‘We were sitting ducks’:100-year-old war veteran shares memories of Dieppe
MONTREAL — At age 100, Honorary Col. David Lloyd Hart still remembers every detail of the bloody and chaotic scene on the beach during the ill-fated Allied raid on Dieppe in 1942.
Hart, a communications operator, remembers being stuck on a crippled boat about five metres from shore, unable to swim for the beach because he couldn’t leave the vessel’s radio unit.
“The fire was terrible,” he said at an interview at his home in Montreal.
“There was mortar fire, and there were machine-gun nests in the cliffs which weren’t seen by our intelligence people because they had them covered, and they had heavy six-pounder or more cannons shooting at us.”