Earlier this summer, I took a portrait of one of them in preparation for this serie of article. That was a real honor to take a picture of him, shake his hand, and thanks him for what he done back then.
Here is his story
Brothers fought on Dieppe beaches
Howard Large kept log on days as POW
Howard Large
Age: 88
Rank: Private
For Howard Large, enlisting in the army at the beginning of the Second World War was a family affair. He and his brothers, Robert and Jansen, joined the Essex Scottish Regiment, suffered wounds and illnesses overseas, starved during the war and came back to Canada as heroes.
Large was living in Leamington with his family and working 18-hour days at the H.J. Heinz Company for an hourly wage of 45 cents when he joined the regiment in the summer of 1940. He trained in Camp Borden and was eventually selected to participate in the Dieppe raid.
Large was one of only seven men who managed to run across the beach, crawl through barbed wire under heavy German machine-gun and mortar fire, and make it into the town of Dieppe on Aug. 19, 1942.
When he sought refuge in one of the nearby houses, he realized he was wounded.
"Blood was just pumping from my foot," he said. "But I didn't even feel it at first."
Large decided to surrender to the Germans, but when one of the soldiers dragged him out of the basement of the house, another one met him with a rifle pointed to his forehead.
"I thought, 'This is it,'" Large said. "But the older German shoved the rifle aside and said: 'He's my prisoner, not yours.' He saved my life.
"I still have nightmares about it."
Large's war log, still carefully wrapped in a gas cape he was given in prison camp, details his experiences as a PoW and includes maps of the room he shared with other captured Canadians. Its pages bear titles such as "The tale of two blind lads" and "My life in imprisonment."
Large said his arrival in England at the end of the war was a very emotional one.
"The Englishmen started crying and then we all joined in," he said. "And then we celebrated in the pubs."
Large returned to Leamington in June 1945 and embarked on a long career with the post office. He married, had three daughters and retired in a quaint, lakeside community in Kingsville.
Because of poor health, he will not be revisiting Dieppe this August. But his memories of the raid will never fade away.
The series of veterans' profil started with an in depth article on the raid and the repercusion of it in Windsor. That Sonja Puzic, a intern reporter, almost made me cry!
Here it is.
Return to Dieppe
'What those men went through is truly remarkable'
Sonja Puzic, Windsor Star Published: Saturday, August 12, 2006Wednesday, Aug. 19, 1942, was a day like any other in Windsor.
Workers rushed to jobs in bustling wartime ammunition factories, housewives shopped for groceries and took their children to school. The latest news from the battlefields overseas was a hot topic in coffee shops and at dinner tables.
By all accounts, the situation was grim. The Second World War was raging and the Allied forces were not strong enough for a full-scale invasion of Western Europe. They were losing battles and had been pushed across the English Channel to Britain as the Germans penetrated further into Russia. Politicians and military commanders were calling for the opening of a second front on the enemy-occupied continent in hopes the Nazis would be stopped in their tracks.
Despite the discouraging newspaper headlines, Windsorites had something to look forward to. Their pride and joy -- the Essex Scottish Regiment -- had been training rigorously in Britain and the troops were ready for combat. Their letters home were optimistic and reassuring.
The Essex Scottish boys were set to see some real action in the war and make their families and girlfriends proud. They were the talk of the town.
No one was prepared for what happened on that fateful day.
Just after 5 a.m., the Essex Scottish, one of seven Canadian units involved in the raid, descended on the Red and White beaches of Dieppe, under cover of four offshore destroyers and a few Allied airplanes.
Before their feet even touched the smooth rocks, German troops started blasting them with machine guns and mortar bombs from the fortified cliffs. The Canadians quickly realized they were doomed with no place to hide on the beaches, described as "natural amphitheatres" in the battle logs.
Pinned down by relentless fire, without heavy naval bombardment and aerial support, they knew they would not get off the beach unharmed.
By 5:45 a.m., 30 to 40 per cent of Canadian troops were killed. At 10:30 a.m., they were out of ammunition. Within eight hours of landing, Dieppe's beaches were soaked with blood and 807 Canadian men were killed in action. More than 100 others later died of wounds or in prison camps.
Of the 553 Essex Scottish soldiers who embarked on the mission, 105 were killed in action and 16 later succumbed to their injuries. Only 52 managed to escape the bloodbath aboard rescue vessels that took them back to England. The rest were marched off to German prison camps, where they starved and lived in deplorable conditions until the end of the war.
"What those men went through is truly remarkable," the regiment's honorary Col. Rae Martin said in May. "No one but them will ever truly understand what it was like to be at Dieppe, to see their friends killed, to be wounded and shipped off to prison camps.
"It was a pivotal moment in Canadian history."
Nearly 5,000 of the 6,100 soldiers sent to Dieppe were Canadians. Of the 4,963 who embarked on the operation, only 2,210 returned to England -- many of them wounded -- and 913 lost their lives. More than 1,900 spent the remainder of the war as prisoners of war.
Ironically, the raid on Dieppe was not supposed to happen.
Lord Louis Mountbatten, the newly appointed British head of Combined Operations, came up with a plan to launch a large-scale raid -- dubbed Operation Rutter -- on Dieppe in July 1942. The mission was designed to be a test run for an amphibious invasion that would one day defeat Germany. There was new equipment to be tested and years of training to be put to use. By May 20, troops were in standby mode on the Isle of Wright in the English Channel, but poor weather in July prevented the launching of the attacks.
Many Essex Scottish soldiers, including Harold Scharfe, believed the raid was abandoned for good. To their surprise, it was suddenly revived in August and given a new name -- Operation Jubilee.
"I was shocked when they told us we were going ahead with it," Scharfe recalled recently. "The element of surprise was lost by then and we had damaged ships. But we went ahead anyway, because we were trained and eager and ready for battle."
The troops were not aware that Mountbatten resurrected the raid without the approval of the Allied chiefs of staff.
As Canadian vessels approached the beaches of Dieppe overnight, a German convoy travelling from Boulogne spotted them. Although radar stations on the English coast picked up the "unidentified vessels," the warnings were never acknowledged by the naval commander and the ships continued. Five German ships came upon several landing craft, alerting the enemy and jeopardizing the main assault landing.
Operation Jubilee went down in history as one of Canada's biggest military disasters. Once the smoke cleared, officials were able to identify a number of flaws that led to the destruction of two-thirds of the Canadian forces. Intelligence provided to the Allied troops was poor, and senior officers were not updated on the raid's progress in time to prevent disaster. Mountbatten faced heavy criticism for giving unauthorized orders at Dieppe and leading soldiers to their death.
Some surviving participants still lament the lack of naval and air protection as they fought the enemy on wide-open shores.
"We were left to our own devices," said Robert Large, a former private with the Essex Scottish who was severely injured during the raid and nearly lost his leg. "Not only were (the Germans) pounding us with bullets and bombs, the explosions shattered the rocks on the beach and those were injuring us, too. The sharp rocks became weapons, too."
When the carnage was over, the beaches of Dieppe were littered with bodies and moaning injured soldiers. Back home, Windsorites were unaware of the tragedy until telegrams started pouring in.
"We regret to inform you that your son was killed in the raid on Dieppe," they read, or gave families a glimmer of hope by listing their sons and husbands as missing or prisoners of war.
In the days that followed, casualty lists began appearing in The Windsor Star. It was a sobering jolt of reality. The headline: "The war came grimly to Windsor."
Every household was in mourning, whether it had lost a loved one in the raid or not. The Essex Scottish troops became everyone's boys. Many were outraged that they were sent on the ill-conceived and poorly executed mission.
But a number of surviving veterans have no regrets.
James McArthur, a former corporal, said the disastrous consequences provided valuable lessons that helped pave the way for D-Day success.
Indeed, as Allied planners reviewed the fatal blunders made at Dieppe, they were able to draw up new plans for amphibious landings at Normandy two years later. Intelligence and communications strategies were improved, topographical conditions were studied intensively and the need to develop armoured landing craft that would shield soldiers from small arms fire was recognized.
"You can't call Dieppe a failure, even though we lost so many men," McArthur said. "We did what had to be done and learned from our mistakes. That's the reality of war."