The heroes lost in Canada's worst setback of the Second World War will be remembered Sunday.
Hundreds are expected to take part in the 76th annual Dieppe Memorial Service at Windsor's Dieppe Gardens. The service will remember those who fought in the Dieppe Raid, which occurred on August 19, 1942 in the German-occupied French seaside town.
The centrepiece of the service will be the Dieppe Monument, a black granite slab featuring a cutout of a maple leaf. When the service begins exactly at 1pm Sunday, the sun's rays will shine through the leaf and create a perfect shadow of the leaf on the ground directly in front of the monument. That is the time troops from the Windsor-based Essex and Kent Scottish Regiment began arriving on the beach at Dieppe on that fateful day.
Of the 6,000 Allied forces who went ashore and took part in the raid, about 5,000 were Canadian. The Essex and Kent Scottish Regiment had 553 men take part in the raid. Of those, 530 were casualties, with 121 dead.
The rest of the soldiers that hit the beach included about a thousand British troops and a handful of U.S. Army Rangers.
Overall, 907 Canadians were lost in the raid, the single bloodiest for Canadian forces in the Second World War.