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At Dieppe, eighty-five percent of Canadian sappers became casualties — the highest rate of any unit in the entire raid. The tanks were ready. The infantry was fighting. But without engineers, the whole operation seized.
Two years later, German intelligence on the Western Front began tracking Canadian engineering units with the same attention they gave to armored divisions. When sappers appeared in a sector, German commanders knew what was coming.
Something happened between that beach in 1942 and the Rhine in 1945 that turned the men carrying wrenches into the most feared element of the Canadian Army. It started with one lieutenant who decided to solve a problem his superiors said couldn't be funded — and it ended with a record that no Allied engineering unit broke for the rest of the war.
The engineers were never the loudest part of the Canadian Army. They were never the most famous. But every German defensive strategy — every demolished bridge, every flooded field, every mined road — was ultimately aimed at stopping them. And every time, they answered.
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