My amazing great-uncle, Red Campbell, and how he went through Dieppe "armed with a revolver as well as his pipes" (1942 article)

SET OF BAGPIPES NUMBERED AMONG DIEPPE CASUALTIES

Heroic Piper Played For Wounded Men Until Sheepskin Broke

SHRAPNEL-PIERCED

    Somewhere in England, Oct. 22 -- (CP) -- Piper Gordon (Red) Campbell, who wears the balmoral of the Cameron Highlanders on a head of short-cropped hair responsible for his nickname is back at the old training job of "piping the boys up the hills."

Things Were Crowded

    There's a brand new sheepskin in the crook of his arm as the 28-year-old soldier from Transcona, Man., helps the route-marching Camerons along with a skirl of his pipes.

    "The bag that was on my pipes when my company gave them to me was put out of order at Dieppe," said Red.  "Shrapnel did it -- left nine pinholes in the sheepskin.  So I've a new one."

    The square-jawed, solidly built piper went through the big raid armed with a revolver as well as his pipes and used one and the other as the circumstances warranted.  The Camerons fought their way more than three miles inland and Red was in the thick of it.

    "Things were so crowded, you couldn't tell whose shots were putting the Germans down," he grinned.  "But I sure got rid of a lot of ammunition."

    When Red got back to the beach for re-embarkation he hadn't yet had time to blow one wailing note.  And for quite some time after he was too busy tending wounded for anything else.

    "We were aboard a destroyer stalling around picking up survivors," Red recalled.  "I was down below helping with the wounded because the first-aid men seemed short-handed.

    "When I came up after doing some bandaging somebody asked me to play a tune.  I played requests one after another.  There was dive-bombing going on."

    The wounded and exhausted men sprawled about the destroyer in the midst of that air attack heard such tunes from Red's punctured pipes as the March to the Battlefield, the Road to the Isles, Blue Bonnets, Hundred Pipers and Bonnie Dundee.

    "The longer I blew, the bigger got the holes in the sheepskin," said Red.  "But it lasted until we were back in our camp."

    The Camerons took five battle-dressed pipers to Dieppe and lost three.  Red said chance gave him a part in the raid and luck pulled him through unscathed.

    When the Camerons were taking combined operations training before Dieppe, Red was up in Edinburgh polishing up his piping under a Scottish pipe major who once taught the Duke of Windsor.

    "Ah!  He's good," said the Canadian of his Scottish tutor, then going on to explain how he was assigned to the raid because the Camerons' pipe major who had been designated was on leave at the time.
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I transcribed this article from a scanned newspaper clipping found at http://collections.civilisations.ca/