Angel of Dieppe tended wounded ‘liberators’
Agnes Cecile Marie-Madeleine Valois, nun: b June 30, 1914, Rouen; d Dieppe, April 19, 2018, aged 103.
Sister Agnes-Marie Valois became known as the ‘‘Angel of Dieppe’’ as she cared for nearly 2000 wounded Canadian soldiers after a disastrous Allied raid along the French coast during World War II.
Sister Agnes, a member of the Augustinian order of nuns, was trained as a nurse and worked with the French military and in surgical wards before the war. By 1942, northern France was under German control and was considered occupied territory. Allied forces hoped to launch commando raids inside France by landing troops on the rocky Normandy shoreline near Dieppe.
Operation Jubilee was launched from southern England on August 19, 1942. It was one of the Allies’ first co-ordinated invasions of the war, involving naval forces, ground troops and air power. Of more than 6000 soldiers who stormed ashore at Dieppe, almost
5000 were from Canada. There were also about
1000 British, plus a handful of Americans and French loyalists.
‘‘Don’t worry, men,’’ a Canadian general told the landing force. ‘‘It’ll be a piece of cake.’’ It was an utter debacle. German ships in the English Channel noticed the flotilla of 237 Allied vessels and warned of the imminent attack. As the troops tried to wade ashore, they were met with a barrage of machine-gun and artillery fire from the bluffs above the beach. More than 100 Allied planes were shot down.
A Canadian armoured unit struggled to drive tanks across the stones on Dieppe’s heavily pebbled beach, and many were stranded. As the Allies attempted to evacuate their overwhelmed forces, many ships were sunk by German artillery fire. One Canadian soldier later recalled that four different landing craft were shot out from under him before he was captured.
The assault was over within a few hours. More than 900 Canadians were killed, along with about 100 Britons. Almost 2000 Canadian soldiers were taken prisoner, many of them suffering grievous wounds. Sister Agnes would care for almost all of them.
At the time of the attack, she was on duty at a hospital in Rouen, about 60 kilometres from Dieppe. She and 10 other Augustinian nurses were charged with looking after the wounded.
Many of the Canadian soldiers greeted Sister Agnes in French, angering their German captors. When she was ordered to treat wounded Germans first, she refused, saying it was her duty to minister to all.
‘‘She is known for standing up to the German soldiers,’’ Hardy Wheeler, a retired Canadian army officer, told Canada’s National Post newspaper. ‘‘They held a gun up to her to treat the German injured first, but she just looked at everyone as equal – regardless of rank, regardless of nation, regardless of who or what you are.’’
Some Canadians recalled that a German was about to execute a wounded comrade when Sister Agnes stepped between them, saying the bullet would have to pass through her first.
When her patients died, she helped arrange for their burials in a local cemetery. One soldier, she recalled years later, asked her to kiss him as if she were his mother. He died soon afterwards.
Dieppe contains several memorials to the 1942 raid, and the Dieppe Canadian War Cemetery is the final resting place of more than 700 Canadians.
When asked to describe what the Canadians had endured, she said: ‘‘It wasn’t war, it was a massacre.’’
Agnes Cecile Marie-Madeleine Valois was born in 1914, in Rouen, where her family had a rope-manufacturing business. She joined the Augustinian order and began training as a nurse in 1936.
She received the French legion of honour in her later years and attended reunions of Canadian soldiers at Dieppe. ‘‘I remember all my Canadians,’’ she said in 2002. ‘‘They’re like my family . . . because they were trying to liberate France. They were all very brave.’’ – Washington Post