Given Their Orders

We all moved up, climbed up the stairs, got up there to the main part of the deck. The captain was on the winch, as high as he could get. He took out an envelope out of his pocket and he opened it, and he says “Men, up till now I have not been able to tell you anything. Where we’re going or what we’re going to do or anything. But it’s all in here.” And then he started to read it. He says “Our destination is Dieppe. The object is to build a bridge head at Dieppe that we can later on, carry on as a front for any invasion of the continent. Now Dieppe has been selected because it is not very heavily fortified. At least that’s what the word is, that is the fortifications are very light. There are a lot of embankments and so they’ll be a lot of climbing. It’s not going to be a picnic. But” he says “the worst part, I have to tell you is that only one out of every four of you people will come back alive. That’s all depends on your luck.” We had 27 operators, radio operators on board ship, on Calpe. Each one had a wireless set and some of them were out in the open, some of them they were protected a little bit by some armour plating and different directions, but with that he said “There’s a consolation. You go back down in your, in the hold and you write a letter to your friend, your mother, your parents, your girlfriend or whoever you want, and you tell them whatever you want. Those letters will not be censored. The way you’ll write them is the way they’ll receive them, if you don’t come back. If you come back those letters will be destroyed. But it’s up to you, and God bless you. But now go back down and write your letters.” Now what would you do?

Interviewer: What did you do?


I threw mine in the waste paper basket. I wrote about ten of them and I threw them in the waste paper basket and so did the rest of them. What could you do? So, anyhow at four o’clock in the afternoon the sirens started up and we were moving very, very slowing toward Dieppe. Because the distance between Portsmouth and Dieppe is around eighty miles. And so eighty miles with these ships that can do 45 knots, well it wouldn’t take them long, but they were just going to cruise along very slowly. And so, as darkness fell we were still half ways to our destination.