Dieppe 80th anniversary: Sault soldiers endured horrors of raid

Tom Douglas, a Sault-born military author now living in Oakville, Ontario, received the Minister of Veterans Affairs Commendation in 2012 for his efforts in promoting Canada’s military heritage.

Back in the mists of time when I was a young teenager, my friend Garry Bassett and I attended the Sault’s Central United Church Sunday School — and one memory haunts me to this day.

Our Sunday School teacher was a man named Gordon Kerr and I wish he were alive today so I could thank him for his heroism during World War II. I would also like to apologize to him for our callous and flippant attitude when he tried to share with us the details of his personal nightmare that took place on Aug. 19, 1942.

Mr. Kerr had been part of the invasion force, code-named Operation Jubilee, that landed at the heavily fortified French port town of Dieppe in the early morning hours of that summer day exactly 80 years ago today. The raid had been doomed from the get-go. Of the 4,963 Canadians who had sailed from England overnight, only 2,210 returned to their home port — and many of those were wounded. The Germans took 1,946 prisoners of war and 916 Canadians lost their lives. Mr. Kerr was one of those wounded in the assault.

One of the fatalities was another Sault man. Twenty-seven-year-old Private Orville John Bellmore of the Royal Regiment of Canada is buried in the Canadian military cemetery in Dieppe. He was the son of John and Victoria Bellmore. (Thanks to Sault media colleague Art Osborne, as well as the Project ’44 website, for supplying me with the information on Private Bellmore).

To my everlasting sorrow, my friend Garry and I were more interested in a game of Rock Scissors Paper at the back of that Sunday School class when Mr. Kerr tried to share his wartime experiences with us. We missed most of what he said and only looked up from our silly pastime when we heard a strange noise. It was Mr. Kerr, tears in his eyes, loudly blowing his nose into a handkerchief. Unable to carry on with the lesson, he choked out a few words telling us that he was ending the session earlier than usual.

As I headed out into the summer sunshine that day, it never occurred to my immature mind that I had lost an opportunity to hear first-hand of a major historical event that had taken place just over a decade previously. It would be almost thirty years before that opportunity would arise again.

In June of 1984, as communications assistant to Veterans Affairs Minister Bennett Campbell, I was fortunate enough to be part of the minister’s entourage that travelled to Plouha, Brittany for a ceremony where two French-Canadian veterans of the Second World War were awarded valour medals by the French government.

Late in the war, those two men had risked being executed as spies when they agreed to be flown in a small Lysander aircraft into Nazi-occupied France. They were disguised as French civilians and their bravado in helping the French Underground (the Maquis) set up an escape network would save the lives of almost 150 downed Allied aircrew. Their base of operations had been a farmhouse in that small town in northwestern France, halfway between Saint-Malo and Brest.

Lucien Dumais of Montreal had been a sergeant-major with Les Fusiliers Mont-Royal infantry regiment when fate tapped him on the shoulder to be part of the invasion force for the ill-planned raid on Dieppe. I had the rare opportunity of spending three days in Plouha with him and his fellow medal recipient, Ottawa’s Raymond LaBrosse — a former sergeant with the Canadian Corps of Signals.

When Lucien related his version of the events of August 19, 1942, my thoughts immediately turned to Gordon Kerr and I sent a silent word of thanks to my former Sunday School teacher for what he had gone through in the long and bitter fight against Nazi aggression.

Lucien was there to tell the tale because he was one of a handful of the 1,946 captured Dieppe raiders who managed to escape from his German guards. Making sure no French-Canadian phrases made it into the French he used on his freedom run down to the south coast of France, he eventually made it to England. When British Intelligence asked him to go back into the fray to set up an escape network code-named Operation Bonaparte, he considered it not only his patriotic duty but also as a way to retaliate against the Germans for the brutal way they had treated his men at Dieppe.

There are two schools of thought about that fateful event in August 1942. One group – myself included – believes to this day that it was a colossal blunder that should never have been allowed to go forward. Most of the blame for this snafu has to go to the hapless Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Allied Chief of Combined Operations. The port was heavily fortified, the Germans knew in advance through German spies in English pubs that the raid was on, and the invasion force lacked the full air and naval support that such an operation required to soften up the enemy before the first Canadian boot touched French soil.

We armchair generals who give a thumbs-down to the exercise believe that these troops were sacrificed in order to prove to Russia’s Josef Stalin that it was too soon in the war to launch a Second Front against the Nazis — whose forces were pummelling the Soviet Union at the time.

Apologists — the first of whom were wartime British Intelligence propagandists — have tried over the years to paint the disaster as a worthwhile exercise. Some of them suggest that part of the raiding party consisted of a squad tasked with trying to capture a German Enigma cypher machine.

Others say there were valuable lessons learned that helped save lives two years later in the D-Day invasion farther west along the Normandy coast. Of course there were lessons learned – never invade a heavily fortified port, especially when the enemy knows you’re coming and when you lack adequate naval and aerial back-up. But these lessons should have been learned at military school.

Lucien Dumais, still fit and deporting himself with a military bearing at the 1984 medal ceremony, related how he had had to surrender at Dieppe in order to get medical assistance for his wounded men. He had vowed at the time that he would never end up in the German prisoner-of-war camp one of their captors told them they were headed to as they were being rifle-butted into cattle cars on a railway siding.

His opportunity for escape occurred when the German-bound train, still in French territory, slowed down to negotiate a sharp curve. He and two other prisoners pried the boards off one of the openings in their railway car and leapt to safety. As related in one of my military books, Lucien made his way back to England with the help of the French Underground – learning evasive tactics that would come in handy when he later volunteered to return to enemy territory.

Sweet revenge for the indignities suffered at Dieppe was granted Canada’s battle-weary soldiers of World War Two when the D-Day Invasion of June 6, 1944 led to the surrender of the Nazis on French soil. Here’s how Canadian Press war correspondent Ross Munro, OBE, OC, in his post-war memoirs “Gauntlet to Overlord” described the Allies rolling into Rouen after the successful D-Day landings in Normandy:

“Columns of carriers and half-tracks, tanks and guns and hundreds of trucks filled with fighting men passed down the wide thoroughfares lined with ecstatic French people offering a wild, prolonged welcome. But the 2nd Division could not tarry. It had a rendezvous with history 40 miles (64 kilometres) away.

“On the outskirts of Rouen, the highway forks – left to Le Havre, right to Dieppe. A crowd watched the Canadians wheel to the right. ‘Ca, c’est bien!’ they shouted. ‘Les Canadiens s’en vont à Dieppe.’ (That’s wonderful! The Canadians are going to Dieppe)…

“… At 10:30 a.m. on September 1st, they entered Dieppe. The Germans had gone, had fled even as they approached. Instead of bullets and blood, Dieppe gave the Canadians flowers and wine. A delirious population poured into the streets to shout that the town was free.”

I hope with all my heart that the Sault’s Gordon Kerr was one of those victorious troops enjoying the hero’s welcome that he and his comrades so richly deserved.