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Text originally published in 1943 under the same title.
Pickle Partners Publishing 2015, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.
Publishers Note
Although in most cases we have retained the Authors original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern readers benefit.
We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.
WE LANDED AT DAWN THE STORY OF THE DIEPPE RAID
by
A. B. AUSTIN
PREFACE
THIS is the story of a landing on Hitlers 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 ONEONE-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 littleonly 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 Vaags, 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 cant 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.
