Puys Beach

On August 19, 1942, an allied force of some 6,000 men landed around the port of Dieppe – some 200 km north along the coast from the later Normandy Invasion beaches. A mixed allied force – mainly comprising Canadians, with support from the British No 3 and No 4 Commandos, and even 50 recently arrived US Rangers – undertook the raid to test the strength of Hitler’s vaunted ‘Atlantic Wall’. Supported by air and by sea, the large raiding force landed in the early hours of August 19 and met far greater resistance than had been anticipated. It was a costly disaster, especially for the Canadian forces, which had been eager to take the lead and prove themselves as worthy warriors. By the time the remaining allied participants were withdrawn several hours after landing, over 4,100 men had been lost. The raid was largely forgotten, written off as an unsuccessful footnote to D-Day. However, interest in the raid was suddenly piqued in Britain some six years after the end the war thanks to a rather strange re-enactment. In 1951, two women contacted the Society for Psychical Research in England (SPR) with a report of a strange occurrence that had happened to them whilst on holiday. The two women – who were referred to by the pseudonyms ‘Mrs Dorothy Norton’, and her sister-in-law, ‘Miss Agnes Norton’ – were staying just outside Dieppe, at the coastal resort of Puys. While both women had read reports of the raid in the press, they did not have any detailed knowledge of the event and were unaware that Puys had been the site of a Canadian landing that had been bloodily repulsed. Their strange experience occurred between 4am and 7am on Saturday, August 4. They were staying in a second-floor bedroom of a three-story guesthouse (and former German billet) nestled on the cliff above Puys beach. Although their room faced the sea, which was some 400 metres away down a steep path, they could not actually see the beach from their window or its balcony. Speaking to SPR investigators Guy Lambert and Kathleen Gay, the two sisters-in-law recalled their experiences thanks to a series of notes they kept as events seemingly unfolded. At 4.00am, Dorothy became aware of a distant noise which ‘started suddenly and sounded like a storm getting up at sea’. Twenty minutes later, Agnes got up and left the room for a few minutes, before coming back on and asking, “Can you hear that noise?” Both women continued to listen in the darkness, as a strange roaring ebbed and flowed, accompanied by what sounded like cries and gunfire. Perplexed, Dorothy and Agnes switched on the bedroom light and went out on to the balcony, where they looked down towards the sea yet could see nothing. The noise definitely seemed to be coming from that direction, with Dorothy describing it as becoming ‘very intense, it came in rolls of sound’ and they could make out separate sounds of cries, guns, landing craft and dive-bombing distinctly. Agnes had the impression of the sounds coming from a great distance, ‘like a broadcast from America in unmistakable waves of sound’. On several occasions, both Agnes and Dorothy heard the loud ‘crunch’ of a shell landing at the same time. The roaring grew louder, then suddenly stopped completely at 4.50am. Seventeen minutes later, the noise of battle started again just as abruptly, more intense than ever. The sisters-in-law were very surprised that nobody else had woken up in neighbouring rooms, given the intensity of the sound. Dorothy noted that ‘as it started to become light and the birds began to sing, we both heard a rifle shot on a hill above the beach’, and that the sounds became more distinctly those of dive-bombers, with cries and shouts becoming fainter. As before, the women reported that the noise was loud and seemed to come in waves. Dorothy also recalled a ten minute pause in the sound from 5.40am. At 5.50am, Agnes recalled hearing ‘large numbers of planes, and other fainter sounds dying away at 6am’. Twenty-five minutes later the sound of men’s cries grew fainter and after 6.55am, nothing could be heard at all. Dorothy had drifted off to sleep by this point, but remembered hearing sounds ‘fainter than before’ around 6.25am. However, Dorothy revealed that she had actually had a similar experience in the early hours, five days earlier. On this occasion, Agnes had not woken up and the sound was fainter on this occasion. The experience ended with the sound of men singing, and stopped when the cocks began to crow in the dawn. She had not mentioned this to Agnes as she ‘didn’t want to spoil the holiday’. Enquiring among other guests the next morning, the sisters-in-law were surprised to find that nobody else had heard anything. They were surprised that a woman who had been kept awake by ‘casual noises’ in the night had heard nothing unusual, even though they had noticed her bedroom light on whilst they stood on the balcony listening to the sounds of war. The SPR investigators looked into the case, assessing the reliability of the witnesses and any potential sources of information they might have had access to regarding the Dieppe Raid. Agnes had been a naval nurse during the war, and both women were used to the sounds of wartime vehicles and aircraft. Although the pair had referred to a French guidebook about Dieppe during their experience, it did not contain enough information to provide a detailed breakdown of the 1942 raid. The SPR investigators then decided to study the original raid in more detail, and they were taken aback by the eerie similarities between the timeline of events and the auditory experience of the two holidaying ladies. The presence of the raiding force was accidentally revealed when part of it ran into a German convoy at 3.47am on August 19, 1942. A fire-fight started out a sea, which lasted some time before the Germans extricated themselves – this coincided with Dorothy’s ‘storm getting up at sea’ around 4am. The landings still went ahead, but one of the leading landing craft destined for Puys headed towards Dieppe itself by mistake, alerting the German garrison. They started to shell the unfortunate vessel as it made its way along the coast towards Puys – around the time that Dorothy and Agnes clearly heard shells landing nearby. The first wave of Canadian landing craft to reach Puys arrived at 5.07am – precisely the same time that the two women heard the noise start up again with increased intensity. Nine years earlier, men of the Royal Regiment of Canada had been gunned down as they attempted to run towards the high seawall behind the shingly beach. A second wave of landing craft only added to the confusion and slaughter some twenty minutes later and a third wave fared little better. The sound of battle at this point would have been the most intense – much as the two women reported. The evacuation of the survivors from the beach began at around 7am, with firing dying away over the next half hour. German snipers continued to fire from the cliffs – much as Dorothy and Agnes had heard rifle shots coming from the hill. During the raid, 67 RAF squadrons of fighters had attacked ground targets before being engaged in dog-fights with the Luftwaffe planes that scrambled to combat them – ‘dive bombing’ was one of the distinct sounds that the two sisters-in-law recorded during their encounter. The investigators concluded that it ‘was a coincidence that seems far outside the bounds of chance. No other landing, than that at Puys is recorded as having started at 5.07am, and that minute stands out with grim significance’. They felt both women came across as ‘well-balanced individuals’ and were pleased that the women had ‘recorded the evidence at once’. There were those who offered alternative theories. A man who had been camping outside Dieppe at the same time suggested that Dorothy and Agnes had simply heard a dredger working overnight in Dieppe harbour – he and his family had been woken up by this vessel and only found out what was causing the noise the following day. Another suggestion was that the women heard low-flying aircraft on an air-route between London and Paris, whilst a further suggestion noted that there had been a very high tide at Puys on August 4, 1951 and that may have contributed to the unusual sounds. It was pointed out that as the two women were visitors, they were not used to the regular night-time sounds that could be heard at Puys. However, the SPR investigators responded by pointing out that both women were familiar with the sounds of military vehicles and aircraft and would not have mistaken civilian craft for these. They also pointed out that whilst the dredger was indeed in operation on the night of August 4, it was not operating when Dorothy alone heard the same sounds five days earlier. Finally, if the ‘regular’ noises had indeed been as loud as the two women said they had been, why did nobody else in the guesthouse wake up? Did the two ladies staying at Puys in 1951 really hear an echo of the grisly raid there nine years earlier, or did they simply imagine it?