ERIN – The amphibious Allied attack along the coastal French beaches of Dieppe was meant to gain a foothold in Western Europe and test the German Wehrmacht’s defences.
Instead, it became a bloodbath and a monumental failure that taught lessons carried forward to assaults in Africa, Italy and Normandy.
Of 6,100 troops involved, 5,000 were Canadian; the rest American rangers and British commandos. Eight Allied destroyers and 74 air squads participated.
Keith “Koop” Spence, 21, and his five comrades from the 6th Canadian Infantry, were about 300 feet out from shore on landing craft tank seven as the air cracked with gunfire on Aug. 19, 1942.
Machine guns laced the troop and tank carrier as it hit the sand of White Beach at 6:05am.
The men were tasked with defending Brigadier William Wallace “Bill” Southam of the 48th Highlanders, and setting up a headquarters.
A shell blasted through the carrier’s left side, blowing it outward and detonating a gas cylinder on one of the three Churchill tanks aboard. Their radio was destroyed and two men injured. Two more shell strikes hit the carrier, causing more injuries.
As the Churchill tanks were driven from their carrier, drawing German firepower, the men made a mad dash to the rocky sand.
The wounded carrier was forced to limp back out a mile from shore, awaiting an evacuation order.
Two beached Calgary Highlanders tanks and landing carrier tank 5 in flames. Library and Archives Canada
Spence was tasked with engaging enemy aircraft, but without tracer ammunition and their mission to establish a headquarters doomed, he thought about lying down in the sand to join the rest of the men dying around him.
But he kept pulling the trigger on his gun, fighting for his life as he recited a prayer his mother, Florence, had taught him when he was a boy.
By 11am, the evacuation order – “vanquish” – was given.
Spence pulled his injured friends onto another carrier because the one they rode in on sank to the bottom of the English Channel. Those aboard the new carrier rescued many soldiers from the shallows.
Early news reports broadcasted government propaganda about a successful mission, rather than the truth of an abysmal failure and bloody massacre costing the lives of 907 Canadians, and leaving 2,460 wounded and another 1,946 captured be the Germans.
Canadian prisoners of war being lead through Dieppe by German soldiers. Library and Archives Canada
“I was sure lucky,” Spence wrote in a letter back home to Georgetown in 1942.
“I was one of the very few who came back unhurt. It was really terrible and I hope I never see so many boys die that way again.”
Spence, then 24, returned in 1945 to his 23-year-old wife, Eleanor Hornby, and a young daughter he had never met.
The pair had married in July 1940, under a year before he signed up with the Lorne Scots defence platoon in Brampton.
Eleanor had felt like a feather in Keith’s arms when they met at a Georgetown dance. Before long they were married with their first daughter on the way.
By the time Judy was born, in August of 1941, Spence had already crossed the Atlantic on the RMS Andes and arrived at the New Martinique Barracks in England.
He would spend the next four years overseas fighting the Germans in Europe, including in France and Germany, and later with the Saskatoon Light Infantry in Sicily.
Keith “Koop” Spence, left, in Hillsburgh with his wife Eleanor, and neighbour Bruce Harley, in 1940. Submitted photo
Jackie Turbitt, the second of nine children, said her father returned to a family he didn’t know.
“He left a 20-year-old wife and came back to a woman who had a career and a child and her own life,” Turbitt said.
Eleanor worked at a munitions factory, took up smoking and loved reading.
“They were like strangers to each other, really,” Turbitt said.
Though Turbitt thinks of her father fondly, she said each of her siblings got a different version of Spence as he changed over the years.
In his younger days, Spence had a bad temper and drank a lot, she said. He regularly butted heads and fought with Judy.
Turbitt recalls him barking orders to the children “as if he were in the army” – she once called him a “dictator.”
“How did they live with what they had seen and then come back and they were supposed to pick up at the factory and be a good father and learn how to be a husband?” Turbitt said.
“It changed everyone’s life.”
Jackie Turbitt leafs through a photo album in the kitchen of her Hillsburgh home. Photo by Jordan Snobelen
Spence was born on Jan. 11, 1921 in Georgetown to Wilfred Spence and Florence Ayling.
He was the youngest of five, and his sisters teased him for his curly hair, nicknaming him “Koop,” after the Kewpie dolls of the time.
When Spence was 15, his father was badly burned at a paper mill. Spence dropped out of secondary school to work as a clay pressman at Smith and Stone in Georgetown to earn money for the family.
After the war, he returned to the electrical fixture manufacturer. It closed in 1992.
The Spences moved to Hillsburgh from Georgetown in 1955, when Eleanor was pregnant with their fifth child.
For $5,000, they bought a brick home on George Street, fully furnished, along with a barn on the property where Spence kept horses.
Spence loved to rest in the hay mounds and listen to rain patter against the barn roof, Turbitt said.
Keith “Koop” Spence in his later years. Submitted photo
He played the cornet, trumpet and bugle; coached baseball and hockey; sang in the Hillsburgh United Church choir; was a member of the Odd Fellows; and liked to hunt with his beagles, Jack and Tubs.
“He wasn’t a killer, he was a hunter,” Turbitt said.
To this day, she has a hard time reconciling the man she knew later in life with someone who shot and killed people.
Spence didn’t talk much about the war throughout his life, according to Turbitt.
His military record is pocked with unexplained “absent without leave” entries during lulls in fighting, along with an Army Act charge for his conduct against military standards.
Turbitt recited a story of her “mischievous” father’s time in France, when he borrowed a Bren Gun carrier for a road trip.
“They weren’t fighting at the time, but the guys, they were fairly close to Paris, and a bunch decided, ‘We’re not going to be in France and not see Paris,’” she said.
“I think alcohol was involved more than you like to think.”
Spence’s medals from his time at Dieppe as well as Italy, France and Germany. From left to right on the top row: Canadian Volunteer Service Medal with Dieppe Clasp, France and Germany Star, Lorne Scots cap badge, Defence Medal and 1939-45 War Medal. On the bottom row are the 1939-45 Star and the Italy Star. Lorne Scots and Saskatoon Light Infantry shoulder patches are in the centre, below the the cap badge. The collection is kept in the archives of the Regimental Museum of the Lorne Scots in Brampton. Submitted photo
Nearer to the end of his time, Spence was using a mobility scooter to get around.
“He had a horn put on the scooter, and the joy of his life was to go up silently behind somebody and honk,” Turbitt said.
In 1994, he died of a heart attack while sitting in a sofa chair at the age of 73.
Pipers from the Erin Legion played at Spence’s funeral, and a since-closed restaurant served a special meal in his honour.
Spence is buried at Huxley Cemetery in a casket with a metal top, intentional by Eleanor, so he can hear the rain pattering on the earth as he once did in life, inside the old George Street barn.
