If a photograph is worth a thousand words then it would seem the reality that Essex Scottish veteran Howard Large lived through the day Canadian forces stormed German defenses at the Port of Dieppe would have been far beyond his ability to describe in a 10-minute interview.
Yet the words that the 95-year-old veteran, sunk deep into his wheelchair on the Windsor waterfront, spoke in a barely audible and subdued tone still made the hair stand up on the back of your neck.
It was the detail his memory was still able to furnish that made the images he painted so vivid: the “Hitler Youth kid” pushing the barrel of his gun into Large’s head upon capture, only to have an older and more experienced German soldier shove the gun aside in disgust, the stretcher bearers stepping gingerly over the bodies of the dead as they hauled him away from the house where the severely injured Canadian had taken shelter.
Dieppe veteran Howard Large and Honorary Colonel Hardy Wheeler (right) lay a wreath during the annual service to mark the Dieppe Raid in Dieppe Park in Windsor on Monday, August 19, 2013. (TYLER BROWNBRIDGE/The Windsor Star)
“On a stone beach, the stones become shrapnel too,” he related in the moments before the famed Windsor regiment began its annual ceremony at the waterfront Dieppe Monument to mark the 71st anniversary of the ill-fated attack on the Nazi coastal defenses in occupied France. “I was taken prisoner after we made it into town across the promenade. Twenty started out, seven made it, the rest killed along the way.”
That, on a personal scale, sums up the way the attack played out all along the beach. Canadian troops crept up on the German positions by sea in the grey early-morning hours. If they were in the least bit surprised, it didn’t matter. That day, 6,100 Allied servicemen mounted what high command termed “a major raid.”
Of the 4,963 Canadians who took part in the attack, code-named Operation Jubilee, only 2,200 returned to England, many of them badly wounded.
The Essex Scottish sent 521 soldiers and 32 officers to the eastern section of the main attack on Red Beach, an expanse of loose shale and stone. Only two officers and 49 soldiers from the Windsor regiment made it back to England. Of 3,367 casualties among all Canuck forces, 1,946 were taken prisoner and 907 Canadians paid the ultimate price.
“The 1942 raid was intended to put pressure on the enemy and test the strategy of landing a military force at a port in France,” said Hardy Wheeler, honorary colonel of the Essex and Kent Scottish. “It did both those (objectives) but came at a horrible cost in lives and lost and captured for the Essex Scottish and impacted almost every family in WIndsor and Essex County.”
Honorary Colonel Hardy Wheeler speaks during the annual service to mark the Dieppe Raid in Dieppe Park in Windsor on Monday, August 19, 2013. (TYLER BROWNBRIDGE/The Windsor Star)
That, he said, was why the annual ceremony, attended by scores of observers and dignitaries over the lunch hour, remains important to the region.
For Large, the memories, seemingly, have barely dimmed.
“We were being fired on before we even got to shore,” he recalled. “We were running a gauntlet. There were bodies falling all over the place. It was wicked. I managed to make it to the wall, injured. But I got into town…. I went down into the cellar of a house and buried my grenades.”
Another soldier pointed to Large’s leg. He looked down at his boot and saw it had “blood squirting out of it” from taking shrapnel. He dressed his own wound using the kit in his pants pockets, fashioning a tourniquet out of rifle sling and bayonet scabard.
“Then I went to sleep.The next thing I knew I heard voices yelling. The Germans were shooting . We waited for the Germans to get into the building and we fired, got a whole mess of them.”
But the enemy eventually captured the building and took Large prisoner.
The pipes and drums band plays during the annual service to mark the Dieppe Raid in Dieppe Park in Windsor on Monday, August 19, 2013. (TYLER BROWNBRIDGE/The Windsor Star)
“I couldn’t walk because my leg was all smashed up,” he said. “The older German made the HItler Youth kid carry me out. They took me to a field hospital. Then this woman came out of a building with a whole tray of beer. She offered some to the Germans and she offered some to me. It’s still the best beer I’ve ever had, to this day.”
Large said he has shared his stories with students in the area, when called upon to make a presentation for a living history classes.
“When I talk you can hear a pin drop,” he said. “I think they’re truly interested.”
Click here for a gallery of Dieppe Raid ceremony.
Find Windsor Star on Facebook
