Unauthorized Action: Mountbatten and the Dieppe Raid 0195406796

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Brian Loring Villa

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One of the most memorable events of the Second World War took place on 19 August 1942, when the largest amphibious raiding force in modern history made its way across the English Channel towards the Germanoccupied French port of Dieppe. The result, a few hours later, was a disaster. That some 3,300 Canadian soldiers and officers should wait over two-and-a-half years for combat and then be killed, wounded, or captured in a single morning is one of the great tragedies of the Second World War. It was a bitter chapter, difficult for Canadians ever to ac¬ cept. For more than forty-five years a cloud of mystery has hung over the event, which has seemed to defy all rational explanation. Why was it executed when it was known to court failure? Who was responsible? On the basis of much new research and a meticulous and sensitive analysis of all the forces—political, military, diplomatic, and personal—that shaped the disaster, Brian Loring Villa answers these questions and casts new light on the horrendous affair, in the process delineating the element of in¬ trigue and the acts of folly that lay behind it. The event is examined in the context of the political pressures that were being exerted on Britain, Canada, and the United States and of the Soviet Union's demands for as¬ sistance in the form of a Second Front. De¬ spite lost and destroyed documentation, and the obfuscation engendered by the authors Continued on back flap

Oxford University Press

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https://archive.org/details/unauthorizedacti0000vill_o9d5

Mountbatten and the Dieppe Raid

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of the raid, determined to avoid blame. Un¬ authorized Action contains revealing studies of Britain's chiefs of the Army, Navy, and Air Force—in the midst of a war that seemd on the way to being lost—who acquiesced in the ill-fated raid. Most striking is the portrait of Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Com¬ bined Operations, who was at the start of a meteoric rise, which reveals how ambition, publicity, and high patronage all played their part in one of the war's most controver¬ sial careers. His responsibility for Dieppe becomes clear as in no other study to date. This engrossing and highly readable analysis of decision-making, and of the numerous motivations that lay behind the execution ,of the raid on Dieppe, is fascinat¬ ing in its detective-like treatment of facts and evidence, right down to the startling resolu¬ tion of the principal mystery. It is a brilliant revisionist contribution to the literature of the Second World War. Students of political science will value Un¬ authorized Action as a case-study of defective decision-making, which is summed up in an Appendix that examines the evidence from the perspective of a vitally important ques¬ tion: Why do governments do what they know they should not do? is Associate Professor of History at the University of Ottawa. A Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard University, and ob¬ taining high thesis honours there, he has been awarded, for excellence in scholarly publication, the Binkley-Stephenson Prize of the Organization of American Historians and the Bernath Prize of the Society for His¬ torians of American Foreign Relations. This is his first book.

BRIAN LORING VILLA

The jacket photograph is of Lord Louis Mountbatten giving a morale-boosting talk in 1942 to one of the Canadian Scottish regiments off the Isle of Wight, where they were in training before seeing action at Dieppe. (Courtesy the Imperial War Museum.) ISBN 0-19-540679-6