The Sicily Landing
Heroes Remember
The Sicily Landing
About the first day of July, we got instructions to move in to
Malta, and it was, it was kind of exciting. Although, we ran
into two German planes on the way over, you know they were still
watching us. And we got in to Malta, and all our group, the
flotilla, we went out, tied all up in a buoy, all in line.
Starboard to port, starboard to port. And we sat there knowing
something was going on, but not sure you know. And you get these
buzzes what's going to happen, "Oh, we're going to go into
Southern France from here." "Oh no, no, we're going to go into
Italy." And so anyway. On the, I guess July 9th, we got
instructions that all leave was cancelled, so we knew something
was going on. So that night, we pulled out of Valletta Harbour,
in Malta and we went around the island and we took on board a
hundred and fifty troops and all the convoys were forming. And
as you got towards Sicily you could see all these, the
battleships coming in, the destroyers. And unfortunately, with
the landing craft, the seas were rough and I think every soldier
on that boat was sick, sea sick, yeah. I was down in the engine
room, I didn't feel that great myself, you know, because of the
fumes and the waves were quite high, it was stormy. And probably
lucky for us because when we hit the beach in Sicily there was
very little defence there. We just sort of moved in to it. We
were beginning to think it was just like one of our practice
landings. And so we got the troops off, the ones they staggered
off, we felt sorry for them but then we went back to
Tunisia and wait for the next instructions.
Related Videos
- Date modified: