Re: Dieppe

On Tue, 7 Apr 1998, Alan E & Carmel J Brain wrote:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall that they were supposed to

send a British unit that had actually trained for that sort of stuff,
but 
somehow got replaced with the poor canucks.

> b) One reason for the raid was to cover a very secret operation to
steal
> some parts of a German Radar, vital for the Allied war effort. So
vital,
> that the sacrifice of an elite division would almost have been worth
> it...

This doesn't compute. The allies had better radars all through the war. 
After all, they invented the bloody thing. Why would they need to steal
parts from a German radar? 

> So: Dieppe was an awful shambles, but despite this, the guys who died
> there did not do so in vain. 

In vain? It's a matter of definitions and viewpoints. You could say
every
single German casualty (including 2-3 million civilians (* ) died in
vain,
since they lost the war in the end. On the other hand, all sides had
countless soldiers whose lives at personal level wouldn't have been
greatly affected by the outcome of the war either way -- thus they all
died in vain from that viewpoint. 

I'm sorry, but I can't see justification in war. Necessity, sometimes, 
but no justification.

*) Before you ask, that includes post-war famine victims.

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