Dieppe Canadian War Cemetery

The Dieppe Canadian War Cemetery lies in the village of Hautot-sur-Mer, about five kilometres south of Dieppe, on a hillside overlooking the valley. It holds the graves of 707 soldiers, most of them Canadian, killed during the Dieppe Raid of August 1942. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission maintains the cemetery; the headstones are the familiar Portland stone, arranged in neat rows on a closely mown lawn.

The cemetery is quiet and well kept. Visiting it puts the seafront memorials in Dieppe itself in context: the beach is where the troops landed and fell, the cemetery is where many of them were buried by local people who witnessed the disaster. Most visitors come from the beach, a twenty-minute drive or a long walk along the cliffs. A register book at the entrance records the names of all those buried here. Open daily, free admission.

things to do sight
A story
The Dieppe Raid on 19 August 1942 was intended as a test of amphibious assault tactics, but it became a disaster. Of the roughly 6,100 troops who set out, fewer than 2,500 returned to England. Over 900 Canadians were killed in a single morning, and nearly 2,000 were taken prisoner — the largest single-day loss in Canadian military history to that point. Many historians argue that the hard lessons of Dieppe directly shaped the more successful D-Day landings two years later.