Dieppe

This is the place which first started my interest in taking a trip like this. Dieppe was the site of an ill fated raid in 1942, one which suffered casualties of over 50%. The planning of this raid was awful and lead to numerous errors. That said, the lessons learned at Dieppe saved thousands of lives at the Normandy landings. If the Normandy landings had gone as the Dieppe raid went, they undoubtedly would have been a failure.

In my last 2 years of high school, I wrote a rather lengthy essay detailing Operation Jubilee at Dieppe and showing how the lessons learned here were a huge part of the success of Normandy. I spent hours staring at maps and reading personal accounts of the battle, and I really had a visual image of Dieppe and how the operation took place. After I was all done, I said to myself that one day I would visit Dieppe and see how much the personal accounts gave one an idea of the battle location.

As it turns out, I was very nearly right on almost everything. What I didn’t get was the scale of the battle site. Watch this video to get a better understanding, but the odds they were up against, just looking at the battle site itself, were enormous.

In case you didn’t catch it in the video, the Hotel du Casino, the place I stayed at, was the farthest they got into the town. And though I stayed in the place that numerous men made their last stand in order to buy other men time to get off the beach, nothing supernatural occurred.

I also went to the Dieppe Canadian War cemetery, were most of the casualties from this raid are buried. It is a very interesting setup, and I am not sure it was designed by the same people as every other memorial so far. The grace are arranged back to back, rather than in individual rows, and it almost feels like the men were buried and then someone came after to add the rest of the memorial. Take a look: