Operation JUBILEE: The Allied Raid on Dieppe (1942) -- A Historical Analysis of a Planning Failure

On 19 August 1942, over 6,000 soldiers waded ashore at Dieppe as part of Operation JUBILEE. The plan called for a raid-in-force by a closely coordinated joint attack of air, sea, and land forces. Planners anticipated that the joint operation would take only 15 hours for successful execution and withdrawal. Unfortunately, within 7 hours the raid on Dieppe ended in complete disaster. The losses were grim 60 percent of the ground force was killed, wounded, or captured 106 of 650 aircraft were destroyed 33 of 179 landing craft were lost at sea or on the beaches and one of eight destroyers was sunk. The raid on Dieppe was conceived as a coordinated joint plan of air, sea, and land battles. However, as planning progressed, it devolved into a complex and inflexible script in which synchronization was used to make up for operational shortfalls. Inevitably, Clausewitzian friction affected the battle, and the inability to achieve operational objectives within carefully prescribed timelines meant that the pre-conditions for successive steps were not met. It was not any single event that led to the catastrophe at Dieppe, but rather a cascading series of events which began with the drafting of the plan and ended in the failure of the mission. Operation JUBILEE did not fail because of poor intelligence, a lack of preparation, or the loss of operational surprise. It failed because a plan that originally started out as a joint battle of air, land, and sea forces, had devolved into an overly complex, scripted event that had no possible chance for success.