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D-Day chaplain turns 102
TEVIAH MORO, Free Press Reporter 2004-05-06 03:03:37
A priest who delivered one of the last masses for Canadian soldiers before the D-Day invasion turned 102 yesterday, weeks before the battle's 60th anniversary. Rev. Michael Dalton is now confined to a wheelchair, but once he had to dodge bullets to deliver soldiers their last rites in battle.
Residents at the Caressant Care home for the aged in Courtland, near Tillsonburg, sang Happy Birthday to the decorated war chaplain yesterday at lunch.
Dalton had to tend to the emotional toll of a failed Canadian assault on Europe two years before D-Day, when Canadians were repulsed from the German-held beaches at Dieppe, France.
"Hundreds of them died," Dalton said of the casualties at Dieppe in 1942, where 907 soldiers died and 1,874 were taken prisoner.
His job was to write home to soldiers' families, notifying them of their deaths, Dalton said.
Born May 5, 1902, near Goderich, Dalton entered St. Peter's Seminary in London and was ordained a priest in 1932.
He was nearly 40 years old when he volunteered to go to war with the Essex Scottish Regiment in 1939. He returned home in 1946 and served as a pastor in Southwestern Ontario until his retirement in 1970.
An old photograph outside his room shows Dalton as a tall and handsome padre, delivering his last mass before the D-Day troops hit Juno beach on June 6, 1944.
Though he didn't accompany soldiers in the landings, he had many close calls on battlefields.
"The only weapon he ever carried was a crucifix," said caretaker and friend Michael Murray.
The brave chaplain was hit three times by shrapnel during his time overseas, twice while travelling in a jeep, Murray said.
Once near Caen, France, his jeep driver saved his life by taking the vehicle in for repairs, Dalton wrote in a meticulous diary he kept during the war.
Dalton had to sleep underground instead of in the jeep that night. Overnight, the enemy struck and obliterated the area.
"In the morning, I crawled out of (the) trench to find my hat pierced with shrapnel," he wrote.
Asked the secret to his longevity, his eyes twinkled. "God only knows," he said.
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