“You promised you’d come back, and you came back!”

Jul 22nd “You promised you’d come back, and you came back!”

Although the Mémorial du 19 Août 1942 (Dieppe Raid Museum) was one of the most moving moments of the trip, it’s really hard to put the experience into words. The museum is a partially restored theatre that still shows interior scars from Nazi occupation. After a short tour our guide, a dedicated volunteer, sat us down for a movie about the Dieppe Raid. For those who don’t know, the raid on Dieppe in 1942 was a desperate attempt by the allies to gauge the Nazi coastal defenses and to experiment with a large scale landing. The battle was referred to as a raid from the beginning as no one had any false hopes of breaking the Nazi lines or gaining any sort of a foothold. The soldiers involved knew from the outset that the raid was little more than a suicide mission, but one that was absolutely necessary to win the war. Seeing as the Canadians had no intention of liberating Dieppe at this time they were fearful that the Nazi’s would seek retribution on any of the Dieppe citizens that assisted the Canadians during the raid, so the Canadian pilots dropped leaflets on the town urging citizens to stay indoors. The leaflets basically said that this is a raid, not liberation, and closed with “We promise we will come back”. I only tell the story so that you can have some appreciation of the emotion of the experience. After explaining all this to us the volunteer looked at us solemnly and said “You promised you’d come back, and you came back. For that we will forever be grateful”. There wasn’t a dry eye there. Turns out that after the success at Juno Beach the Canadians pushed in to occupied France further than any other of the Allied forces with the sole objective of the liberation of Dieppe. Some of the same soldiers that survived the raid indeed came back to free the people of Dieppe.

If that wasn’t enough the video depicted the raid in vivid detail. The rocky beach at Dieppe is very distinct, and even though the video was black & white and 73 years old, you could clearly see that the beach with all the bodies, all the death and tragedy was the exact spot we ran into the ocean the previous night. There was a scene that showed a giant pile of bodies on the exact staircase that we stopped at to dry off after a wonderful night on the beach. It really, really brought everything in to a sharp focus that we all felt. The Scouts were silently hugging each other and we all had a new appreciation for just how special our late night dip really was.