Essex Farm Cemetery, Dunkirk and Dieppe

After stopping at Passchendale, we headed to St. Julien where the famous Brooding Soldier Memorial is.  This commemorated the Newfoundland (who were still a colony of GB then) war dead.  It is a striking piece and around the base are markers pointing to other battle sites....

Essex Farm Cemetery is best known for being site of the dressing station where Col. John McCrae, the author of In Flanders Fields composed it.  He died of Pneumonia in 1918, which was not surprising since he was a physician and was attending to Allied troops suffering from everything from Pneumonia to the Spanish Flu that killed 50 Million people in Europe that year.

There is a large memorial stone in his honour just outside the cemetery grounds (actually on the ditch near the road) but I could not believe they would allow one of our soldiers to lie in a ditch so sent the family off in 4 different directions to find his actual grave.  We hunted around for about 30 minutes before we found one for J McCrae at the back in an unobtusive plot, marked much as the same as the rest of them.  It wasn't until researching for this entry that I realized he wasn't actually buried at Essex Farm but in Wimeraux in France (under full military honours with even Lieutenant General Arthur Currie in attendance).  The fact that it was an official Canadian government memorial fooled me into thinking that was where he had died as well.

The fact that this fine gentlemen was part of the Engineers got me wondering if he was actually John McCrae.

We also stopped at the Passchendale Museam in a neighbouring town and toured a replica of the tunnels the Allies had dug under a destroyed cathedral.

A German pill box

You can still see the trenches.

They were restoring the exterior of the Museum.

A scale model of the church ruins and the dugout under them... they had originally tried to use the crypts but gave up and dug the tunnels instead.

After that, it was time to leave for the WW2 portion of our trip before taking up residence of our Gite (farmhouse) in the Loire Valley on the 15th... so we piled back into our little Ford Focus wagon and headed for Dunkirk.

We didn't actually stop at Dunkirk as it wasn't obvious to us that there was much to see, but Dunkirk was the site of the rushed evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from France & Belgium after Hitler's Blitzkrieg into France from Belgium around France's impregnable Maginot Line.  The British and French managed to rescue 338,000 soldiers using 850 merchant marine, pleasure craft, fishing boats and life boats of every shape and size from England.  On June 4th, 1940, the day after the final evacuation, Churchill gave his famous "We shall fight on the beaches..." speech rousing the English populace to resist the German advances.

After passing the harbours of Dunkirk (now Dunkerque), we headed down the beautiful French coast toward Dieppe.  By now, you are probably sensing a theme here... I have always been intrigued by the wars and was trying to impart on the kids some important Canadian history.

Dieppe was the site of a mostly Canadian invasion on the European continent in August of 1942... Yes, 1942.  Those of you who know your history, know that D-Day occurred on June 6th, 1944 but the Canadians actually attacked Nazi controlled continental Europe two full years ahead of that.  Canada declared war on Nazi Germany in September, 1939 along with the rest of the Commonwealth (the US didn't declare war until December 7th, 1941) but didn't participate in any of the early battles up to and including the evacuation at Dunkirk.  After their successes in WW1, Canadians were eager to get their soldiers into it and our boys were roughhousing up the English countryside looking for a fight.

Vice Admiral Louis Mountbatten (the same guy who was later assassinated by the Irish Republican Army) planned the raid without specific authorization - and thus necessary resources.  It didn't really have a defined objective although it was later stated to be that it was to prove it was possible to capture and hold an enemy port for a short period.  If you know your history, you may remember that by this time, the Germans had abandoned their attempt to invade Britain due to the inability of their Luftwaffe to beat the Allies in the Battle of Britain.  Germany had turned her attentions on their ally (for the Polish invasion) Soviet Russia and had launched a major offensive in that direction.  The Soviets and Allies were now fighting on multiple fronts and the Soviets were pushing hard for the Allies to make an attack on the Western Front to take some of the German pressure off themselves.  Mountbatten was sympathetic to this and emboldened by the aggressive Canadians.

Unfortunately, no major objectives of the raid were accomplished. A total of 3,623 of the 6,086 men (almost 60%) who made it ashore were either killed, wounded, or captured. The air force failed to lure the Luftwaffe into open battle, and lost 96 aircraft (at least 32 to flak or accidents), compared to 48 lost by the Luftwaffe. The Royal Navy lost 33 landing craft and one destroyer. The attacking force was comprised of 5000 Canadians, 1000 British troops and 50 US Rangers.

Intelligence on the area was sparse: there were dug-in German gun positions on the cliffs, but these had not been detected or spotted by air reconnaissance photographers. The planners had assessed the beach gradient and its suitability for tanks only by scanning holiday snapshots, which led to an underestimation of the German strength and of the terrain.  The new "Churchill" tanks were almost completely useless in these conditions.  A French double agent also revealed the plans in advance to the Germans and they had used the opportunity to bolster their coastal defences.  The morning of the raid, one of their ships encountered and sunk some of the landing craft sending the warning to the beaches where the Germans were well prepared for the attack.  Out of the 5000 Canadians that morning, 3367 were killed, wounded or captured - an exceptional casualty rate of 68%.  The events at Dieppe later heavily influenced preparations for the North African (Operation Torch) and Normandy landings (Operation Overlord) where only 1200 Canadian casualties were suffered.

We viewed the Canadian cemetery at Dieppe and immediately noticed it wasn't like other Commonwealth cemeteries in that the tombstones were placed in double rows - like the German cemetery we were to see later outside Caen in Normandy.  This was because the Germans buried the Canadian's here at Dieppe.

The dead are buried in double rows (facing head to head) like the German cemeteries we saw later

Getting ready for the memorial 

After Dieppe, we continued down the Normandy coast to Caen where we'd spend the night in a little town called Bayaux in preparation for our tour of the Normandy D-Day beaches the next day.  Along the way, we saw a neat tornado (that luckily did not touch down) and some cool bridges... the French really know how to build cool looking bridges.  We saw a similar one in Saigon built by the French and the Milau Bridge in the south of France is on my agenda as it has been my screen saver for years (along with a nice Aston Martin DBS in the foreground).

It was really twisting and moving... this is the best I could do with one hand as I was motoring along the A15.

One of the bridges at LèHarvè

LèHarvè on the right bank.... Normandy on the right.