On 19 August 1942, a six thousand strong combined Allied landing force took part in a raid on Dieppe, Northern France. Sixty-seven percent of these became casualties. The raid has gone down in history as a catastrophe conceived by Lord Mountbatten. With the help of 100,000 pages of classified British military files, however, David O’Keefe has uncovered a pinch mission undertaken at Dieppe, concealed by the raid, to steal one of the new German 4-rotor Enigma code machines. In this first of two episodes from our sibling podcast Warfare, David tells James about the main raid, undertaken in the majority by his fellow Canadians, and explains the evidence which supports the theory that this was a pinch raid, not just by opportunity, but by design.

Listen to part two of this podcast: The Enigma of Dieppe