“I am convinced that nearly all wars are caused so that someone will profit and those who profited and those who are profiting now are the International Financiers, the Jews. Gather together the fifty most wealthy Jewish Financiers, the men who create wars for their own profits, control them and you will put an end to it all.” — Henry Ford
By William Anderson
In the years before World War II, the American public had no desire to go to war in either Europe or Asia. We, as Americans, had no interest in warring with Germany, Italy or Japan. Yet America was forced to battle the Axis Powers for four long years at the sole behest of International Jewry.
In fact, World Jewry commenced its War against Germany in 1933, the year Hitler came to power, even before he had time to begin implementing a program for pulling Germany out of its own economic depression. [See headline below dated 3/24/33]
Jewry’s declaration of a “holy war” against Germany was issued by Samuel Untermeyer of the World Jewish Federation who said in the New York “Times” of 7 Aug. 1933 that it would be means of an “economic boycott that will undermine the Hitler regime and bring the German people to their senses by destroying their export trade on which their very existence depends.” Furthermore, the Toronto “Evening Telegram” of 26 Feb. 1940 quotes Rabbi Maurice L. Perlzweig of the World Jewish Congress as telling a Canadian audience that “the World Jewish Congress has been at war with Germany for seven years” (i.e. 1933).
They somehow forget to say a word on any of this during all those History Channel documentaries. These stinking Jew mothers get us Goyim into wars killing each other all the time! (INCOG)
Jews were obviously willing to back up their threats, for the London “Sunday Chronicle” of 2 Jan. 1938 reported that “leaders of International Jewry” had met in Geneva, Switzerland to set up a $2.5 BILLION fund to undermine the economic stability of Germany.
However, Jewish boycotts against Germany failed to bring that nation to its knees as Hitler had already freed Germany from dependence on Jewish usury. Since economic pressure by World Jewry could not break the back of Germany, it was determined that an actual war would be necessary to destroy Hitler.
The Jewish desire for war was admitted to by Rabbi Felix Mendelsohn in the Chicago “Sentinel” of 8 Oct. 1942 where he states: “The Second World War is being fought for the defense of the fundamentals of Judaism.” Thus, Rabbi Mendelsohn flatly expresses the view that WWII was a Jewish war.
This Jewish scheme came to fruition in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. Britain and France, under Jewish domination, then declared war on Germany, conveniently ignoring the fact that the Soviet Union (under Jewish rule) had also invaded Poland.
As proof, James Forrestal, later to become Secretary of Defense, in his diary of 27 Dec. 1945 notes that he played golf with Joseph Kennedy, FDR’s ambassador to Britain, who told him that ex-Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain “stated that America and the world Jews had forced England into war.” For his candor and later opposition to the bandit state of Israel, Forrestal was murdered in 1949 (ruled a “suicide”). [The Forrestal Diaries, Life Magazine October 15th, 1951]
Jews throughout the world screamed that Germany was intent on ruling the world, but Gen. George C. Marshall admitted after the war, in testimony before Congress, that no proof could be found that Hitler planned any conquest of the world.
In fact, Hitler’s actions against Czechoslovakia over the Sudentenland and Poland over Danzig were just part of Hitler’s long stated desire to re-acquire the territory taken from Germany after WWI in the Treaty of Versailles.
While stones are being cast, it should be recalled that after Germany took back the Sudentenland from Czechoslovakia, Poland seized the territory of Teschen from the Czechs which it had no claims toward.
So, after the Jews had ignited a war in Europe, it was found to be necessary to draw America into that war as France had fallen and Britain tottered on the brink of defeat.
To bring the U.S. into this Jewish war, International Jewry had the services of a master at corrupt politics — the one and only Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Interestingly enough, Col. Curtis Dall who was once FDR’s son-in-law accused Roosevelt of being partly Jewish. In any event, Roosevelt was surrounded by plenty of Jewish advisors such as Bernard Baruch, S. I. Rosenman, Sidney Weinburg, Sidney Hillman and Felix Frankfurter.*
For the first time, Jewry had a President who was totally subservient to them and they spared no effort to keep him in office [four terms]. For example, when it appeared that Sen. Huey Long would defeat Roosevelt for the 1939 Democratic nomination, he was assassinated by Dr. Carl Weiss, a Jew.
Nevertheless, American public opinion was overwhelmingly opposed to any involvement in WWII. Americans realized that they had been duped into WWII and were not interested in losing the lives of loved ones in a war that offered no benefits to the U.S. In effect, Americans were heeding the advice of George Washington in his “Farewell Address” where he warned that Americans must not become involved in entangling alliances with foreign nations.
Those patriots who followed Washington’s sound advice were disparagingly referred to as “isolationists,” but they were, in actuality, neutralists. Thus Congress, acting on the will of the people, passed the Neutrality Act of 1935 which embargoed any U.S. arms from being sent to a warring nation.
About three years later, in 1938, Rep. Louis Ludlow of Indiana introduced a resolution requiring a public vote of support for any declaration of war by Congress. Roosevelt and the Jews knew this measure could easily destroy their efforts, so an all out attack on the resolution was launched. As a result, the Ludlow bill was narrowly defeated.
The Jews had good reason to block the resolution for the American Institute for Public Opinion (AIPO) released at that time a poll showing 83% of the citizens opposed to U.S. intervention in an European war.
Moreover, in April 1939, during the height of war fever, a whopping 95% opposed American entry into a war against Germany. That’s right, virtually every citizen was soundly against the U.S. involving itself in a foreign war. As a result, Congress strengthened the Neutrality Act by barring commerce and travel, as well as arms, to any belligerent power.
At this point, the Jews began to show signs of desperation, but these wily manipulators of world events still had a few tricks up their collective sleeve. So, in 1939 an immense propaganda campaign, the likes of which had never before been seen, was launched. No stone was left unturned in Jewry’s assault on the minds of the American people.
One was bombarded with the most outlandish lies about Hitler and Germany from all sides -in newspapers, magazines, books, radio and motion pictures. FDR also unleashed the powerful, persuasive techniques of the federal government in the blitz to “hate Germany.”
To get an idea of just how far this propaganda attack went, one should note that the Jew Theodore Kaufman wrote a book entitled “Germany Must Perish,” which outlined a plan to exterminate Germans by sterilizing 48 million of them. Believe it or not, this call for genocide by a Jew was well received in many influential circles. [Online Book: Germany Must Perish!]
Conversely, Germany never carried out a “holocaust” against the Jews, but after the war was accused of doing so any way. This “holocaust” trumped up by Jewry has been used since WWII to divert attention from their own machinations to plunge America into the maelstrom of yet another war.
The Jew orchestrated assault of hate against Germany was successful in cowering Congress into lifting the arms embargo and allowed the free flow of weapons to Britain and later to the Soviet Union. This action made U.S. ships carrying the arms fair targets for German subs; but no attacks occurred [until October 31, 1941], which is certainly odd behavior for a “madman” (Hitler) bent on “world rule.”
While Congress succumbed to the barrage of hate propaganda, the public remained totally against the war. For instance, in Oct. 1940 about 83% polled were opposed to U.S. involvement. In April 1941, it was 85% against and in July 1941, opposition was pegged at a healthy 79%. Not surprisingly, the pollsters quit asking the question at this point, as FDR and Jewry had all but gotten war officially declared.
By 1940, Roosevelt had rammed through Congress a draft and conscription although polls indicated at least 50% of the public was against such a move. By now it should be perfectly obvious that World Jewry had begun planning for U.S. entry into the war at least three years before Pearl Harbor, despite overwhelming opposition.
Speaking of Pearl Harbor, it is important to understand the complete facts surrounding the “surprise attack.” While 95% of all respondents were opposed to war in 1939, about 90% indicated they were willing to fight if directly attacked. Operating on this information, Jewry did everything possible to goad either Germany or Italy into attacking America.
However, the bait was refused as Hitler was attempting at that time to negotiate a peace with England, which was flatly rejected by the Jew lackey Churchill.
Thus Jewry’s attention turned toward Japan, which had a mutual defense pact with Germany and Italy. Japan had been engaged in a war with China which FDR and the Jews tried to use as an excuse for American intervention, even though the events in Asia were of no concern to America.
Jewish, not American, interests however were what concerned Roosevelt and in July 1941, he froze Japanese assets in the U.S. and embargoed trade. This was reason enough to declare war, but Japan humbly proposed to sit down and negotiate U.S.-Japanese differences. Instead of accepting the offer, FDR insulted Japanese Ambassador Nomura and refused to meet with Prime Minister Konoye.
As a result, Konoye and his “peace party” were replaced by Gen. Tojo and his “war party,” yet Japan continued to make peace overtures only to have them all flatly rejected. Finally, on 26 Nov. 1941, Roosevelt sent an ultimatum to Japan which amounted to a virtual declaration of war. This ultimatum, according to Prof. Harry Elmer Barnes, was actually drafted by Jew Harry Dexter White (Weiss) in collaboration with Jewish Treasury Secretary Harry Morgenthau.
It was this ultimatum, penned by two Jews, that forced Japan to attack or else “lose face,” which in Oriental thinking is a fate worse than death. The final, sorry episode of this disgusting chain of events is that Washington knew of the impending attack on Pearl Harbor at least 12 hours before the blow fell, but refused to warn military officers there.
The U.S. had been forewarned since the Japanese message code had been broken and America was thus able to monitor Japanese dispatches. No word was sent to Pearl Harbor by FDR and the Jews as the messages revealed that the attack should be called off if it appeared that the Americans were prepared.
So International Jewry by going through the “back door” had successfully ensnared America into WWII; a war that would cost millions of lives and billions of dollars. The bottom line of the war would be a world under the total subjugation of Jewry through its twin arms of Communism and Zionism.
These facts have been covered up and ignored in the mass media, but Charles Lindbergh, for one, recognized where the finger of proof pointed. In his “Wartime Journals,” he states that “the Jews, the Roosevelt administration, and British sympathizers combined to encourage the U.S. to enter World War II.”
Lindbergh and other patriots sought to stop Jewry’s war plans by setting up the America First Committee. The committee found widespread support, but could not overcome the billions spent by Jews to brainwash the public into accepting war after Pearl Harbor.
And it is Jewry which best recognizes why the U.S. entered WWII. “The American Hebrew,” in an editorial of 24 July 1942, declared that “whenever an American or a Filipino fell at Bataan or Corregidor or at any other of the now historic spots where MacArthur’s men put up their remarkable fight, their survivors could have said with truth: the real reason that boy went to his death was because Hitler’s anti-semitic movement succeeded in Germany.”
The above quotation from a Jewish newspaper is an admission that the U.S. entered WWII only at the behest of World Jewry — a war Jewry declared all the way back in 1933! Of course, this admission was intended only for consumption by a Jewish audience to keep them in the know, which tends to make it all the more revealing.
Any American involvement in a foreign conflict should be judged as to whether it is in the best interest of the American nation; yet the U.S. entered WWII because it was in the best interest of International Jewry.
Thus, the Jews forced the U.S. into war against the public’s will in 1941 and the $64 million question is will it happen again? Events are already pointing towards a build-up of war hysteria. Without a doubt, Jewry is leading America by the nose towards war in the Middle East on behalf of the bandit state of Israel.
Will we learn from the lessons of the past or will we once again find ourselves forced into war for the benefit of World Jewry?
SOURCE: WHITE CIVIL RIGHTS SITE NOW TRASHED BY JEWRY!
Real Truth: WW1, WW2, Zionist WW3 Agenda & Palestine – Exposed by Jewish Defector.
The Truth will stand on its own merit. A Jewish Defector Warns America:
Introductory Note — Benjamin H. Freedman was one of the most intriguing and amazing individuals of the 20th century.
Mr. Freedman, born in 1890, was a successful Jewish businessman of New York City who was at one time the principal owner of the Woodbury Soap Company. He broke with organized Jewry after the Judeo-Communist victory of 1945, and spent the remainder of his life and the great preponderance of his considerable fortune, at least 2.5 million dollars, exposing the Jewish tyranny which has enveloped the United States.
Mr. Freedman knew what he was talking about because he had been an insider at the highest levels of Jewish organizations and Jewish machinations to gain power over our nation. Mr. Freedman was personally acquainted with Bernard Baruch, Samuel Untermyer, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Kennedy, and John F. Kennedy, and many more movers and shakers of our times.
This speech was given before a patriotic audience in 1961 at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., on behalf of Conde McGinley’s patriotic newspaper of that time, Common Sense. Though in some minor ways this wide-ranging and extemporaneous speech has become dated, Mr. Freedman’s essential message to us — his warning to the West — is more urgent than ever before.
* FDR did have Jewish ancestry. Please read my Day of Deceit: FDR and Pearl Harboron how FDR goaded the Japs into attacking us at Pearl Harbor as a way to inflame Americans and backdoor us into a war against Hitler (who successfully threw off the chains of International Jewish money). Folks, we’ve long been manipulated by evil people who have no problem seeing you or your children killed for the greed and ambitions of World Jewry. Look at Israel’s connections to 9/11 and the resulting never-ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for chrissakes!
Benjamin Freedman’s 1961 Speech at the Willard Hotel (Complete)
Benjamin H. Freedman’s excellent speech on how World War One (and Two) really started and why the U.S. was eventually drawn in.
Churchill Lied About Hitler
You be the judge: did Churchill really save Britain? Britain was still paying its World War II loans in 2006—and keep in mind that the war was over in 1945
…by Jonas E. Alexis
One of the most interesting things about Zionist ideology and history is that there is so much nonsense and claptrap that it will take a historian or serious scholar the rest of his natural life to expose them all.
Kevin Myers of the Irish Independent declared back in 2012 that “Everything people believed about Hitler’s intentions toward Britain was a myth created by Churchill.” For example, Churchill perpetuated that Hitler desired to invade Britain in 1940, but it was a total fabrication.
On the contrary, Myers declared, Hitler “admired the British Empire,” and that he “offered terms that did not involve German control of Britain. Churchill refused to allow these terms to be read to the cabinet, and they remain prudently concealed under the 100-year rule.”[1]
Myers wrote,
“Instead, Churchill’s determination to keep Britain at war turned what had been merely a continental defeat of its army into the enduring myth that in 1940, Britain faced a war for national survival.
“But the German naval leader, Raeder, had repeatedly forbidden his staff from planning an invasion of Britain. And far from wanting to continue the war, in June 1940, Hitler ordered 20pc of his army to be demobilised, in order to get the German economy going again.”
“The ‘invasion fleet’ that the Nazis began to assemble that summer was no more capable of invading Britain than it was Hawaii. It was war by illusion: its purpose was to get the British to the negotiating table.”
Myers concluded,
“Just about everything that people believed about Hitler’s intentions towards Britain in 1940 — and still believe today — was a myth created by Churchill, which he probably came to believe himself. Consider all the facts above, and then consider how that myth has endured, despite them. Makes you wonder, no?”[2]
Yeah, it should make us all wonder. What is so pathetic is that Myers got paid to say things like that, but Holocaust revisionists have been saying the same thing for the past thirty years or so and have been persecuted all across the globe! David Irving has been writing about these things since the past thirty years or so, but he always gets into trouble because he does say some uncomfortable but true things about Churchill and Hitler.
Perhaps the bigger issue is that Churchill concocted lies about Hitler because he was working for the Dreadful Few. In fact, right after his father’s death, Churchill became Ernest “Cassel’s creature,” one of the most “influential Jewish moneylenders” then.[3] Once that happened, Churchill began to hate the Germans. In the process, he starved the German civilians to death and bragged about. This is Churchill at his best:
“Starve the whole population—men, women and children, old and young, wounded and sound—into submission.”[4]
Churchill got his wish:
“In December 1918 the German Board of Public Health claimed that 763,000 Germans had died because of the blockade. In April 1919 Dr. Marx Rubner claimed that another 100,000 Germans who died between April and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in July, so the number of Germans who died from Winston Churchill’s starvation blockade most probably approximates the number of Irish who died during the Great Famine.”[5]
Churchill was obviously used by the Zionists to starve the Germans. But by 1920, he seemed to have realized there was something mendacious and pernicious about the ideology known as Zionism. He said:
“There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution, by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews, it is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others.
“With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd) or of Krassin or Radek — all Jews.
“In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses.”[6]
Yet Churchill’s real actions defeated all this great insight. In fact, he ended up joining the greatest mass murderer (Stalin) in the twentieth century in order to defeat Hitler.
In 2013, popular historian Max Hastings wrote in the Daily Mail that Churchill did summon bold lies, but those lies were good because “Churchill did it to save Britain…”[7]
You be the judge: did this man really save Britain? Britain was still paying its World War II loans in 2006—and keep in mind that the war was over in 1945.[8]
Now, what if the debt is six trillion dollars (the Iraq War)? How long will it take to pay that?
You do the math and see how generational children will have a huge burden on their shoulders. What is equally worse is that the mad man in Tel Aviv is telling us all to wage a frontal war against a decent country such as Iran.
Perhaps the Obama administration should upgrade the “chickenshit” thing.
[1] Kevin Myers, “Everything people believed about Hitler’s intentions toward Britain was a myth created by Churchill,” Irish Independent, June 19, 2012.
[2] Ibid.
[3] E. Michael Jones, Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism as the Conflict Between Labor and Usury (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2014), 1201-1202.
[4] Ibid., 1211.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Winston Churchill, “Zionism Versus Bolshevism: The Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,” Sunday Illustrated Herald, February 1920.
[7] Max Hastings “Yes, they both used lies to wage war. But Churchill did it to save Britain – Blair did it to save himself,”Daily Mail, July 2, 2013.
[8] “What’s a little debt between friends?,” BBC, May 10, 2006; see also “Britain to repay £2bn First World War debt,” The Independent, October 31, 2014.
Rense.com
The Reasons Historians Call
WWII A ‘Jewish Creation’
From YesConceptsyesconcepts@mweb.co.za
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The Allies Second Front in World War II: Why Were Canadian Troops Sacrificed at Dieppe?
August 19, 1942, 70 Years Ago
This article was first published by GR in August 2012
The tide of World War II turned in early December 1941, when a counter-offensive of the Red Army in front of Moscow signalled the failure of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg strategy. That setback doomed Nazi Germany to lose a war it had to fight without the benefit of Caucasian oil and other resources it had hoped to gain through a speedy victory over the Soviet Union. The war was far from over, however, and for the time being the Red Army continued to do battle with its back to the wall, so to speak. Material help from the United States and Great Britain was forthcoming, but what the Soviets really needed from their allies was effective military assistance. And so Stalin asked Churchill and Roosevelt to open a second front in Western Europe. An Anglo-American landing in France, Belgium, or Holland would have forced the Germans to withdraw troops from the Eastern Front, and would therefore have afforded the Soviets much-needed relief.
In Great Britain and in the USA, which had entered the war only recently, in December 1941, political and military leaders were divided with respect to the possibilities and the merits of a second front. A number of British and American army commanders – including the American chief of staff, George Marshall, as well as General Eisenhower – wanted to land troops in France as soon as possible. They enjoyed the support of President Roosevelt, at least initially. He had promised Churchill that the United States would give priority to the war against Germany, and would settle accounts with Japan later; this decision became known as the “Germany First” principle. Consequently, Roosevelt was eager to deal with Germany right away, and this task required opening a second front. In May 1942 Roosevelt promised the Soviet minister of foreign affairs, Molotov, that the Americans would open a second front before the end of the year.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, on the other hand, was an outspoken opponent of a second front. He may have feared, as some historians suggest, that a landing in France might lead to a duplication of the murderous warfare associated with the battlefields of northern France in the First World War. But it is more likely that Churchill liked the idea that Hitler and Stalin were administering a major bloodletting to each other on the Eastern Front, and that he believed that London and Washington would benefit from a stalemated war in the East. Since he already had nearly three years of war experience, Churchill had much influence on Roosevelt, a newcomer to the war in Europe. It is therefore understandable that the opinion of the British leader ultimately prevailed, and that plans for opening a second front in 1942 were quietly discarded. In any event, Roosevelt himself discovered that this course of action – or rather, inaction – opened up some attractive prospects.
For example, it allowed him, in spite of the “Germany First” principle, to quietly commit a high proportion of manpower and equipment to the war in the Pacific, which was very much “his” war, and where American interests were more directly at stake than in Europe. He and his military and political advisors also started to realize that defeating Germany would require huge sacrifices, which the American people would not be delighted to bring. Landing in France was tantamount to jumping into the ring for a face-off with a formidable German opponent, and, even if ultimately successful, that would be a bloody and costly affair. Was it not far wiser to stay safely on the sidelines, at least for the time being, and let the Soviets slug it out against the Nazis?
With the Red Army providing the cannon fodder needed to vanquish Germany, the Americans and their British allies would be able to minimize their own losses. Better still, they would be able to build up their strength in order to intervene decisively at the right moment, like a deus ex machina, when the Nazi enemy and the Soviet ally would both be exhausted. With Great Britain at its side, the USA would then be able to play the leading role in the camp of the victors, to act as supreme arbiter in the sharing of the spoils of the supposedly common victory, and to create a “new order” of its liking in Europe. In the spring and summer of 1942, with the Nazis and Soviets locked in a titanic battle, watched from a distance by the “Anglo-Saxon” tertius gaudens, it did indeed look as if such a scenario might come to pass. (Incidentally, the hope for a long, drawn-out conflict between Berlin and Moscow was reflected in numerous American newspaper articles and in the much-publicized remark already uttered by Senator Harry S. Truman on June 24, 1941, only two days after the start of the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union: “If we see that Germany is winning, we should help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we should help Germany, so that as many as possible perish on both sides.”)
Of course, the Americans and the British could not reveal the true reasons why they did not wish to open a second front. Instead, they pretended that their combined forces were not yet strong enough for such an undertaking. It was said then – and it is still claimed now – that in 1942 the British and Americans were not yet ready for a major operation in France. Allegedly, the naval war against the German U-boats first had to be won in order to safeguard the required transatlantic troop transports. However, troops had been successfully ferried from North America to Great Britain for quite some time, and in the fall of that same year the Americans would experience no trouble whatsoever landing a sizable force in distant North Africa, on the same side of the admittedly dangerous Atlantic Ocean. (These landings, known as Operation Torch, involving the occupation of French colonies such as Morocco, did not force the Germans to transfer troops from the Eastern Front, did not provide any relief to the Soviets, and can therefore not be construed as the opening of a second front.)
In reality, it was already possible in the summer of 1942 to land a sizable force in France or elsewhere in Western Europe and open a second front. The British army had recuperated from the troubles of 1940, and large numbers of American and Canadian troops had joined them on the British Isles and were ready for action. Furthermore, it was not a secret that the Germans only had relatively few troops available to defend thousands of kilometres of Atlantic coast, and these troops also happened to be of considerably inferior quality compared to their forces on the Eastern Front. On the Atlantic coast, Hitler had about 60 divisions at his disposal, which were generally deemed to be second-rate, while no less than 260 German divisions did battle in the East. It is a fact, furthermore, that on the French coast in 1942 the German troops were not yet as strongly entrenched as they would be later, namely, at the time of the landings in Normandy in June 1944; the order to build the fortifications of the famous Atlantic Wall was only given by Hitler in August 1942, and the construction would drag on from the fall of 1942 until the spring of 1944.
Stalin, who knew that the German defences in Western Europe were weak, continued to press London and Washington for a landing in France. Churchill also experienced considerable domestic pressure in favour of a second front, for example from members of his own cabinet, such as Richard Stafford Cripps, and particularly from the side of the trade unions, whose members were sympathetic to the plight of the Soviets. Thankfully, relief from this relentless pressure came suddenly to the British Prime Minister in the form of a tragedy that appeared to demonstrate conclusively that the Western Allies were not yet able to open a second front: on August 19, 1942, a contingent of Allied soldiers, sent on a mission from England to the French port of Dieppe, seemingly in an effort to open some sort of “second front,” were tragically routed there by the Germans.
Of the total of 6,086 men who made it ashore, 3,623 – almost 60 percent – were either killed, wounded, or captured. The British Army and Navy suffered approximately 800 casualties, and the RAF lost 106 aircraft. The 50 American Rangers who participated in the raid had 3 casualties. But the bulk of the losses were suffered by Canadian troops, with nearly 5,000 men the bulk of the entire force; no less than 3,367 of them – 68 percent! – became casualties; about 900 were killed, nearly 600 were wounded, and the rest were taken prisoner. Of losses such as these, it is traditionally considered that they were “not in vain”; but unsurprisingly, the media and the public wanted to know what the objectives of this raid had been, and what it had achieved, especially in Canada. However, the political and military authorities only provided unconvincing explanations, though these duly found their way into the history books. For example, the raid was presented by Churchill as a “reconnaissance in force,” as a necessary test of the German coastal defences. But did one really have to sacrifice thousands of men to learn that the Germans were strongly entrenched in a seaport surrounded by high cliffs, in other words, in a natural fortress? In any event, crucial information such as the location of pillboxes, cannon, and machine gun positions could have been gleaned through aerial reconnaissance and through the services of local resistance fighters.
Talking about the Résistance, the raid was also purported to boost the morale of the French partisans and the French population in general; if so, it was unquestionably counterproductive. Indeed, the outcome of the operation, an ignominious withdrawal from a beach littered with abandoned equipment and corpses, and the sight of exhausted and dejected Canadian solders being marched off to a POW camp, was not likely to cheer up the French. If anything, the affair provided grist for the propaganda mill of the Germans, allowing them to ridicule the incompetence of the Allies, boast of their own military prowess, and thus dishearten the French while giving a lift to Germany’s own civilians, who were very much in need of some good news on account of the constant flow of bad tidings from the East.
Last but not least, Operation Jubilee was also claimed to have been an effort to provide some relief to the Soviets. It is obvious, however, that Dieppe was merely a pinprick, unlikely to make any difference whatsoever with respect to the fighting on the Eastern Front. It did not cause the Germans to transfer troops from the East to the West; to the contrary, after Dieppe the Germans could feel reasonably sure that in the near future no second front would be forthcoming, so that they actually felt free to transfer troops from the west to the East, where they were desperately needed. To the Red Army, then, Dieppe brought no relief.
Historians have mostly been happy to regurgitate the official rationalizations of Jubilee, and in some cases they have invented new ones. Just recently, for example, the Dieppe raid was proclaimed to have been planned also, if not primarily, for the purpose of stealing equipment and manuals associated with the Germans’ Enigma code machine, and possibly even all or parts of the machine itself. But would the Germans not immediately have changed their codes if the raid had achieved that objective? (The argument that the plan was to secretly steal the Enigma material, and that that the raiders would have blown up the installations prior to withdrawing from Dieppe, thus destroying evidence of the removal of Enigma equipment, is unconvincing, because it presupposes a high degree of naivety on the part of the Germans.)
After the June 1944 allied landings in Normandy, code-named Operation Overlord, an ostensibly convincing rationale for Operation Jubilee was concocted. The Dieppe Raid was now triumphantly revealed to have been a “general rehearsal” for the successful Normandy landings. Dieppe had supposedly been a test of the German defences in preparation for the big landing yet to come. Lord Mountbatten, the architect of Jubilee, who was – and continues to be – blamed by many for the disaster, thus claimed that “the Battle of Normandy was won on the beaches of Dieppe” and that “for every man who died in Dieppe, at least 10 more must have been spared in Normandy in 1944.” A myth was born: the tragedy of Jubilee had been the sine qua non for the triumph of Overlord.
A very important military lesson had allegedly been learned at Dieppe, namely, that the German coastal defences were particularly strong in and around harbours. It was for this reason, presumably, that the Normandy landings took place on the harbourless stretch of coastline north of Caen, with the Allies bringing along an artificial harbour, code-named Mulberry. But was it not self-evident that the Germans would be more strongly entrenched in seaports than in insignificant little beach resorts? Had it really been necessary to sacrifice thousands of men in order to learn that lesson? And one must also wonder whether information, obtained from a “test” of the German coastal defences in the summer of 1942, was still relevant in 1944, especially since it was mostly in 1943 that the formidable Atlantic Wall fortifications had been built. If Dieppe was a “general rehearsal,” why was the main event not staged until two years later? Is it not absurd to proclaim Jubilee as a rehearsal for an operation that had not even been conceived yet? Finally, the advantage of lessons learned at Dieppe, if any, were almost certainly offset by the fact that at Dieppe the Germans had also learned lessons, and possibly more useful lessons, about how the Allies were likely – and unlikely – to land troops. The idea that the tragedy of Jubilee was a precondition for the triumph of Overlord, then, is merely a useful myth.
Even today, then, the Dieppe tragedy remains shrouded in disinformation and propaganda. But perhaps we can catch a glimpse of the truth about Dieppe by finding inspiration in an old philosophical conundrum: If one seeks to fail, and does, does one fail, or succeed? If a military success was sought at Dieppe, the raid was certainly a failure; but if a military failure was sought, the raid was a success. In the latter case, we should inquire about the real objective of the raid, or, to put it in functionalist terms, about its “latent,” or hidden, rather than its “manifest” function.
There are many indications that military failure was intended. First, the town of Dieppe happened to be, and was known to be, an eminently defensible site, and therefore necessarily one of the strongest German positions on the Atlantic coast of France. Anyone arriving there by ferry from England sees immediately that this port, surrounded by high and steep cliffs, bristling at the time with machine guns and cannon, must have been a deadly trap for the attackers. The Germans could not believe their eyes when they found themselves being attacked there. One of their war correspondents, who witnessed the inevitable slaughter, described the raid as “an operation that violated all the rules of military logic and strategy.” Other factors, such as poor planning, inadequate preparations, inferior equipment (such as tanks that could not negotiate the pebbles of Dieppe’s beach), make it seem more likely that the objective was military failure, rather than success.
On the other hand, the Dieppe operation, including its bloody failure, actually made sense if it was ordered for a “latent” non-military purpose. Military operations are frequently carried out to achieve a political objective, and that seems to have been the case at Dieppe in August 1942. The Western Allies’ political leaders in general, the British political leadership in particular, and Prime Minister Churchill, above all, found themselves under relentless pressure to open a second front, were unwilling to open such a front, but lacked a convincing justification for their inaction. The failure of what could be presented as an attempt to open a second front, or at least as a prelude to the opening of a second front, did provide such a justification. Seen in this light, the Dieppe tragedy was indeed a great success, even a double success. First, the operation could be, and was, presented as a selfless and heroic attempt to assist the Soviets. Second, the failure of the operation seemed to demonstrate only too clearly that the western Allies were indeed not yet ready to open a second front. If Jubilee was intended to silence the voices clamouring for the opening of a second front, it was indeed a great success. The Dieppe disaster silenced the popular demand for a second front, and allowed Churchill and Roosevelt to continue to sit on the fence as the Nazis and the Soviets slaughtered each other in the East.
The political motivation for Dieppe would explain why the lambs that were led to the slaughter were not American or British, but Canadian. Indeed, the Canadians constituted the perfect cannon fodder for this enterprise, because their political and military leaders did not belong to the exclusive club of the British-American top command who planned the operation, and who would obviously have been reluctant to sacrifice their own men. Our hypothesis likewise explains why the British were also involved, but in much smaller numbers, and why the Americans sent only a token force.
After the tragedy of Dieppe, even Stalin stopped begging for a second front. The Soviets would eventually get one, but only much later, in 1944, when Stalin was no longer asking for such a favour. At that point, however, the Americans and the British had urgent reasons of their own for landing on the coast of France. Indeed, after the Battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, when Soviet troops were relentlessly grinding their way towards Berlin, “it became imperative for American and English strategy,” as two American historians (Peter N. Carroll and David W. Noble) have written, “to land troops in France and drive into Germany to keep most of that country out of [Soviet] hands.” When a second front was finally opened in Normandy in June 1944, it was not done to assist the Soviets, but to prevent the Soviets from winning the war on their own.
The Soviets finally got their second front when they no longer wanted or needed it. (This does not mean that did they did not welcome the landings in Normandy, or did not benefit from the belated opening of a second front; after all, the Germans remained an extremely tough opponent until the very end.) As for the Canadians, who had been sacrificed at Dieppe, they also got something, namely, heaps of praise from the men at the top of the military and political hierarchy. Churchill himself, for example, solemnly declared that Jubilee had been “the key to the success of the landings in Normandy” and “a Canadian contribution of the greatest significance to final victory.” The Canadians were showered with prestigious awards, including no less than three Victoria Crosses. The hyperbolic kudos and the unusually high number of VCs probably reflected a desire on the part of the authorities to atone for their decision to send so many men on a suicidal mission in order to achieve highly questionably political goals.
Jacques R. Pauwels is author of The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War, James Lorimer, Toronto, 2002
