Dieppe Raid

I'm of the opinion that after 100 years it's time to let any remaining secrets into the public domain. We all have a fairly good idea of the sorts of things that may have been kept secret for 100 years but anyone directly involved will no-longer be around, so lets get it out in the open and make it part of history. All sorts of extremely unpleasant events can and do occur in war and war crimes can be committed by all sides in a conflict.

My father first experienced war, aged 6, at the end of April 1940 and 6 people died, 4 Germans and 2 British.

You're not wrong. Everyone who was in a position of authority on all sides in WWII has long since begun pushing up poppies. Get it out and tell the story.

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Originally Posted by Paul S.

One caveat here. The book No Queensbury Rules, about WE Fairbairn and EA Sykes' WWII SOE and OSS service quickly points out that the biggest problem the researchers encountered was the abundance of published, and widely accepted as fact, 'fabricated' histories of individuals' SOE/OSS experiences, training and operations, including Ian Flemings historical account of events. In fact, the editors repeated cautions that about the questionable validity of certain accounts that they included was annoying for me when I read the book.

I should add that the researchers also point out that many (read most) of the SOE files were reportedly destroyed immediately after 'closing shop' after the war.

https://cqbpublications.com/products...combat-1940-42

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SOE was a bit of a cowboy club like the OSS, some say. Also seems to have been full of marxists of various stripes, and aroused the violent resentment of other similar organizations IIRC, M16 in particular. That would be one reason for purging their files: so the organization could not be easily reconstituted if needed again; or politicians merely decided it was. Probably it also contained many very talented and original individuals well able to "think outside the box", but when peace is declared the "establishment" generally tries to put things back where they were before "the recent unpleasantness" so rudely interrupted routine! LOL. Hence for example the disappearance of the Machine Gun Corps and the near disappearance of the Royal Tank Corps after WWI. In the later case the senior officers of the Corps cleverly got the King to become Colonel-in-Chief which scotched the plans for outright abolition.

Richard Meinertzhagen, not necessarily an entirely reliable witness one must admit, stated that before the war he was working on a plan with Lawrence and Churchill and perhaps a few others to somehow amalgamate British intelligence, and perhaps counter-intelligence services. He states in his memoirs IIRC that after Lawrence's death, he had to give up this plan. Now it so happens that some odd events surrounded Lawrence's death. Could there be a connection? Not likely we'll ever know.

There was no love lost between SIS and the SOE. That is a certainty.

My father (told me himself this family history) lost his brother on the docks during the blitz his brother and another worker were heading for cover when a bomb fell on them they found the other bloke but of my dads brother nothing it just atomized him.

My family was lucky. Everyone of my male relatives that were old enough served in the Army, Navy or Air Force during WWII. My godfather (RAF fighter pilot) and godmother (Army) both served as well. A number of my aunts worked in defence industries. One uncle had what would be called PTSD today. Some others had minor injuries, but we had no one lost during the war, thank heaven.

Somewhere I do still have some of the bomb splinters that were pulled out of one of the craters from one of the bombs that nearly killed my father and other family members in November 1940. I will eventually find them and posts some pictures of them when I do. But when you see them, it's easy to understand why such terrible injuries were cause to people by hot shrapnel, with razor sharp zagged edges, flying through the air, at high speed.