Green Beach

Arrived on time Good book

Green Beach is a true account of an incident of over 60 years ago which has been the subject of a great deal of contraversial discussion since its occurrence. The Dieppe raid of August 1942 took place over a few places near Dieppe but the area on which this book is mainly concentrated is Pourville , about two miles from Dieppe. I was in my early twenties during the 1939-1946 war and lived in the north of England so the momentous happenings in the south of the country and over on the continent affected me very little. I got on with my life with its occasional air-raids and was fortunate not to lose any close,loved ones.I am now in my eighties and I can safely say that nothing ever made the war real to me in the way that this book, which I have just read, did. It is mainly the story of a modest man, a radar expert in the R.A.F. who volunteered for a very dangerous mission to try to get the low-down on the extent of the Germans' knowledge of this branch of developing technology.I lived with the people who were there, I shared their sorrows and their problems and I think they deserve to be remembered forever. I often go to Dieppe but my vists from now on will feel like pilgrimages because of this book.

"If I tell you, I'll have to kill you," is a comment sometimes heard during discussion of highly classified information. There are several cases where military personnel chose not to be taken alive because of the secrets that they knew. One is US Navy Captain John Cromwell that chose to go down with the submarine rather than be taken alive because of his knowledge about the US code-breaking capability. "Green Beach" is a story about an RAF non-commissioned officer that had substantial knowledge about RADAR, was physically conditioned and therefore was selected to participate in the raid on Dieppe, France in 1942. Someone with his knowledge was required because if they got inside the facility he needed to know what accomplishments the Germans had made in this area. A team was assigned to protect him so that he might get into the RADAR facility but if he was wounded, their secondary job was to ensure he was not taken alive.This book does an excellent job of tracing the planning and execution that went into this raid on German facilities on the French coast. Several thousand soldiers participated in the attack with the bulk of them Canadian servicemen. A small number of US Army Rangers and British also participated in preparation for what would eventually be D-Day at Normandy.The author, James Leasor, captures the accomplishments of these brave men recounting both those that succeeded and those that were killed and left behind. Based upon my early military experience with RADAR it was enjoyable to learn the history of this discipline in an operational setting. The only distraction that I noted was the repeated reference to the team's responsibility to kill a fellow serviceman rather than let him be taken alive. After a few times it failed to add anything to the story.Dieppe is a very important event in the history of the Canadian military and "Green Beach" does an exceptional job of documenting their bravery and sacrifice.