Dieppe Raid Research Paper

August 19, 1942 and the Allied forces were faced with a situation that was harsh. Germany had taken over most of Europe by this time and had pushed the Allies back to Britain which in turn, weakened their forces. The weakened Allied forces could not go on with their invasion of Western Europe so they pronounced a raid on the Germans through the seaside town of Dieppe, France. Was the battle at Dieppe a strategic effort or was it an act of senseless slaughter? The Dieppe Raid was an operation that was directly responsible for the senseless slaughter deaths of thousands of Canadians. This raid was strategically destined to be a failure, but the Allies had a lack of intelligence, and the outcome of this battle ended in a gruesome massacre. Dieppe's …show more content…
Strategy plays a crucial role in determining the success or failure of a battle. Allied soldiers were thrown into the middle of a battlefield with the purpose of failure on their minds. Brigadier General Forbes West, who was taken and held prisoner during the raid once stated "I feel that from the day planning began, it was intended to be a failure." Unfortunately, West was not the only troop from this operation that went into it knowing that it would fail. The Generals left in charge of planning the raid had only declared it with the motive of gaining knowledge for the future battle of D-day in 1944. In Arthur Kelly's article, it is stated that "the brutality of August 19, 1942 is contrasted by the kindness bestowed upon the raid since, namely its designation as 'a rehearsal' for D-Day. The lessons supposedly learned from the disastrous attack are easily refuted, yet are routinely used as justification for the raid." It therefore appears that it was widely accepted that Dieppe was clearly a suicide mission, and the only way to somehow justify the doomed raid, was to claim it yielded valuable information which led to the