Join the Navy and See the World: 5 (Sicily)

This story is submitted to the People's War Website by David Thacker, a volunteer from BBC Radio Northampton, on behalf of his Mother, Isabella, wife of the late Len Thacker, and has been added to the site with her permission. She fully understands and accepts the site's terms and conditions.

---

Firstly here are Len's words written in a W/T Operator's Log book, about Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily. He is believed to have written this soon after the war's end:

"We were not told of our objective during the outward trip from Britain. It caused lots of speculation. A very uneventful trip to the Med which was far different to what I’d expected, and I was surprised that we met no trouble.

Once we entered the Med, we saw convoy after convoy, all due to join our show. We joined up with some of these making a huge fleet. And although we circled and slowed to pass time, we still met with no trouble. An earlier convoy lost a ship, and our escorts bagged a U-Boat. We had Canadians aboard, a grand crowd of lads.

The night before landing, I was strangely thrilled. A rather heavy sea calmed as we edged towards the enemy shores. We crept forward in inky blackness. We could see the flashes as our bombers went in, and the flak going up in a vain effort to stop them.

The heavy detonations of the bombs could be felt as well as heard. As we moved in, a searchlight or two cut through the night and swept the sea, but were soon extinguished. Our paratroops must have been on the job for we could see tracer bullets and other of their little playthings whizzing around. All was very quiet, we were still undiscovered. It was a complete surprise.

We lay some miles off the beach during the night in quite a rough swell. On our way over we were given a warning what to expect — heavy air attacks, human torpedoes, circling torpedoes, all types of mines, E-Boats, U-Boats, everything, and of course, the Italian battle fleet was expected too.

Consequently we were on our toes, and a little scared, at least I was. But dawn came and in we went with no opposition. Through the night our monitors, cruisers and destroyers had been shelling. They carried on all day, and the next day. We discharged our troops and equipment by LCT, as it wasn’t suitable for beaching. Throughout the unloading of tanks etc there was an atmosphere of calm, almost as if we were just landing passengers. We stayed the night and the next day, without seeing a single enemy plane. At dusk however, a lone bomber flew over and dropped a bomb pretty close. He met with a terrific barrage, and didn’t stay long.

Our fighters too were in complete control. We left next day, shortly after that he bombed and sank a hospital ship. Altogether the invasion seemed unreal. It was more like the numerous exercises we’d done on Scottish shores.

Two or three weeks later we were surprised and amused to see an artist’s impression in a newspaper. He had shells, planes and ships everywhere. The only shells and planes I saw were ours, playing hell with the “wops”.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.