The Dieppe Raid "battle replay" at Puys

Puys is a small cove about a mile east of Dieppe. On 19 August 1942 it was Blue Beach in Operation Jubilee, the Dieppe Raid. The Royal Regiment of Canada landed there at 05:07, 17 minutes late. Of its 554 men, 227 died and 264 were taken prisoner. Only 65 returned.

Almost nine years later, two English women rented a holiday house at Puys. They are known as Dorothy Norton and her sister-in-law Agnes Norton. Both names are pseudonyms. Dorothy was 32, according to Vincent H. Gaddis, and had her two children and a nurse with her. Their rooms on the second floor faced the sea, with a balcony over the beach.

About 04:20. A sudden loud noise woke them. It rose at sea like a storm. Then came booming, as if thunderclaps were rolling over the water. Gunfire. Shellfire. The rattle of machine guns. Men shouting, crying out, screaming. Words of command. Landing craft grounding on the shingle.

At 04:50 it stopped abruptly. At 05:07 it began again. At 05:40 it stopped. At 05:50 it returned, quieter, and now it was clearly aircraft, dive-bombers coming in waves. Silence at 06:00. A brief, fainter return at 06:20. Then, at 06:55, nothing.

They went out onto the balcony. They could see nothing other than the placid water and empty beach. They noted the times as it happened, and over the next two days wrote separate reports for the Society for Psychical Research. Dorothy had heard similar noises, much fainter, the previous Monday. Nobody else in the house reported anything.

G. W. Lambert and K. Gay of the SPR took up the case. They found the women "well balanced individuals" with "no tendency to embellish their accounts, and no desire to prove they had had a paranormal experience." They set aside surf, commercial aircraft and a dredger. Agnes had served in the navy and could tell such sounds apart, and the dredger was not operating at the time.

Then they laid the log beside the battle. The first distant noise was matched to the naval force running into a German convoy at about 03:47. The Puys landing came at 05:07. The main landings at Dieppe followed at about 05:20, and RAF and Luftwaffe aircraft fought on through the morning. In 1952 they published "The Dieppe Raid Case: A Collective Auditory Hallucination" in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research.

In 1969 Robert J. Hastings published "An Examination of the Dieppe Raid Case" in the same journal, the main sceptical re-examination. Lambert replied that year. Other explanations have been raised since: naval exercises or shipping carried by atmospheric conditions, a shared half-awake state, prior knowledge of the raid, suggestion after the fact. The weak point is plain. Two witnesses, related, side by side. Yet even one sceptical summary concedes that "the granular timing recorded was not easily explained by suggestion alone." Later retellings added German military speech and censored details that the earlier summaries do not contain.

Popular writers call it a residual haunting or a time slip, a place with "some memory of the past engrained upon it, like images to film." Gaddis set it beside the phantom battles of Edgehill and Cedar Creek, "audio soundtracks caught in the web of timelessness." Others compare it with the Versailles experience of 1901. Nothing was seen. Nothing was recorded. Only two women on a balcony, and the times they wrote down.