In the wind and on the rock, a time to remember
Members of the RHLI and their families travel to Dieppe to pay respect and find meaning in a battle fought 75 years ago today
BRENDA LYNN RICE WILSON got up at 5 a.m. Friday. She gathered a Ziploc bag containing her dad’s Second World War medals, a black-and-white photo of him in uniform and his “Soldier’s Pay Book.”
Then through the blustery wind and faint light just before sunrise, the 53-year-old Binbrook woman tearfully walked across the street to a waterfront area known as White Beach. Ever so carefully, she stumbled through the wobbly, potato-sized rocks to the water’s edge and tried to imagine what it was like on Aug. 19, 1942.
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THAT MORNING, her father, Ken Rice, was one of 582 Royal Hamilton Light Infantry soldiers who stormed the beach in what many describe as the bloodiest day in Canadian military history.
Nearly 200 Rileys died, along with 700 others from other Canadian regiments, in a raid on Hitler’s Europe that was a disaster from the start. For one thing, troops landed in daylight, instead of darkness, because the early-morning attack was delayed. And they found themselves struggling for footing in the rocks as they were met with a hail of gun and shell fire from the front and sides, which turned the ground into a killing field.
Rice Wilson’s dad survived that day, only to become a prisoner of war. But bullet fragments in his back and painful memories haunted the rest of his life. He died in 1979.
“I tried to imagine my dad walking the beach again in 2017, like he did in 1942. I went and stood in the water up to my ankles holding my dad’s picture and his medals to memorialize him,” she said.
Saturday is the 75th anniversary of that fateful day and Rice Wilson is one of more than 50 people who have made a RHLI pilgrimage from Hamilton to pay respects and find some meaning from a military plan that sent so many to slaughter.
The visiting group consists of numerous family members of Riley Dieppe vets, along with officers and soldiers currently serving, as well as a handful of others who have an interest in military history. But notable about this year’s sojourn to France — something the Rileys tend to arrange every five years — is that no Dieppe vets from the RHLI were able to go.
There are only two known survivors: Fred Engelbrecht, 97, and Ken Curry, 95 — and both are in frail health. However, they are both expected to attend Saturday commemorations at the Beach Strip Dieppe Monument at 11 a.m., in Hamilton.
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VET WHO was hoping to make it to the 75th anniversary was the city’s most well-known Dieppe vet, Jack McFarland. But sadly, he died in February 2016 at the age of 95. Saturday morning, his ashes will be spread along the French shoreline at a private ceremony to be attended by 13 McFarland members.
His son, Jack McFarland Jr., says it was “a highlight of my life that I got to go to the 65th commemoration with my dad. For hours, we walked that beach and he told me all kinds of stories I had never heard. We walked so long, that he almost didn’t make it back to the hotel he was limping so bad. He wouldn’t stop.”
It didn’t surprise Jack Jr. that his dad would later tell him he wanted his ashes spread on the beach that had forever changed his life. McFarland spent the rest of the war as a prisoner of the Germans.
“Dieppe meant a lot to my father and it was something that was part of our family,” said his daughter, Dale McFarland, showing a tattoo on her arm that features a poppy and the words “We remember.”
She said the beach ceremony will be “very emotional for our family.
“A lot of people expressed interest in being at the ceremony, but we wanted it to be private.”
Friday saw the RHLI touring group travel to the beaches where Canadian regiments landed, with commentary by RHLI Commanding Officer J.P. Hoekstra.
The beaches were known by colours including blue, red and green. The main strategy involved taking down major gun placements in the high cliffs on the sides, before charging the RHLI and the Essex Scottish onto the centre part of the beach.
But the first part of the attack was largely a failure and it meant the Rileys and Essex Scottish were sent into a slaughter.
“Dieppe was very pivotal for us. Because since the Battle of Ridgeway in 1866, the RHLI had not fought together as a unit,” Hoekstra said.
“We sent soldiers out in the Northwest Rebellion in 1885. We sent soldiers to the Boer War and many to the First World War. But all of those soldiers were parcelled out to different battalions.
“The RHLI really only fought again together as comrades shoulder-toshoulder at Dieppe. We suffered horrendous losses at Dieppe, but it was still a watershed moment where members of the regiment were working together again.”
The regiment would go on to fight together in later battles in the Second World War.
Friday night, the RHLI delegation took part in a candlelight vigil at the Dieppe Canadian War Cemetery.
The cemetery contains the remains of more than 900 members of the Allied Armed Forces, with several hundred having died during the Dieppe raid.
Saturday, the Rileys will host a remembrance service at the RHLI cairn on White Beach at 11 a.m. local time. It will be followed at 3 p.m. by another ceremony that will feature Canada’s Veterans’ Affairs minister, Kent Hehr, along with the mayor of Dieppe and other officials from France.
The afternoon ceremony is expected to be packed with people in the French community that has Canadian flags flying all over town.
Noticeable in attendance have been heavily armed police to deal with heightened security in a country that has experienced several terrorist incidents in recent times.
It didn’t surprise Jack McFarland Jr. that his dad would later tell him that he wanted his ashes spread on the beach that had forever changed his life.