Chub's Wartime Journey: The Battle

It was a disaster from the start.

During the crossing, the troop ships encountered a German convey and exchanged fire, thus eliminating the element of surprise. On the main beach at Dieppe, the German gun positions on the surrounding bluffs gave them an open view of the entire beach.

The men were totally exposed, and many were mowed down as soon as they left their landing crafts.

The tanks that accompanied them were rendered useless by the stony beach and never made it away from the shore.

The men who did make it up the beach huddled against the sea wall to avoid the enemy fire. A few who did manage to make it into the city found themselves alone with no backup and were either captured or killed.The operation commander based on a ship offshore could not maintain clear commuication with the beach, and mistakenly sent in other regiments on the presumption that success was being achieved. Those sent in were obliterated on the beach.

Ross Munro of The Canadian Press, was assigned to cover the Canadian troops in Britain, and went ashore with allied shock troops that morning to get this first-hand story of the war's biggest commando raid:

"For eight hours, under intense Nazi fire from dawn into a sweltering afternoon, I watched Canadian troops fight the blazing, bloody battle of Dieppe. I saw them go through the biggest of the war's raiding operations in wild scenes that crowded helter skelter one upon another in crazy sequence. There was a furious attack by German E-boats while the Canadians moved in on Dieppe's beaches, landing by dawn's half-light. When the Canadian battalions stormed through the flashing inferno of Nazi defences, belching guns of huge tanks rolling into the fight, I spent the grimmest 20 minutes of my life with one unit when a rain of German machine-gun fire wounded half the men in our boat and only a miracle saved us from annihilation."