The Dieppe Raid

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30342, 18 January 1964, Page 3

The Dieppe Raid

Dieppe: The Dawn Of Decision. Jacques Mordal. Souvenir Press. 285 pp. | The Dieppe Raid began early in the morning of I August 19. 1942. and ended less than 12 hours later. The; main burden of the fighting was borne by a force of 4963 i Canadians, of whom less than half were able to return to their bases in England. In this book Mr Mordal, a sailor who was wounded at Dunkirk and has since written a number of books on naval and military history, describes, with minute attention to detail about men. units ■ and material, this “recon-1 naissance in force.” as | Churchill called it at the time. It was not of course a mere raid unrelated to the earlier events of the war. and Mr Mordal very properly begins his tale in 1940 and leads up to Dieppe through the intervening two years. In this he examines the reasons for the decision to send this strong force across the Channel, an operation of which Montgomery disapproved and which had already been postponed by bad weather before it actually took place about a month later—this time with commandos instead of paratroops. The various landings that took place on an inhospitable coast dominated by cliffs are here described one by one, and then the attack on Dieppe itself before the withdrawal from a catastrophic situation. In conclusion, Mr Mordal turns his attention to the aftermath of the raid and the lessons learnt by both sides, and so finally brings the reader to the events of 1944, when the Canadians were able to enter Dieppe unopposed. The student of military (operations will find this book j a most interesting study in which he will be helped by j a large number of illustrajtions and by maps. The ordinary reader will wonder whether any great military advantage was gained to justify the appalling losses in an operation which, according to Admiral Keyes, “badly conceived and ill starred, constituted in the last analysis a very costly experiment.”