Odd this day

4 August 1951

Two English women on holiday in France woke in the small hours to the sounds of a fierce battle taking place, later discovering that they were ‘witnessing’ the disastrous raid on Dieppe, which had taken place almost exactly nine years earlier.

Our story starts in 1942, when Stalin is putting pressure on the Allies to open up a new front to take pressure off Stalingrad; when thousands of Canadian soldiers have been mobilised, but don’t yet have very much to do; and when

the British Chief of Combined Operations, Rear Admiral Louis Mountbatten, was agitating for a practical trial beach landing, against real opposition, for his troops.

The Dieppe raid was later reframed as essential practice for D-Day, because valuable lessons were learned about the need for factors such as better intelligence about fortifications, maintaining the element of surprise, and artillery support/aerial bombardment before landing. It was a bloody awful mess, though.

Things began around 5am on 19 August 1942, and a retreat was ordered by 11am. 6,086 men landed, and by the end of the day 3,623 had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. One account says “They had a man killed every 35 seconds of the raid”.

‘What were you trying to do?’ a puzzled German interrogator asked the captured principal military landing officer. ‘If you could tell me… I would be very grateful,’ his captive replied.

There has been a theory more recently that the operation was cover for Ian Fleming’s Intelligence Assault Unit’s attempt to capture an Enigma machine. (We had others, but they had three rotors, and the Germans had added a fourth in 1942, making them harder to crack.) However, as one historian says:

The revisionist theory requires one to accept that 245 ships and landing craft carrying 6,100 troops, landing on six beaches with 58 tanks and the participation of 74 air squadrons comprising 1,000 aircraft were involved just to be a cover for the pinch. Wow, that’s some stretch!

In the end, what seems likely is that a combination of needs and war aims coincided, and it was decided the raid offered more potential gain than loss.

Anyway, in 1951, two English women, sisters-in-law who were supposedly named Dorothy and Agnes Norton, were staying in the seaside town of Puys, just east of Dieppe (and not to be confused with Le Puy in southern central France where the lentils come from).

On this day in 1951, they were roused from their sleep at about 4.20am by what sounded at first like a storm — but soon

they could distinctly hear sounds of gunfire, shellfire, dive-bombers, and men shouting and crying out. The women got up and went out on their balcony, where they could not actually see the sea, but they detected nothing that could account for the noises. Meanwhile, the noises came in from the direction of the sea, loud and intense, and still seemed like gunfire, divebombing and voices shouting.

The noises came and went, gradually getting fainter, until just before 7am. All the time, however, only these two women heard what was ‘happening’. No one else in the guest house was woken up.

They knew there’d been a battle in the area during the war, but didn’t know the details. So, they found themselves a guidebook, and read up on it. Finding the account tallying rather with what they heard, they decided to write separate accounts of what had happened — and found they matched.

One way or another, their experience found its way to the Society for Psychical Research, which sent two investigators to hear their story. G.W. Lambert and Kathleen Gray said they

came across as well balanced individuals who displayed no tendency to embellish their accounts, and no desire to prove they had had a paranormal experience.

In fact, one had heard something two days earlier, but not mentioned it “because she had not wanted to spoil the holiday with something mysterious”. They may, then, not have made the whole thing up to become famous. Their names are pseudonyms, and seem to have been invented by the psychical researchers for their report in order to protect the identity of the sources.

They certainly got some publicity, but without their names being made public. This cutting from a fairly obscure Australian newspaper suggests the story spread a fair way from home.

Cessnock Eagle and South Maitland Recorder, 6 May 1952

What actually happened, though? Well, a storm by the seaside would not be the most unusual occurrence — and at this point, a short diversion into Bob Newhart’s ‘Defusing a Bomb’ (“You found a shell on the beach?”) is clearly mandatory:

But one of the women

had served in the women’s Royal Naval Service during the war, however, and she probably would have been able to distinguish the sounds of the sea and of a single commercial aircraft, had those been the natural sources.

Admittedly, they had both heard about the Ghosts of Versailles, when two English ladies on a French holiday witnessed apparently strange things from history…

Odd this day

…but in this case, before they read the guidebook, the two women were apparently not aware of the details of the Dieppe raid. Those among us who are… more dedicated to the paranormal might favour explanations such as ‘stone tape theory’ (where objects and places are ‘imprinted’ with unusual or intense events which are later ‘replayed’) or psychometry, the idea that you can get in touch with past events and people by touching an object linked to them.

…and at this point, I feel we should segue into The Bewildering Julian and his actual telepathy

…but the most likely explanation is some kind of auditory hallucination — which, of course, raises the question: what explains that? Much like the case of the Versailles Haunting, no one knows.