Dieppe Raid

[vykkagur]

I first became aware of the Dieppe Raid when back in the mid to late 1970's, as a child, I pulled a copy of, Dieppe, The Shame and the Glory, off the bookshelf and started looking at it and then started asking other family members about it. At this time there wasn't any Enigma code connection made with the raid and indeed it wasn't so widely known that Britain had broken the Enigma code during WW2.

Dieppe: The shames and the glory: Amazon.co.uk: Terence Robertson: Books

All histories pertaining to WWII and written before 1977, have to be re-written, or at least re-examined, with Bletchley Park and Ultra in mind. Our whole view of the North African/Mediterranean campaign alone is completely changed by Ultra.

I've read that Dieppe book, courtesy of our public library when I was a kid, whiling away the time between classes immersed in history, especially WWII. I've also seen the documentary to which you refer. It's actually a Canadian production, one of a number made by that same group. It speculates that Ian Fleming, of 007 fame, was waiting offshore for the commandos to deliver to him the codebooks. Certainly intelligence-gathering teams would have been attached to this raid, as they were for all such operations, and they undoubtedly targeted the communications installation. That they were specifically after the Enigma materials I'm not so sure. The miracle of Bletchley was not just that they had broken the German secret (building on the prewar work of the Poles, brilliant mathematicians who started well ahead of us.) The real miracle is that they kept it all a secret from the Germans right through the war. The Germans never lost faith that their system was unbreakable. If they'd thought for one minute that we had broken it, they would have changed to something else, with disastrous results for us. No piece of Ultra material could be acted upon unless it could be reasonably attributed to another source, lest the enemy figured out what was going on. That was the whole reason we maintained a base on Malta, for example. The codebooks salvaged from U-559 were believed by the Germans to have gone down with the ship. If you take the same materials from a shore installation, their loss would be obvious and the jig would be up. Photograph them maybe, but they couldn't disappear. I think the documentary was a clever bit of Canadian story-telling, but flawed in its conclusions.