A Very Canadian Hero
Seventy-eight years ago today, Allied forces raided the port of Dieppe in German-occupied northern France. Codenamed Operation Jubilee, the Dieppe raid was a largely Canadian undertaking, and it’s been mostly forgotten outside Canada, where its name remains synonymous with debacle.
The intent of the Dieppe operation, which was a raid rather than an invasion proper, was to demonstrate the commitment of the Western Allies to a Second Front against Nazi Germany, which Stalin was demanding as the Red Army was bleeding out in the East. Jubilee was also intended to shore up British morale, to demonstrate that, even though the British Expeditionary Force had been evacuated in defeat at Dunkirk two years before, the war could still be won. It was likewise a trial run to see how difficult conducting a cross-Channel, opposed amphibious landing in occupied France might be.
The Dieppe landing was attempted by two brigades of the 2nd Canadian Division, 5,000 men backed up by a thousand British Commandos (among whom were 50 green U.S. Army Rangers). Everything that could go wrong in Operation Jubilee, did. Intelligence significantly underestimated the strength of German defenses. Aerial bombing to soften up Wehrmacht positions had little impact, while naval gunfire support to the landing forces was uncoordinated and ineffective. Tank support arrived too late to assist the landing in any real way.
The Dieppe raid was subsequently presented as an indispensable training ground for Operation Overlord, the successful Allied landings in Normandy on D-Day two years later. This claim undeniably contains much truth. The Dieppe fiasco revealed how much work remained to be done with tactics and organization for the Allies to be able to pull off any major amphibious landing on the coast of German-occupied France.
Yet nothing could obscure how disastrous Operation Jubilee really was. The victorious Germans, surveying the odds after the battle, could scarcely believe that the raid had been attempted at all. The two Canadian brigades that landed at Dieppe early on the morning of August 19, 1942 were all but wiped out. A staggering 68 percent of the Canadians who stormed Dieppe’s beaches were killed, wounded, or captured. Over 900 Canadians died that day.
The six Canadian infantry battalions that landed at Dieppe were functionally annihilated. Hardest hit was Toronto’s Royal Regiment of Canada, which lost an astonishing 227 men killed of the 554 who hit Blue Beach that fateful morning. Most of the rest were wounded or captured. Only 65 of the battalion’s soldiers made it back to Britain as the raid collapsed and survivors retreated across the Channel.
The second-worst casualty count belonged to the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry, which spearheaded the main landing, to no avail. The Rileys, as everybody called them, landed before dawn but their promised tank support was delayed so the infantry had to charge German machine guns dug in on the cliffs above their beach. The best way to picture what happened is to recall the remarkable opening scene of 1998’s Saving Private Ryan, which vividly depicts the hell facing infantry landing on a beach in the face of machine gun fire. Except the Canadians, unlike the Americans in Steven Spielberg’s movie, never got off the beach.
Hamilton is Canada’s Pittsburgh, a tough steel city and many of the Rileys were hard men who had labored in the mills, but on the open beach they were no match for pre-sighted German machine guns and mortar fire. Of the 582 Rileys who stormed Dieppe that morning, 197 were killed while most of the rest were wounded or captured, sometimes both. August 19, 1942 remains the deadliest day in Hamilton’s history.
The survival of many of those RHLI wounded can be attributed to one man, the Reverend John Weir Foote, who was their chaplain. Foote, a native of rural central Ontario, was an atypical clergyman. He was working at his father-in-law’s hardware shop when he felt the call and was ordained a Presbyterian minister at age 30. He worked in parishes for five years until the Second World War arrived, at which point Foote volunteered for the Canadian Army.
He was assigned to the RHLI as their chaplain and ministered to the Rileys as the battalion readied for war then shipped out to Britain. The brawny Foote, standing six-foot-three, was popular with the men despite the age gap – he was 38 years old at the time of the Dieppe raid, twice the age of many of the young infantrymen who were his flock – and he insisted on taking part in Operation Jubilee, over the objection of the RHLI’s commanding officer, who didn’t see the point of having a chaplain take part in a raid.
The point became clear immediately once the Rileys reached the beach and men began dropping, hit, by the dozen. Padre Foote quickly found the battalion’s aid post, located in a shallow depression, barely out of sight of German machine guns, where the wounded were being collected. Throughout the eight hours that the RHLI was trapped on the beach, the chaplain assisted the battalion surgeon by treating the wounded, administering morphine to the dying and maimed, as well as bringing wounded men to the aid station.
In full view of German machine guns, with no regard for his own life, Padre Foote made his way to wounded men, throwing them over his shoulder and carrying them to shelter and medical care. Once it became clear that the raid had failed, he carried wounded soldiers to landing crafts, under heavy enemy fire, to get them off the beach, to safety in England. In all, Foote saved the lives of at least 30 soldiers – in the bloody chaos at Dieppe that day everybody, the padre included, lost count.
Survivors could scarcely believe the calm bravery of the tall rescuer who carried one wounded man after another to safety, without being touched by shot or shell. Foote himself couldn’t explain how he managed to escape the inferno unscathed. “Moving about the beach, I wonder why I was never hit,” he stated after the war: “And I have never ceased to wonder why I am alive day.”
As midday approached it was apparent that the Dieppe raid had failed, and as the last landing craft prepared to leave the beach, Foote made a fateful choice. The padre looked at the more than 170 wounded Rileys being left behind and decided to stay with them, reckoning they would need his pastoral care in a German prisoner of war camp.
The subsequent two-day forced march to the POW camp was a horrible experience for many Rileys and Foote suffered terribly since he had abandoned his boots on the beach. Waterlogged, they slowed him down as he carried wounded to safety. Now he had to march in bare feet.
But Foote never complained and until the end of April 1945 when they were liberated by the victorious British from their POW camp near Bremen, he cared for his flock – regardless of their faith, or none at all – behind the wire, for nearly three years. He considered this undertaking more difficult than one day on the beach at Dieppe had been. That was a few terrifying hours while the POW experience was psychologically devastating for some soldiers, who became depressed and even contemplated suicide as the war dragged on.
Foote had concerns of his own, namely that he might be reprimanded for allowing himself to be captured. He had no idea that, among the survivors who made it back to Britain, word spread of the hero padre who had saved many lives on that terrible day back in the summer of 1942. To his surprise, he was awarded the Victoria Cross, Canada’s highest valor decoration, for what he did at Dieppe, the only Canadian chaplain to be so honored.
A modest man seemingly allergic to boastfulness, Foote insisted that he had done nothing special. “I simply did my job as I saw it,” he explained to the press when he briefly became a celebrity of sorts, “It was a very ordinary piece of work.”
He stayed in the army until 1948 then was elected to the Ontario Legislative Assembly as a Progressive Conservative. Foote served for six years as the provincial minister responsible for prisons, something he knew about from the war, and he retired from politics in 1959 due to declining health. Foote returned to the RHLI, an army reserve unit, in 1964, serving as their honorary lieutenant-colonel for nearly a decade. He bequeathed the regiment his medals before his death and they can be found in the RHLI Museum today. Foote died in 1988, three days shy of his 84th birthday.
Today the Rileys call home the John Weir Foote VC Armoury, located on James Street North in downtown Hamilton. The Reverend Foote remains the only Canadian chaplain to receive the Victoria Cross. The padre’s heroic deed now belongs to history. This April, Ken Curry, the last RHLI soldier to have stormed the beach at Dieppe 78 years ago today, passed away at the age of 97.