At dawn of 19th August 1942, six thousand and one hundred Allied soldiers, of whom roughly five thousand were Canadians, landed at the French port of Dieppe in their first major test of the defence of the German-held coastline of Europe since Dunkirk. A combination of over-rigid planning,inadequate communication; lack of supporting firepower; and in the final hour before the raid, absolutebad luck inflicted on the Allies made the Dieppe raid one of their worst defeats in World War Two.The codename given to the operation was Jubilee and its aim was to capture Dieppe to provide theAllied war planners with the vital information about the enemy preparedness for the Russians torelieve their sorely-pressed armies in the East. The Dieppe raid also served as a risky opportunity forAllied Forces to test their new invasion techniques and equipment with little experience. TheCanadians who had been itching to get into action for two years, were flung into battle ill-prepared andscarcely armed, reduced to attempting to overcome concrete and barbed wire with little more thansheer courage. In nine hours of carnage and horror Jubilee became a disaster. The plan for a raid on the port of Dieppe originated at Combined Operations Headquarters,London, in April 1942, the month, by Churchills direction, Lord Louis Mountbatten was given thetitle of Chief of Combined Operations. The German armies had plunged deeper into the Soviet union,and Russian losses were appalling; Stalin began exhorting Churchill to open a second front at theearliest possible moment and thereby relieve his hard-pressed armies. A great public clamour forsupporting the Russians arose in Britain, Canada and the United States (Hunter, 57). It wasconsidered important that there should be a raid to afford a test of the new technique and materialwhich had been developed. A fairly considerable assault fleet was being built up, and althoughCombined Operations Headquarters (C.O...
