Re: Dieppe

On Thu, 09 Apr 1998 14:08:56 GMT agoodall@sympatico.ca (Allan Goodall)
writes:
>On Tue, 07 Apr 1998 19:51:49 +1000, Alan E & Carmel J Brain
><aebrain@dynamite.com.au> wrote:
>
>>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...
>
>Are you sure about this? This is the first time I've heard of this. 
>This
>sounds like you've got the Bruneval raid mixed in with Dieppe. As far 
>as =
>I
>know, beside the Canadians and British landing on the main beach, 
>there =
>was a
>British Commando raid to take out some gun emplacements overlooking 
>the =
>beach
>(this commando raid was successful; one of the few bright sparks on 
>the =
>raid).
>
>>c) But the real kicker is that the operation above covered a VERY 
>SECRET
>>INDEED operation to recover most of the French research data from the
>>Curie institute about Nuclear Fission, and a shadowy figure involved 
>in
>>German Nuclear weapons Research. This probably saved the Manhattan
>>Engineering District nearly a year, and cost the Nazis any chance of
>>getting an A-bomb before 1950. This part was only revealed relatively
>>recently (6 years ago, under the 50-year rule), and wasn't given much
>>publicity.

I read something by the radar expert who went along on the raid, he had
a
team with him who were instructed to kill him if there was any chance at
all of him being captured!!!!  Needless to say he was VVVery careful!!! 
He was checking to see if the Germans had found out about the "cavitron'
[they hadn't.]

Second, the way I heard it was that the troops were told that this was a
practice mission to test landing procedures, so not being stupid they
left their good weapons {brens?] at home and took some new ones with
them
to soak in the salt water. They were in the boats when told this was the
real thing. The Bren gun were these stamped metal submachine guns and
needed a lot of work on them [ they had to remove the sprues and file
down some of the bolt heads to get the action to work smoothly and not
jam up all the time!!!] So they went into battle with very un-reliable
weapons and this was credited with killing a lot of troopers [the radar
tech I mentioned above reported this from his squad sargent {the one who
was supposed to kill him if things went bad.}]

Tom Hughes

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