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The Commandos at Dieppe: Rehearsal forD-Day, by William Fowler, Harper-Collins UK, distributed by Trafalgar Square, No. Pomfret, Vt. 05053. -800- 944-6190, www.trafalgarsquarebooks.com. $13.95 paperback. 256 pages.
WILLIAM FOWLER SETS FORTH the events of the 19th August 1942 Raid on Dieppe, telling human stories. He also examines the question of whether the lessons learned in this earlier attack on the French coast contributed to the success of D-Day.
Things looked bleak for the Allies in the spring of that year. The Germans had penetrated deep into Russia, the British Eighth Army in North Africa had been forced back into Egypt, and the Japanese controlled the Pacific. In the west, Allied forces were bottled up in Britain as the Germans threatened just across the English Channel. Operation Overlord, the full-scale invasion of Western Europe, lay two years in the future, but the Allies thought a raid on one northern French port would weaken the Germans.
Eight Allied naval destroyers and 74 air squadrons supported the raid on Dieppe, code-named Jubilee. Major General J. H. Roberts was Military Force Commander of 6,100—about 5,000 Canadians, 50 American Rangers, and the rest British Commandos.
The Allied plan called for four flank attacks spanning 10 miles and one main attack on the city. British Commandos were tasked with destroying the batteries at Berneval to the east and at Varengeville to the west. However, the Commando assault force approaching Berneval encountered a small German convoy at sea, and a sharp fight broke out, alerting coastal defences. One small party of Commandos still got within 200 yards of the eastern battery and kept enemy guns from firing on the assault ships for more than two key hours. Nearby at Puys, Canadian forces suffered their biggest single-day, single-battalion losses of the war—more than 200 killed and the rest taken prisoner. The main attack was doomed as the Germans rained fire on the Dieppe beaches.
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Meanwhile in the west, the No. 4 Commando operation was successful—destroying the feared HESS Battery at Varengeville and withdrawing safely. Elsewhere, the South Saskatchewan Regiment and Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders of Canada made some-progress but soon lost many men, either to death or surrender. Meanwhile, in Dieppe, fierce street fighting broke out. An inferno of gunfire and a nonnegotiable seawall awaited the Calgary Regiment. The Royal Marine “A” Commando also suffered heavy losses.
The full raid included a tremendous air battle, and while Allied forces were able to protect the ships off Dieppe from the Luftwaffe, the cost was high. The RAF lost 106 aircraft, their highest single-day total of the war. The RCAF lost 13 aircraft.
By early afternoon, Operation Jubilee was over. A thousand Allied troops had died, and 2,000 had been captured. The Rangers who died were the first U.S. troopers killed in combat on European soil in World War II.
Some describe the Raid at Dieppe as useless slaughter, but Fowler asserts that improved techniques, fire support, and tactics learned at Dieppe helped to reduce D-Day casualties.
— DAVID J. MARCOU
Becoming Jaye Austen, by Jon Spence, Hambledon and London, 102 Gloucester Avenue, London NW1 8HX. $29.95 hardcover. 256 pages. (email: [email protected].)
YET ANOTHER AUSTEN BIOGRAPHY? What could it possibly say that it is new?
Jon Spence has given us the most cogent portrait of Jane Austen’s literary life to date. Taking Dorothy Sayers’wise advice to be “precise in detail,” keeping in mind that “the proportions and relation of things are just as much facts as the things themselves,” Spence set out to search overlooked sources for clues to the novelist’s inspiration. He turned to diaries and histories going back some 100 years before Austen was born. He studied public records and read through wills and testaments. Spence considered not only Austen’s juvenilia but her brother Henry’s too, published in popular contemporary journals such as The Loiterer.
The result is an extraordinary new portrait.
Novelists before and after Austen took their inspiration from the events and abuses in the society of their time. Austen did not. Her country existence, her shattered youth, her accounts of small town entertainment, her visits with married brothers and friends, even, more particularly, her frustration in courtship, the genteel poverty of her lot—nothing of those intimate details accounts for her exceptional literary achievement.
In Becoming Jane Austen, Spence’s sensitive appraisal of the new sources reveals how Austen moulded all those previously unconsidered lives into her books.
Several examples of the biographer’s telling insights come from his recounting of Jane’s visit in 1794 to Adlestrop Park in Gloucestershire. Adlestrop had been the grand estate of her mother’s genteel family, the Leighs, for over a century. Jane was then 18. Spence notes that her mother’s first cousins, Thomas and Mary Leigh, entertained her there. Dudring that stay she could have perused a recently completed history of the Leighs of Adlestrop Park composed by her hostess.
Jane’s mother would naturally have talked about her fine family. Moreover, Mary Leigh was herself a novelist. Jane’s fascination with these tales influenced her later marvels. One gem from the Austen family history is the story of the three daughters of Jane’s great grandfather, Theophilus Leigh, the eldest of whom made a splendid match; the second married respectably but not spectacularly to a merchant; while the third wed a penniless suitor for love, “eloping by night from a high balcony.” That youngest girl suffered much, bore numerous children, and “lived in low circumstances.” Spence observes that the strongest evidence of the young Jane Austen’s having read this is the “virtuoso opening paragraph of Mansfield Park recounting the history of the Ward sisters.” Other such stories and anecdotes from the Austen family mirror the events in Persuasion and Emma.
From her brother’s writings in The Loiterer, we learn about her family’s fascination with their Continental cousin, Eliza de Feuillide, newly returned from her grand marriage in France. Henry Austen in his early fiction exposes his infatuation, even alluding to the difference in age between his hero and heroine; Eliza was ten years older than Henry Austen. Indeed she eventually married Henry. Here too we see for the first time Jane’s involvement in her brother ’S romance. (She was fiercely opposed to it.) Spence also shows us how Eliza de Feuillide served as the model for the callous and worldly Mary Crawford of Mansfield Park.
Significantly, Spence’s study delves into Jane’s love for Tom Lefroy, her early suitor. What role in Austen’s life this gentleman actually played has long been the source of speculation. Spence demonstrates that the young man was ever in her thoughts. The proof, he believes, was in her use of “names from Lefroy’s favourite book” in each of her six novels.
Spence grounds the plot of Emma in still other sources. He observes Jane Austen in her later letters gossiping to her sister Cassandra about an appealing young medical man’s ill-fated courtship of their rich, all-too-proper niece, Fanny Knight of Godmersham. Matchmaking, that mischief-making avocation for self-importance on the part of Emma Woodhouse, takes shape before our eyes in Austen’s keen promotion of that affair.
Spence’s impressive compilation of such particulars demonstrates the credibility of his method. Becoming Jane Austen is a splendid contribution to Austen scholarship. Better still for all readers enchanted by her genius, it is a wonderful find.
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