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By Dr. Frederick A. Aldrich
Alice had been to the
seaside once in her life, and had come to the
General conclusion that wherever you go on
the coast you find
A number of bathing machines in the sun…
Alice
in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll, 1865.
I am writing this after the historic events in Paris that saw the NATO/Warsaw Pact meeting which officially
brought the Cold War to and end. As
David Brinkley and others have put it, the end of the Cold War marks the
official end of World War II. Even as
these events are celebrated, tension develops in other parts of the world, but
at least there is, to all intents and purposes, a unified Europe at
peace where once there was Hitler’s Fortress Europe (Festung Europa). That
fortress had to be breached, which was no easy job. Canada was to play a significant role in what history records as
“a bloody dress rehearsal” for what became the fateful D-Day landings on the Normandy coast of France. Let us not forget
that it is in memory of the fallen warriors from Newfoundland in both world wars that our university was created.
The
dress rehearsal to which I refer is what the Canadian Encyclopedia attributes to “an experimental, small-scale
Allied invasion on Europe to test amphibious landing techniques.” The site was Dieppe, a resort town on the north coast of France between Le Havre and Boulogne on the English
Channel. The name Dieppe apparently comes from an old Saxon word meaning “the deep”
referring to the deep waters of its harbor at the mouth of the Arques River surrounded by chalky cliffs. The castle there dates from 1435 and much of
French, and Western, history has been written both in that port city and its
contiguous waters. At one and the same
time Dieppe developed as both a fashionable resort (the oldest resort
town in France and with its casinos and its boardwalks – les planches – the closest to Paris), and as a fishing port.
But war was no stranger to its citizens.
The Dragonnades of Louis XIV virtually destroyed the city in his war
against Protestantism, and English raids in 1694 did their share of damage as
well. But Dieppe survived and it was there that the joint Allied Command
decided to launch the first testing of Hitler’s strength in occupied France. This plan
culminated on Aug. 19, 1942,
in the major disaster which we know as the Dieppe Raid.
For
years, Russia’s Stalin had pressed upon Churchill and his commanders for
some relief to divert Hitler’s attention from the war in the west by the
opening of an eastern assault on Festung
Europa. In due course this relief
(code name Operation Jubilee) was provided by a joint Canadian, British, and
American force numbering less than 7,000 (some 5,000 Canadians, 1,000 British
and 50 U.S. Rangers). The raid lasted
less than nine hours and more than 900 Canadians were killed, with 1,874 taken
prisoner. Indeed 70 per cent of the
entire invasion force fell as casualties in that action. A total of 106 Allied aircraft were lost
along with 81 airmen, of which 13 machines and 10 pilots were on the RCAF. Lessons were learned, and if hell has a
shoreline, it was exposed to view during that day in August. Like malevolent, over-sized mosquitoes, the
Junkers JU87 Stuka dive-bombers of Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe dove to near
water surface levels, each dropping 500 kilograms of bombs on the Allied
Forces. Propelled by 1200 horsepower
engines, these gull-winged death craft with their fixed landing gear manoeuvred
mere feet above the sea surface, and the confusion and the destruction they
wrought were compounded by the rapid fire from fixed 7.9mm MG17
machine-guns. It soon became apparent
that the landed troops had to be evacuated.
On
that eventful day one of the evacuees, Private Howard Phillips of the South
Saskatchewan Regiment, was on board a British destroyer, the HMS Calpe, half a mile into the
Channel. He was one of those forced to
remain above deck as the ship was already filled to capacity with rescued men
below. He was in an opportune location
to see what was to follow. Mr. Phillips
communicated to me the incidence of a giant squid surfacing after being struck
by the fire from one of the dive-bombers.
He wrote, “At that time I was offshore of Pourville, France. There was a huge
thrashing of water and a giant tentacle rose, writhing and splashing after
obviously being hit. I can verify to
about 25 feet being out of the water and at least 10 inches across, but of
course [it was] hard to judge during the trauma of the time.”
Nine years
after the Dieppe Raid, Sir Winston Churchill wrote of Operation Jubilee as “a
costly but not unfruitful reconnaissance in force. Tactically it was a mine of experience. It shed revealing light on many
shortcomings…it taught us to build various new types of craft. We learnt the value of powerful support by
heavy naval guns in an opposed landing and our bombardment techniques both
marine and aerial were thereafter improved.
Above all it was shown that teamwork was the secret of success. All these lessons were taken to heart.” So let us all remember.
Indeed,
this has been a strange month here at Memorial and elsewhere. We
commemorated our war dead on Remembrance Day and soon thereafter
celebrated the
end of World War II. If Alice had gone that day to the pebbly beaches of Dieppe, she would have seen machines of war, bathing as it were,
in the deep waters of the harbor. She
would have seen, too, downed aircraft and the lifeless bodies bathed both by
the Channel waters and their own blood. Canada was indeed bloodied by that confrontation and two years
later, almost to the day, it was Canadians who freed Dieppe from Nazi control.
Perhaps nothing much has changed, for this month has also seen mankind’s
hope for a world at peace threatened once again, but in far different climes.
My
mind keeps returning to Dieppe, to Howard Phillips and that Stuka-slain giant squid in
the Channel some 48 years ago. I must
confess to wondering if the German pilot of that JU87 is still alive and if he
remembers “bagging” a giant squid that day.
Even if he does remember or for that matter even realized he had scored
that unique “kill,” I doubt he painted an architeuthid on the fuselage of his
aircraft along with the mementoes of his other scores and victories in the
cause of the Third Reich.
Gazette 4 November 29, 1990
Entered
by the Estevan CAP YI, Angela Mennie ~~~22 Sept 2005 ~~~