OPERATION JUBILEE
DIEPPE, 1942: THE FOLLY AND THE SACRIFICE PATRICK BISHOP
Viking, 400pp, £20
Soon after the Dieppe Raid had taken place, one of the officers involved said that it was a sea parallel of the charge of the Light Brigade. It lasted ten hours and out of 5,000 Canadian troops, there were 3,367 casualties, a rate of 68 per cent. The RAF lost 106 aircraft and the navy lost 33 landing craft and a destroyer, all for the sake of testing the feasibility of a landing and gleaning intelligence.
‘Bishop’s account of the operation is the best I’ve read,’ wrote Allan Mallinson in the Spectator. ‘He understands war, he understands battle, and he understands men. He marshals the material well; and there’s plenty of it, for failure generates much paper.’ Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, criticised the planning of the raid, while Vice-admiral Louis Mountbatten, in charge of Combined Operations Headquarters, exaggerated the lessons learned in order to deflect criticism.
In his Sunday Times review, Max Hastings praised Bishop’s ‘exemplary account of this wartime fiasco... It was afterwards claimed that Dieppe taught important lessons for D-day. This is true only if it is indispensable to stage a fiasco ahead of a proper operation of war. Bishop tells the sorry story with superb authority and verve.’
According to Daily Telegraph reviewer Saul David, ‘Bishop’s instinctive grasp of human nature and forensic analysis of the surviving evidence combine to pinpoint exactly why the hare-brained mission was launched and who was to blame... The hundred or so pages covering the raid itself are a masterclass of heartstopping historical narrative as we accompany the doomed soldiers on their hopeless mission.’