headgear
LE

Recently there was an interesting documentary on TV in regard to the Dieppe raid which stated that the raids primary objective was actually to capture german naval ciphers from Naval HQ on the seafront, under the control of a certain Ian Fleming who was actually waiting offshore to personally collect the captured data - this was because the germans had recently changed their ciphers and had added an extra wheel on the enigma machine - as a result of our loss of ability to monitor german sub traffic we were losing so many ships that it was felt that a large scale raid would be a perfect cover for capturing the data - in reality it was felt that the loss of so many men would be worth it to save Britain from starvation or worse. As it happens no data was captured but luckily for us fairly soon afterwards another enigma and cipher were captured elsewhere and the boffins at bletchely made further breakthroughs.
The majority of the canadians and other troops were just ordinary fit, keen and green troops who had been trained to attact the beaches or other objectives and it is very doubtful if 'commandos' would have done any better against such a dug in defending force. Indeed the small raiding party whose objectice was the cipher data also failed in their task despite being a specially trained document capture commando troop (they did similar actions in other theatres of the war).
The majority of the canadians and other troops were just ordinary fit, keen and green troops who had been trained to attact the beaches or other objectives and it is very doubtful if 'commandos' would have done any better against such a dug in defending force. Indeed the small raiding party whose objectice was the cipher data also failed in their task despite being a specially trained document capture commando troop (they did similar actions in other theatres of the war).