Prisoner of Dieppe

by Hugh Brewster

  August 19, 2007

  Dear Lachlan:

  If you’re reading this letter, then you already know that your old grandpa has “gone West,” as we used to say in the Army. I’m writing this letter on the 65th anniversary of the Dieppe Raid. I know that today some of the men I served with will be standing on Blue Beach for a memorial service. When the band plays “O Canada,” these old men in their berets and medals will salute and people will cry.

  I always remember this day in my own way.

  But I’ve never wanted to go back to that beach. Nor have I ever wanted to join the Legion and swap war stories — stories that get more embellished with every telling. However, there is one war story that I have never told anyone. It has lain in my heart as a terrible secret for sixty-three years. For a long time, I tried to cover over what really happened in Stalag VIIIB and how Mackie really died. I think I needed to do that to survive. But now that I’m an old man, the urge to tell someone the truth about it weighs very heavily on me.

  I hope you will forgive me for unloading this burden on you, Lachlan. But you’re the only person to whom I think I can entrust this. You’re also the only person who has read my account of what happened to me at Dieppe and afterwards. But the story that I told there about how Mackie died is a lie.

  You may remember me describing how distraught I was in October of 1943 when Mackie became so determined to escape from Stalag VIIIB. That part is all true. I knew that he was going to make a break through the tunnel he’d worked so hard to build. I also knew that he would almost certainly be captured, and very likely shot. When he refused to talk to me about it, I felt really hurt. The thought of having to survive in that camp without him filled me with gloom.

  On the day that I knew he was going to escape, I became desperate. I racked my brains to think of a way to stop him. The two FMRs had escaped the night before and the tunnel entrance would soon be filled with dirt. I knew that Mackie would try to make a break for it that night.

  During that afternoon there was a soccer game going on behind the compound — playing soccer in shackles wasn’t easy but we managed. I went into our hut and saw that it was empty. I grabbed one of the Red Cross boxes filled with soil. Walking outside with it under my arm, I headed for the guards’ barracks. A few of them were outside enjoying an off-duty cigarette. I walked by them, but when I was still where they could see me, I deliberately tripped. As I fell over, the box hit the ground and its contents spilled out. I quickly scooped the sandy soil back into the box, hurried back to the hut and stowed the box back under a bunk. I don’t think any of the other POWs saw me, but I was sure the guards had. And I knew that they understood where the sand in the box had come from.

  Before long, there were cries of “Raus, Raus!” as Spitfire and the goons conducted one of their “routine searches.” They began next door in 19A, tearing apart bunks and throwing clothes and blankets out the door and windows. By the time they got to 19B, a crowd had gathered outside. The goons had brought poles with them and were tapping the concrete floor. All of a sudden I saw Mackie racing red-faced from behind the barracks. He pushed through the crowd and charged into 19B. I heard yelling and swearing from inside and a few minutes later, three guards dragged out a struggling and kicking Mackie and hauled him off to the cooler. I felt guilty about this, but thought that at least he would be safe there. A half hour later, a very proud Spitfire was able to show the camp commandant the “prize” he had so cleverly discovered. The next day the entrance shaft to the tunnel was filled with poured concrete.

  They kept Mackie in the cooler for two weeks. Work began almost immediately on another tunnel from Hut 22B. There was also talk of the Germans having planted a spy among us who had given away the location of the first tunnel. Then rumours about us being transferred to another camp began circulating. I tried to get word to Mackie in the cooler. I wanted to tell him that it would be easier to escape from the new camp. But the goons wouldn’t allow him any visitors.

  I didn’t know that Mackie had been let out of the cooler until I heard the noise. Our whole compound was cheering as he was put into line at the evening Appell. He seemed very pale and a little shaky. When I went towards him later he only stared at me very coolly. After they took our shackles off that night he crawled straight into his bunk. I thought he was just overtired and would feel more like talking in the morning.

  The sound of a siren outside woke me up. Spotlights were sweeping the compound. I ran to the window and saw a man climbing the fence. I knew immediately that it was Mackie. The guard in the nearest tower fired shots over his head, but Mackie kept on going. He leapt across to the second fence. He must have had a wire cutter, because he managed to cut through the barbed wire at the top of the outside fence. Machine-gun fire ricocheted around him, but I saw him jump to the ground and begin to turn away. It was only then that he was caught in a hail of bullets.

  “No!” I wailed as I saw him fall. “Please! No, no, no!”

  I yanked on my boots and ran out of the hut. Outside the fence, some guards had picked Mackie up and were carrying him back to the main gate. I ran to the gate of our compound. They were taking him to the infirmary. I prayed that he was only wounded. Suddenly I was grabbed by two goons and swung around to face Spitfire.

  “Please! I must see him!” I stammered in my broken German, pointing to the infirmary. “He is my friend!”

  “Sein Freund? — his friend?” sneered Spitfire, imitating my voice. Then he spat out the words that have haunted me ever since. “Sie sind sein Judas!”

  I took a step back, shocked. Spitfire had said, “You are his Judas!”

  The guards hauled me back to the hut. The next morning at Appell I heard that Mackie had died in the night. We buried him in the camp cemetery the next day. The word Judas — that damning word that Spitfire had hissed at me — echoed constantly in my ears. The thought that I had betrayed my friend, the best man I had ever known, made me want to die. There were many times when I thought of simply heading for the wire myself.

  One of the things Padre Foote said to me at Camp IID was that we had to live for those who had died. So I resolved to live for Mackie’s sake. After returning home, Lachlan, I decided to go to university and become a history teacher, just as he had said I should. Your father is named Hamish after Mackie — a name he never liked. But still the thought that I had helped bring about Mackie’s death would sometimes overwhelm me. It nearly killed me to have to lie to Mackie’s family about how he had died.

  About six months after I came home I had what in those days was called a nervous breakdown. I was in hospital for a while and then in a convalescent home for veterans. While I was recovering I met your wonderful grandmother, who was a nurse there. I never told her the whole story of how Mackie died — just about the crippling guilt I felt for having survived. She, too, persuaded me that it was my duty to live my life in honour of Mackie and the others who never came home.

  That is what I have tried to do, Lachlan. And that is why I’ve written about my war experiences for you. There are so many terrible things about war. But one of the most horrifying is that colossal mistakes are made — mistakes that cost thousands of lives. Mistakes that mark the lives of those who survive, sometimes forever.

  I can only hope and pray, Lachlan, that you, and your children and grandchildren, if you have them, will be spared from wars and the horrors they inflict.

  I leave you my warmest wishes for a long and happy life.

  Your loving grandpa,

  Alistair Morrison

  In another, larger envelope, Lachlan Morrison found a slightly scorched, leather-bound copy of Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott and a photograph of three young Canadian soldiers in Trafalgar Square with pigeons perched on their arms and shoulders. Also included was a war service medal and a small bronze bar that said Dieppe. Both were still in wrappers that had never been opened.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  The Dieppe Raid haunts us still. We wonder how it could have ha
ppened. How could so many Canadians have been sent to die there?

  A good place to begin to answer these questions is on the beaches of another French town called Dunkirk. There, two years before Dieppe, thousands of British and French soldiers were trapped as Hitler’s armies overran France. By the end of May 1940, it looked as if tens of thousands of Allied soldiers would either be killed or captured. Then from every port in southern England came ships of all kinds. They sailed across the English Channel and rescued over 338,000 soldiers.

  What soon became known as “the miracle of Dunkirk” was a great morale booster for the British. Prime Minister Winston Churchill had to remind his people that a rescue was not a victory. Churchill knew that the British were now in no shape to attack Hitler’s Fortress Europe.

  Then a top-secret plan landed on Churchill’s desk. It proposed the formation of a small force of raiders that would assault and disrupt the enemy. Immediately, some of their toughest soldiers were sent to the highlands of Scotland for fierce training. Only a few weeks after Dunkirk, a raiding party of 120 men crept across the English Channel by night and blew up a German facility. The newspapers cheered. Bigger and more ferocious raids followed.

  The Canadian generals noted the success of these raids. Why couldn’t our men be part of them, they asked. By the fall of 1941 there were 125,000 Canadian soldiers in England who hadn’t seen any action yet. People were beginning to wonder why the Canadians weren’t fighting. The man in charge of planning raids was the young, handsome and ambitious Lord Louis Mount-batten. Mountbatten’s team had chosen Dieppe as one of several ports in Nazi-occupied France to be targeted for possible small raids in early 1942. But soon plans were afoot to make Dieppe a “super-raid” that would involve five thousand men from the 2nd Canadian Division. They would attack and capture the town and then retreat — showing Hitler that he was vulnerable.

  The raid on Dieppe was code-named Operation Rutter. Each time the British commanders met to review the plan for Rutter, however, it was changed. Before long, all that the plan had going for it was the element of surprise and a belief that Dieppe was not strongly defended. Meanwhile, the men of the 2nd Canadian Division were undergoing intensive training on the Isle of Wight. On the night of July 2, 1942, they boarded ships for what they thought was yet another training exercise. Instead, they were told that tomorrow they would attack Hitler’s Fortress Europe in a raid on Dieppe. The men cheered, thrilled that they would finally see some action. But the next day they learned the raid had been postponed. For the next four days, the Canadians waited in the hot, stuffy ships for the order to go. Then, at dawn on July 7, four German planes swooped down and bombed the troopships lying at anchor. Amazingly, there were only a few casualties. The men were taken ashore and later told that the Dieppe raid had been cancelled. They were bitterly disappointed.

  Within a week, however, Mountbatten had raised the idea of remounting the raid. At first the generals scoffed. Everyone knew about the aborted raid on Dieppe — surely the enemy would be prepared for an attack?

  Mountbatten argued that the Germans would never expect the Allies to attack the same target again. He also stated that if they did not attack Dieppe, there would be no chance for another raid that summer. The generals knew that Soviet leader Josef Stalin was insisting that the British should invade France and force Hitler to divert some of his troops from Russia. He was even threatening to make a separate peace with Hitler if the British did not comply. On July 24, Churchill approved a remounting of the Dieppe Raid, to be named Operation Jubilee.

  On the afternoon of August 18, 1942, the men of the 2nd Division were once again loaded onto ships and told they were going to attack Dieppe. This time no-one cheered. The first thing to go wrong happened after the ships had crossed through the enemy minefield off the French coast. Some of the landing boats carrying the commandos towards Yellow Beach ran into a German convoy. A firefight erupted, a British gunboat was damaged, and the commandos’ landing craft were scattered. Despite this, some of the British commandos, who were responsible for taking out the big gun batteries on either side of Dieppe, did manage to attack some of their targets. But these were among the few successes of the raid.

  At Green Beach, just west of Dieppe, the South Saskatchewan Regiment landed without being detected and quickly seized control of the village of Pourville. But despite some brave fighting, the Saskatchewans soon found they could proceed no farther towards Dieppe. The Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders of Winnipeg had landed at Green Beach after the Saskatchewans and they, too, were halted from advancing on Dieppe by enemy gunfire.

  At Blue Beach, the enemy saw the Royal Regiment come ashore at dawn and greeted them with gunfire and mortars. Of the 250 men in the first wave, only a handful made it to the seawall. The Royals suffered the worst casualties of any regiment; 225 of them were killed and 264 taken prisoner. The men landing on the main town beaches, which were code-named Red and White, were also met with withering enemy fire. The tanks of the Calgary Tanks Regiment either got stuck on the pebbled beach or were unable to advance any farther than the concrete promenade just beyond the beach. Some men from the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry, however, did manage to seize the town’s white casino building, and a few men from Windsor’s Essex Scottish regiment made it into the streets of the town. When the raid’s commander, General Ham Roberts, heard of this, it encouraged him to send in his reserve troops, the men of the Fusiliers Mont-Royal of Montreal. But when the FMRs came ashore, they, too, were trapped in blazing gunfire.

  It was not until 9:40 a.m. that Ham Roberts, in his command ship offshore, realized that the raid had utterly failed. With an ashen face he issued the coded order to withdraw. But rescuing the men still alive from the body-strewn beaches would be no easy task. After several attempts, Roberts instructed the offshore fleet to sail for England. Remaining behind were 3367 men, 2752 of them Canadians — dead or soon to be taken prisoner. Of the 1027 men who died, 907 were Canadians. As one survivor remembers, “Anyone who was on that beach will tell you that the water was just like red ink with blood and body parts washing ashore.” It is for this reason that the Dieppe Raid has been called “the bloodiest nine hours in Canadian military history.”

  Despite the raid’s failure, it has been claimed that “valuable lessons” were learned at Dieppe which helped lead to success on D-Day in June of 1944, and to the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany. Certainly the Allies would never again try to attack an enemy port. But today most historians agree that the price of learning at Dieppe was far too high.

  On the morning of September 1, 1944, the men of the 2nd Canadian Division marched into a liberated Dieppe to be greeted with flowers and champagne. That afternoon they went to a graveyard with small wooden crosses to pay tribute to the more than one thousand men who had died there two years before. On every August 19 since then, the town of Dieppe has been draped in Canadian flags. In the square, called Square du Canada, crowds gather around a monument that bears the inscription: On the beaches of Dieppe, our Canadian cousins marked with their blood the road to our final liberation.

  Images and Documents

  Image 1. Canadian soldiers board a transport ship in preparation for the Dieppe Raid in the summer of 1942.

  Image 2. Soldiers charge ashore from a beach landing craft with weapons in hand.

  Image 3. By 9:00 a.m. on August 19, 1942, there were 225 men lying dead by the seawall on Blue Beach.

  Image 4. Captured Canadians are marched through the streets of Dieppe.

  Image 5. The men of Hut 19B in Stalag VIIIB pose for a photo.

  Image 6. A prisoner descends into a tunnel to begin work, armed with homemade tools.

  Image 7. Another Canadian uses a homemade shovel to enlarge the cramped tunnel.

  Image 8. After a four-month death march during the bitter winter of 1945, the soldiers who survived were severely emaciated.

  Image 9. Private Ron Reynolds of Toronto’s Royal Regiment of Canada. After his death, Reynolds’ ashe
s were scattered on Blue Beach at Dieppe, as he had requested.

  Image 10. The courage of Sergeant-Major Harry Beesley of British Number Three Command Group kept up the spirits of the men in Stalag VIIIB.

  Image 11. Padre John Foote jumped back onto the waters off Dieppe from a landing craft poised to rescue him, saying, “My place is with my boys.”

  Image 12. Most of Western Europe was occupied by Hitler’s forces in 1942.

  GLOSSARY

  Allies: the nations — including Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, Canada and others — that fought against Germany, Japan and Italy during World War II.

  army units: The Canadian army during World War II had 5 divisions. The 2nd Division, which fought at Dieppe, was made up of 3 brigades; each brigade had 3 regiments, also called battalions. A battalion had 5 companies made up of 3 platoons of approximately 35 soldiers each. Along with a headquarters company and a support company, a battalion usually numbered 600–800 men.

  artillery: weapons such as big guns and cannons.

  bandolier: a broad belt worn over the shoulder by soldiers, with small loops or pockets for holding bullets.

  battery: a defensive position from which guns are fired.

  Blitz: from Blitzkrieg, a German word meaning “lightning war” that refers to the bombing of Britain by Nazi Germany between September 7, 1940 and May 10, 1941.