American Codebreakers News Today

  Some years ago, I came across an account of the disastrous World War II raid on Dieppe written by a British naval intelligence officer who viewed the raid from the deck of a warship off the coast of France.  The intelligence report read like a thriller, which should come as no surprise, as the naval intelligence officer was Royal Navy Lt. Commander Ian Fleming, who went on to write the James Bond thrillers.  The Dieppe Raid was the stuff of thrillers, and Canadian historian David O’Keefe...

  Some years ago, I came across an account of the disastrous World War II raid on Dieppe written by a British naval intelligence officer who viewed the raid from the deck of a warship off the coast of France.  The intelligence report read like a thriller, which should come as no surprise, as the naval intelligence officer was Royal Navy Lt. Commander Ian Fleming, who went on to write the James Bond thrillers.  The Dieppe Raid was the stuff of thrillers, and Canadian historian David O’Keefe...

I reached out to David O’Keefe and I asked him why the Dieppe Raid was controversial, tragic and something of a mystery. “In less than 9 hours on August 19th, 1942, over 1,000 Allied soldiers, sailors and airmen died in a raid on the German-held port of Dieppe, France in the English Channel,” Mr. O’Keefe said. “The vast majority of these deaths, 907, were taken by the Canadians, but the British and the Americans (fighting their first actions against Hitler in Europe) also paid a heavy...