10 August 2012

Revisiting 1942 Dieppe Raid

Was the Dieppe raid a cover to steal an Enigma machine?

New research suggests the real intent of the historic raid on Dieppe in 1942 was to steal a machine that would help crack top-secret German codes.

Military historian David O’Keefe spent 15 years searching through the once-classified and ultra-secret war files and says the real purpose behind the Dieppe operation—which cost hundreds of Canadian soldiers their lives — was to capture advanced coding technology from the German headquarters near the French beach.

“For years, so many veterans, men who stormed the beaches and ended up in prisoners of war camps, had no clue what the reason was that they were there,” O’Keefe tells Global National’s Christina Stevens.

“They had their own missions, but they did not understand what the driving force was behind the raid.”

Historians have assigned many purposes to the disastrous raid: to gather intelligence from prisoners and captured materials, to assess Germany’s response to amphibious raids, to boost Allied morale and to assure the Soviets—locked in a titanic struggle with Germany — that the west was committed to fighting in Europe.


Good article to go along with this map at the link above.

h/t Shelldrake

By: Brant

1 comment:

Brian said...

I strongly doubt this. I refer you to my article on Dieppe in S^T #255 for why.
Capturing an Enigma machine may have been an additional objective, much as the search for a German radar set was one of the many smaller nice-to-haves on the list of objectives for the raid. But it seems to me the way RUTTER, the original operation that was scrubbed six weeks before JUBILEE, was planned would not have optimized their chances of grabbing one.