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 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 premières Sunday night at 9 p.m. - 70 years to the day of the Dieppe invasion - on History Television.
Produced and directed by cinematographer Wayne Abbott, the film reveals for the first time - thanks to 15 years of research conducted by military historian David O'Keefe - that the doomed 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 the popular theories that the raid was a diversion tactic to throw the Germans off the ultimate D-Day scent, or a sop to the Russian military leadership then begging the allied commanders to open a second front in Europe. The end did not justify the sacrifices made at Dieppe - over 900 Canadians killed in roughly three hours of savage bloodshed - in O'Keefe's estimation.
O'Keefe likens his Dieppe discoveries to pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Among the revelations he made was the extent of involvement in the planning of the raid by Ian Fleming, the British agent who later gained fame as the author of the James Bond spy novels.
Fleming, O'Keefe surmised, saw Dieppe as a full scale "pinch raid," an opportunity to create a diversion while a top secret special force of elite commandos snuck a block or two into town and raided what had been identified as the enemy's makeshift headquarters.
Fleming's goal was to gather code intelligence at a time when complex Axis espionage machinery was thwarting Allied efforts.
When O'Keefe presented his findings to the keepers of British code-break intelligence, they confirmed his discoveries and released more documents.
