Legislative 1
Parliament BL
Victoria,
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Ca:

Vol. 40, No. 66

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CASTLEGAR) BRITISH COLUMBIA, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19, 1987

3 Sections (A, B &C)

Veterans remember Dieppe

DIEPPE, FRANCE (CP) — Georges Giguere stood
silently on the bow of the English Channel ferry Versailles
on Tuesday and watched the high brown- and grey-flecked
cliffs of Dieppe slowly grow in the distance.

A seagull cried mournfully overhead as the 66-year-old
Montreal resident remembered that day 45 years ago today
when about 5,000 Canadians stormed ashore in an ill-fated
Second World War raid.

Nine hours later, more than 3,300 of them were dead,
wounded or prisoners of the Germans.

As the ferry approached the French port Tuesday,
Giguere finally said, slowly, haltingly as the memories
rushed back?

“When I landed in Dieppe (45 years ago), I asked one of
my comrades on my left: ‘Is it raining?’

“It was (actually) bright sunshine.

“He said: ‘No, it’s bullets (blackening the air).’ "

Giguere, president of the Dieppe Veterans Association,
added: “How I didn’t get hit, I don’t know. I guess God was

de f

THE HUDDLE . . . Viviana Abenante and some of the
children from the Castlegar Library's summer reading
program put their heads together to devise a plan to

Three of his close Montreal school buddies were among
the more than 900 Canadians killed that day on the
1.5-kilometre-wide strip of shale and rock.

Giguere remembers the horror well.

Within minutes of janding, the Allied boats were
destroyed by German shore batteries and the Canadian
troops, who made up five'sixths of the attacking force, were
pinned down by massive German firepower on the
surrounding cliffs.

“We were just like a bunch of rats (caught in a trap),” h
said. “The last order I heard was: ‘Every man for himsel!

WAS CAPTURED

Giguere spent five or six hours hiding under what scant
cover he could find on the beach before being captured.

He spent the next 33 months as a prisoner of war — a
situation he still recalls as horrible.

“We had our hands tied for 54 days,” he said. “On no
occasion were we untied. To go to the washroom, we had to
undo the fly of our comrades and they would do the same for
us. It was degrading.”

Earlier on the ferry, Veterans Affairs Minister George
Hees rekindled old arguments about the raid by accusing the
top Allied generals who planned it of “stupidity of the
highest degree.”

Hees, who was serving in England at the time with the
Canadian Army but who did not participate in the raid, said
his first visit to Dieppe years later left him

invasion of German-held Europe, two years later.

“But it was a very, very sad thing that so many men had
to be killed and such a disaster take place to learn what not
to do.”

It was a far different reception for the Canadian war
veterans who returned to these-shores Tuesday.

Once he saw the naked, isolated beach wide open to the
big German guns on the heights, he said, he couldn't believe
anyone would have ordered such an attack.

“It is unbélievable that any sane person could send
troops against a beach like that,” Hees told reporters hours
before the ferry landed at Dieppe. “There never was a
chance.”

Hees praised the men who died and who survived for
trying to carry out “impossible” orders.

LEARNS LESSONS

Hees agreed with the Allied planners who ordered the
raid and their latter-day defenders who say it taught them
lessons important to the success of D-Day, the Allied

Dieppe waving Canadian flags leaned from
balconies of shops and homes overlooking the port, and
thinly lined barricades surrounding the ferry terminal.

yy clapped as the green- and blue-jacketed former
soldiers, sailors and airmen, many bedecked with rows of
medals, walked down the gangway to the shore.

The welcome was hospitable, and the memories of so
many Canadians dying were uppermost in the minds of the
visiting veterans.

‘You know, in battle, you never believe that it (being
killed) is something that will happen to you,” one grizzled
veteran on the ferry said as Dieppe came into view.

“(But) that wasn't true over there,” he said, pointing. “I
was sure I was going to die.”

beat their opponents in a

summer-time game of
“Wizards and Giants.”

Cosews Photo by Mike Kalesniko

never regret.
help of a “It’s bringing

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at the north end of the ish » street
parking lot.

John Charters,
Heritage Advisory Committee,
spoke to council and said
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the responsibility, toa greater have tmayed.

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he is asa whole, rather than acting as an aspects

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News good and bad

By CasNews Staff

An agreement to defer interest
payments on a $2.4 million Industrial
Development Subsidiary Agreement
could mean both good and bad news for
the City of Castlegar.

According to a letter presented at
Castlegar city council Tuesday even.
ing, Municipal Affairs Minister Rita
Johnston has agreed to waive interest
payments on Castlegar’s loan for five
years starting last July 31. The agree
ment will then be subject to review

“We expect that all IDSA clients will
be relieved to know that all money paid

later with details of the loan agreement
amendments.

In other news, if you are in the
market for a good used fire truck, the
City of Castlegar has one for sale.

The fire truck, which is almost 30
years old and no longer good for city
use, is among dozens of objects up for
grabs in a giant surplus sale.

Other items include 10 speed bi
cykcles, typewriters, gun cases and
even a hooked rug.

Some of the items had been turned
over to the RCMP but were never
claimed and others are the city's office

Those objects not sold will be sent to
an auction sale. A tender date will be
released.

Also, the B.C. Health Association is
asking the City of Castlegar to help
persuade nurses to move to the area.

The association wants Castlegar to
prepare a presentation to be shown ata
nursing Recruitment Fair held in the
fall in Vancouver which would “demon-
strate the attractiveness of your region
as a place to live and work.”

Council will forward the letter to the
Chamber of Commerce and the Castle-
gar Development Board to prepare a

Kidnapped journalist
wrote with blood

WASHINGTON (REUTER) — Kid.
napped American journalist Charles
Glass said Tuesday he wrote messages
in his own blood asking for help before
working out the escape plan which
freed him from two months of captivity
in Lebanon.

Glass said his escape early Tuesday
from a seventh-floor Beirut apartment
while his captors slept was a near
last-ditch bid for freedom because his
kidnappers were becoming impatient
with him

In an inteview with his former
employers, the ABC television net
work, Glass described for the first time
in 62 days of captivity during which he
said he was chained, blindfolded and
threatened.

Glass said the first death threat was
made within eight hours of his kid
napping on a Beirut street by four men
who also took as hostages the son of
Lebanon's defence minister and their
driver. They have since been released.

“I asked for water and one of the
guards said ‘why water? You death.
You no need water.’ ”

Glass said that for the first week he
was left alone, blindfolded and chained
top a bed.

“j just lay there most of the time,
quietly. And waited for them, occa
sionally to bring me meals, or go to to
the bathroom.”

MADE CONFESSION

Glass described how he was forced to
make a false videotape confession of
working for the Central Intelligence
Agency while a gun was held at his
head throughout the filming.

“There was a gun pointed at my head
a few feet away during the entire time
that I was reading it,” he said. “And
they assured me if I didn’t read it word
for word I would be dead.”

Glass described ploys he used on the
videotape to let the world know the
confession was false

He said he crossed his fingers while
holding the statement prepared by his
kidnappers, read it as ungrammatically
as possible and spoke in a southern ac
cent to indicate he was held in south
Beirut.

Glass said during the month spent at

the first location he was held he
worked out a way to get messages to
the outside world by pushitg seraps of
paper through a window fan when he
was taken to the toilet

“Over a period of a couple of weeks
any opportunity I had I was pushing
these notes out of the window. I began
writing the notes in my own blood
because I didn't have a pen,”
said.

In the messages, which were written
in Arabic, French and English, he said
he wrote: “I am Charles Glass, I am a
hostage. Please call such and such
people at such and such numbers

“Help me. I have a wife and five
children in London. If you ean help me
I will give you $10,000.”

FINDS NOTES

Until his captors gave him a pen to
write to his wife, Glass used sticks,
pins and nails, cutting himself with a
razor to use his blood for ink. After
two weeks, Glass said, a guard found
one of the notes and he was moved to

Glass

continued on page A2

to service these development loans will
now go entirely to reducing indebted.
ness,” Johnston states, “rather than, in
the main, merely meeting
charges.”

But City Administrator Dave Gairns
later explained that though the loan
deferrment is good news, he said the
letter leaves “a lot left unsaid.”

He said the letter seems to indicate
an “obvious extended loan agreement”
and the letter also implies that the
government still wants to be paid up
until July 31

The Ministry of Economic Develop. BI
ment will be contacting city council

FOR THE
RECORD

story in the Aug. 5, 1987
Gain News reported that 483
people died as a result of drinking
and driving in the central Kootenay
area in 1985. In fact, 483 was the
total number of deaths for all of
British Columbia. Thirteen people
were killed in the central Kootenay
area while three died in the Castle-
gar area. This information was con
tained in the 1986 annual report of

supplies.

interest

BIG REDS:

performances

the Central Kootenay Health Unit.

inside

B-BALL CAMP: The ninth annwal
Rockettes basketball camp is,
being held at Stanley Humphrie:

secondary school all this week .

TOP NAZI: The man who caught Hitler’s deputy Herman Hess would
have shot him if he had known

Tomatoes are growing bigger than ever before in
Castlegar gardens with some reaching up to 2 Ibs

WIN MEET: The Castlegar Aquanauts won the swim meet last
weekend in Greenwood and Robson River Otters also had some top

TENT SHOW: WINNIPEG (CP)
evangelists on the straight and narrow, suggests Claude A. Gagnon
as he practises what he preaches out of a condy-striped tent pitched
in the middle of downtown Winnipeg

“All those TV preachers, they all started out in the street like
me, but now they've got multi-million-dollar buildings ond look
what it's done to them,” he sald in a recent interview

“want to keep this tent ministry going because this is old
fashioned religion.”

suitable presentation.

A2

A3

B2

Working out of a tent can help keep