Dad's Navy Days: October 1943 - Homeward Bound (18)

After our work from Sicily to Italy was done and our armies
were advancing we returned to Malta. We stayed but a few days,

then took MT boats to Boujie (sic: Bougie - Arabic Bijiyah) in Algiers,

and were soon after loaded onto a Dutch ship, the Queen Emma.

[Pg. 37, "DAD, WELL DONE"].

In October, 1943 after my father left Italy, Sicily and Malta behind and reached the safety of calm waters behind submarine nets off Gibraltar, he took a good long look around him. After a full two years worth of training with Combined Operations, shepherding barges loaded deep with tonnes of war materials across hostile waters and onto hostile beaches, and - on off days - travelling into war zones and collecting a few souvenirs, he likely knew what he was looking at when he saw it and had a fairly good sense of how big, cruel and devastating was the fight called World War 2.

[H.M.C.S. Prince David at Gibraltar:
Photo by G.A. Milne, H.M.C.S.]

Because of his love of ships going back to his childhood days, he almost automatically collected vivid memories of some that transported him to various ports. About the Queen Emma, as it slowly steamed toward Gibraltar (approximately 70 years ago today), he recalls the following:

     The ship had been bombed and strafed, her propellor shaft
     was bent and we could only make eight knots an hour under
     very rough conditions. Her super structure was easily half inch
     steel, and in various places where shrapnel had struck I could
     see holes that looked like a hole punched in butter with a hot
     poker, like it had just melted. [pg. 37, "DAD, WELL DONE"]

[A stubborn Dutch freighter with gaping wound:
Photo by G.A. Milne, H.M.C.S.] 

And in his weekly column for The Norwich Gazette (published circa 1992) he recalls the following scene he saw inside the submarine nets off Gibraltar on his way back to England:

     The scene at Gibraltar was one of carnage, war at its worst.
     Nearby were destroyers which had been mauled by bomb and
     torpedoes, with gaping holes in their sides and deck plating,
     and some of the large guns were bent and pointed at bizarre
     angles. Miraculously they floated with pride and here and there
     steam came from the odd funnel. We thought of what the crews
     had been through and the fire and heat that had buckled the
     plates, how anyone could have survived. But Malta had to be fed.

[A Scot retrieves $100 from his sinking ship:
Photo by G.A. Milne, H.M.C.S.]

That he sums up the twisted carnage in six words - 'But Malta had to be fed' - suggests to me he understood the reason why convoys of ships tried to keep the small island alive at great cost to themselves. He likely marvelled at the courage of unseen crews and the desperate plight of often helpless islanders in the face of an unrelenting siege. Though he wouldn't have known that Malta had endured, a year or two before he had spent time recovering from dysentery in one of its hospitals, the highest tonnage of bombardment per capita of any site in the history of war, he surely knew 'the island... was a legend now in the world' (Seige: Malta 1940 - 1943, E. Bradford). 

["Recommended reading for anyone interested in World War 2"]

That being said, without any doubt he was thankful to be heading home. 

There are only a few more stops to make before he will plant his feet on Canadian soil. Only one more big battle, with an unsuspecting fellow wearing black garters.

More to follow.

Last photo by GH

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