Thomas Dinesen

He rushed five machine guns during ten hours of hard combat.

Danish-born Canadian Expeditionary Force Victoria Cross recipient Thomas Fasti Dinesen was born at Rungsted, Denmark, on 9 August 1892. He trained as a civil engineer and was a skilled shot. When the First World War began, he wanted to join the Allied armies despite Denmark's neutrality. Attempts to enlist with the French, British and American forces failed. He ultimately reached a Canadian recruiting office in New York in 1917 and was accepted for service with the Royal Highlanders of Canada.

After training in Canada and Britain, he joined the 42nd Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force, in France in 1918. He was still a private when the battalion fought near Parvillers during the Amiens offensive. The ten-hour engagement on 12 August became the basis of his Victoria Cross.

His official citation describes persistent close fighting through more than a mile of heavily defended trenches. On five occasions he moved ahead alone and put machine guns out of action, killing twelve defenders with bombs and bayonet. It emphasizes both the physical attacks and the example that his resourcefulness gave to men fighting through a critical phase of the operation. These are the substantive facts in the retrieved London Gazette citation, 26 October 1918, reproduced by National Defence at https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/services/medals/victoria-cross-recipients/thomas-dinesen.html.

Dinesen continued serving after the action and received the French Croix de Guerre. He became an acting corporal and then a commissioned lieutenant in November 1918. The war ended while his battalion was in Belgium, and he left Canadian service early in 1919. His experience subsequently supplied material for his war memoir, published in Danish and in English as A Dane with the Canadians.

His later life extended well beyond soldiering. During the early 1920s he spent substantial periods in Kenya, helping his sister Karen Blixen with her coffee farm and working as an engineer and farmer. He later returned to Denmark, where farming and writing became lasting occupations. His books included works about his father and his celebrated sister as well as fiction and reflections on life. These family connections place the decorated veteran within a wider Danish literary history, without reducing his own military career to a footnote in hers.

Dinesen lived to see the 1977 Silver Jubilee and died at Leerbaek, Denmark, on 10 March 1979. His surviving medal group includes appointment as a Knight of the Danish Order of the Dannebrog and the Finnish Pro Benignitate Humana humanitarian medal, as well as his Canadian wartime awards.