Ticket to Hell via Dieppe: From a Prisoner's Wartime Log 1942-1945

Stafford Johnston was a freelance reviewer living in Mitchell, Ontario.

The remarkable thing about Robert Prouse’s memoir of his three years as a prisoner-of-war, 1942-45, is that the source material on which the book is based should have survived. Prouse, a corporal when he was wounded and taken prisoner at Dieppe, was a compulsive diarist who made day-to-day notes on scraps of paper he could scrounge. His collection of paper scraps came back to Canada with him when the war ended, even though he had many times been transferred from camp to camp, many times strip-searched, and had twice escaped, been recaptured, and sentenced to solitary confinement as punishment for escaping.

It is not surprising that he let 40 years go by before using his paper scraps as the material of a book. Much of the record he wrote is painfully vivid and honest. The detailed account of a strip-search by brutally efficient Nazi guards does not make a pretty memory for the one who was searched.

Prouse had professional training in security in the army provost corps in wartime Britain and as a private investigator in civilian life. His training shows in what he omits from his book. He is careful, even at this late date, to say nothing of what he must have known about the techniques of the ultra-secret links between British Intelligence and the prisoner organization inside the P.O.W. camps in Nazi Germany.

This book is a useful addition to the historical record of Canadian experience at and after the Dieppe raid.