Hello and welcome to this Battleground Special series on Special Forces with me, Patrick Bishop and Saul David.

Today we're going to be talking about an early

World War II operation carried out by British commandos which showed what special forces could

do with proper training, proper equipment and a proper plan, which was by no means always the case.

The success of Operation Caldron carried out on the 19th of August, 1942,

stood out all the more because it was the one bright spot in a larger enterprise,

that was in other respects an almost complete disaster. We're talking about Operation Jubilee,

better known as the Dieppe raid, a harebrained scheme

cooked up by Lord Lulie Mountbatten's Special Operations Executive, which resulted in utter

failure and huge losses, most of them Canadian.

Now, Cawdham was designed to take out the Hess Battery, a cluster of big guns on the cliff-top east of Dieppe at Veronjeville.

Unless it was silenced, the battery could sink the entire fleet, carrying the Canadians on their mission to land, occupied Diep and Skidadl.

To what end, you may well ask, but in a nutshell, it was a propaganda

exercise, really, to show the Americans who'd recently joined the war, the Russians who were

despairing of the Brits doing anything to aid their existential struggle in the East, and last but not

least, the British public, who need to be convinced

that their politicians and generals were capable of mounting a successful military operation

following their morale-sapping performance in the Battle of France, culminating in the Dunkirk

evacuation. So let's start by saying something about the thinking behind the formation

of those first commando units. What was their purpose? What was their nature? And what were they

supposed to achieve? Well, Patrick, the commanders had sprung into life following the defeats in France and, of course, Norway in the spring of 1940 that you mentioned.

Their purpose initially at least was essentially psychological.

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