Unauthorized Action: Mountbatten and the Dieppe Raid Hardcover – November 16, 1989

Had heard of this tragic piece of World War II and wanted to read more. This gave us this option.

Canada got plastered on that day-August 19,1942-the leadership in Canada's military at the time had backbone but forgot to use it that day. LTG Crerar,LTG McNaughton and the Task Force Commander-MG Hamilton- failed to speak up and protect the military personnel and allowed this disaster happen. Yes Canada's military wanted to meet the enemy dead on but should have scrubbed the whole plan even if they would lose their jobs. This is a great read for all the lessons it brings to the table. Great read, great facts of this brutal disaster in Canadian military history.

EXTREMELY ENLIGHTENING AND INTERESTING ACCOUNT THAT EVERY CANADIAN SHOULD READ AND ANYONE WHO WANTS TO KNOW WHAT REALLY HAPPENED IN WW ll BATTLES....MUCH FOOD FOR THOUGHT. GREAT BOOK!

Court intrigue, hubris, and dereliction of duty. That best describes this diplomatic history of Operation Jubilee — the World War II code name for the infamous Allied Commando raid on the Nazi-held coast of France.

The Dieppe raid ranks among the most highly publicized military disasters, yet facts about the background, implementation, and orders to launch the attack are still shrouded in secrecy. There is no archive record of signed orders for the operation, meaning that the whole undertaking was probably illegal. The British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Field Marshall Alan Brooke were inspecting the troops in Egypt when the Dieppe raid was launched from England.

Author Brian Loring Villa has examined all this from a political science angle. As the title of his book implies, the spotlight is put on bureaucratic failures to accept responsibility for actions that took place without official consent. That is where Louis Mountbatten —a British Navy Admiral with ties to the Royal Family — becomes a central figure in this story.

The book is well documented, but do not expect to read a bullet-by-bullet after action report. The author instead brings the planning stages into focus. From there, he builds a list of high-ranking generals and admirals who knew that the Dieppe landings were doomed from the start, but somehow the raid was launched without written permission from the British Prime Minister and his military Chiefs of Staff.

The author also poses questions about the selection of Dieppe as the target. In peacetime, the French seaside town was a popular tourist attraction with its harbor and waterfront casino. By August 1942, Dieppe was converted into a fortress by German occupation troops. Concrete bunkers bristled with shore-based artillery and automatic weapons that menaced Allied ships and aircraft. The buildup of firepower was strengthened by pre-existing barriers, including a large sea wall and high cliffs on either side of the pebbled beaches.

When British-led assault troops stormed ashore at Dieppe, there was little hope they could overcome all of these enemy strongpoints. To make matters worse the Royal Air Force and British Navy did not provide a heavy bombardment for the ground troops. The Canadian Army insisted that their troops be given the main task in what was a bloody frontal attack. With the odds stacked in favor of the German defenders, it should have been no surprise that the beach landing would fail.

Because there was no official endorsement for the Dieppe Raid, one might wonder how it was possible for this “Unauthorized Action” to go ahead. Prime Minister Winston Churchill was first to raise suspicions about that in December 1942, and again while writing his memoirs. Each time that Churchill wanted answers about the lack of signed orders in the official files, Admiral Mountbatten and General Hastings Ismay were not able to give a precise reply. Both officers skated around the enquiries and they tried to discourage Churchill from digging any deeper.

It should be pointed out that Churchill’s investigations were done privately and discreetly, because to make it public would underscore that he had lost control of the situation. He ultimately backed off from challenging Mountbatten and Ismay, and the reason is still open to speculation. Perhaps Churchill believed that he might need their support later and did not want to foreclose on that possibility.

The first eight months of 1942 went very bad for Churchill, due to the almost unbroken chain of victories by Germany and Japan. Churchill was under intense pressure to open another battle front to divert some of the German armed forces from attacking the Soviet Union, which had suffered staggering losses. Russian and American leaders proposed a significant Allied landing in France at the earliest possible date.

The most strident criticism of the Prime Minister came from within the British government. Churchill’s rivals threatened to bring down his administration with complaints that not enough aggressive military action was taken against the Nazis. The Soviet Embassy tried to exploit the internal pressure on Churchill by demanding further increases in military aid.

Another side effect of this rising political strife was that it created conditions for Mountbatten to begin his unlikely rise from being a mediocre captain of destroyers, to Admiral and Chief of Combined Operations. The main reason for Mountbatten’s sudden ascendence was his youth and enthusiasm for headline-grabbing military raids, which appealed to political ministers who were impatient with the cautious and conservative strategies advised by the military Chiefs of Staff.

Churchill had to do something fast to quell the criticism of his leadership, if only to buy time. It’s easy to understand why he might back a strategy of hit-and-run raids, for those operations could be planned and staged more quickly than a full-scale invasion of France.

Meanwhile, Canadian Prime Minister William Mackenzie King tried to block the combat deployment of his troops until public opinion and Canadian generals lobbied for taking the lead in a Cross-Channel attack. Mountbatten was willing to let the Canadians spearhead the assault, but the original plan was discarded because the air and naval services offered very limited cooperation. Charles Portal, the RAF Chief of Staff, feared high losses and he declined to risk Bomber Command to support a ground operation of questionable military value. The British Navy Chief of Staff, Admiral Dudley Pound, did not approve requests to provide offshore firepower from larger vessels such as cruisers and battleships.

Much has been made of German ships that detected the Channel crossing while it was in progress, but security was actually compromised before the raid, when the first attempt was aborted. Allied assault troops were loaded aboard landing craft and given information about objectives, then off-loaded and released back into British towns near the staging areas.

The revised plan to raid Dieppe was discredited and rejected by General Bernard Montgomery, but Mountbatten was apparently not willing to accept it. He was on the hot seat to justify the existence of his Combined Operations Headquarters, where little was accomplished since its inception. The British army, navy and air force Chiefs of Staff did not respect Mountbatten because he was inexperienced and reckless. They knew that Mountbatten had moved upward through social and political connections, and he used the same resources to keep the Dieppe Raid alive.

Mountbatten’s deputy, Captain John Hughes-Hallet, was also a naval officer and his pet project was solving problems of building and defeating port defenses. He was quoted to say, “We were not so much concerned at the intrinsic value of objectives on a particular raid, but rather with the feasibility of reaching the place undetected”. As author Villa put it, those were the words of a technocrat, interested only in overcoming existing limitations to possible operations; the military objectives could be worked in later. The personal motives of Captain Hughes-Hallet to get the Dieppe Raid pushed through at any cost is one of the most overlooked aspects of the battle.

Mountbatten was rightly assigned with the greatest burden of blame for the outcome, although Winston Churchill did admit that he wanted a big-scale raid to appease his dissenters. But the burning question still remains, why was he not asked to give formal approval for a major military operation like the Dieppe landings? It’s a matter of law, ethics, and the chain of command.

It’s worthy of mention that this book was first published over 25 years ago, but no one has seriously challenged the findings of the author. That is probably its best selling point. A fine effort though it could use more editing to clean up repetition.

I was prepared not to like this book. I say this at the beginning to give the reader of this review warning: I'm a convert, somewhat, to the author's point of view.
The Dieppe Raid is one of the puzzles of WW2. Why the British persisted in launching it when it had already been cancelled once, and was obviously a precarious proposition at best, has never been satisfactorily explained. My worry was that Villa, being a Canadian, would take an explicitly anti-British point of view, with which I would take issue. He doesn't.
Instead, the book focuses on the decision-making process, and the way governments launch operations in wartime. This part of the book is fascinating, and enlightening. His premise (that Mountbatten launched the raid himself, as Combined Operations head, without the required approval of the Chiefs of Staff) is a bit of a stretch, but by the end of the book, I was willing to say I needed to see an alternative explanation before I believed otherwise.

The book's style is rather formal, and there's little attempt at humor or levity, but the writing is clear and incisive. The author has obviously done his homework. There are separate chapters on the navy and RAF, both of which display knowledge of the overall context of the period of the war in which Dieppe took place, and the circumstances under which the decision was made. All of this strongly adds to the book itself, and the author's thesis. All in all a very good book.

An excellent book with a chilling additional chapter in the updated edition.

Very scholarly work, examines in detail the supposition that Mountbatten launched the Dieppe Raid without permission or authorization. The claim is supported by evidence, though it may take several readings to fully grasp the intricacies of the argument being presented.

Focusses entirely on politics and thus will not satisfy those looking for the military details of this action, nor the planning issues. A well focussed, well written, and - if one reads the final chapter added to the first edition - chilling story of how this disastrous raid came into being and who may have been finally responsible.