- 41 minutes ago
John Weir Foote had a seat in the last boat off Dieppe — and climbed back out. This war history story follows the Canadian chaplain of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry as he walked the shingle under German fire, carried wounded men to cover, and then kept going back toward the beach, the cliffs, and the guns.
The video traces the Dieppe Raid from the first landings to the evacuation, showing how Foote stayed with the wounded, then later carried that same sense of duty into German captivity. It also explores the Victoria Cross citation, the prisoner-of-war years that followed, and the way his quiet, steady presence helped Canadian prisoners endure the camps and work detachments.
If you enjoy military history, World War II stories, Canadian war stories, and narrated historical documentary-style storytelling, this episode offers a powerful look at courage without a rifle. It is a story of chaplains, prisoners of war, Dieppe, and the long shadow of one decision on a French beach.
Created for listeners searching for WW2 history, Canadian military history, Dieppe Raid analysis, war stories, and narrated history documentaries. Strong search terms for this episode include John Weir Foote, Royal Hamilton Light Infantry, Victoria Cross, prisoner of war, and Dieppe Raid storytime.
The video traces the Dieppe Raid from the first landings to the evacuation, showing how Foote stayed with the wounded, then later carried that same sense of duty into German captivity. It also explores the Victoria Cross citation, the prisoner-of-war years that followed, and the way his quiet, steady presence helped Canadian prisoners endure the camps and work detachments.
If you enjoy military history, World War II stories, Canadian war stories, and narrated historical documentary-style storytelling, this episode offers a powerful look at courage without a rifle. It is a story of chaplains, prisoners of war, Dieppe, and the long shadow of one decision on a French beach.
Created for listeners searching for WW2 history, Canadian military history, Dieppe Raid analysis, war stories, and narrated history documentaries. Strong search terms for this episode include John Weir Foote, Royal Hamilton Light Infantry, Victoria Cross, prisoner of war, and Dieppe Raid storytime.
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00August 19th, 1942
00:04The beach in front of the casino at Dieppe, on the coast of occupied France.
00:09It is past eleven in the morning, the tide is running out, and the stones are covered
00:14with Canadians who cannot get off them.
00:17A small landing craft has come in under a curtain of smoke.
00:22Men are being lifted into it, men with field dressings on their legs, men who cannot walk,
00:28men who have been lying on the shingle since dawn.
00:33Some of them are alive because one man carried them across that shingle while German machine
00:38guns fired down from the cliffs and the buildings along the seafront.
00:43He is easy to pick out, 6'3", 38 years old, older than almost everyone around him.
00:51He carries no rifle, his boots are gone, he got rid of them hours ago so he could move
00:57faster over the stones.
00:59He has a place in that boat.
01:01Nobody on that beach would say he had not earned it.
01:06He climbs over the side, he drops into the water, and he wades back toward the beach, toward
01:12the casino, toward the cliffs, toward the guns.
01:17His name is John Weir Foote.
01:20He is the chaplain of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry, the Rileys, as Hamilton calls them,
01:27a Presbyterian minister from Madoc, Ontario, who played the organ in his family's church
01:32as a boy and worked in his father-in-law's hardware store before he ever preached a sermon.
01:38By every rule of this war he is a non-combatant, and he is free to leave.
01:43Instead, he has just walked back to be taken prisoner by the Germans.
01:49Hold that picture.
01:50A man in a boat that is about to leave.
01:54The same man climbing out of it.
01:56Within two hours, nearly 2,000 Canadians on these beaches will be prisoners of the German
02:03army, and he has just chosen to be one of them.
02:07Now you have probably already reached for the obvious answer.
02:11He stayed for the wounded.
02:13And that answer is not wrong, but it is not the whole of what the official record says.
02:19When the citation for his Victoria Cross was finally published, years later, it said he
02:25refused a final opportunity to leave the shore, choosing to suffer the fate of the men he had
02:32ministered to.
02:33And then it added a phrase that has nothing to do with eight hours on a beach.
02:39For over three years.
02:41Of all the chaplains who served in the armies of the Commonwealth through the whole of the
02:46Second World War, he would be the only one to receive the Victoria Cross.
02:52For a day most people remember as a Canadian defeat.
02:56Remember those words, for over three years.
03:00They will come back, and when they do, they will mean something very different from what
03:05they mean right now.
03:07If what the Canadians did at Dieppe matters to you, a subscribe helps these stories reach
03:12more people.
03:13Thank you for being here.
03:15Here is what John Foote was walking back into.
03:18The Canadians had landed at Dieppe before dawn, the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division with British
03:25commandos on the flanks and a few dozen American Rangers.
03:314,963 Canadians had sailed from England the night before.
03:36By the end of the day, fewer than half of them would come back.
03:41Those are numbers.
03:43Here is what they meant on this beach.
03:45The Rileys had come ashore at twenty past five, almost exactly on time, and the tanks
03:53that were supposed to land with them were ten to fifteen minutes late.
03:58Ten minutes does not sound like much.
04:01On an open beach under the cliffs, it was everything.
04:05The battalion fought its way into the casino anyway.
04:08A party under Captain Anthony Hill got into the town itself.
04:13And by ten o'clock, there were too few of them left to hold any of it.
04:18At eleven, the withdrawal began.
04:21The navy would not risk the big tank landing craft.
04:24So it sent small assault boats instead, through smoke, onto a beach where the falling tide widened
04:31the open ground every man had to cross.
04:34From the main beaches at Dieppe, only three hundred and fifty to four hundred men were
04:39taken off.
04:41Everybody else stayed.
04:43The wounded, who could not be carried.
04:45The men at the seawall, who kept firing so the boats could load.
04:49The Rileys' own commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Labatt, last seen standing over
04:57his badly wounded adjutant.
04:59Of the Canadians taken prisoner that day, at least five hundred and sixty-eight were wounded.
05:05And on the German side, the men who held Dieppe were already forming their opinion.
05:11The headquarters of the German 81st Corps would put it into an official report.
05:16The Canadians, it said, had on the whole fought badly, and had afterwards surrendered
05:22in swarms.
05:24Not every German officer agreed with that sentence.
05:27Keep that in mind.
05:29It matters later.
05:31That is the sentence John Foote waded into.
05:34He never read it.
05:36But nearly two thousand Canadians were about to spend almost three years behind German wire,
05:43guarded by men who believed it.
05:45And a padre who climbs out of a boat is not going to change what a German corps headquarters
05:51thinks of anyone.
05:53So what, exactly, did he think he was going to do?
05:58Here is the first clue, and it does not come from the beach.
06:02It comes from before the raid.
06:05John Foote was not supposed to be at Dieppe at all.
06:09Robert Labatt had told him the chaplain would not be going.
06:13What Foote said back to his colonel is the first piece of this answer.
06:17And it tells you that the decision on that beach was not made on the beach.
06:23August 18th, 1942.
06:26The landing ship Glengile slips out from the south coast of England with men of the Royal
06:32Hamilton Light Infantry aboard, bound for France.
06:36Before the landing, a tall officer gathers a company of them together and leads them in
06:41prayer.
06:41That officer was not supposed to be on the ship.
06:45Here is how close John Foote came to watching Dieppe from England.
06:49When the Rileys learned who was going on the raid, the chaplain's name was not on the list.
06:55Lieutenant Colonel Robert Labatt had decided it himself.
06:59The padre would stay behind.
07:01Foote did not argue the way officers usually argue with their commanding officer.
07:05As the story has come down in the regiment, he told Labatt plainly that he was going.
07:11And if the colonel wanted to stop him, he could have him arrested.
07:15On the boats.
07:17Think about what that sentence actually says.
07:20Not let me come.
07:22Not I volunteer.
07:24It says the only way to keep me off that beach is to put me under arrest in front of
07:29the men.
07:31Labatt gave way.
07:32So before a single shot was fired, you already have the pattern.
07:37Somebody offers John Foote a way to stay behind.
07:41He refuses it.
07:43Keep that pattern in your head, because before this day is over, it is going to repeat itself
07:49again and again.
07:51The assault boats went in through the last of the dark.
07:54At twenty past five in the morning, the first craft carrying the Riley's touched down on
08:01White Beach in front of the casino.
08:03Remember what I told you about the tanks.
08:06They were late.
08:07For ten to fifteen minutes, the infantry was alone on an open slope of stones, with the
08:13casino in front of them, the headland on their right, and German guns that had been waiting
08:19for exactly this.
08:21Now here is a detail that changes how you see everything Foote did that day.
08:27The battalion's regimental aid post, the place the wounded were brought to, the place
08:32the doctor worked, was set up in a slight dip in the beach.
08:36The official record describes it precisely.
08:39It was deep enough to give cover to men lying down.
08:44Lying down.
08:45Not kneeling, not standing.
08:47The battalion's medical officer was Captain David Clare, twenty-seven years old.
08:53Casualties came to him so fast that he ran through all the medical supplies he had in
08:59a short time, and from then on he was forced to improvise.
09:03And John Foote was six foot three.
09:06Picture what the job looked like.
09:09A wounded man lies out on the open stones.
09:12He cannot crawl.
09:14Somebody has to get up, go out to him, give him morphine, and bring him back.
09:19Every trip means standing up on a beach, where standing up is what gets you killed.
09:24The citation says Foote left that shelter time and again.
09:28He injected morphine.
09:30He gave first aid.
09:31He carried men on his shoulders back to the dip where Clare was working.
09:36And the people who watched him did not describe a man running from cover to cover.
09:41They described a man walking.
09:45He was not the only one out there.
09:48Private Thomas McQuaid of the Riley's volunteered to go out under fire and lay timber palings
09:54so the tanks could climb the shingle.
09:57And then he helped bring in the wounded.
10:00Corporal George Stewart was hit on his first attempt to blow a gap in the wire, went back,
10:06finished the job, and afterwards carried wounded men to cover.
10:11So Foote was not one brave man surrounded by frightened ones.
10:16He was one of many Canadians on that beach doing the same arithmetic, my life against his,
10:24and arriving at the same answer.
10:27But the men who watched him remembered something particular.
10:31When the witnesses gave their accounts for his citation, they did not talk about speed
10:36or strength.
10:38They talked about his calmness.
10:40The way he walked about collecting the wounded on a fire-swept beach.
10:45They said it would never be forgotten.
10:48Ask yourself why that is the thing they remembered.
10:52A man who walks calmly among the wounded under fire is doing more than carrying bodies.
10:59He is telling every man still lying on those stones that somebody is coming.
11:04That nobody out there will be left alone.
11:08That is a chaplain's work, done with his hands instead of his voice.
11:13And here the first layer of our answer begins to show.
11:18The obvious explanation, he stayed for the wounded, is starting to look too small.
11:24A man who threatens his own colonel to get onto the beach, and then walks upright among the
11:30wounded for hours, is not making one decision.
11:34He is keeping one promise, over and over.
11:38You do not know yet what that promise is.
11:41I am not going to tell you yet either, because the beach has not finished testing it.
11:47By the middle of the morning, the Rileys were losing White Beach.
11:51Captain Anthony Hill's party, which had got into the town, fell back to the casino.
11:56The casino could not be held for long, and the sea itself began to turn against them.
12:02The tide was going out.
12:05Every minute the water's edge moved further from the seawall, and the open ground between
12:10the wounded and any boat that might come for them grew wider.
12:15The dip in the shingle that had been the only shelter was no longer enough.
12:19The aid post had to move.
12:22The only solid cover left on that stretch of beach was a tank landing craft that had grounded
12:28on the stones and never got off again.
12:31So the wounded went inside a steel hull, out of the line of the machine guns at last.
12:38It was the strongest shelter on White Beach.
12:41It was also carrying ammunition.
12:44And within a short time, German shells would find it.
12:48The citation does not say which German gun fired.
12:51It records only what happened next.
12:55Enemy shells struck the stranded landing craft, and the ammunition inside it caught fire.
13:02Think about the men inside that hull.
13:05They had been carried there because it was the safest place on White Beach.
13:09Many of them could not stand.
13:12And now, the steel walls that had been protecting them were holding in a fire, with ammunition
13:18burning in it.
13:20John Foote went in.
13:22The citation says he removed wounded from inside the landing craft when the ammunition had been
13:28set on fire by enemy shells.
13:31It does not say how many trips he made or how long it took.
13:35It says he did it, and that the men who saw it made sure it was written down.
13:42So that is the second time in one morning the safe place turned into a trap.
13:48First, the dip in the shingle stopped being enough as the tide went out.
13:53Then the steel hull caught fire.
13:56And both times, the answer was the same man, walking back into the place everyone else was
14:02trying to get out of.
14:04While that was happening on the beach, a few miles out to sea, aboard the destroyer HMS
14:11Calpy, the decision that would shape the next three years of John Foote's life was being
14:17made.
14:18On the Calpy were the force commander, Major General John Hamilton Roberts, and the naval
14:24force commander, Captain John Hughes Hallett.
14:27Messages from the beaches had been confused all morning, and some of them had been wrong.
14:33But by mid-morning there was no longer any doubt.
14:37The raid had failed, and the men had to come off.
14:41Hughes Hallett proposed the earliest time he thought practical, half past ten.
14:47Roberts asked for thirty minutes more.
14:50He wanted time to reach the Cameron Highlanders of Canada, who had pushed inland from the western
14:56beach, and to get better air cover.
14:58The withdrawal was set for eleven o'clock.
15:01Hughes Hallett also advised that it be confined to personnel, men only.
15:08Every tank on that shore would stay there.
15:11Here is a detail that tells you what the Navy expected.
15:15The big tank landing craft, the boats that could carry the most men at once, were judged
15:21too vulnerable to send back in.
15:24So the evacuation went to small assault craft.
15:28They would come in behind smoke, as close as they could get, and every man who wanted
15:33to leave would have to cross the open beach to reach them.
15:37Canada's official army historian, Colonel Charles Stacy, chose his words carefully when
15:43he wrote about what followed.
15:45He called it an evacuation carried out under conditions probably without parallel in the
15:51history of warfare.
15:53On White Beach, John Foote's work changed direction.
15:58Until now, he had carried men from the open stones into shelter.
16:02Now he carried them the other way, out of the aid post, down the widening beach, into the
16:09water, to the boats.
16:10The citation gives it one line.
16:13When landing craft appeared, he carried wounded from the aid post to the landing craft through
16:19very heavy fire.
16:21Other Rileys were doing the same.
16:24Lieutenant John Gartshore had carried a Bangalore torpedo up to the wire at dawn and then led
16:30his platoon toward the casino with a severe wound in his arm.
16:35Now he was helping wounded men into the boats.
16:38Captain Anthony Hill, the officer who had fought his way into the town, was loading the craft
16:45too, and, his citation says, refused the chance to get away himself.
16:52Captain Dennis Whittaker was directing much of the battalion's withdrawal at the water's
16:56edge.
16:57Remember Whittaker.
16:59He made it home, and fifty years later he would publish a history of this day.
17:04The Germans did not stop firing.
17:07German 15th Army headquarters put it flatly afterwards.
17:11The craft provided for re-embarkation were almost all hit and sank.
17:17Not every wounded man carried into those boats reached England.
17:21Now I want you to hear one sentence from Foote's citation slowly.
17:26On several occasions, it says, this officer had the opportunity to embark, but returned
17:31to the beach, as his chief concern was the care and evacuation of the wounded.
17:37Several occasions.
17:39Not one.
17:40Every time he waded out with a man on his shoulders, he was standing beside a boat that was about
17:46to leave.
17:48Every time, he could have stayed aboard.
17:50Nobody would have called it running away.
17:53An unarmed chaplain who had been carrying wounded through fire since five in the morning,
17:58any officer on that beach would have pushed him in.
18:01And every time, he turned around and walked back up the stones.
18:06So now you can put part of the answer into words, and you would be right.
18:12As long as there were wounded on that beach and boats to put them in, John Foote's place
18:17was between the two.
18:19That explains several occasions.
18:21It explains a whole morning.
18:23It does not explain the end.
18:26A point came when that reason ran out.
18:29The boats stopped coming.
18:30Nobody was going to evacuate the men still on the beach.
18:34And carrying them to the water could no longer save them.
18:38Once that happened, the reason the citation gives for Foote staying on White Beach no longer
18:45applied.
18:46That is the moment you saw at the start of this story.
18:49The last boat.
18:51The man climbing over its side.
18:53The man wading back.
18:55Now you can see why it is so strange.
18:59He was not going back to finish the job.
19:02As the citation describes it, the job was over.
19:06At about ten past one in the afternoon, a signal from Brigadier William Southam's headquarters
19:12reached the Calpie.
19:14Our people here have surrendered.
19:17Southam had brought something ashore with him that morning.
19:19A copy of the operation plan.
19:23Among its dozens of pages was one short instruction about what to do with prisoners.
19:29The Germans were about to read it.
19:31And the men John Foote had just chosen to stay with would pay for that one line with their
19:37hands.
19:38August 19th, 1942.
19:41The Afternoon.
19:43On White Beach the firing died away, and German soldiers came down onto the stones.
19:50They found what was left of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry.
19:54Lieutenant Colonel Robert Labatt was among them.
19:57In all, 174 Rileys were taken prisoner that day.
20:03One of them was the tall man with no boots who had climbed out of the last boat.
20:07The first thing John Foote's choice cost him was very physical.
20:12He had got rid of his boots on the beach so he could move faster across the stones.
20:17Now the prisoners were marched inland, and he marched with them barefoot.
20:22One of the Canadian prisoners later remembered the column crossing Dieppe on foot, surrounded
20:28by guards, to the town hospital, where the officers were separated from the men.
20:33Then, they went on to a church at Envermeux, a few kilometers outside the town, to spend
20:39the night.
20:40For Foote, it was two days on the road.
20:42By one account, he covered more than 30 miles without boots.
20:47When they reached the camp, his feet were raw.
20:51Picture him on that road, 38 years old, a minister who had once worked in his father-in-law's
20:57hardware store in Cornwall, Ontario, walking barefoot into Germany's prison system of his
21:04own free will.
21:06Every man in that column knew he had had a seat in a boat.
21:09Hold on to that image, because the Germans were about to show the Canadians what their opinion
21:15of them looked like in practice.
21:18Remember the operation plan Brigadier Southam carried ashore?
21:21I said the prisoners would pay for one line of it with their hands.
21:26Here is that line, word for word.
21:29Wherever possible, prisoners' hands will be tied to prevent destruction of their documents.
21:35The instruction was about German prisoners the raiders expected to take.
21:40General Roberts later said he had argued against putting it in.
21:43It went in anyway, and the Germans found it.
21:46On September 2nd, Berlin threatened to chain every prisoner taken at Dieppe.
21:52The war office in London replied that any such order would be cancelled, and the next day,
21:58the Germans dropped the threat.
22:01For a month, it looked as if that was the end of it.
22:04Then a new German order came down.
22:07On October 8th, 1942, it was carried out.
22:11At Stalag 8b, Lomsdorf, in Silesia, where the Canadian rank and file from Dieppe had been
22:19sent, the Dieppe prisoners were called out in small groups.
22:24Their hands were tied with cord.
22:26They were tied in the morning, the cord came off at night, and it went back on the next morning.
22:32Think about what that does to a man.
22:34You are already a prisoner, behind wire, in a strange country, two months after the worst
22:41day of your life.
22:42And now you are tied up every day for the crime of having been captured.
22:48The German 81st Corps had written that the Canadians surrendered in swarms.
22:54This was that sentence turned into a camp routine.
22:57Trooper Forbes Morton remembered that his wrists became ulcerated with sores from the rope burns.
23:03The men complained to the Red Cross.
23:07On December 2nd, Burt Moody, of the Queen's own Cameron Highlanders, wrote four words in
23:13his diary.
23:15Ropes replaced by chains.
23:18The new handcuffs were joined by a chain about 18 inches long.
23:23To the men wearing them, that counted as an improvement.
23:27Here is the part the guards had not planned for.
23:30The Canadians fought back.
23:32Not with their fists.
23:34With their heads.
23:36The prisoners started cutting handcuff keys out of the tins that New Brunswick sardines
23:42came in.
23:43Trooper Fred Tanner learned to pick the locks outright.
23:47Then, he kept his hands in his pockets, so he still looked chained whenever a guard walked
23:52by.
23:53Sgt.
23:54Thomas Cunningham remembered that when the Germans collected the shackles, the prisoners
23:59went through the box to find their own pair again.
24:02They wanted their own handcuffs back, because they already knew how to open them.
24:07That was the Canadian answer to, surrendered in swarms.
24:12Not a speech, a sardine tin.
24:15It went on for a long time.
24:18The Germans kept the Dieppe prisoners bound until late in 1943.
24:23One veteran summed it up in a single sentence.
24:27We were tied for 13 months.
24:30So, where was John Foote in all this?
24:33Here, I have to be straight with you about what the record shows.
24:37The documents I have found do not place him at Lamsdorf in the autumn of 1942, and they
24:43do not say whether he himself was ever tied.
24:47What they do say is this.
24:49In his first prison camp, among Canadians and other allied prisoners, he fell ill, and he
24:56kept on doing his work for the men anyway.
24:59Now set that beside everything you know.
25:02He could have been in England.
25:04He refused a boat on several occasions, and then refused the last one.
25:10He walked barefoot into Germany.
25:12And the men he came back for were now being tied up every morning by guards who believed
25:18they were cowards.
25:19So here is the question you should be asking, and it is sharper than the one we started with.
25:26On a beach, a chaplain can carry the wounded.
25:30What can a chaplain do in a prison camp, with no medicine, no authority, and nothing to carry?
25:39Part of the answer comes from a Dieppe prisoner who lived in the same barrack as Foote.
25:44Decades later, he could still repeat word for word what the Padre said to a man who was
25:50falling apart, and he said he never stopped thinking about it.
25:55November 22, 1943.
25:59Without any announcement, the Germans stopped tying the hands of the Dieppe prisoners.
26:04They never formally withdrew the order.
26:07The ropes and chains simply stopped coming out.
26:12You might think things got easier after that.
26:14In one way they did.
26:16In another, they got harder.
26:19Because once the rope was gone, the men were left alone with the thing the rope had been
26:24covering up—time.
26:27By now they had been prisoners for well over a year.
26:31Nobody could tell them when it would end.
26:34There had been no invasion of France, and no one knew whether there would be one next spring
26:39or the spring after.
26:41The men were young.
26:43Many of them had joined up in 1939 to fight, and their whole war so far was one morning on
26:49a beach and then the wire.
26:52That is when men start to break.
26:55One Dieppe prisoner, Elmer Cole, recorded his memories decades later for Veterans Affairs
27:02Canada.
27:03He had fought through the raid, surrendered with the others, and stayed a prisoner until
27:081945.
27:10When he talked about the Padre, he did not begin with sermons.
27:14He began with a room.
27:16Listen to how he described it, because it tells you more about John Foote than any metal citation.
27:25A prison barrack had two ends where the men lived, and between them a small room.
27:31That room, Cole said, was where Foote had his chapel.
27:35And then, before saying anything about prayer, Cole said this.
27:41Foote used to get extra fuel, so it was always nice and warm in there in the wintertime.
27:47Think about what that means in a German prison camp.
27:51Fuel was rationed and fought over.
27:54Winters in the east of Germany are hard.
27:58Somehow, the Padre got more of it, and he used it to keep one room warm so men had a
28:04reason
28:05to come in.
28:06They came.
28:07Cole said they were in there quite often, and they played cards there.
28:12He also said something that might surprise you.
28:15Foote, he said, never really held a service.
28:19He would go around talking.
28:22So hold that picture next to the one from White Beach.
28:26On the beach he walked among the wounded in the open, and the witnesses remembered how
28:32calm he was.
28:33In the camp he walked among the men in a warm room and talked to them.
28:38It is the same work.
28:40The only thing that changed is the kind of wound.
28:44Because the wounds were there.
28:46Cole was blunt about it.
28:48Quite a few men, he said, went over the hill.
28:51A nervous breakdown.
28:52He remembered one man in particular.
28:55This prisoner had started, in Cole's word, hallelujahing.
29:00He told the others that if three or more of them got together and prayed, God would get
29:05them out of there.
29:06He began to gather followers.
29:08Now listen to what Cole and his friends were afraid of.
29:12Because it is the real stake in this scene.
29:15They were not afraid the man looked foolish.
29:18They were afraid he would take his followers out onto the parade square, or try to walk out
29:23of the gate and be shot.
29:25A prisoner who goes toward the wire in a German camp, because he believes heaven has opened
29:32it, does not get a second chance.
29:35The man was a danger to himself and to everyone who believed him.
29:40So Foote went and found him.
29:43Cole's phrase was that the padre got a hold of him.
29:47What a chaplain says in that moment matters a great deal.
29:51He could have taken the man's faith away from him.
29:54There will be no miracle.
29:56Sit down.
29:57He could have encouraged it, the way a lesser man might.
30:00Because it looked like religion.
30:03Foote did neither.
30:05Here are the words Elmer Cole carried around for the rest of his life.
30:10Miracles happen, Foote told him, but you pray to keep your own head on straight.
30:17Cole repeated it twice in one short interview.
30:21You pray to keep your own head on straight.
30:24I always thought of that, he said.
30:27Read it again and see what it does.
30:29It doesn't argue with the man's hope.
30:32It gives it somewhere to go.
30:35Stop praying for the gate to open and pray for the strength to get through tomorrow inside
30:40it.
30:41That is not a sermon.
30:42It is a way of surviving, given to a man in time to keep him off the parade square.
30:47And this is the point where the meaning of that boat on White Beach starts to shift for you.
30:53Up to now you could believe Foote stayed for the wounded.
30:57The men with bullet wounds and broken legs.
30:59The men a doctor could see.
31:01That was true.
31:02But the men the Germans marched inland included hundreds of others who were not wounded at
31:08all, and who would spend years in which some of them would quietly break.
31:13Nobody evacuates that kind of wound.
31:15There is no boat for it.
31:17The only treatment is a man on the inside who has nothing to gain from being there, who
31:23keeps a room warm, who walks around talking, and who knows the difference between hope that
31:28helps and hope that gets you shot.
31:31Remember the other part of his citation, the line about how calm he was.
31:36On the beach, that calm told the wounded someone was coming.
31:41In the camp, it told a breaking man that someone had come and was not going to leave.
31:49So now you have the second layer.
31:52He did not go back only for that afternoon.
31:55He went back for what the afternoon would turn into.
31:58It still isn't the whole answer.
32:01It doesn't explain why a man who could see all this coming would choose it,
32:06when the king's regulations and every officer on that beach would have let him go home.
32:12For that, we need Foote's own words.
32:15And his own words come later.
32:18In January 1944, the Germans moved the Dieppe prisoners out of Lamsdorf,
32:24east to a camp at Stargard in Pomerania.
32:27That summer, a delegate of the International Red Cross arrived to inspect it,
32:33and he wrote down one line about a Canadian padre.
32:37It is the only time in those years we see John Foote through a stranger's eyes.
32:43It shows he was no longer staying inside one camp's wire.
32:48August 21, 1944.
32:51Stalag II-D at Stargard in Pomerania.
32:55A delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Albert Cadler, walks through the camp with a notebook,
33:02the way Red Cross delegates did all through the war, counting and checking and writing down what he finds.
33:10The figures are dry, but stay with me.
33:12He records that the British strength of the camp, which here means Canadians, is 1,166 men.
33:22Many of them are not inside the main camp at all.
33:25They are out on work detachments, small groups sent to labor on farms and in workplaces across the countryside.
33:34Cadler visits some of these detachments the next day.
33:38One has 25 Canadians, another 39.
33:41Twenty-five men on a farm in Pomerania, two years into captivity, far from the main camp.
33:49Ask yourself who comes to see them.
33:52Cadler answers that.
33:53In the middle of his report, he writes this line.
33:57Captain John Foote, a Protestant padre, has arrived at this camp,
34:03and he attends to church services here and on commandos.
34:08Commandos was the camp word for those work detachments.
34:12So the padre was not staying in the one place where the Germans had put him.
34:17He was getting permission to go out to the small groups scattered across the district,
34:22men who otherwise might not see a chaplain for months.
34:27Cadler's report notes that one detachment had not yet had a padre's visit at all.
34:32The report also mentions the large prison hospital at Stargard,
34:38and a Protestant padre from the Stalag going there to see the patients.
34:43There is another line in that report that matters.
34:47The application for a Roman Catholic priest, Cadler writes, was still pending.
34:53So the camp had one padre.
34:55A Presbyterian minister from Maddock, Ontario, was looking after everyone, Protestants, Catholics,
35:03and men who had not been inside a church since they were boys.
35:07The men who knew him said he ministered to all of them, regardless of denomination.
35:14And he was not quiet about whose side he was on.
35:17When he held services, he stood on red cross boxes stacked up for a pulpit.
35:23At the end, against German orders, he led the men in singing the national anthem.
35:31Picture it.
35:32A hut in Pomerania.
35:34A padre on a stack of red cross parcels.
35:38A few hundred Canadian prisoners singing their anthem, with German guards listening.
35:43A German corps headquarters had once written that these men surrendered in swarms.
35:49Twice a week, or once a month, or whenever the padre could manage it, they stood up and sang.
35:56Now, we are ready for his answer.
35:59After the war, a reporter from the Montreal Star asked John Foote why he had done it.
36:05Why he climbed out of the boat.
36:08He did not talk about courage, and he did not talk about the wounded.
36:12He said something much plainer.
36:15He said he did not think a man should be a padre of a regiment and not go where they
36:20go.
36:21That is the whole of it.
36:23Not a vision on the beach.
36:25Not a sudden decision under fire.
36:27A rule he had about what a regimental padre is.
36:32Now go back to the beginning, and see how each piece of this story changes.
36:37Remember the line in his Victoria Cross citation that I asked you to hold onto?
36:42He chose to suffer the fate of the men he had ministered to for over three years.
36:50At the start, those three years sounded like the captivity ahead of him.
36:56They weren't.
36:57They were the years behind him.
36:59John Foote joined the army in December 1939, at 35, and became the padre of the Royal Hamilton
37:07Light Infantry.
37:08In the summer of 1940, he sailed to England with them.
37:13Then came two long years of training, waiting, and false alarms.
37:19For over three years, by the time of Dieppe, the Rileys had been his congregation.
37:25He had already had two congregations as a minister, at Fort Coulonge in Quebec and at Port Hope in Ontario.
37:33The Rileys were his third.
37:35So think about what that last boat actually was.
37:39On one side were the men who would get back to England, who would have other padres, hospitals, and their
37:46own lines.
37:47On the other side was the larger part of his congregation, nearly 200 Rileys, about to become prisoners.
37:56The men who walked off that beach afterwards said he called out as he waited back that the lads on
38:03the beach needed him more than the ones in England.
38:08We have that only as they told it, not in writing.
38:12It doesn't need to be in writing.
38:14You have just watched him spend two years proving it.
38:18A minister does not leave his parish because his parish has been sent to prison.
38:24He follows it there.
38:26And now the other pieces fall into place.
38:30The argument with Labatt, threatening to make the colonel arrest him in front of his men, was not stubbornness.
38:37It was the same rule.
38:39The regiment is going, so the padre goes.
38:43The calm walk among the wounded was the same rule.
38:47Turning back from the boats on several occasions was the same rule.
38:52Climbing out of the last boat was the same rule at its highest price.
38:57The warm room in the barrack.
39:00The words that kept a breaking man off the parade square.
39:05The visits to small groups of Canadians on Pomeranian farms.
39:10The same rule again.
39:13That is why I told you, at the end of the first part,
39:17that the decision on that beach was not made on the beach.
39:22He made it in December 1939, when he became their padre.
39:28Everything after that was him keeping his word.
39:32But a rule only means something if it holds when it costs the most.
39:37In the summer of 1944, in Stargard, it still cost him nothing he hadn't already paid.
39:47That was about to change.
39:49Six months after Cadler's visit, the Red Army was coming west across Pomerania,
39:54and the Germans decided the prisoners at Stargard would not be there when it arrived.
40:00The men were going to be marched west.
40:03The padre was forty years old.
40:06The last time he had marched with these men, he had no boots.
40:10This time, the road would not last two days.
40:14It would last for weeks.
40:16September 1, 1944.
40:18Ten days after the Red Cross delegate wrote John Foote's name in his report at Stargard,
40:24Canadian troops drove into Dieppe.
40:26It was the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division, the same division that had been destroyed on those beaches two years earlier.
40:34The Royal Hamilton Light Infantry came back with it, rebuilt with new men around the survivors of the raid.
40:42The Germans had pulled out without a fight.
40:44The Canadians walked down to the shingle where their friends had died, then buried and honored them.
40:51Two days later, the division paraded through the town.
40:54The men in Stargard were not there to see it.
40:58Nearly 2,000 Canadians who had been on those stones in 1942 were still behind German wire.
41:05And so was their padre.
41:08The division had gone back to Dieppe.
41:10The prisoners still had to get out of Germany.
41:13In February 1945, with the Red Army pushing west across Pomerania, the Germans emptied the camp at Stargard.
41:22They did not leave the prisoners to be liberated.
41:25They marched them west.
41:27The accounts of how long that march lasted do not agree, which tells you something about it.
41:34One says 30 days.
41:36Another says 37.
41:38A third says 44.
41:41All of them agree it was more than a month, on foot, in the last winter of the war, across
41:49a country that was collapsing.
41:52Columns of prisoners were sharing roads with refugees, retreating troops, and allied aircraft that could not tell one column from
42:01another.
42:03John Foot was forty years old, and remember, the last time he had marched with these men he had done
42:10it barefoot and arrived with his feet raw.
42:15I am going to be careful here, because the record is thin.
42:19I have found no document that describes what Foot did on any particular day of that march, and I will
42:27not invent one for you.
42:30What the record does show is where he started and where he finished.
42:35He started in Pomerania with the Dieppe prisoners.
42:38He finished more than a month later, near Bremen, in northwestern Germany, still with them.
42:46Now think about what that means, using everything you know about him.
42:51A chaplain on a march like that has no special protection.
42:56He walks the same roads as the men, eats the same nothing, and sleeps in the same barns.
43:02He could have fallen out, been left behind with the sick, or made some arrangement.
43:08A man who had refused a boat on several occasions was not going to start taking an easier way out
43:15now.
43:16The rule held, the regiment was walking, so the Padre walked.
43:21The column ended up at Stalag 10b, near Bremen.
43:26At the end of April 1945, British troops reached them and the prisoners of Dieppe were free.
43:34The army recorded his release as May 5th, 1945.
43:39Remember the date he was born, May 5th, 1904.
43:45He got his freedom back on his 41st birthday.
43:49And here is something you might not expect.
43:52When John Foot came home, he was worried.
43:55He was worried he would be reprimanded.
43:57As he saw it, he was an officer who had allowed himself to be captured.
44:03He had climbed out of a boat that was taking men to safety and walked deliberately into the enemy's hands.
44:11In the army's eyes, he thought, that might be a problem.
44:15He was wrong.
44:17To see how wrong, you have to hear two verdicts, and the first comes from the Germans.
44:23Remember what the headquarters of the German 81st Corps wrote after the raid?
44:29The Canadians fought badly and surrendered afterwards in swarms.
44:34I told you in the first part that not every German officer agreed.
44:39This is the officer who didn't.
44:41His superior headquarters, the German 15th Army, read that report and rejected it in writing.
44:48The enemy, 15th Army wrote, almost entirely Canadian soldiers, fought well and bravely.
44:56It explained the huge number of prisoners with reasons that had nothing to do with cowardice.
45:01No artillery support, defenses that had been underestimated, the weight of German fire, and landing craft that were sunk before
45:10the men could get back into them.
45:12The German division that had actually held Dieppe, the 302nd, wrote that the main attack had been launched by the
45:202nd Canadian Division with great energy.
45:23So the Germans themselves tore up the sentence that had been used against the Dieppe prisoners for three years.
45:30The men did not surrender in swarms.
45:33They were left on a beach when the boats were gone.
45:36And the officers who studied it most closely knew it.
45:40The second verdict came from London.
45:43Two Victoria crosses were awarded to Canadians for Dieppe.
45:47Lieutenant Colonel Cess Merritt of the South Saskatchewan Regiment received his while he was still a prisoner.
45:54John Foots came after the war, when the men who had watched him on White Beach were finally free to
46:00say what they had seen.
46:02The citation was published in February 1946.
46:06On March 28, 1946, at Buckingham Palace, King George VI pinned the Victoria Cross on the Padre of the Royal
46:17Hamilton Light Infantry.
46:19Think about whom that cross went to.
46:22Not a man who took a position or destroyed a gun.
46:27A man who carried no weapon, who saved lives with morphine and his own shoulders.
46:33And who then walked into captivity on purpose.
46:38Of all the chaplains of every Commonwealth army in the Second World War, he was the only one to receive
46:45it.
46:45The citation ends with the words of the men who were there.
46:50Honorary Captain Foote personally saved many lives by his efforts, and his example inspired all around him.
46:58The calmness of this officer as he walked about, collecting the wounded on the fire-swept beach, will never be
47:07forgotten.
47:07The officer, who had worried he would be reprimanded for getting captured, was given the highest award for gallantry in
47:14the Commonwealth.
47:15And the citation counts the capture as part of what he did.
47:20Remember how he answered that reporter about why he did it?
47:24When he was asked what the medal itself meant, his answer was even shorter.
47:29It is one sentence, and it is the last thing you need to understand him.
47:34Go back one last time to that boat.
47:37August 19th, 1942.
47:40A little after eleven in the morning on White Beach.
47:44Smoke on the water.
47:47Wounded men being lifted over the side.
47:50And a tall man with no boots who has a place among them.
47:55He climbs out, drops into the sea, and wades back toward the guns.
48:01When you first saw that, it looked like a decision made in a second, under fire, by a brave man
48:08at the very end of his strength.
48:11Now you know, it wasn't.
48:13It was the end of a promise he had already been keeping for nearly three years, and the start of
48:21nearly three more.
48:22After the war, the press asked him about the Victoria Cross.
48:26John Foot said,
48:29I simply did my job as I saw it.
48:32He called it a very ordinary piece of work.
48:36He meant it, and that is what makes it hard to hear.
48:41He also said something else, and it may be the most honest thing he ever said about that day.
48:48Moving about the beach, he said, he wondered why he was never hit.
48:52He went on wondering, for the rest of his life, why he was alive.
48:58Here is what he did with that life.
49:01In September 1945, he was posted to Camp Borden in Ontario, as Senior Protestant Chaplain, with the rank of Major.
49:11He left the army in 1948.
49:15That same year, the voters of Durham County elected him to the Ontario legislature.
49:21And here is the last fact I have for you.
49:24Maybe the strangest one in this story.
49:28In 1950, Premier Leslie Frost made him Minister of Reform Institutions.
49:34That was the minister responsible for Ontario's prisons and reformatories.
49:40The man who had walked into a German prison camp of his own free will spent seven years in charge
49:48of the prisons of his own province.
49:50He stepped down from the cabinet in 1957, after several heart attacks, and left the legislature two years later.
49:59He never really left the regiment.
50:02From 1964 to 1973, he was Honorary Lieutenant Colonel of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry, back with the Rileys almost
50:1330 years after he first became their padre.
50:16Shortly before he died, he gave his Victoria Cross to them.
50:22It is in the Regimental Museum in Hamilton.
50:26John Weir Foote died in Cobourg, Ontario on May 2, 1988, three days before his 84th birthday.
50:36He is buried in Union Cemetery there.
50:39After his death, the James Street Armory in Hamilton, the regiment's home, was renamed in his honor.
50:47Today, the Rileys train in the John Weir Foote Armory.
50:53So now let's answer the question from the title as simply as it can be answered.
50:59Why did a Canadian chaplain climb out of the last boat at Dieppe and walk back to be captured?
51:07The obvious answer was that he stayed for the wounded.
51:12It was true, but it was only the first layer.
51:16Underneath it was something he said himself in one plain sentence.
51:20A man should not be the padre of a regiment and not go where they go.
51:26The Rileys had been his congregation for over three years.
51:30Most of them were staying on that beach.
51:33So he stayed with them.
51:35And then he went with them into the camps.
51:39On to the work farms of Pomerania and along the roads of a collapsing Germany.
51:44He went all the way to the day the British reached them near Bremen.
51:49He did it with nothing an army would count as strength.
51:53No rifle.
51:54No rank that mattered behind the wire.
51:57No medicine once the supplies ran out.
52:00What he had was a warm room.
52:03A stack of red cross boxes.
52:06An anthem the guards had forbidden.
52:08And a sentence for a man who was falling apart.
52:11And the people who had every reason not to say so said so anyway.
52:18The German 15th Army threw out its own corps' claim that the Canadians had surrendered in swarms.
52:25And wrote that they had fought well and bravely.
52:28The King of England gave this one padre the only Victoria Cross awarded to a chaplain in the whole of
52:35the Second World War.
52:37But I don't want to end with the king.
52:40Or with the Germans.
52:42I want to end with Elmer Cole.
52:45A Canadian private captured at Dieppe.
52:48Sitting in front of a camera for Veterans Affairs Canada decades after the war.
52:53Still repeating what his padre told a frightened man in a prison barrack.
52:59Miracles happen.
53:00But you pray to keep your own head on straight.
53:05I always thought of that, Cole said.
53:09That is what John Foote went back for.
53:12Not one afternoon on a beach.
53:15Thousands of afternoons behind the wire.
53:18And men like Elmer Cole who came home whole enough to remember them.
53:24And on a beach in France in August 1942,
53:28when the Canadians who could not leave looked toward the water,
53:32they saw a man walking back toward them.
53:37Thank you for spending this time with John Foote and the Canadians of Dieppe.
53:42Stories like this one take a long time to put together.
53:45And it means a great deal that you stayed to the end.
53:48If you think what the Canadians did at Dieppe deserves to be remembered,
53:52a like genuinely helps it find more people.
53:55And if your father, your grandfather, or your uncle served in the Second World War,
54:00I'd be honored to hear about him in the comments.
54:02In the comments section.
54:02Yeah, the other words.
54:02The other words.