Eyewitness at Dieppe: The Only First-Hand Account of WWII’s Most Disastrous Raid

In August 1942, Allied forces mounted an attack on the German-held port of Dieppe; titled Operation Jubilee, it represented a rehearsal for invasion. The amphibious attack saw over 6,000 infantrymen, predominantly Canadian, put ashore, tasked with destroying German structures and gathering intelligence. The doomed raid was an abject failure, and became Canada’s worst military disaster. Eyewitness at Dieppe is a long-overdue reissue of New Zealand-born writer Wallace Reyburn’s dramatic account of the raid. He was with the first soldiers clambering ashore, and aboard the last ship returning to England after six hours of carnage. Awarded an OBE as the only war correspondent to witness the street fighting first-hand, Reyburn was fortunate not be numbered among Dieppe’s dead, suffering just a minor wound inflicted by mortar shell fragments. His book, Rehearsal for Invasion was a wartime bestseller. Accompanied by freelance journalist Ross Reyburn’s new foreword on his father’s account, this new edition tells us more about Wallace’s intriguing life and details the shortcomings of his father’s book, dictated by wartime censorship corrected in the post-war years through a withering condemnation of raid’s mastermind Lord Mountbatten. AUTHOR: Freelance journalist Ross Reyburn, who has revived his late father Wallace Reyburn’s dramatic eyewitness account of the ill-fated Dieppe Raid, is a former newspaper feature writer and non-fiction book reviewer. From 1967-1973, he worked as a journalist with the Hampstead & Highgate Express, the North London weekly hailed as “”the only local newspaper in Britain with a foreign policy!”” Later came a long career with The Birmingham Post, as a feature writer latterly also serving as the regional daily newspaper’s literary editor before going freelance in 2003. His books include Saving Rugby Union (Y Lolfa, 2020) and The Great Rivals – Oxford and Cambridge (2010), a Pitkin Guide comparing the achievements of the world’s two most famous universities. 40 b/w illustrations —- ISBN: 9781399059978