what I want ot know is, is there a medal available to Canadian troops who were at Dieppe?
Hi
The only medal they received for Dieppe was a Bar on the CVSM with the word Dieppe and the combined operations logo (THOMPSON GUN)
Cheers
Those men deserved anything they could get for being at Dieppe.
They should have stood Lord Mountbatten up before a firing squad and some of the other fools who sent these poor guys into this suicide attack in the first place.
That may have been a suicide mission, but it proved that the Allies shouldn’t attack a harbour city, and instead, make their own. Those men that died weren’t the first to die, and certainly weren’t the last ones to die either. They knew they were going into hell, and they did what they had to do. Too bad they weren’t all decorated for doing what they did.
Sadly, lessons sometimes have to be learned the hard way (easy for me to say, but true).
Many lessons were learned from Dieppe. One of the main ones was that the tank tracks became bogged down in the shingle on the beaches.
Many good men were sacrificed at St Nazaire, but the raid was seen as a success. Arguably, Operation Overlord was a success on account of the sacrifice of the men at Dieppe (at least in part, for they helped to make it possible). If so, then one might argue that Dieppe was a success. After all, Dieppe was a raid, not an invasion, to test the methods and equipment of the fledgling, combined-arms operations. It is easy to criticise with hindsight, but these chaps were living in real-time.
Usually, with British forces, if a medal already exist for a theatre, then a ‘Bar’ is added for anything exceptional or beyond the prescribed, as opposed to authorising another medal - it’s just the way of it.