Prime Minister Mackenzie King visited the liberated French community of Dieppe on this date in 1946. It was, of course, the site of the infamous raid that saw more than 900 Canadians give their lives and 2,000 taken prisoner by the Nazis.
King described the scene in his private diary.
Prime Minister Mackenzie King: One sees cliffs rising steeply out of the sea; then there was a narrow sort of valley which led into the town, and then on the other side a very high hill on top of which was a gun emplacement which was occupied at the time by German soldiers and guns. The gun emplacement commands a complete view of the beach and one man with the help of a gun, it seemed to me, could destroy men as rapidly as they would land. It was a steep ascent everywhere. What would have been done once the heights were gained, I don’t understand, as it would have been as difficult again getting into town as getting up. I really felt as though the men who had planned that raid ought to have been cashiered… It was sending men to certain death without a ghost of a chance.
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.