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Windsor War Chest ยท Classroom packet

Dieppe and the Essex Scottish: a local classroom packet

A short local supplement for teachers, built from sources already checked on the War Chest chronology. It is not a replacement for the free national kits, and it does not copy their lesson plans.

Start with the free kits that already exist

Juno Beach Centre: Who Tells the Story of Dieppe? Juno Beach Centre educator resources Veterans Affairs Canada classroom materials Library and Archives Canada: Lest We Forget Lest We Forget: information for teachers

Those kits are free. This page adds only the Windsor and Essex County thread: the Essex Scottish, the 1940 crossing, Dieppe, and the Ford plant on the home front.

What students should know is still in dispute

By both the regimental association and the official historian C.P. Stacey, 553 Essex Scottish all ranks embarked for Dieppe on 19 August 1942. Stacey's Official Historical Summary (1948) says the battalion "brought back only 52, of whom 28 were wounded." The regimental association's pages give different figures for killed and captured (121 killed, with either 388 or about 382 prisoners). The chronology does not combine those into one total. Ask students to say what is known, and what is still unresolved, instead of forcing a single number.

Local threads already sourced on the chronology

  • The 1940 crossing. The battalion's war diary records that the Essex Scottish left Camp Borden on 14 July 1940, embarked at Halifax on 16 July, sailed on 23 July, and went ashore at Gourock, Scotland, on 2 August 1940. Veterans Affairs Canada gives 16 August 1940 as the sailing date. The war diary contradicts that, and the chronology says so.
  • Dieppe, 19 August 1942. Only one party of the battalion, about a dozen men led by CSM Cornelius "Con" Stapleton, is recorded as getting across the Promenade and into the buildings. Stapleton had moved to Windsor in 1938 and enlisted in the Essex Scottish in 1939. He was taken prisoner and later received the DCM. Lt-Col Frederick Kent Jasperson of Kingsville and Windsor commanded the battalion, was taken prisoner, and later received the DSO. No individual citation for that DSO has been found, so this site describes no particular act.
  • The home front. Ford in Windsor assembled military vehicles, including Universal Carriers photographed in March 1941 (Library and Archives Canada). A local classroom conversation can hold both the raid overseas and the factory work here, without treating the two photographs as a single story.
Unidentified infantrymen of the Essex Scottish Regiment after Dieppe, England, 23 August 1942
Unidentified infantrymen of the Essex Scottish Regiment who took part in the Dieppe raid, after their return to England, 23 August 1942. Capt. W.G. Abel / Canada. Dept. of National Defence / Library and Archives Canada / PA-189474. The people in the picture are not identified here.

Questions that do not require a new archive trip

  1. Stacey and the regimental association disagree on parts of the cost. How should a historian write about a unit when two careful sources disagree?
  2. Mayor Arthur J. Reaume's Christmas 1942 message called Dieppe a glorious name on the sands and asked for the safe return of prisoners. What does a hometown message do, and what can it not tell us about the raid?
  3. Why does this packet link out to Juno Beach, Veterans Affairs and Library and Archives Canada instead of rewriting their kits?

Further reading on this site: the Dieppe section of the chronology, the starting honour roll, and credits and rights for the pictures. Teachers may print this page. Nothing here is a complete unit history.