The Canadians in Pourville were at a last-stand stage while landing craft, slow-moving targets for German guns on the heights, did what they could to recover survivors. As casualties mounted and the defense perimeter shrank, Nissenthall, as yet unhurt, could not help but wonder what his chances were of staying alive. His escorts remained under orders to kill him if capture seemed imminent. If that was not enough, he also had to consider the cyanide pill he had been given as a last resort.

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The escort destroyer HMS Brocklesby moved toward the beach, laying down a smoke screen to protect the milling LCAs. The warship’s 4-inch guns blazed at one major source of German fire, and a section of nearby chalk cliff blew apart. An eerie silence followed as other enemy guns stopped firing so as not to attract the ship’s attention. The beleaguered Canadians cheered, and a number of them took advantage of the lull to sprint across 200 yards of open ground to the sea, in hopes of being rescued. Nissenthall and his bodyguards joined them.

The Germans opened fire anew from nearby houses, the high ground and the sea wall over which the Canadians had leaped. Discarding their helmets and gear as they ran past the wounded placed beneath the sea wall, the men splashed into the water. The sergeant and his one remaining bodyguard, miraculously unhit by the hail of lead, dived beneath the surface and swam underwater as long as they could. Lungs bursting, they surfaced and continued seaward toward the landing craft popping in and out of the dark smoke screen. Their partly inflated Mae Wests enabled them to pause occasionally to rest until they were picked up by an LCA. Shell bursts pursued the boat into the smoke, then ceased.

As the boat emerged from the billowing murk, it was set upon by two enemy fighters. This was, to Nissenthall, ‘the most frightening episode of the whole raid.’ German 20mm cannon shells slammed against the small craft’s sides, and it began to take on water. The battered LCA slowly sank, even as its exhausted occupants were being hauled aboard an escort destroyer.

With the destroyer bringing up the rear, a variety of smaller vessels churned northward, away from the French coast. German air attacks continued as the battered flotilla crossed the Channel, overwhelming the outnumbered British Supermarine Spitfires and Hawker Hurricanes.

Operation Jubilee was a costly disaster. Numerous factors, including inadequate supporting fire and a delay in landing the tanks, had doomed it from the start. A withdrawal under fire began at 11 a.m. that fateful Wednesday and continued for about three hours. More than 3,600 men in the invading force were killed, wounded or taken prisoner. The Royal Navy incurred another 550 casualties and lost a destroyer and 33 landing craft. The RAF lost 106 aircraft to the Luftwaffe’s 48. German ground losses were only 591. Whether or not ‘the successful landing in Normandy (on June 6, 1944) was won on the beaches of Dieppe,’ as Combined Operations Command Chief Lord Louis Mountbatten stated, important lessons were learned from the mission and applied to future operations.

Nissenthall disembarked at Newhaven late that August 19. The next morning–in his own words, ‘dirty, dishevelled and unshaven’–he rode a commuter train to London. There, he reported to the Air Ministry building for a full debriefing. If the sergeant was disappointed that he had not been able to examine the Freya firsthand and return with its innards, he was pleased to hear that his severing the telephone lines had provided the Allies with priceless information. British eavesdroppers, listening to the temporarily open German radio plotting that directed Luftwaffe interceptors, learned much about both enemy aircraft control methods and the performance of the key Freya radar. One result was the creation of suitable jamming equipment, a task assigned to Nissenthall.

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