Veterans Interview - CWO Jack McFarland - 19 August 2003

Well, when we left camp we weren't told until we got on the mother ship that carried our landing craft that we were going back to Dieppe - that was the first we knew. It was a chilling experience, we'd been in the army long enough that we knew - most had been in for three years - that you never remount an operation once it had been cancelled.

All the troops went on leave, we had 5,000 men scattered around the British Isles, talking about their experiences on the Channel waiting to go into Dieppe.

And they remounted it, and we said, this is just another operation, we didn't know what the real significance of it until we get there, and when we lost the value of surprise, when the British commandoes on our left flank ran into a coastal flotilla going into Dieppe. They sank the flotilla but not before they sent an SOS to shore.

We didn't know that, all we knew going in was the fact that we lost our surprise.. And it wasn't until we were well entrenched on the beach that we knew that something had happened.

Question:  When you got the word to get down from the mother ship into the landing craft to go to shore, what happened after that?

It was very uneventful, we had going through all the minefields, we just climbed down into the landing craft and we started in, and then we were told to prepare for an opposed landing. We had no indication before that.

Question:  How did it go for you?

Poor! (laughs) I was one of the fortunates, I did fire my weapons! We lost whole sections that never fired a shot.

Question:  Describe the battle for me.

As we approached the shore it was turning daylight, we were late. We could see a whole lot of aircraft over the city, we could see tracer bullets being fired to the ground trying to knock out the searchlights.

And then we were..maybe..almost ready to touch down, maybe 50 yards from shore, we started to take fire from shore, and one of the assault craft about two or three over on our right got hit, took a direct hit.

I jumped off the landing craft, these had a flat nose on them, and the nose went down and that was what you run off on, and we had a dry landing, but we run onto stone, which we weren't expecting, we were expecting sand.

Two or three fellas ahead of me were down on the stones, whether they were dead or wounded, I don't know. We were taught to run off, get down, and proceed. Pretty hard to get down on those stones!

Another fella and I used a Bangalore torpedo and blew a hole in the wire, and we went - I headed for the casino which is what I was headed for, and I never made it. We run into a machine gun post - to the west, or east of us, and we knocked that out, and I set up a Bren gun there. To fire on the buildings across the promenade, cause nobody was getting up on the promenade, the wall was too high, to really climb, and they were firing on us from each flank, and they were actually firing from behind us. And they could all of us behind the wall and they were creating terrific casualties there.

When the evacuation came and I saw Capt Whitaker and his group coming out of the casino, and they said the first wave of boats was coming in to take us off, and I went down and I come across one of our officers that was wounded, and Arleigh Smith, he was a sergeant in the carrier platoon, he and I got a stretcher and took this officer down to the shore. And some of our fellas were standing out there in broad daylight, they could have been shot down at any time, and they were carrhing, putting the fellas wounded onto the assault craft to take them out. Eventually I worked my way down the beach and got onto the back of an assault craft up where the motor is, and there were four of us sitting up there and it started to go out, and it was overloaded, cause there was not enough boats, and it was overloaded, and a German bomber came over dropping anti-personnel bombs, and they hit in the water and anybody near there, it would just blow their bodies right up out of the water, and it was just spraying lead all over the place, and all four of us got hit, one was killed and the other three was wounded. I thought it blew my arm off so I got off it and went back to shore, and I understand that assault craft sank anyhow.

We were all ashore and somebody decided it was useless to carry on, all we were doing was taking casualties and we weren't committing any, and there was no boats coming in, and we had water behind us and Germans in front of us, and I believe they had a German airman who had come ashore hold up his underwear or something on rifle to surrender.

And then the Germans just came from nowhere, there were swarms of them coming down the beach.

Question:  What was the day like?

Beautiful, it was a day like this, I'd say it was very comparable to today, the heat. And we were in battledress, there was no such thing as summer combat dress for the Northern hemisphere. If you were in Egypt or someplace like that you had summer dress, but not in the northern hem. So you were carrying your weapons, ammunition, extra ammunition for the Bren gun carrier, your bayonet, your rifle or whatever weapon you had, if you were in the mortar platoon, you were carrying mortar bombs, and all this heat, it took an effect on ya.

Question:  What water did you have?

We had one little water bottle full and that didn't last long.

Question:  What were you thinking during the day?

I don't recall thinking anything. It was just something that we were trained to do, I'd always thought that if you stopped to think, you were dead. You're trained to do things and you do as you're trained.

The only time that I reflected on what had happened was after I reached Rouen hospital.

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