Major-General Harry Foster
4th Princess Louise Dragoon Guards
Highland Light Infantry of Canada
13th & 7th Infantry Brigades
4th & 1st Canadian Divisions

He was just as guilty of murder as I was at the time … or any other senior officer in the field during a battle. The difference between us was that I was on the winning side. That makes a big difference.

— Gen. Foster on Kurt Meyer

(Quoted in Tony Foster, Meeting of Generals, 1988)

Born on 2 April 1904 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Harry Wickwire Foster left Royal Military College the in 1924 to take a commission with the Lord Strathcona’s Horse. His father, Major-General Gilbert Lafayette Foster, had been director of medical services for the Canadian army during the First World War. With the outbreak of Second World War in September 1939, Foster was appointed brigade major of the 1st Canadian Brigade in England.

While overseas, he was promoted to lieutenant-colonel in January 1941 in command of the newly activated 4th Reconnaissance Battalion (4th Princess Louise Dragoon Guards). In August 1942, he turned over command to Major F.D. Adams when posted to the general staff of 1st Canadian Division. He briely filled in as commanding officer of the Highland Light Infantry of Canada from December to February 1943. By that summer, he had been recalled to Canada and assigned to command the 13th Infantry Brigade during the Kiska operation as part of the Aleutian Islands campaign.

On 15 August 1943, the joint American and Canadian force landed on Kiska Island, which the Japanese had recently abandoned. Foster received the Legion of Merit for “His leadership and unselfish devotion to the success of the project were outstanding and set a high mark for unreserved cooperation between two Allied powers.” Meanwhile, in his diary, he remarked, “I feel bloody silly coming all this way for nothing.”

In February 1944, Foster returned to England to assume command of the 7th Infantry Brigade in anticipation of the Normandy invasion. He led the brigade from the landing on D-Day until August 1944 when he replaced Major-General George Kitching of the 4th Armoured Division. By the end of the war, he was suddenly transferred to Italy, trading places with Major-General Christopher Vokes of the 1st Canadian Division. However, Foster would return to Northwest Europe within a few months along with the Canadian forces in Italy.

As one of his final overseas duties, he acted as president during the December 1945 court martial of Brigadefuhrer Kurt Meyer for complicity in the murder of Canadian prisoners-of-war. Comparing the two generals who had opposed each other on the battlefields of Normandy, the press noted, “Both professional soldiers, the two men probably share more expert military knowledge than could be pooled from all other senior officers present.” Of the court’s death sentence (later commuted to life imprisonment) Foster later stated to his son, “I had no choice according to those rules of warfare dreamt up by a bunch of bloody barrack-room lawyers who had never heard a shot fired in anger.”

After retiring from the Canadian Army in 1952, Foster worked for the Imperial War Graves Commission. He died in Kentville, Nova Scotia, on 6 August 1964.