Some nights, Dieppe comes back to Ken Curry as though it were yesterday. It was a slaughter as soon as the ramps dropped, the water red with the blood of dead and dying Canadians.
The sounds were terrible, the screaming of the wounded punctuated by the shells raining down from clifftop artillery, the bombs falling from German planes.
The Bren gun carrier that Curry followed out of his landing craft was blown from the water. The 20-year-old bandaged the knee of his wounded sergeant, but the man was later killed by a bullet to his head.
Of the seven men who wrestled Curry’s mortar and ammunition ashore, four were cut down.
Machine guns chewed into the Canadians from the windows of beachfront hotels — no aiming, the Germans just had to pull the trigger. Setting up the mortar on a rocky shore, Curry fought back.
“I fired 32 bombs into them, but I don’t think it did any good,” the Sidney man says.
But then, not much good came out of the Dieppe raid, 75 years ago tomorrow.
It was Canada’s costliest day of the Second World War. Of the 5,000 Canadians — along with 1,100 British and 50 Americans — who landed at the French coastal town, more than 900 were killed and 2,400 wounded. Close to 2,000 were captured.
While some historians argue the raid provided crucial lessons for D-Day two years later, others see that view as whitewashing a debacle.
“Dieppe was one big fiasco,” Curry says.
Of the 582 men in his regiment, the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry, 197 were killed. Only 211, more than half of them wounded, made it back to England. The remaining 174, including Curry, were taken prisoner.
Of those 582, only Curry and one other man, Fred Engelbrecht, survive.
That’s why Curry flew from the Island to Ontario Thursday: to spend Saturday, the 75th anniversary, with his old friend.
“There’s only two of us left in the regiment. He’s 97 and I’m 95, and I want to be with him. It’s near the end of the line.”
They don’t spend much time rehashing the war anymore. “We talk about how sore our legs are and who’s going to die first. He said: ‘My doctor says I’m going to live to 100.’ I said: ‘My doctor says I’m going to live to 102.’ ”
It’s not like they’ll ever forget what happened, though.
The soldiers were told the raid would be easy, that they would face only a single beat-up battalion recuperating from the Russian front, Curry says. “They didn’t mention the SS regiments and the tank regiments that were waiting for us.” A skirmish with a German convoy took away the element of surprise, too.
If the subsequent massacre shocked the nation, imagine being there and seeing your friends mowed down. For Curry, who joined up as a 17-year-old in 1939, these were the people he had spent the past three years training with, sleeping beside, eating with, all wiped out in four hours. “It breaks me up and I’ll never forget it.”
The Allies spent the morning pinned on the beach before the navy put down a smokescreen and the evacuation began.
Curry used four captured Germans to bundle two wounded men, one a friend, the other a major, onto a boat. The coxswain wouldn’t let anyone but the wounded aboard, though, so Curry took his four Germans and tried another vessel, only to end up back in the water after it took three direct hits and started to sink. (Years later, he discovered that the two men he saved had made it back to England, but that his friend had been killed in Normandy in 1944.)
Curry spent five hours in the water after that. At one point little fish began jumping around him. No, it was bullets hitting the surface. He swam to a landing craft that was idling in neutral and, grabbing onto ropes, hauled himself up the side, only to find it full of dead bodies. He also saw a Spitfire and a Messerschmitt, dogfighting in their own private war, crash into the cliffs.
It was under one of those cliffs that an exhausted Curry finally washed ashore late that day. Having stripped off his waterlogged clothes, he was wearing nothing but underpants when a big German popped up and pointed a rifle at him. “I’m sure if I’d been in uniform he would have shot me.”
Marched into a factory where other prisoners were corralled, he found his brother, Norman, fast asleep. Norman began to cry when awakened; he had been told Ken was dead. (In fact, their mother got a telegram to that effect, which put her in hospital for two weeks.) It was Norman who noticed the bullet crease down Ken’s back.
The prisoners were loaded onto a train, 80 to a boxcar, and shipped to the Polish-German border and the notorious Stalag 8B. (Among the inmates was a single member of Britain’s Home Guard, a man who had, after being sent for fish and chips by his wife in Brighton, been snatched off a beach by a raiding party from a German U-boat.)
Of Curry’s two years and nine months as a PoW, more than a year was spent in chains (though he learned to open his manacles with a sardine can key).
That was two years and nine months without Norma, the girl from the northeast of England whom he had married just a week before the raid — not long enough to really get to know her, but long enough for her to become pregnant. It was an unconventional start to a marriage that lasted until her death in 2016.
Curry saw the movie Dunkirk the other day. Came out of it with his eyes wet. “It took me right back to Dieppe,” he says. “It was a hopeless, helpless situation.”
It was the waste, the botched planning, that appalled him in 1942 and that appalls him now. Never should have had a head-on attack in broad daylight. Should have taken out the artillery beforehand. Should have taken out the machine guns in the hotels. Shouldn’t have sent tanks onto a rocky beach where they would lose their treads.
Instead, after three years of training, the regiment was tossed into a buzzsaw. “We were top soldiers, and in four hours there was nothing left. How the hell do you forget that?”
After flying to Toronto on Thursday, Curry was to get a motorcycle escort to Hamilton, where he’ll take part in a ceremony Saturday. It’s good not to be forgotten after 75 years. It’s also hard to forget.
“I still remember everything very clearly about Dieppe and I probably will until the day I die,” he says. “I lost a lot of friends.”
