On the Beach and in the Bag: The Fate of Dieppe Casualties Left Behind

When the last Allied ships drew away from the beaches of Dieppe on 19 August 1942, they left behind over 2,700 of the 4,963 Canadians who had embarked on the raid: 807 men were dead, including four Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps [RCAMC] medical orderlies, and 1,946 (including four Canadian Medical Officers (MOs), a chaplain, and at least 11 RCAMC medical orderlies and 48 accredited stretcher-bearers) were abandoned to German captivity on the beaches and environs.1 As Lord Lovat wrote decades after the event, “the raid was an exceedingly bitter experience, learnt the hard way.”2 It is to the fate of these nearly two thousand men, and in particularly the 568 who had been wounded and then captured, that this article is devoted. Many of the survivors faced lengthy hospitalization and rehabilitation, frequently under the care of POW medical personnel rather than German doctors. The account of that medical treatment is one of the untold stories of the Dieppe raid