Give at least five reasons why you think the Dieppe Raid was a military failure.

Answer 1

Ha - well, there was about 20 reasons, but ok, we can boil it down to 5. But we also have to talk about the good things that eventually came from it though.

The problem with the Dieppe Raid was it was too big and too complicated to be a true raid, and too small to be a real invasion. A raid is supposed to be a small elite group with a single-threaded mission who go in, hit hard, and get out fast. In the raid on Dieppe, over 6,000 men were involved and they had to be coordinated on 6 different landing beaches and there were several competing missions involved. That is too many people trying to do too many things, and that is not a raid. That is an over-complicated mess.

In answer to your question, the five most important reasons for it to be thought of as a failure would be:

1. There must be effective pre-landing naval and air bombardment. If you aren't willing to risk your big ships to get close in and provide fire support, then don't send in the troops.
2. There must be the element of surprise;
3. You must have proper intelligence concerning enemy strength, fortifications and defenses
4. Avoid direct frontal attack on heavily defended fixed fortifications whenever possible
5. Make sure you have a proven plan and equipment for getting everyone out and back home



None of this happened on the raid. Less than half the force made it back.

On the good side, many, many lessons were learned here, and the raid wound up being a dress rehearsal for the Normandy invasion 2 years later, in 1944. If Dieppe had not happened, the Allies probably would have tried to land a year earlier in 1943 instead, and would have had a high chance of failing. Instead, the Allies hunkered down and amassed a super strong overwhelming force and used the additional time to do extra careful planning, and so in 1944 things went pretty smooth. It has been said that for every 1 soldier killed at Dieppe, 10 others lived at Normandy, due to the lessons learned. One of the other big things that happened was we successfully snatched a German Enigma code machine, which helped us continue to break the German codes and read their message traffic throughout the war.