Ted Barris

There’s a spot on the calendar that belongs to a friend of mine.

Every year, on a day late in the summer, he and I usually get together to remember how he once spent that day. I remember out of homage. He recalls the horrors of August 19, 1942, the day he landed on the chert-rock beach of a seaport in France during the Second World War. One year, I phoned ahead to his home to make sure he was up for my visit. When he remembered it was the anniversary of the Dieppe raid, he said:

“That’s right. By this time on that day I had about 23 chunks of shrapnel in me and I was the unexpected guest of the Fuhrer.”

Stephen Bell arrived at Dieppe during low tide that morning after an all-night crossing of the English Channel aboard a tank landing-craft. Just 19, he was a wireless radio operator with the Calgary Tanks Regiment and at Dieppe he and his tank squadron were supposed to land before daylight and provide simultaneous support for Canadian infantry.

Instead, the landing craft were late and his armoured assault up the beach only lasted a few minutes. Bell’s tank got bogged down in the chert rock leaving him and his crew immobile and an easy target for German gunners occupying the cliffs and fortifications in front of Dieppe.

“We were hit on the turret just coming down the ramp,” Steve told me in our first interview in 1993. “The shell hit the top of it. Just blew the tank lids right off.”

And so, there was a spot in Canadian history for my friend. A dubious one he’d quickly remind me. By 11 a.m. that day, Germans had captured Stephen Bell – one of 100 tank troopers taken prisoners – and for the next four years he became a POW. In a way, Steve was one of the fortunate ones.

Of the nearly 5,000 Canadians who embarked from England that day, 3,367 became casualties. More that 900 of those were killed, in the bloodiest nine hours in Canadian military history.

There’s a spot in my backyard where Steve and I regularly sat and talked.

Some years after I had asked him all the questions I could think of about his Second World War experiences (and published some of them in my books), Steve and I struck up a friendship. We shared favourite books and recommended others. It turned out that he loved cooking sauces and he regularly dropped by my home with an armful of preserve jars containing his latest batch of spicy chili. During those summertime or autumn visits, I would pull a couple of lawn chairs into the shade. He would roll a few of his filterless cigarettes. And we would talk, not just about the war and his five escapes from German POW camps, but about returning to civilian life and getting his first job.

“I was so happy about having a job, being able to work again,” he said, “that it didn’t bother me that my pension was cut off. I could make it on my own.”

There truly was a spot for him to “make it on his own.”

Steve told me he worked for the post office, the railway, as a pressman at the Toronto Telegram newspaper and eventually establishing his own landscaping business. He married right after the war, but later married his true life partner, Marilyn Dobie, with whom he shared retirement. He often spoke of his and Marilyn’s childhood home at Govan, Saskatchewan. He told me the latest about his four children and his numerous grandchildren. He was proud of them all.

In retirement, the wounds of his wartime mistreatment in German POW camps came back to haunt him – bleeding in his ears, back aches from the concussion shells and shrapnel he endured on the beach at Dieppe, swollen hands and wrists from being bound and shackled, and arthritis in every joint that was exposed to the cold and damp during three years of abusive imprisonment.

In 2003, the Royal Regiment of Canada – not the Government of Canada mind you – struck and awarded a medallion to honour Dieppe vets, among them Stephen Bell. The same year, doctors diagnosed him with cancer of the lungs, liver and spleen. They gave him months to live. Steve, given his constitution, defied their predictions…

Until early Tuesday morning, when he died with Marilyn at his side.

Now there’s a spot in her life and mine that’s empty. But I’ll ever be thankful that he more than filled that spot as a courageous citizen soldier, strong family man, giving neighbour and loyal friend.