A Return To Dieppe

And then, as we’d pass the, the coast line we’d run into Dieppe again. Oh yes! I can not forget Dieppe. Yes sir, two years after the Dieppe raid. 1944. Word got around, “We’re going to Dieppe, we’re going down the main street and we want to be in the very best shape.” So all our uniforms and everything was saturated with, with brown, oh I don’t know. They use them on their boots and it went on everything. All your brass would be covered with it. I forget the name of it now, maybe you remember. But anyhow, everything was covered up anyhow so that there’d be no shine at all to it. “But all that’s got to come off now. We want a parade, and we want a real parade.” I have pictures of it here. And so, alright, we got all our uniforms pressed, and we got everything ship-shape. And said “Ok, now we couldn’t, we didn’t make it the back door but we’re going to come in through the front door.” And that’s the way they came in. And I took pictures of the, of the parade. And so, the cheers that we got you know, as the boys were marching down the street, you know, with their oh galore and the girls were hanging off their necks and everything. Ah, and cookies and cakes and everything else. But it was a great event. Yeah. Going through Dieppe.

Mr. Grand recalls that two years following the landing at Dieppe, the French port was again the target of Mr. Grand’s regiment, but for an entirely different and happier reason.

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.