Red Beach an Appropriate Name!

And we went in, there were six thousand seasoned German troops against our six thousand. And that’s an absolute no, no. You never do a frontal assault when the odds are even especially when they got a background of guns and defences that they could put up against and all you got is the boats coming in. Not only that, in the first attempt on Rutter, we had been told we were going to have heavy bombers bombing Dieppe. We were going to have two navy battleships pounding away at the guns. The only problem was that the navy withdrew their capital ships. They weren’t going to do it. They said we can’t risk capital ships in a narrow channel and bomber Harris decided that he was going to withdraw the bombers because they had better things to bomb in Europe in either Berlin or other places. As a result the Germans had six inch guns or bigger and all we had was destroyers with four inch guns so were out gunned right from the start and we didn’t have a chance to get anywhere. And like I said, six thousand seasoned German troops with our intelligence didn’t show the fox holes that they had built in the cliffs with the machine gun nests and so on, and the batteries were right trained on the beach. The mortars were trained on the sea wall where the troops hid so we had a terrible time because we landed at 4:45 but I was on Red Beach. It was very aptly named because it ran red with blood.