A new book tells story of doomed intelligence operation overseen by Lord Mountbatten and future James Bond writer Ian Fleming
Two years after ordering the mass internment of German refugees at the start of the second world war, the British government put a small, elite group of them in military uniforms and sent them on a secret cloak-and-dagger mission to occupied Dieppe to snatch an Enigma coding machine from under the Nazis’ noses.
A new book published later this month presents extraordinary evidence that the refugees, all Germans who had fled from Nazi-annexed Sudetenland, were at the centre of military planning for the daring and ultimately disastrous August 1942 raid on Dieppe. The idea was that while British and Canadian troops staged a frontal assault on the port, a group of five refugee soldiers would break into a hotel used by Nazi military commanders and steal both the Enigma machine and the code books that enabled the Germans to send encrypted military communications across Europe.
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