Lieutenant-Colonel Steve Lett
Queen’s Own Rifles

Sleep is the thing we run short of most. The actual fighting isn’t so bad … we can all take that … but it’s being in before your own guns that’s tough. When they fire—and they’re firing a lot of the time—they practically blow you our of your own slit trenches. That’s not conducive to sleep, this moaning, whining and roaring which at times never ends. But the lads are in good spirits.

(Quoted in Toronto Star, 14 Jul 1944, 2)

Born on 27 July 1909 in Cobourg, Ontario, Stephen MacLeod Lett worked in the lumber industry in Toronto and Northern Ontario. He served as second-in-command of the Queen’s Own Rifles at D-Day and succeeded Lieutenant-Colonel Jock Spragge on his promotion to brigadier at the end of August 1944. He would be one of the few infantry commanding officers to remain in command through the latter phase of the Northwest Europe campaign from the end of the Normandy operation to the surrender of Germany.

In an interview after D-Day, Lett declared, “If the Canadians had held those beaches, not a man would have landed. The emplacements were marvellous. At the same time, the Germans have all along put up a good show, though my opinion is that their heart isn’t in it.” Of 12th SS Panzer Division (Hitlerjugend) prisoners captured in Normandy, Lett remarked, “These Hitler youth kids are disillusioned. They consider they have been sacrificed. They all say the war is lost for Germany, but they are prepared to fight to the last … At the same time, they don’t seem to mind fighting us for they say we fight fair.”

Lett explained another German tactic to war reporter Frederick Griffin:

At night they will send dogs over specially trained Alsatians. These will come sneaking into our lines in friendly fashion and the impulse of everyone is naturally to pet and feed them. Then they creep back to the German lines later to lead a patrol right in before you can detect them. We know all about the dog trick. We have already shot two of them.

Despite the enemy’s dissipating morale, the Queen’s Own faced months more hard, slow fighting into the Low Countries before the final push into the Rhineland in early 1945.“We were getting pretty ragged by those days,” Lett recalled before the end of the war. Brigadier J.A. Roberts of 8th Infantry Brigade explained that his battalion commanders “plus the stability fine co-operation of Steve Lett, of the Queen’s Own Rifles, gave me a brigade which, according to other qualified soldiers, became equal to, or better than, any other brigade in the division!”

He led the battalion home to Toronto in December 1945. Lett returned to the lumber business in Northern Ontario after the war. He died in Oakville, Ontario on 18 January 1992.