51 Squadron, readied his tank crews as LCT 124 (Landing Craft Tank) headed for the main beach at Dieppe. Bennett climbed on top of his tank, dubbed Bellicose, to get a better view of their approach. A smokescreen just put down by the RAF obscured much of the main beach and now the challenge was to figure out which way to come in. Bennnett could see little more than the tops of buildings rising up out of the smoke but he knew there was plenty of action on the beach because he “could hear all the firing.”1 As the twenty-nine-year-old Lieutenant scanned the beach and considered his landing options, a shell tore through the LCT’s left side and exploded the landing craft’s store of hydrogen cylinders. Bennett was caught in the middle of the fireball. Now on fire and fast approaching the hostile shore, Trooper Anderson, one of Bennett’s crew members, climbed up onto the turret and put out the flames with a fire extinguisher. Bennett remembers, “’my face was burnt – all my hair gone…but we were coming into action and I picked myself up and we went into shore.”2 Bennett’s right eye was also blinded by a sliver of shrapnel. As well, the explosion damaged Bellicose’s radio equipment and jammed the turret so that the tank’s six-pounder gun could only fire in one direction. With fire blackened face and blinded in his right eye, Bennett’s day of war was just beginning. No. 10 Troop managed to land and made their way off the beach and onto the promenade but the street entries into the town were barricaded; the engineers who were supposed to clear these obstacles were mostly dead by this time. Regardless, Bellicose’s crew pressed on performing admirably despite its damaged turret by firing on enemy positions that were raking the infantry on the beach. In the heat of battle Bennett initially ignored his wounds but Bennett’s burns were Canadian Prisoners on the Grounds of l’hotel Dieu, the hospital at Rouen. Lt. Edwin Bennett before the Raid.
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