Feature

both British and German sources, that to

Canadians would be mollified. Were they?

the Contrary, the origins and objects of the Perhaps there are some Canadian

Taid are very poorly spelled out. To
Preserve the secret, there has been a
dearth of detailed accounts of the
Preliminary conversations. Historians are
Still forced to base their thoughts on a few
accounts in the memories of the main
Protagonists,”

There is another quite interesting point
that comes to the surface. Churchill very
nearly was removed as prime minister
during a stormy session of Parliament in
Which British MPs reflected the anger felt
from both U.S. and Canadian high

Iplomatic circles.
_ The Canadians of the time were
Justifiably boiling. Perhaps they
remembered that Churchill seemed to
€xcel in sending others into the breach as
fannon fodder in service of the King. And
I Wouldn't be surprised if in that
aforementioned Parliament session, the
World “Gallipoli” was raised — where
Churchill sent Australian and New

faland lads to their deaths in the tens of
thousands in an operation about as well
planned as Dieppe. He was kicked from
the British government for that, not to
return until World War II started.

My hunch is one can only understand
the Dieppe Raid in its broader context, in
fonjunction with Churchill’s still and well-
known reluctance to open the Second
Front in Europe in the war against the

azis. As should be well known, there
Was strong pressure from Stalin to do so
to help relieve the Soviets of fighting the
Nazis Virtually alone in Europe.

At the time of the Dieppe Raid the
Nazi offensive in Stalingrad was in full
Swing. Sevastopol had fallen and the
Nazis had defeated the Soviets at Kharkov
In May, taking 240,000 prisoners. Some
U.S. and British military analysts,
Considered the “optimists,” tended to
think that the Soviet Union would not
Survive the end of the year. Others
Predicted the USSR would collapse by
October,

Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov had
been in London in May pressing the
British to open an offensive, but he was
resisted. Certainly the Soviet requests were
being actively repeated in July and August
Ge" and had some support from the

Under such circumstances, Churchill

€8an to take Lord Mountbatten’s
Cavalier suggestion of the Dieppe raid
More seriously. I cannot speak much
about Mountbatten, my knowledge of
Whom is scanty, but I do not think it a
radical statement to say that Winston

hurchill, while he had a number of
glaring shortcomings, was no idiot.

The Dieppe raid was heavy on symbol
and light on substance. It would give the
'Mpression that the British had tried to
act, to respond especially to Soviet
©oncerns, but would do it in such a
Manner that it produced a situation of no
tangible strategic military importance.

My hunch continues that a failed
raid — and the more badly failed the
better — would strengthen Churchill's
argument that the time was not ripe for a
Major Allied offensive against the Nazis in

Tance or Belgium. The bigger the Dieppe
fiasco, the easier it would be to argue for
Postponing a major offensive. That is
Pretty much how old Winston played his
Cards after the raid.

What better way to ensure the result
that by sending a large, unwieldy

anadian raiding force to pebble beaches
atound Dieppe with a task akin to
Walking on water: to scale the chalk cliffs
Or penetrate the narrow passages between
t €m. Later the fluff and necessary
rationales could be added about the
testing ground for D-Day and after
“nough water had gone under the bridge,

documents yet to be released on the

question.

If the issue is still alive, a good deal of
credit goes to the French people in the
Dieppe region who refuse to forget how
much Canadian blood flowed along its
beaches and streets. It’s not for nothing
that a Canadian in Dieppe in August has
trouble paying for his drinks in local bars.

A failed raid — and the
more badly failed the
better — would
strengthen Churchill’s
(r) argument that the
time was not ripe for a
major allied offensive
against the Nazis in
France.

And the exchanges and general relations
between Dieppe and Canada are well-
developed. So the memory of the 1942
raid, and the heroism and sacrifice of the
Canadians here is appreciated, even
cherished.

Is it too much to ask that the remaining
clouds over the causes of the Dieppe raid
be cleared up? This is more than an
obscure, historical question. How many
lives would have been saved if the Second
Front had been opened two years earlier?
It is impossible to tell. But I keep thinking
of little town with names like Auschwitz,
Treblinka, Buchenwald where production
lines were really humming in 1943 and
1944 until the whole system of death
collapsed caught in the press of a two-
front. offensive from east.and west.

In the not so distant past, I worked
under an administrator — the west’s
version of an eastern European
bureaucrat — whose actions were
predicated upon the firm belief that
people’s memories work in such a way
that they will forget an earlier scandal as
new crises emerge. This skewed view of
human potential did indeed prove true to
the degree that under its influence he was
able to pretty well wreck the fine
educational institution where I worked for
15 years. But it doesn’t always work and
in fact, and as events take on greater,
more universal importance, the opposite
seems to be more the rule than the
exception: history suggests that people
remember and insist on knowing the truth
many years after events, and that the pain
of social tragedies lives on long after the
events themselves.

Look what emotions, 50 years later, are
alive concerning the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact and the first days of World War II.
Recently, the Soviet Union and Poland
have had the courage to take an honest
look at what now cannot be denied were
Soviet executions of Polish officers in the
forests of Katyn, Poland in 1939.

It is in the same spirit that the case of
the Dieppe raid should be re-examined.
Coming from a country with its share of
skeletons in the closets still to be
uncovered, I’m not trying to single out
any one country or social system. There
should be glasnost across the board.
Among the many historical incidents the
British should be held accountable for, is
the August 1942 Dieppe raid. It is
unfortunate the Mountbatten and
Churchill cannot be hauled from their
graves and held accountable.

Possibly my hunches about the Dieppe
raid are off the mark and that rather. than
fitting into the context of the Churchill-
Stalin-Roosevelt tug-of-war over the

Second Front that it was a simply a case
of a rather developed level of military
short-sightedness and ineptitude.

Certainly, | make no claims on being a
historian nor military analyst. I’m just
someone sitting in a bar in Puys drinking
a beer beneath a sheer vertical chalk cliff
some 50 feet from a memorial dedicated
to some brave and unfortunate soul from
the Royal Regiment of Canada. I’m
looking out at my kids enjoying

themselves playing with flint pebbles on
the beach on a slightly windy late
afternoon in August in a quiet place
where people gather moules among the
rocks wanting to make sense out of yet
another one of history’s many little ripoffs
and knowing that in some file cabinet in
London are the answers to-questions that
people living in Montreal, Calgary and
Saskatchewan have been asking for 47

vears.

Pacific Tribune, September 25, 1989 « 7