaged,

of whom at least 2,000 were killed or prisoners.

It was not intended to stay on shore longer than

was actually done (i.e., dawn till about 4 p.m.),

but the idea was to destroy all the defenses of Dieppe,

and the attempt to do this was an utter failure.

In fact only comparatively trivial damage was done,

a few batteries of guns knocked out etc., and only

one of the 3 main parties really made its objective.

The others did not get far and many were

massacred on the beach by artillery fire.

The defenses were formidable

and would have been difficult to deal with even if there

had been artillery support, as the guns were sunk in the face

of the cliff or under enormous concrete coverings.

More tank-landing craft

were sunk than got ashore.

About 20 or 30 tanks were landed

but none were got off again.

The newspaper photos which showed tanks

apparently being brought back to England

were intentionally misleading.

The general impression was that

the Germans knew of the raid beforehand.

Almost as soon as it was begun they had

a man broadcasting a spurious "eye-witness" account

from somewhere further up the coast, and another man

broadcasting false orders in English.

On the other hand the Germans were

evidently surprised by the strength of the air support.

Whereas normally they have kept their fighters

on the ground so as to conserve their strength,

they sent them into the air

as soon as they heard that tanks were landing,

and lost a number of planes variously estimated,

but considered by some RAF officers

to have been as high as 270.

Owing to the British strength in the air

the destroyers were able to lie outside Dieppe all day.

One was sunk, but this was by a shore battery.

When a request came to

attack some objective on shore,

the destroyers formed in line

and raced inshore firing their forward guns

while the fighter planes supported them overhead.

David Astor considers that this definitely proves

that an invasion of Europe is impossible...

I can't help feeling that to get ashore at all

at such a strongly defended spot, without either

bomber support, artillery support except for the guns

of the destroyers (4.9 guns I suppose), or airborne troops,

was a considerable achievement.

By George Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, pages 304 - 305

"Al Kirby meets with other WW2 Combined Ops veterans"

Readers can link to a Canadian sailor's experience on his landing craft re the Dieppe Raid by clicking here - Memoirs re Combined Operations: DIEPPE by A. G. Kirby (Mr. Kirby appears in the above photo).

Another excerpt from Writers On World War II follows:

DIEPPE: THE AWFUL WARNING

Dieppe, in retrospect,

looks so recklessly hare-brained an enterprise that

it is difficult to reconstruct the official state of mind

which gave it birth and drove it forward.

Churchill himself in the planning stages

expressed anxiety, and was confirmed in support for the

operation only by the insistence of General Sir Alan Brooke

that "if it ever was intended to invade France it was essential

to launch a preliminary offensive on a divisional scale."

Churchill was moved too by the need

to offset in some way the recent loss of Tobruk,

to say nothing of his loss of face with Roosevelt and

Stalin through his opposition to Operation Roundup.

And there were the raiding successes achieved by the Commandos

- his "Tigers" - at Vaagso and the Lofoten Islands to lend reassurance...

Photo of text from Writers On World War II, page 306

And, to cap their case, the staff officers

of Combined Operations Head quarters invoked

the legendary fighting qualities 0f the Canadians,

who had broken the Hindenburg Line in September 1918...

But bravery was to count for nothing

on the morning of August 19th, 1942.

The Commandos, attacking up the high cliffs which march almost

to the mouth of the little river Arques on which Dieppe stands,

achieved their customary surprise

and silenced the flanking batteries.

But the battalions of Canadian infantry and the tanks

they had brought with them were stopped almost as soon

as they left their landing craft, sometimes before.

The Royal Regiment of Canada... was detailed

to land in the mouth of a narrow gully... defended by the

German 571st Regiment (who) had watched the approach

of the landing-craft and, as soon as the ramps went down,

directed the desperate fire of outnumbered men

at the open mouths of the vessels...

The first few scraped through to the cliffs beyond.

The rest were barred by fire... and killed by machine guns firing

"in enfilade" - that is, at an angle to the Canadians' line of advance -

from under the wall. Twenty minutes later a second wave

of landing craft arrived, and soon after a third, carrying

a company of the Black Watch of Canada.

The landing-craft drew off behind them.

Fire implacably denied their advance.

By 8:30 a.m. every man on the beach

was dead or captive...

Out of 554 Royal Canadians who had disembarked,

94.5 per cent had become casualties; 227 had been killed.

Almost all were from the city of Toronto.

As found in Dieppe memoirs by Al Kirby, RCNVR, Combined Ops

...And, to crown the tragedy, at the last moment

the force commander landed his "floating reserve,"

Les Fusiliers de Mont-Royal**, who were bracketed by concentrated

German artillery during their ten-minute run-in to the beaches, and

drenched with fire as they touched ground. The French Canadians

nevertheless stormed from their landing-craft. But shortly

they too had lost over a hundred men killed and were pinned

to the shingle, unable either to advance or retreat.

Photo of text from Writers On World War II, page 30

...But one lesson was drawn,

by the man best placed to perceive it and, as luck

would have it, subsequently to put it into practice.

Captain (later Vice-Admiral) John Hughes-Hallet

had acted both as Naval Adviser to the

Chief of Combined Operations, Lord Louis Mountbatten,

before the operations and as Naval Commander during it.

He had come back from the raid naturally impressed by

the importance of air cover - the RAF had brilliantly succeeded

in sparing the Canadians the crowning agony of air attack -

and concerned by the need to add to the number and

types of landing-craft, to rehearse their crews in a variety of

simulated beach assaults and to keep such a specialized force

in permanent existence. But he was above all determined

to ensure that no landing should ever again take place

without covering firepower sufficient not simply

to hinder the enemy from using his weapons

but to shock him into inaction, stun him into

insensibility or obliterate him in his positions.

"The Lesson of Greatest Importance,"

his report capitalized and italicized,

"is the need for overwhelming fire support,

including close support, during

the initial stages of attack."

By John Keegan, from Six Armies in Normandy, pages 306 - 308

**Poignant details related to the "floating reserve," Les Fusiliers de Mont-Royal, can be found in a volume of stories by Canadian Navy volunteers (RCNVR, Combined Operations). A letter by Lt. Robert McRae appears below:

Dieppe-August 19, 1942 by LT R.F.McRae

At dawn, in our R-boat,
with Lloyd Campbell, Richard Cavanagh and Robert Brown
and a unit of the Fusiliers Mont-Royal,
we were off the French coast which was invisible
behind a heavy smoke-screen and from which
there came the awful noises of war.

About 7:30 a.m. the flotilla got orders
to go in and land the troops. We quickly fanned up
in line abreast, went through the smoke-screen and saw
that we were headed toward a beach under huge cliffs
with the heads of the enemy looking down over the top
and pouring machine-gun fire into the boats.

"Landing crafts of troops taking part in Operation Jubilee, Dieppe, Aug.

19th, 1942. On left, a smoke screen conceals them from enemy fire."

Department of National Defence / National Archives of Canada

Campbell, who was at the wheel, took a line

of bullets across his thighs (and later, as a POW,

lost his legs in successive amputations and

died before Christmas from gangrene).

Cavanagh, who was standing next to him,
got it in the chest and died an hour later
when his lungs had filled up.
Brown, though hit in the stomach,
took over the wheel from Campbell.
I was the lucky one and received only
a piece of shrapnel in the ankle.

In the meantime, the engine had been blown up
and was on fire and the plywood hull of the boat
was well perforated, but we had enough
weight on to make it to the beach.

The troops scrambled ashore except for the Captain

who had been standing up forward with us, was badly
wounded and, I believe, dying. Some of the troops
never made it across the beach which was strewn
with their bodies, and those who did were easy targets
for grenades lobbed down from above.
There was no life in the boats on either side of us,

and it was, I think, because they could see that
I was busy with the wounded and that we were unarmed

so that the Germans on the top of the cliffs gave up
trying to finish us off.

Some hours later, it was evident that a surrender
had taken place when I saw a few German soldiers

walking along the beach with a medical orderly.
I jumped out of the boat to fetch him for the wounded
but our discussion was rudely interrupted by a corporal
with a machine-gun directing me in no uncertain terms
to a crevice on the cliff face, down which a rope

had been lowered and up which I and a few surviving troops

had to hoist ourselves hand over hand.

I did not see my crew again.
I spent the first year in handcuffs in a British Officers camp,

and there I stayed for the remainder of the war.

The last two weeks were spent with a long struggling

column of POWs being marched up to the Baltic

and regularly strafed by our own fighter craft.

I was reluctant to write this note about Dieppe
but I knew that I owed it to Lloyd Campbell,
Richard Cavanagh and Bob Brown.
I have visited Cavanagh's grave a couple of times
in the War Cemetery in Dieppe.
I do not know where Campbell is buried.
It will be somewhere in Germany.
Brown, I saw last January when he came
with some old shipmates to have lunch here.
I heard about his death when I got back
from Italy at the beginning of May.
The loss of Campbell's and Cavanagh's lives was,
as you can see, a complete waste.

-LT Bob McRae (retired), age 66

As found in St. Nazaire to Singapore, Volume 1, page 66

On somewhat of a less dramatic note, this post concludes with a few samples of lingo as heard in the Marine Corps:

"Boot camp is a profound shock to most recruits because the Corps begins its job of building men by destroying the identity they brought with them. Their heads are shaved. They are assigned numbers The DI is their god. He treat them with utter contempt..."

And the new recruits had to learn a new language as well:

The Corps Had Its Own Language

Boots were required to learn it,

just as the inhabitants of an occupied country

must learn the conqueror's tongue.

A bar was a slopchute, a latrine was a head;

swamps were boondocks, and field boots, boondockers.

A rumor was scuttlebutt, because that was the name

for water fountains, where rumors were spread;

a deception was a snow job, gossiping was shooting the breeze,

information was dope, news was the scoop,

confirmed information was the word.

You said "Aye, aye, sir," not "Yes, sir."

The nape of the neck was the

stacking swivel, after a rifle part.

An officer promoted from the ranks was a mustang.

Your company commander was the skipper.

You never went on leave; you were granted liberty,

usually in the form of a forty-eight or a seventy-two,

depending on the number of hours you could be absent.

If you didn't return by then, you were over the hill.

Coffee was Joe; a coffeepot, a Joe-pot.

Battle dress was dungarees.

A cleanup of barracks, no matter

how long it lasted, was a field day;

a necktie was a field scarf,

drummers and trumpeters were field musics.

Duffle bags, though indistinguishable

from those used by GIs, were seabags.

To be under hack meant to be under arrest.

To straighten up was to square away;

a tough fighter was a hard-charger;

underwear was skivvies: manipulating

people was called working one's bolt.

Lad was a generic term of address for

any subordinate, regardless of age.

One of my people, a twenty-eight-year-old

Vermont school principal, was known, because of his

advanced age, as "Pop." An officer five years his junior

would summon him by snapping, "Over here, lad."

... There was even a word for anything

that defied description. It was gizmo.

By William Manchester, from The Raggedy Ass Marines, pages 228 - 229

In the Feb. 19, 1944 issue of The Winnipeg Tribune one will find - after reading about the Anzio Bridgehead - details re Canadian slang or 'the lingo' during WWII: