"After about a month Do-go had a tearful goodbye with his friend Peepo.
He stood on the beach and I on my landing craft, waving our goodbyes."
Doug Harrison, Leading Seaman Coxswain, recalling October 1943
["Doug's hand-written memoirs, circa 1975"]
Time flies.
Seventy years ago today, while waving farewell, a young Canadian seaman likely felt his 30 days in Sicily and Italy had passed quickly. Solemn goodbyes play tricks I suppose, and the hard work associated with his many trips back and forth across Messina Strait between Messina (Sicily) and Reggio (Italy) upon barges filled with the material of war was perhaps forgotten in the time it takes to wave a hand to a young friend left behind and then turn his mind toward home for some relief.
After months of serving the needs of Allied forces in their fight for the Mediterranean, Doug was bound for Canada and Norwich, the small town in which he was born, raised and would spend - for the very most part - the rest of his life. He would spend Christmas, 1943 primarily with his mother, family and girlfriend Edith, my mother.
[The Aquitania arrived "safely at Halifax on December 6th, 1943"]
Father first wrote about his time in Sicily and Italy thirty years later (but no doubt recalled it during many restless times between 1943 and 2003, the year of his death), and included more details about his youthful, eye-opening, ofttimes harrowing adventures there and in other faraway places. About these adventures he once said, "It would cost a small fortune today to retrace the places I had been to and seen under the White Ensign."
In that he and I are in agreement. A travel itinerary would have to include dozens of places in the UK, North and South Africa, Sicily, Italy and Western Canada. My own travels, costing 'a small fortune today', have barely begun to scratch the surface and in the space of the few sentences below he touches on a few places that will cost me far more to visit.
About his departure from Sicily and then Europe he writes the following:
Our flotilla went back to Malta for a few days and from there
we took fast Motor Torpedo boats to Bougie in North Africa and
boarded a Dutch ship, the Queen Emma, whose propellor shaft
was bent from a near miss with a bomb. In convoy we made about
eight knots up the Mediterranean to Gibraltar, anchored inside
the submarine nets for a couple of days, and slowly moved out
one night for England.
In true navy fashion, after landing at Gourock, near our Canadian
barracks H.M.C.S. Niobe in Greenock, (Scotland) we entrained for
a barracks at Lowestoffe, where on a clear day the church spires
of Norwich could be seen. We spent a month there, then went by
train to Niobe, received two new uniforms and a ticket aboard the
Aquitania, arriving safely at Halifax on December 6th, 1943. I had
a wonderful Christmas at home with Mother and family. It was sure
nice to walk down main Street and meet the people.
[The Norwich Gazette, circa 1992]
[Father's friends 'Rosie' and 'Westy' aboard the Aquitania, 1943]
Sicily, Italy, Malta, Bougie, Gibraltor, Gourock, Greenock, Lowestoffe, Norwich (UK), and Halifax. Quite the itinerary for one man among many in the RCNVR at the end of 1943, and that doesn't include his stops at several ports (including Freetown, Cape Town, Durban and The Hidden Valley) as he sailed around Africa, from Scotland to Port Said, Egypt, during the middle of the same year. It is no wonder then that the Canadian Navy boys were known to often sing about rolling along, as in the following song:
Roll along, Wavy Navy, roll along
Roll along, Wavy Navy, roll along
If they ask you who you are
We’re the R.C.N.V.R.
Royal along, Canadian Navy, roll along
[D. Harrison's version, penned in 1975]
Somewhere along the way between Sicily and home, my father signed on for two more years with the RCNVR, but not for 'HO' or 'Hostilities Only'. After Christmas, 1943 he was sent by train to Vancouver Island ("It was heaven," he said), and it was there he celebrated the end of World War 2, all in one piece as some would say.
["Then I went to Givenchy III... Vancouver Island"]
I wouldn't say 'all in one piece', to be completely honest, but that's another story.
["Doug at home in Norwich with Combined Operations flag"]
***
Please click here to read Dad's Navy Days: September 1943 - Italy (15)
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