Sometime after breakfast on 1 September 1944 a strange silence fell on the town. At about 09.20 the first tricolours appeared in windows and the news jumped from house to house and street to street. ‘They’re here!’1 At 10.10 two soldiers on motorcycles appeared at the top of the rue Gambetta, the main route south. By the time they reached the war memorial in the place des Martyrs near the seafront the crowd was so dense they could get no further. ‘Twenty women, mad with joy, jumped out and hugged and kissed them,’ the local paper reported. The motorcyclists were carried off to the town hall where this time it was the turn of the mayor René Levasseur to kiss them, whereupon the crowd burst into the ‘Marseillaise’. After four years and four months of fear, suffering and humiliation, Dieppe was free again.
The men of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry arrived at Rouxmesnil-Bouteilles on the southern edge of the town in the afternoon. They had landed in France a month after D-Day with the rest of the 2nd Division. Since then they had fought in the great battle for Caen and the rout of the German army at the Falaise Gap. The division had been remade since 1942. There were fewer than 300 Dieppe veterans in the Canadian ranks and many of them had since died. Just a few days before, fourteen men had been killed or were missing and twenty-seven wounded clearing out machine-gun posts south-west of Rouen. Mercifully it seemed that the Germans had decided not to make a stand in Dieppe and had already retreated, leaving behind only booby traps and mines and a few snipers who were dealt with by the local Resistance fighters.
From their holding position at Rouxmesnil-Bouteilles, the Rileys ‘caught the first glimpse of the English Channel and…the outskirts of Dieppe’.2 Alongside them were the Essex Scottish and the Royals, their brothers-in-arms from the beaches of 1942. The Fusiliers Mont-Royal and the South Saskatchewans were backed up on the road behind. The whole 2nd Division were there. Their diversion from the main path of the Allied advance was, as Matthew Halton, a CBC reporter with the troops put it, ‘a gesture. But it was a gesture demanded by Canadian history.’3
As they waited for the order to move, word reached them that there were some old comrades nearby. The Rileys had halted only a mile or so away from the cemetery at Les Vertus where the dead of 19 August 1942 lay. Two men who had been on the beaches that day, Major Jack Halladay and Major Joe Pigott, slipped away. The graveyard was surrounded by fields and woods. The graves were arranged in eleven rows. Each was marked by a wooden cross with a number corresponding to a name written in a list kept in a hut nearby. The lawns between the rows were neat and clipped. Halladay and Pigott went down them, pausing at the graves of special friends, taking photographs to send back to the dead men’s families. Then they returned to the road where the troops stood smoking and talking quietly in the warm, apple-scented evening.
It was not until the following day that the town was put in bounds. The Rileys entered to the same ecstatic welcome that greeted every man in uniform. The veterans showed the others the sites of the carnage, and they ‘swarmed over the German defences, smashed by their own demolitions and broken by Allied bombings’.
That night the new mayor, Resistance leader Pierre Biez who had taken over following the honourable departure of M. Levasseur, hosted a dance for the officers in the town hall while the men fanned out through the town’s bars. ‘One could not help but notice the mixture of strange emotions that night on the faces of personnel who had visited the town previously,’ the Rileys’ war diary recorded. ‘Some were gay. Some were lost in reverie, but all enjoyed the real hospitality of the French people. Dieppe was avenged and this celebration was a fitting close to the agonised scenes of two years ago.’4
Next day was the time for remembrance. At 11.00 there was a memorial service at the cemetery. Two hours later the division marched six abreast through streets packed with cheering civilians and past their commander General Crerar. There was a day to reorganise. Then on the morning of 5 September the 2nd Division mounted their jeeps and lorries and went back to the war.
The Canadians would always return, along with British commandos who fought with them and the sailors who carried them all over. Every year on the anniversary of the raid the town filled up with veterans and their families. The survivors are almost all gone now but the anniversary is still a big event in Dieppe and probably always will be. On the morning of the 19th a crowd gathers at Les Vertus for speeches and prayers, then they stroll among the graves and summon up the young faces behind the names on the white headstones. Before he died George Buchanan of the South Saskatchewans talked of the struggle he had to retain his composure, a battle he always lost. ‘I try to steel myself,’ he said. ‘I’m fine until I see some names I know and before long I’m bawling like a kid…you see us guys we all joined together, in the Depression from the prairies…we bunked together and we went up the ranks together. We were buddies…’5
It is a French as much as an Allied occasion. The cemetery is the creation of the people of Dieppe. They joined in the grim work of collecting the dead and the carts that carried the catch from the fishing boats to the markets were loaded up with corpses scattered over the beaches. More arrived on the tide for days afterwards. The bodies were put first in mass graves around the town then exhumed a few days later and reburied at Les Vertus. The site had been selected in 1940 as a cemetery for the dead from the Allied military hospital. It was no more than a cow field but over the next few years, encouraged by the sub-prefect Michel Sassier and tolerated by the Germans, the local people turned it into the green and peaceful space it is today.6
It became a place of reconciliation as well as remembrance. From 1960 onwards men of the 302nd Division returned most years to lay a wreath at Les Vertus and to visit the graves of their own dead. There were very few of them left. After the raid the division was sent to the Russian front and by the end the war had been reduced to 200 men.7
Jubilee lasted a long morning but the scar it left on Dieppe will never fade. The town has reverted to its old identity as a genteel resort, and the surrounding villages are peaceful and prosperous. The innocent backdrop makes the plaques and little monuments dotted around on street corners and crossroads all the more poignant. In these innocuous corners one hot summer morning, young men died in their hundreds. At least they have their memorials. Millions of others do not. The last service of the dead of Dieppe is to remind us for ever of a simple truth: that peace is sweet and war an abyss of sorrow and waste.