November 11 is Remembrance Day, when we again pay homage to Canada’s war dead. Among the names on Guelph’s downtown cenotaph are those of two brothers, Cecil and Thomas Graham. Theirs was not the only Guelph family to lose more than one loved one to war. But for this Remembrance Day, besides all the others named on the cenotaph, the Graham brothers can represent those families who endured multiple bereavements.
Thomas Graham Sr., the boys’ father, was a seaman from Newfoundland. He was serving with the Canadian Expeditionary Force during the First World War when he met their mother, Mabel, in England. Thomas Jr., the first of seven children, was born in England on May 24, 1917. The Grahams moved to Canada in 1919. They lived in several locations before moving to Guelph about 1926. Cecil was born in Florence, Nova Scotia, on October 20, 1924. (The other siblings were Patricia, Catherine, Marjory, Robert and William.)
The family lived at a few different residences in Guelph, including homes on Nottingham Street, Norwich Street and Toronto Street. The children attended Central school and the Tytler school. The boys were active in sports like boxing and baseball, and Thomas belonged to the Guelph Bugle Band. Thomas eventually went to work for the Guelph Carpet and Worsted Spinning Mill, and Cecil for the Federal Wire and Cable Company. Thomas also spent some time working in the Sudbury nickel mine.
Thomas enlisted in the Canadian Army immediately after the outbreak of the Second World War and following training was shipped off to England with the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry (RHLI). He evidently had a problem with army discipline, because his record shows him being docked pay several times for being AWOL (away without leave). However, Thomas Graham would distinguish himself in one of the bloodiest and most controversial battles in which the Canadian army participated.
On August 19, 1942, the Canadian 2nd Infantry Division, of which the RLHI was a part, made up the main force of an Allied attack on the French coastal town of Dieppe. Accompanying the Canadians were British, American, Free French, Polish and Czech fighters. Code-named Operation Jubilee, the attack was not an invasion, but a large-scale raid. The purpose was to test German defences, take prisoners, gather intelligence, damage enemy harbour installations and other important facilities, and demonstrate to the Soviet Union that the Western Allies were committed to invading Hitler’s Fortress Europe.
The operation was a disaster for the Allies. Almost everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. It was one of the darkest days in Canadian military history, with 907 Canadian soldiers killed, 2,460 wounded and 1,946 taken prisoner. But Graham survived the carnage and emerged from the debacle as a hero.
Graham was part of an advance unit that made it off the deadly beach and into a building. That was the Dieppe Casino, and it was occupied by German snipers and machine-gunners. In fierce fighting in and around the Casino, Graham used an anti-tank rifle and hand grenades to knock out four machine gun posts and kill at least a dozen enemy soldiers. He forced others to drop their weapons and surrender.
Graham later wrote to his mother, “How I came through the Dieppe raid alive I will never know. I just charged up the beach with the idea that if there was a bullet for me I would get it, and I wanted to get as many Nazis as I could before they got me. They tell me I was like a madman. I don’t remember half the things I am supposed to have done.”
Graham escaped from the battle without a scratch, and then back in England suffered an injured leg when he was hit by a truck. For his actions at Dieppe he was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal and promoted to Lance Corporal. The story of Graham’s bravery was covered in Canadian newspapers and would later be retold in books about the Dieppe Raid.
Cecil enlisted in the army as soon as he turned 18 and also became a soldier in the RHLI. He expressed a desire to be transferred to the RCAF and become an air crewman, but that never happened. He was sent to England as a foot soldier.
On June 6, 1944, the Allies launched their massive D-Day invasion of France and began the Battle of Normandy that would last until the end of August. It was a brutal campaign against a German army that took every possible advantage of a difficult terrain, and it cost the lives of more than 5,000 Canadians. Cecil Graham was one of them. On July 25 his platoon attacked a German machine-gun nest. A burst of machine-gun bullets struck him in the chest, killing him instantly. In a letter to Graham’s mother, his captain said that Cecil was “an eager fellow, always ready to pitch in and do his bit … he proved himself to be cool and brave at all times.” Cecil was buried in the Bretteville-Sur-Laize Canadian War Cemetery between Caen and Falaise along with more than 2,700 of his countrymen.
Meanwhile, Thomas had been transferred to the Lanark and Renfrew Scottish Regiment of the Royal Canadian Infantry Corps, and was now a sergeant. His division had been sent to the Mediterranean theatre of the war and was fighting in Italy. What was supposed to be the “soft underbelly” of Axis-controlled Europe was anything but. Even after the fall of Hitler’s ally, Mussolini, the German army stubbornly resisted the Allied advance up the Italian peninsula. By September of 1944, the Canadians were in Northern Italy, fighting to break through the Germans’ Gothic Line. On September 2, the luck that had seen Thomas Graham survive Dieppe unscathed, ran out. He was reported killed in action. Graham was buried in the Gradara War Cemetery located between Pesaro and Rimini along with more than 300 fellow Canadians. He left behind his wife Ivy and baby daughter Shirley.
Killed within a few weeks of each other, the Graham brothers lay in foreign graves hundreds of miles apart. Their names are together on the cenotaph, Guelph’s empty tomb that is a monument to the fallen.
