Wednesday, March 23, 2022

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:



The articles articles above and much more can be found at Editor's Research: Canadians in Combined Ops Return Home (17)

Please click here to view Passages: Writers on World War II (Part 1)

Unattributed Photos GH

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