Operation Jubilee: The Raid on Dieppe August 19, 1942

By 1942 the British Admiralty was increasingly fearful of losing control in the skies over the English Channel. Earlier in February the German’s Operation Cerberus saw the battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gniesenau, as well as the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen sail up the channel to ports in Germany, beneath the very noses of the RAF and Royal Navy. New German radar and anti-aircraft and shore batteries installed along the north coast of France were making life more dangerous for Allied shipping as well as increasingly dangerous for their bombers crossing the channel to conduct bombing raids in occupied France, Belgium as well as Nazi Germany.

In May it was decided to conduct a raid on the channel port of Dieppe. Vice-Admiral Lord Louis Mountbattan, commander of the British Combined Operations Center, was charged with planning the raid. It was hoped the raid could cause serious damage to the German’s defenses, demonstrate to the Soviets that the Allies were earnest in their desire to quickly take the war to the Germans on the European continent, as well as demonstrating the feasibility of large scale amphibious operations. The RAF was counting on the Luftwaffe also rising up to aggressively defend the skies above Dieppe in a battle the RAF leadership was confident they could win. It was also hoped that intelligence agents, that would land with the 5,000 Canadian and 1,000 British assault troops (along with 50 US Rangers), could perform “pinch” operations to capture German code books, samples of their new radar technology, and perhaps an Enigma code machine (this aspect of the raid was overseen by Ian Fleming, the future author of the James Bond novels). An earlier raid to be launched in July, dubbed Operation Rutter, was cancelled but the raid was resurrected in the first week of August and called Operation Jubilee.

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