PERSONAL
B OO K R E V I E W
Tragedy at
Dieppe
By Mark Zuehlke
$27.95 CDN, 6” X 9”, 472 pages, 27 B&W
photographs, Douglas & McIntyre.com
The 1942 raid
on Dieppe by
the Allied Forces
was, as Mark
Zuehlke’s Tragedy
at Dieppe tells us
in no uncertain
terms, the worst
military disaster
for Canadians in
World War II.
About 68% of the 5,000
Canadian soldiers involved
in the nine-hour raid
would become casualties,
and the majority who were
unscathed never made it
ashore.
The Dieppe raid, codename Operation Jubilee,
has been controversial since
the moment news of its outcome reached the world.
How could it have gone so
terribly wrong, and who
was at fault? In Tragedy at
Dieppe, Zuehlke tackles
these questions through
the personal accounts of
soldiers, sailors and airmen. These anecdotes form
a narrative of the planning
and execution of the raid
that is brimming with personal insights from everyone involved, from the decision-makers to common
soldiers who wouldn’t even
learn the raid was happening until a few hours before
it began.
Through Zuehlke’s highly
detailed descriptions of the
politics around the raid, the
plans that were adopted
and then abandoned and
adopted again, growing and
becoming more complex
and unmanageable, and the
grand fiasco of the training
exercise codenamed Yukon
that preceded it, make it
sound almost impossible
that the Dieppe raid got off
the ground in the ifrst place.
As he leads us through the
experiences of the soldiers
during the raid itself, we
watch heartbroken as one
batalion and then another
sopes with the reality of the
ill-fated operation.
However, as Zuehlke says
in his epilogue, “Honouring
the sacrifice of those who
fought ar Dieppe requires
no justification for the raid.”
Tragedy at Dieppe, now
available in trade paperback
for the first time, stands as
a tribute to the brave men
March 2014 | foreveryoung
Canal Barging in France …from page 22
who met disaster on the
beaches of France on August 19, 1942.
MARK ZUEHLKE was
nominated for Canada’s premiere history prize, the 2013
Governor General’s History Award for Excellence in
Popular Media: The Pierre
Berton Award. Widely hailed
as Canada’s leading popular
military historian, he is author
of more than twenty books, including the popular Elias McCann mystery