Dieppe: Landscapes and Installations

Galen Roger Perras is an assistant professor of history at the
University of Ottawa.

The catastrophic raid by the 2nd Canadian Division on the French coastal
town of Dieppe on August 19, 1942, is likely the best known (or
infamous) Canadian battle of World War II. Some 913 Canadian soldiers
perished on Dieppe’s bullet-swept stony beaches, while hundreds
marched off to austere German captivity. It was not Canada’s finest
military moment, a fact driven home by a legion of academic and
non-academic studies, some of which are not shy about pointing fingers
of blame for the bloody defeat. Lord Mountbatten, the ambitious and
well-connected British head of the Combined Operations Command, usually
gets much of the blame.

This book, which is presented in both French and English, is not
another postmortem of the tragic events at Dieppe. Yes, Professor
Béatrice Richard seeks to place the disastrous battle in a wider
historical context. (Oddly though, her French-language analysis is a
great deal longer and far more nuanced than her English-language
account.) But the bulk of the book centres on Carriиre’s choice to
use photographs that he recently took at Dieppe to drive home the
sacrifices of 1942. There are numerous colour shots of Dieppe’s
beaches and cliffs as they appear today interspersed with well-chosen
photos from August 1942. The book’s most moving portion, however,
revolves around Carriиre’s employment of 913 black-and-white head
shots of soldiers that he took at the Canadian Army’s Valcartier base
near Quebec City. He transported those photos to Dieppe’s battle sites
and arranged them in various installations, which he then photographed.
Thus, we see dozens of portraits arranged on the beaches or floating in
a gentle surf, representing the great many Canadian bodies that littered
that battlefield over 60 years ago.

This book does not add much to the academic debate about Dieppe, but
that is not its goal. Instead, it seeks to remind us in a most moving
way of the human sacrifices that war demands, a lesson we should never
allow ourselves to forget.