Photography, History and Whatever Else Strikes my Fancy.
OK, this is a little crazy. I was about to shoot a few more books as hit a section that is a little disorganised, so I started moving things around, and of course you just can’t move books around without inevitably thumbing through half of them. One I flipped through was a book on the Dieppe Raid called “The Shame and the Glory: Dieppe” wherein was an image of a tracked vehicle in a landing craft. Despite the low resolution halftoning in the book a face jumped out… because it is mine. Or rather, my dad’s, who I closely resemble. “Nah,” I think, “That can’t really be him.” Over 6,000 people were deployed on that raid (and over 3,600 didn’t come back) - chances are slim. But I thought I’d check, so I and scanned it and then Google image searched for a higher resolution copy of the picture. Now I’m really not sure it isn’t him. The guy in the back of the vehicle with his head tilted could be him. Even when zooming into the high resolution picture it’s still too blurry to be sure. A point against this being him is this in not a Churchill tank, but the picture is from a training exercise, not the actual raid. The points for this being him are there is a maple leaf with a buffalo on the front of the vehicle, which is the 14th Army Tank Regiment (Calgary), his regiment, and the sergeant leaning against the bulwark near the front of the landing craft looks an awful lot like a guy in another picture I have of my dad standing in front of a tank, a tank that also has a “5” on it just like this vehicle.