The number is 907. It is a very poignant number as it was the amount of soldiers who bravely sacrificed their lives so that people like myself could have freedom. This number is the amount of men who died in the Battle of Dieppe on Aug. 19, 1942.
Many Canadians may not know that much about the Canadian Forces first major foray into the war against defeating Nazi Germany, but to me it was the precursor to Operation Overlord, the June 6, 1994 D-Day Normandy invasions and without the harsh lessons learned at Dieppe, I don’t think D-Day would have been successful.
Dieppe was a bold and possibly miscalculated step in trying to breach France and the Nazis’ hold over it. It was smart to take a beach head such as Dieppe, but the German Army was to dug in and well armed and the Canadians didn’t have the numbers needed to achieve the objective that day.
The Canadian-led attack had a total number of 6,000 soldiers with a total of 3,623 of them either being killed, wounded or captured and the Royal Air Force also lost 96 aircraft that day.
Many brave souls died that day and I don’t think the battle gets enough credibility in the history books as an event that helped the Allied troops push into France on D-Day and eventually into Germany to end the European part of World War II.
There are some key aspects of Dieppe that gives clear evidence to the preparation of D-Day.
In the aftermath of Dieppe, the Allied commander realized they would need a lot more soldiers, air support, tanks to support the ground troops as well as the use of paratroopers to go in behind the lines before the German army was pressed by a frontal assault.
When soldiers and historians talk about D-Day they talk about at the massive amount of firepower, ships, planes and men used in one single attack. From Dieppe the Allied commanders knew it would be a war of attrition over strategy. They had to take Europe by force and a big battering ram of everything was needed to take those beachheads on June 6, 1944.
I took quite a few WWII classes while in university and the text book I had for my one class was probably close to 1,000 pages and it only had about two sentences on the Battle of Dieppe. This book was called “How the war was won”. Well one of the reasons the war was one was because of Dieppe and I strongly feel without the brave sacrifice from our Canadian soldiers, the war wouldn’t have swayed in the Allied forces favour.
There is always discussion on whether or not the mission should have taken part in the first place, but all I know is that without 6,000 men defending our freedom on Aug. 19, 1942 I don’t think I’d be enjoying the freedom I do today.