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.