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DIEPPE, France -- It lasted just hours and cost hundreds of lives.
Sixty-five years ago today, nearly 5,000 Canadians crossed the English
Channel, gallantly sailing toward what would become one of the
bloodiest, most disastrous events in Canada's military history. It was
meant to be a swift, surprise raid of the German-occupied French port
town, but botched planning and bad circumstances led to the great
debacle that was Dieppe.
Waiting on high alert from a commanding
clifftop perch, the Germans sprayed heavy fire as fast as the Canadian
soldiers could land. By early afternoon, the pebbled beach was littered
with corpses and painted with blood.
Of the 5,000 Canadians involved in the attack, 3,367 were killed, wounded or captured.
Raymond Gilbert, 85, has already made two emotionally charged return
trips to Dieppe since the raid. He does not expect this third
pilgrimage will be any easier.
The Stettler, Alta., native, who served as a tank
loader-operator with the King's Own Calgary Regiment, recalls sailing
over the sea that beautiful, quiet, fateful August morning in 1942. He
couldn't hear even a whisper.
Before long, the silence was broken by the thunder
of gunfire; corpses lay all around and the sandy, rocky terrain ground
tanks to a halt.
"The whole beach was in a terrible mess," Gilbert
said. "When the shells were expelled we couldn't do anything more. We
just sat until the inevitable moment when we had to surrender. I never
envisioned becoming a prisoner. That was the furthest thing we ever
thought about. We thought it was do or die."
Arriving at the prison camp in Lamsdorf, Poland, by
boxcar, Gilbert was in the first group of 20 men to have their wrists
tied together -- a demeaning practice hundreds of Canadian PoWs endured
for more than a year. Eventually the men were dispatched to various
work parties, and Gilbert was recruited as a "go-between," forced to
convey orders from the enemy Germans to his own troops.
"Our job was not to help them, they would walk off a lot and you could have been shot at any time," he said.
It was a stressful job that ultimately led to a nervous breakdown that
required shock treatment; he was transferred to hospitals in
Switzerland, England and London, Ont., before returning home to
Alberta. The emotional toll of the war still lingers 65 years later.
"Trust is a hard thing for me. Trusting anyone. That's one thing that came as a result," he said.
Today, veterans, youth representatives and Canadian, British and French
dignitaries will mark the anniversary of the Dieppe raid in solemn
ceremonies of remembrance for the fallen. It was a heavy sacrifice for
Canada, and 65 years later controversy still rages over whether Dieppe
was a needless waste of lives or whether the raid served a critical
purpose in aiding the success of future seaborne landings like Normandy
two years later.
Military historian Jack Granatstein views Dieppe as
an unmitigated military disaster that had little value in the overall
scheme of the war. Code-named Operation Jubilee, the raid was initially
scheduled to launch a month earlier as Operation Rutter but was
cancelled due to unfavourable weather conditions and remounted.
"It was a disaster with lessons learned that were
obvious and should have been obvious before the raid," Granatstein
said. "Like you need a lot of heavy gunfire, you need tanks to move on
the beach, and that it's not a good idea to attack a fortified,
defended port."
The plan was to attack at five points along a 16-km
front, with four flanking attacks before dawn and a main assault on the
town of Dieppe a half-hour later. Granatstein said one critical flaw in
the plan was the "awful" site selection itself -- cliffs overlooked the
beach, affording the enemy a superior observation and firing position.
A series of confusions on the way over compounded the disaster, from
meeting a German convoy to a mix-up in directions for the beach landing
that delayed the arrival.
But Cliff Chadderton, chairman of the National
Council of Veterans Associations and a veteran of Normandy, insists the
lessons learned at Dieppe helped save lives in subsequent battles --
and quite possibly his own.
"I landed at D-Day and I just had to look around
and I could see how all the failures had been taken care of," he said.
"We could not have landed in an occupied village or port in France
without the lessons of Dieppe and applying them. That's hard fact.
"I know some historians like to look back and call
it a disaster and say we lost a lot of people. All of those things are
true, and it was a badly planned raid. We lost more than we should
have. But those losses have to be measured against what changes we did
see in the method of operating when we landed at Normandy, and they
were enormous."
Chadderton said Dieppe led to fundamental changes in tanks, air cover, communications and resupply mechanisms.
"It was a change in the way you fought a war," he said.
As a private with the Royal Regiment of Canada, Dieppe veteran Ron Beal
said soldiers suspected they were running into a "trap" because the
raid had been cancelled, then remobilized. Yet they quietly followed
orders as soldiers do. The boats were supposed to land during nautical
twilight to catch the Germans by surprise, but instead arrived in
daylight due to the delays.
"There was practically nothing we could do. We were
totally trapped in a complete outlay of fire from every direction. The
problem was we couldn't even see who was doing the firing -- we could
only see the results," he said. "As fast as we were getting off the
boats, they were cutting us down. Unfortunately it turned out to be a
turkey shoot on the part of the Germans."
Beal endured nearly three years as a German prisoner of war, and is still amazed he survived the carnage at Dieppe.
Steve Harris, chief historian for the Department of National Defence,
said there were "circling motives" that thrust the flawed plan into
action in August 1942. It was a grim time in the war for the Allies,
and there was a strong desire to stage a major raid that might turn
things around.
Objectives remained to knock out shipping
capability at Dieppe harbour to stop German barges and to take an
airfield infield that served as a major headquarters for the Germans.
The original plan for Operation Rutter did not call for a frontal
assault, and this change and significant others "fatally weakened" the
plan by the time it was implemented as Operation Jubilee on Aug. 19.
Even though it had been cancelled and remounted,
Harris said there is no solid evidence the Germans were specifically
forewarned of the raid. Enemy troops were on heightened alert that
morning, but that was usual for each morning.
Harris believes hard lessons were learned at the
raid, but doesn't draw a direct link between the failure at Dieppe and
the success at Normandy.
"It was not a straight-line learning curve, but did
it contribute? Yes it did, because it reinforced the sense that we've
got to do better here, here, here and here," he said.
'GAVE US HOPE'
Taking part in a pilgrimage to Dieppe five years ago, Harris said he
learned how some merits of the raid can't be measured alone in terms of
military success or failure. A mayor of the nearby town of Pourville
told veterans what the Canadian sacrifice had meant to the local
people.
"He said, 'This operation may be called a failure,
but August 1942 was the darkest part of the war. You came, you died and
you gave us hope because we saw we weren't forgotten by you,'" Harris
recalled. "What better legacy is there for veterans of Dieppe and for
Canada's memory of Dieppe than that we gave these people hope at the
darkest time of the war?"
Today, there is a town in New Brunswick and a
school in Saskatchewan named in honour of the Canadians who fell at
Dieppe. But it is here in France where raw emotion flows, and where the
gratitude is most keenly heartfelt.
"When we were taken prisoner, that was like a
disgrace. You felt like you didn't fulfill your job because you
couldn't go on to fight any more battles. You were held as a captive,"
Raymond Gilbert said. "But when we go back to France and go through the
memorials, they treat us like heroes. That is the one good thing that
came out after that particular battle."
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