Description
Mr. Roger’s regiment was not involved in the Dieppe Raid in August, 1942 as they continued training in England but he was asked to speak about the impact the failed raid had on him and his comrades.
Frederick Rogers
Mr. Rogers was an infant when his father died as a result of gas poisoning during his service in the First World War. His mother brought him and his only sister to Canada when he was about two years old.
Mr. Rogers joined the Essex Regiment Tank (militia) in Windsor, Ontario when he was 14 or 15 years old. He went on to complete Grade 10 and at the age of 16 went to work on a farm to support himself. He enlisted in the Canadian Army on February 18, 1941. Basic training was provided in Kitchener, Ontario and he was then sent to Camp Petawawa and, finally, to Sussex, New Brunswick to join the 12th Field regiment as a replacement. The regiment arrived in Liverpool, England on July 31, 1941 and were immediately taken by train to Bramshot, England.
Transcript
It’s hard to say, but when I learned about the Dieppe raid I was up in Glasgow on leave and I was up at about 11:00 o’clock in the morning to a pub on a side street having a beer and this had come over the radio. We didn’t really know the, at that time, they didn’t broadcast the amount of casualties, where you didn’t hear this, this wasn’t made public. But I think most us sitting there in the pub said, “Thank God it wasn’t us.” Because that was cancelled and they stayed on the Isle of Wight for so long, then they rescheduled it. And having landed at Dieppe on the 50th Anniversary of D-Day, why in the hell they ever let anybody land there, they had to have been nuts. We got off, our bus came off the ferry and I seen those cliffs and said, “What in the hell would they ever land anybody there for? ” But as far as reaction go back, cause you never heard the total losses of life like you would today. It wasn’t brought up, it was a loss of life and the fellows came back and you didn’t hear much talk. Cause you never talked much about what was going on. They say, “walls have ears” and maybe we were more content with the fact that we were still here, able to get around and maybe lost friends over there. We didn’t know this.
Interviewer: After the Dieppe raid, did it appear to you that training escalated?
Well, see the, being artillery, we were differently trained than the infantry. See, we never, hardly ever, well we got these cross-country schemes, we could go all the way for hundreds of miles for two weeks at a time on the road, getting our guns in position. This is the way we trained, but the infantry trained a lot harder than we did. I mean, thank God I didn’t join the infantry cause I’ll tell you, those guys had it tough.
