As in the St. Bruneval raid, the unit assaulting the Freya site would have to include a radar expert. Twenty-four-year-old Flight Sgt. Jack Maurice Nissenthall of the Royal Air Force (RAF), who had volunteered for “special missions in which my expertise would be of value,” was chosen for the job. An electronics specialist, Nissenthall was a cockney from London’s East End. His father was a Jewish tailor who had immigrated to Britain from Poland in 1912. Nissenthall had been working on radar since 1937.

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Since the radar expert selected for the mission knew British secrets that had to be kept from the Germans, the printed orders received by officers in charge of the Freya assault team stated that the “RDF (radio direction finder) expert must under no circumstances fall into enemy hands.” As a result, 10 riflemen of Company A of the Canadian 2nd Division’s South Saskatchewan Regiment were specifically tasked with providing protection for Nissenthall. If the RAF sergeant was in danger of being captured by the enemy, however, he was to be killed by his own bodyguards.

Operation Jubilee was launched during the breezy night of August 18-19. An invasion force of just over 6,000 men sailed southward from five southeastern British ports aboard 237 vessels, toward Hitler’s “Fortress Europe.” Immediately facing them were about 1,500 soldiers of the Dieppe garrison, the German Fifteenth Army’s 571st Infantry Battalion, which was backed by other units of its parent 302nd Infantry Division, as well as by panzer forces farther inland. Their will and defenses had been strengthened in the wake of a July 9 directive from the Führer warning that “it is highly probable that an enemy landing will take place shortly in the area.” The period from August 10 to 19 was designated by the German high command as “invasion possible” because of favorable moon and tides.

At 3:48 a.m., the Allied armada ran smack into a five-ship enemy convoy. During the ensuing shootout, the convoy’s three small escort vessels battered one British Commando group’s landing craft before being counterattacked by the Polish destroyer Slazak. Two radio warnings from the British Admiralty about the convoy’s approach never reached the Jubilee force commander. Antenna damage prevented the German escort vessels from warning the mainland of the approaching invasion force, but, as it turned out, no warning was necessary.

Just minutes before a star shell triggered a 10-minute naval engagement, the operator in the tiny cabin beneath the cliff top Freya antenna had detected five columns of vessels about 21 miles offshore. He dutifully passed the information on to the men in the concrete-covered brick blockhouse supporting the Freya. Inside the three-room, sandbagged blockhouse sat a range reader and a plotter, connected by landline to the site’s command post and an analysis center located on the other side of Dieppe. Jubilee’s last veil of secrecy had fallen.

The alerted radar section commander reported the ominous radar contact to both army and naval units. The latter pooh-poohed the report, but the army did not. The navy would soon pay for its skepticism when its coastal artillery battery, unlike the army’s, quickly fell to a Commando attack during the battle that followed.

Trailing phosphorescent tails in the cold, choppy waters, the LCA (landing craft, assault) of two Commando groups made a run from their mother ships to beaches east and west of Dieppe. They landed mere minutes before 5 a.m. The Commandos were to silence the heavy artillery batteries flanking the city so that the tank-supported main assault against Dieppe’s narrow streets and cliff-hugging harbor could be made half an hour later.

The South Saskatchewan Regiment’s LCAs churned shoreward on the left flank of the westernmost Commando group. Their objective was the shoreline, designated Green Beach, at Pourville. Inside one of the landing craft was Jack Nissenthall–nicknamed “Spook” by his invasion companions because of his intelligence mission–who was expected to return with a lot of answers to questions about Freya (and hardware to back those answers). Although he, too, wore a helmet and battle dress over an inflatable life vest, Nissenthall was armed only with a revolver. He carried a blue RAF haversack crammed with hand tools.

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