History Television doc sheds new light on Dieppe, 70 years after invasion

 

DIEPPE, France – Dieppe has long been a word that has made Canadian war veterans swell with pride and wince with sorrow. Ron Beal didn’t like the sound of the word when he first heard it

 

Vue sur le centre-ville de Dieppe (France) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

spelled out 70 years ago as his regiment’s top secret military target. The first three letters, he points out, spell DIE — “and when we got there, that’s exactly what we did.”

 

Beals, a member of the Royal Regiment of Canada, is one of a handful of surviving war veterans who share first-person insights in the illuminating new documentary “Dieppe Uncovered.” The 90-minute film premieres Sunday night at 9 p.m. ET/PT — 70 years to the day of the Dieppe invasion — on History Television.

 

 

Produced and directed by cinematographer Wayne Abbott (“Deep Wreck Mysteries: Unsinkable Battleship”), the film draws on 15 years of meticulous research conducted by military historian David O’Keefe to make the case that the doomed dawn raid had a purpose and a complexity that went far beyond its legacy as a military failure.

 

O’Keefe, who served with the Royal Highland Regiment, just never bought some of the popular beliefs about the raid. Some said it was a sop to Russian demands for a second front in Europe and to provide a testing ground for D-Day. The sacrifices paid at Dieppe — over 900 Canadians killed in roughly three hours of savage bloodshed — did not, in O’Keefe’s estimation, justify the means.

 

Another 2,000 troops were captured that terrible August 19th, and many spent the next year-and-a-half shackled to one another.

 

O’Keefe likens his Dieppe discoveries to pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Among the revelations he made…

 

EXCERPT

 

via History Television doc sheds new light on Dieppe, 70 years after invasion.

 

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