8/28/2023 0 Comments What battle saw the first use of tanks? What role did Winston Churchill play in World War I?![]() In early April Mountbatten and his naval advisor, Captain John Hughes-Hallett, prepared a draft plan for a raid on the French channel port of Dieppe. This was a spectacular success, encouraging Churchill to ask Combined Operations for a more ambitious attack. Still, something had to be done, and on 9 March Roosevelt wrote Churchill to urge action.įrom his earliest days as prime minister, Churchill wished to “set Europe ablaze.” He asked the head of Combined Operations, Lord Louis Mountbatten, to “press forward as opportunities arise.” 2 One opportunity, in February 1942, was to destroy the dry dock at Saint-Nazaire in northwest France. The promise could not be carried out, for there were insufficient troops and inadequate landing craft. Roosevelt, concerned that Russia might make peace with Germany, promised a second front that year. He emphasised the dire situation his country faced. ![]() Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov met with President Roosevelt in May 1942. This, he argued, would divert substantial German troops away from the precarious Eastern Front. Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin appealed (or to be correct, demanded) an immediate second front in Western Europe. On the Eastern Front the Russian Army was hard-pressed to withstand the German onslaught which threatened Moscow. ![]() Referring to his reaction at that time Churchill later wrote: “So we had won after all.” 1 Yet in the early months of 1942, an Allied victory was far from assured. The attack at Pearl Harbor, on 7 December 1941, assured American entry into World War II. O’Keefe adds that the major objective of the raid was to “pinch” a German four-rotor enigma coding machine. In a recent article in Maclean’s magazine, author David O’Keefe contends that the rogues gallery of people responsible for the disastrous Dieppe raid in August 1942 included Winston Churchill. ![]()
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