Gordon Fennel is installed in his wheelchair in front of a large bay window of the Dieppe casino hotel. Around him, his doctor checks each interview. It must be said that today, “Gord” is a hundred years old and that he made the trip from Canada, to return for the first time to Dieppe.
A fatal lack of organization
His ears are no longer those of a young man, but his bright blue gaze quickly imposes silence on his interlocutors. There is still anger there. It begins without a preamble:The events of that night were a disappointment for me“At the time, Gordon was 20 years old, the Dieppe raid was the first military operation in which he took part.
“All these dead and wounded… It’s a serious thing. I think the events could have been better prepared! I thought the operations manager went on vacation taking things lightly!“
He evokes the lack of training of infantry soldiers embarked in ships that they do not master. He even remembers a unit that will never be able to land because it lost control of its boat and will end up adrift.
On the practical details, again, it was a fiasco: “the pebbles got caught in the tracks of the tanks! After an hour they had to be changed… But how do you change tracks when a war is taking place all around you?”
Errors that will cause the lives of 1,200 soldiers, including 900 Canadians.
An exceptional destiny
His gaze suddenly softened, he recognized: “I do not condemn them for everything… it was something never seen! They were trying to help the Russians“.
This was indeed the objective of Operation Jubilee: in 1942, the Allied troops were in bad shape so to relieve the Eastern front, they wanted to open a second front in the West.
6000 soldiers are sent to Dieppe, 5000 are Canadian and 1000 British. But most will end up captured by the Germans and sometimes sent to concentration camps.
Gordon Fennel, he managed to escape: “I managed to survive because at one point, faced with the extent of the losses, the Canadian government ordered everyone to surrender and be taken prisoner. But I said to myself: “I don’t want to go to prison!” So I stayed close to the waterfront and convinced a stranger to tow me to England…it took a very long time as we took off slowly, hoping he wouldn’t sink us“
He will finally join England and will continue the war in the front line until 1945, in Italy and the Netherlands.
Of these years:you know, life on the front line is not happy. We wonder every morning if we’ll still be here tomorrow…“.
A memorable anecdote, however, is recounted in his presentation of the Canadian Embassy: “While in England, he asked for the hand of Joyce Cobb. He wrote to his mother to send him a pair of new shoes from Canada in preparation for the wedding day, the shoes then being rationed in England. By the time the shoes arrived, he was in Sicily with the invasion force. So he stowed the new shoes next to his head inside the tank. The tank exploded. Shrapnel penetrated the tank, lodged in the soles of his new shoes, in his headphones and in his head. Thanks to the thickness of the soles of his shoes, he suffered only a minor injury.”
He is taking part in the celebrations today and says he is happy and relieved at the welcome and support he has received from the young and not so young who take part in the commemorations.
The new generation
In the Canadian delegation, Gordon of course did not come alone. With him, twenty young people from all the states of Canada.
– Milena Aellig
Among them, there is sla Huppé, who comes from the Yukon, more than 7,000 km from Dieppe, and Manuel Sauvé-Chevalier, a 17-year-old boy from Quebec. His great-great uncle participated in the raid: “it’s a story that has been happening in the family for several generations but my parents passed it on to me a little less… So I wanted to take part in this trip to close the loop and bring this story and the to transmit. In Canada, we tend to confuse the Dieppe raid with the Normandy landings.“.
The first celebrations he attended were rich: “it is an upheaval of emotion! I expected to be serene but… I wouldn’t say I was sad… I was honored! And at the same time I trembled to be able to pay homage to him 80 years later. To see where he was buried, where he died”