Road to Portsmouth and Dieppe

We got orders to disembark, disembark. There was our ship, the Calpe, HMS Calpe. You’ll hear a lot of it in the next few minutes. And there, oh it was loaded down with ammunition, of all types of bombs, and shells, and everything you could think of in there. And, it was really a going concern. So, we climbed up the, the steps. Got on the board and went down below in the hold they called it. Everything was quiet. Found a bunk. The siren went. And then an announcement came, it says “We’re moving out. Where, we’ll let you know in very shortly.” And so the ship started, there was Calpe, the Fernie, the Berkeley, and they, all destroyers. They were all heading off, pulling out for the sea. Now about three miles out of port they have what they call the safety gate. And it’s two ships, and these ships have buoys to hold the chain up. It’s a big master chain that goes right across. And they have air bags that they inflate. And they can drop these chains down wherever they need them or raise them up for the ships to go out. When ships go out well they raise the chains and they let them out. Now when they, there’s an alert on well they have to leave the chains on. So that was three miles out. Siren went. And we were asked, the announcement came over the loudspeaker system “All hands to main deck for briefing.” The most solemn time of my life was right there, I didn’t know it.

Mr. Grand recalls how his trip to Portsmouth, England would enable him to participate in the Dieppe landing.

John Grand

Mr. Grand was born in 1909 in, as he described it, “a small hamlet in the wilderness of southern Manitoba.” His father homesteaded in Manitoba and then Saskatchewan. John Grand described his growing up during the Depression as poor and tough.

Mr. Grand was very interested in electronics as a teenager and held an amateur radio licence. He tried to join the Signal Corps in the 1930's, but was rejected for being “too flat-chested”. He remembers being so poor that he often joined the soup line to get something to eat. His first job was on the assembly line at Canadian Marconi for eleven cents an hour.

He joined the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals when war was declared in 1939. He was first assigned as a radio operator, but when his superiors saw his mechanical skills he was quickly re-assigned as a radio technician. His overseas service included landing at Dieppe, participating in the Normandy Campaign and in the liberation of Holland.