| Eighty-four years ago this morning, shortly after five o’clock, Canadian soldiers began landing on six beaches on either side of the French port of Dieppe. Nine hours later it was over. |
| Operation Jubilee was a raid. The plan was to land, take the town and hold it for a matter of hours, then withdraw the same day. Most of the force was the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division under Major-General John Hamilton Roberts, with Churchill tanks of The Calgary Regiment, No. 3 and No. 4 Commando on the outer flanks, and a Royal Marine commando. More than 230 ships and landing craft crossed the Channel, escorted by nine destroyers. There were no cruisers and no battleships. |
| It went wrong early and it went wrong nearly everywhere. At Blue Beach, below Puys, The Royal Regiment of Canada landed late into the light and was cut apart on a seawall it could not get over. At Green Beach, near Pourville, the South Saskatchewan Regiment came ashore on the wrong side of the Scie with one bridge to cross. In front of the town, at White and Red Beach, the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry and The Essex Scottish crossed open shingle under the two headlands with the tanks coming in behind them. Les Fusiliers Mont-Royal, held offshore in reserve, were ordered onto the main beach after it had already failed. |
| Of the beaches, only Orange went as intended. No. 4 Commando landed west of the town, destroyed the coastal battery at Blancmesnil and came off again. |
Landing craft going in, 19 August 1942. Library and Archives Canada PA-113246.
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The main beach in front of the town, with Churchills stopped on the shingle. Imperial War Museum.
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The seawall at Blue Beach, Puys. Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-291-1230-13.
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Canadian prisoners in the streets of Dieppe, 19 August 1942. Canadian War Museum 19830136-001.
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| 4,963 Canadians embarked for the operation. 2,210 came back to England, many of them wounded. Across the whole force the day cost 991 killed, 2,585 wounded and 2,005 taken prisoner. |
| In those nine hours the Canadian Army lost more prisoners than it would lose in the eleven months of the campaign in North-West Europe, or in the twenty months of fighting in Italy. Of the seven major Canadian units engaged, only Les Fusiliers Mont-Royal brought its commanding officer back, and he came back wounded. Royal Navy and Royal Air Force crews were killed offshore and overhead, a destroyer and a number of landing craft were lost, and French civilians were killed in their own town. |
| Three Victoria Crosses were awarded for that day, two to Canadians. Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Merritt of the South Saskatchewan Regiment led men across the bridge at Pourville by walking over it. Honorary Captain John Foote, chaplain of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry, spent eight hours on White Beach carrying wounded men out of the open, then gave up his place in a landing craft. Both were captured and spent the next three years as prisoners of war. Both survived. |
| These were hometown regiments, recruited locally, and the losses came out of specific places on a single morning. Hamilton, Windsor, Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg, Calgary, and the towns of southern Saskatchewan all got their telegrams in the same week. |
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| Today we are publishing a rebuilt map of the raid. It is animated, and it now runs the whole nine hours end to end rather than as a set of stills you click between. You can watch the units move. |
Landing at 05:30.
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| How did we map all this? The infantry tracks come from the battalions’ own war diaries, from signals and situation reports logged during the raid, and from the after-action reports written up afterwards, read against the naval records and the German war diaries covering the same hours from the other side. |
| The tank positions came from German evidence. German photographs taken after the raid show the Churchills where they stopped. Where each Landing Craft Tank landed is also documented. The eight hours in between came from the tank crews’ own interviews, which describe where they drove and where they came to stop. The two ends of every tank route are recorded. The line between them is a reading of those accounts, and the map presents it as one. |
SSR moving off Green Beach.
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Red and White Beach, the surrender.
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| There is also a casualty layer mapping out where soldiers were killed. It is an interpretation. We do not know where individual men were killed as that would be impossible. What is recorded is how many were killed, wounded or captured on each beach, and the layer shows those totals spread across the beach they belong to. It is a representation of what the beaches would have looked like to provide a sense of scale. |
Slaughter at Blue Beach.
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| Free, no account needed. |
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Royal Canadian Legion, US Branch #25 