Lessons Learned

If I had have tried to land with my radio set I would have drowned. There was at least ten feet of water. That’s why I had to stay where I was. And not only that, we had engineers with us that were supposed to blow the seawall for the tanks and they couldn’t land either because of that difference in depth. They would have drowned their explosives.

Well, we landed around 4:45. I didn’t get out of there until, the towing didn’t take place til about 1, 1:30 in the afternoon. But I was watching all this before that. The surrender took place at about 11 o’clock or 11:30 and the troops were being marched off by the Germans.

As far as I’m concerned, we learned the lesson of having first of all a moveable wharf, that’s what they came up with and they could go in on a beach and have the landings that way and they came up with artillery that was self-propelled and they came up with a lot of other things that they wouldn’t have had if they, in other words, Churchill himself said that if it hadn’t been for the lessons we learned at Dieppe, Normandy would never have happened.