There's a debate about whether the Germans had received infos about a planned raid in the sector or not.
As I understand it, there was no need for info on this, as the allies had fallen so far behind schedule, that they were still on their way to the landing in daylight hours, when they were supposed to already have been attacking by stealth cover of darkness.
So, I tend to think the pebble beach wasn't the main problem at Dieppe.
Unless you ask the Tank Drivers of course. There was another horror story about those thanks, I do remember quite a few tank crews drowned before even making it to the shores, not because of sunken transports, but because areas that were supposed to have shallow water in fact were much deeper, and some tanks were immediately plunged to their watery graves the second they rolled off the boats.
Anyhow, thanks for pic references. Usually this is one event the allies would rather just sweep under the carpet and pretend it never happened. There was a historical documentary the CBC did on this after interviewing the survivors on what happened, but then they got a tremendous amount of flack for it since it made the Canadians look like the worst combatants ever. In fact, the CBC got sued by the Canadian Historical War Museum. Well that's patriotism for you.
I think the biggest problem was that instead of aborting this in the early hours, which they were ready to do, a very few infantry had a bit of success in reaching some French houses. By the time this small success had made its way back to top command, it had been exagerrated bit by bit through each link, until the final message relayed that just about all the forces were having success in penetrating. So hence, more and more units were dumped off in droves right into the meat-grinder.
