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The Sicily Landing

Heroes Remember

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.

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