Feature

Dieppe: the questions
linger among the
Canadians’ graves

The commemoration of the 50th anniversary of World War II has evoked searing memories
for people around the world, no less so for Canadians, some 1,086,343 of whom took part in the
conflict. But as the world marks the anniversary, questions remain about the course of war and
whether its outcome could have been dramatically altered by an early opening of the second front
in western Europe. Rob Prince, the U.S. secretary to the World Peace Council in Helsinki,
recently visited Dieppe, where 907 Canadians died, hundreds were wounded and 1,874 were

captured in-an ill-planned and ill-fated

offensive in 1942. He files this story.

By ROB PRINCE

PUYS (near Dieppe, France) — It’s a
rocky beach littered with thousands of
flint stones at the foot of a sheer vertical
chalk cliff. High above, the wheat fields
are accessible only because over several
million years, a stream cut a small valley
through to the sea. People come here at
low tide to swim and sunbathe, or to
collect moules (mussels) and to wander

among the rocks and outcrops that like a ~

spider’s web, have trapped their share of
ships on this coast for two thousand
years.

Recognizing the insanity of a frontal
assault from the pebbled beach to high
ground above, Julius Caesar established a
horse camp here, the outlines of which are
clearly discernible when viewed from the
air in a light aircraft.

While Puys is one of the finer places to
sit in a restaurant overlooking the
Atlantic — in what I later learned was yet
another German pillbox in 1942 — it’s a
downright rotten place to mount a
successful military raid from the sea under
any conditions. If such a suggestion would
have met little success even during
Caesar’s time, in an era of modern
weaponry, even the now-ancient stuff used
in World II, such an operation is a
prescription for disaster.

And in August 1942, the Nazi pill-boxes
and machine gun emplacements which
littered these cliffs were not the tourist
attraction they are today. :

History has a way of finding peaceful
places and so it is with Puys, the
Beautiful. But it it was exactly here, 47

6 e Pacific Tribune, September 25, 1989

years ago and at a few other equally
beautiful but militarily foreboding spots in
and around Dieppe that 5,000.(mainly-
French) Canadians landed on these rocky
beaches in a raid against the Nazis.

The ostensible goal was “to carry out
large scale manoeuvres as a prelude to a
larger Allied landing on enemy territory
and to knock German military
installations out of action,” according to
one account I read.

‘Put another way, the troops were
supposed to parade around the Dieppe
region with no real goal for half a day,
challenging the Nazi’s here and there to
test the waters for a future large scale
invasion which would later become D-
Day.

These were — to put it mildly —
poorly defined, but accurately
described goals in contrast to prior British
raids in France which were carried out
against shipyards at St. Lazaire and a
radar station at Berneval.

As if to assure the operation’s failure,
the Canadians were provided neither air
cover nor naval bombardments to soften -
the enemy defences.

Plans to drop parachute divisions
behind enemy lines were first considered
and then vetoed by British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill. The element of
surprise was non-existent. The Nazis were
ready as if they had been called on the
telephone from London a month in
advance, warning them to prepare for the
action.

In any case, the results could hardly
have been worse. Anticipating some

Allied military moves, Hitler had sent out
a directive as early as June of that year
that the Normandy coastal defence should
be strengthened. British General
Montgomery who had first supported the
raid, changed his mind and suggested that
if such a raid were necessary it should be
done “anywhere but Dieppe.” But by
Aug. 19, 1942 he was in Egypt already
involved in the battles for El Alamein.

Given the geography, formidable Nazi
fortifications and high state of
preparedness, the operation met with
predictable results. As the official account
in the nearby Canadian Cemetery “Les
Vertus” politely puts it, “little could be
done to support the infantry and stop the
German fire.”

Put more bluntly, the Canadians were
cut to pieces. Most died before leaving
their landing craft, caught stranded on the
rocks. An hour after the landing, the
rocks and water at Puys were stained in
red. Twenty-seven of the 28 Canadian
tanks landed at Puys never made it
ashore, the flint rocks catching the treads
and snapping them. The last one fared no
better, being instantly knocked out of
commission after touching the shore.

Twelve soldiers made it beyond the
beach, only two of whom survived.

Hitler was beside himself with joy when
the reports came. The two French-
Canadians from Montreal who lived
return to Dieppe every summer, driven by
a need not to forget the fallen. They go to
Puys where the damage was greatest and
burst into tears remembering how they
had to climb over the bodies of their

friends and comrades to save themselves.
Those who weren’t killed were made
prisoners by the Nazis.

People in the region, where memories
of the war are still very much alive, say
that for months afterwards, bodies
without identification, but assumed to be
Canadian, washed up along the
Normandy coast.

Those who were fortunate to die on the
beach were buried at Les Vertus. Some
955 WW II Allied soldiers are buried
there, the overwhelming majority of them
Canadians from Montreal, Hamilton,
Calgary, and the farms of Saskatchewan,
members of the Royal Regiment of
Canada. ; :

The raid has been justified as a painful
if necessary probing operation from which
valuable lessons were drawn which were
said to be indispensible for the D-Day
Invasion of June 6, 1944. It would be easy
to argue that this explanation came ex
post facto, as they say.

It is not difficult to argue that it is

simply not a credible explanation. There is :

no comparison between the beaches near
Caen and the natural fortress at Dieppe.
The “lessons” of Dieppe could have been
learned, and in fact were and remain
obvious with what were, according to
many, the predictable and unnecessary
carnage in which Canadians were the
cannon fodder.

True enough, given the magnitude of
the horror in WW II, the Dieppe Raid

EE so er er

The beach at Dieppe (I)
-.. aS If to assure the
operation’s failure the
Canadians were
provided neither air
cover nor naval
bombardments to
soften the enemy |
defences.

was something of a minor footnote, less
than a day’s work of the proprietors of
Auschwitz of the mobile Nazi death
squads in Byelorussia and the Ukraine.
And after all, isn’t Dieppe a closed
chapter of the epic of World War II? Why
bring it up now? What is left to say?

I asked myself these questions and
discussed them with my wife during the
three weeks we walked past the memorial
plaques found all over the area
acknowledging the Canadian sacrifice. Is
it only a bit of local folklore whose main
outlines are now well known and the .
significance of which is magnified out of
proportion? Why return to the subject 47
years later?

Because something is missing.

Almost half a century later, the topic is
still considered sensitive enough that the
British have yet to release the relevant
classified documents of the detailed
preliminary political discussions between
Churchill, Mountbatten, Montgomery and
the others justifying the decision to
approve the operation.

As Jacques Mordal points out in his
book, Les Canadiennes 4 Dieppe, “‘no
competent authority has ever given a
completely satisfactory explanation why
after the operation was cancelled in July,
it was then reconsidered and approved.”

Elsewhere in his book, he raise the
question in another way:

“In any case it is remarkable that — as
C.P. Stacey, the official historian of the
Canadian Army has pointed out — if the
details of the military operation of the
Dieppe Raid are well documented from