Deconstructing Dieppe: Seventy Years Later, Remembering a Battle Whose Name Remains a Metaphor for Military Disaster
sigmundcarlandalfred.wordpress.com
In the early hours of August 19, 1942, Roy Hawkins, a twenty-one-year-old sergeant from Fort McMurray, Alberta, walked purposefully through the grey passageways of a troop transport as it steamed toward the fortified town of Dieppe (population 16,000), on France’s northern coast. He was looking for another soldier. Built as a ferry to travel from Harwich to Hook of Holland, HMS Princess Beatrix was one of 237 vessels carrying some 5,000 Canadian, 1,000 British, and fifty American troops to beaches code named Yellow, Blue, Red, White, Green, and Orange. On the mess decks, soldiers did what soldiers do before battle: played cards, sharpened bayonets, wrote letters home, prayed. And, of course, worried: a private nicknamed Red complained to Sergeant Jack Nissenthall, the man Hawkins was trying to find, that their new Sten guns might seize up in the heat of battle, because the rivets hadn’t been filed down properly. When Hawkins caught up with Nissenthall, he told him that he, Hawkins, would be commanding the ten-man unit assigned to help Nissenthall steal the secrets of Freya, a German radar station near Pourville, just east of Dieppe. Neither man mentioned it, but both knew that an order unique in the annals of the Canadian military now rested on Hawkins’ shoulders. Nissenthall was not a Canadian soldier. He was, in fact, a twenty-two-year-old British Royal Air Force officer with top secret knowledge of the radar system that had stymied the Germans during the London Blitz. Hawkins’ job was to get Nissenthall, known to the Canadians of the South Saskatchewan Regiment as Spook, out of France. If for any reason Hawkins could not do so, he was instructed to kill him.