An Interview with Edwin Ferru

We started out on the evening of August 18th. We took right off from England in landing craft. As we made our way across the Channel, there were German planes flying overhead. I don't know how many boats went in ahead of us but at the time it seemed we were very short of men.

We safety reached the beach. As we left the landing craft, we started to go up a hill and, at the time, nobody knew we were coming; no one was opposing us at the time. We worked our way around the small town of Berneval and climbed up a plateau that overlooked the town. A short time later, the British Commandos that were leading us said that we were supposed to withdraw. As we were starting to go back to the beach we started to draw fire. At the time, I was bringing up the rear of our column. We climbed a small hill. We passed a French hotel and hid briefly in a garage. Dieppe was a resort town and they had hotels for vacationers. At the time, I was carrying a bangalore torpedo, which is a metal tube filled with explosives that is used to cut holes in barbed wire. We left the garage and made our may down another hill, drawing a little bit of fire as we went down. We came upon two Commandos who were wounded. They were pretty badly wounded and they said to me, "Keep going Yank. Get out of here!" And then I saw a GI, it was Lieutenant Loustalot lying there on the ground, dead. He had a pair of field glasses and I took those off; they had one eye piece missing.

I proceeded down to an area near the beach and found Sergeant Codsen near the beach smoking a cigarette. As I was coming down the trail, I watched artillery shells go over my head and explode nearby. At the time, I was the last man that came down from the hill. I spoke with the sergeant for a minute and also had a smoke. Then we went down to the beach and on the beach there were a couple of Commandos who had been killed. About half a dozen men were hiding in a shallow cave near the beach. We sat there for a while waiting for the boats to come back. Meanwhile, we heard a lot of fire around us. We waited for a while and a squad of Germans came down to the beach. There was no use fighting; they had the top of the cliffs and they could drop just about anything down on us, so we surrendered.

They rounded us up and put us in trucks and we got on a highway and started moving inland. I was in the last truck in the convoy and as we were moving down the highway I heard machine gun fire; we were being strafed by a plane. The truck exploded. British Spitfires came over and were strafing our column. I reached up and lifted the handle on the back of the gate of the truck and the guy next to me fell out. The other man next to me was killed and another man's legs were completely shattered by the strafing. At this point, I noticed that there were several holes in my pants and shirt and I felt tingling in my knee. It felt like I hit my crazy bone. I looked down and there was a large piece of shrapnel in my knee. I think I could've escape but I couldn't move my leg very well and figured I may have torn up my knee because of the shrapnel. So I sat on the side of the road and saw a German staff car come by and I flagged them down. They took me to a field hospital. Everyone else in the truck (I think there were about 8 or 10) was killed; I was the only one that survived. I spent the rest of the war, approximately 33 months, in a POW camp.

Source: Interview by Patrick O'Donnell with Ed Ferru 9/4/98

Copyright 1999 Patrick O'Donnell