Story Time: Bury Me At Sea (3)

“Bury Me At Sea”: A Father’s Final Voyage

A WW2 Navy veteran’s request becomes a son’s great adventure

My mother and father both got their wish... eventually. Photo GH

Part 2 of their story concluded as follows:

Most of the pressures I felt on November 26 paled in comparison to what I thought lay ahead during discussions with my father.

Fortunately, while anxious thoughts filled my mind I received two gifts that brought some relief.

* * * * *

The first was the gift of time, and it could not have come at a better one. Because the ground at the cemetery was frozen the interment of mother’s ashes would occur in the spring, so I had three to four months in which to talk things over with my father.

The time was used with benefit in a variety of other ways. My brother, sisters and I had time to plan a wake in the comfortable setting of our family home in Norwich, during which my mother was remembered in conversation, stories and song by all, including many thoughtful friends. (At no time did anyone mention they really missed the opportunity to stand out on the frozen tundra to say a final goodbye to my mother while facing into a biting Canadian wind). My brother had time to search for and find a ceramic orb for our mother’s ashes, and I had time to find a wooden box - formerly for someone’s 78 rpm record collection - and velvet bag, into which the orb would be placed and later lowered into the ground.

The other gift was that of sound advice. A neighbour in London and the best of friends during the best and worst of times, heard about my plight and responded with a few very helpful ideas. He felt it would be worth mentioning to my father that a burial at sea offers surviving family members no place to go to visit and remember ‘the dearly departed,’ e.g., at significant dates during the year, like on a birthday or Father’s Day. On the other hand, a grave site in or on the outskirts of mother and father’s hometown, and a suitable gravestone upon which both parent’s names are inscribed, provides a definite place for sons and daughters and other family members to visit and think good thoughts.

After doing a bit of research I found I could bury father at sea by going aboard a Canadian Navy vessel (e.g., HMCS Sackville, Halifax) at a prescribed time or by mailing cremated remains to a certain pastor with connections to the military, and that a detailed map is provided with the exact location of burial in Halifax Harbour, but I felt the map would not provide the same type of connection to my father - once dead and buried - as an actual site in our long-standing hometown.

Armed with such options and ideas, I slowly nudged my father to think about what he felt the best course of action would be as we considered our shopping list of future responsibilities, i.e., purchasing and preparing a grave site along with a fitting gravestone before the spring thaw.

Fortunately, we both liked big cups of hot coffee and long car rides in the country together. So, on (just about) every Saturday during the winter of 2000 and spring of 2001, I’d pick him up at the front door of London’s Parkwood Hospital (he moved there shortly after mother’s death) and we travelled up this country road and down that one - "just following our noses," my father would say - and when the time felt right, I’d ask, ‘slow and easy,’ like a man who had about four years to decide and not four months, what he thought about this option, i.e., a single grave site for mom; or that one, a double for both of them. Or this one, i.e., a grave site on Quaker Street (north-west of his hometown); or that one, in a harbour near Halifax.

SS Silver Walnut under construction. Details to follow. Photo GH

“No pressure,” I’d say. “Take time to think and I’ll see you same time next Saturday.”

I kept my siblings informed about our progress by email and only by studying them closely could anyone discern whether I was both inwardly and outwardly calm at the same time. But I say now that the discussions with my father didn’t result in an ulcer like I thought it would. (It could be true I have, at times, an overactive imagination).

As weeks went by and a long list of winding roads in Middlesex, Elgin and Oxford counties became more familiar to us both, we not only got closer to final answers but grew closer as father and son. At the beginning of our travels together a medium coffee was all we had time to drink before I dropped him back at Parkwood, and I was sometimes hesitant to get to the point of the matter. As spring approached only a large coffee would satisfy our needs (and sometimes we’d stop at a small town along the way and pick up refills), and it seemed we both approached issues together more confidently. Talks about mother were not only getting somewhere but doing us both some good.

Finally, the day arrived, not by accident but by some small surprise, when just thinking about things had to come to an end and final decisions had to be placed upon the table. And I found I had little trouble turning to him after we’d taken a second look at gravestones in Norwich and asking the question: What do you think you’ll do?

Happy times during their younger years in Burgessville. circa 1953

I recall driving father to Long Point on a pleasant Saturday afternoon and while cruising at about 70 kilometres per hour on a dirt road outside Walsingham I spotted his favourite birds - bluebirds - flying from fence lines and telephone wires to a nearby and freshly plowed field.

I slowed the car and pointed toward the activity. “There’s your bluebirds,” I said.

“I think you’re right,” he said. “I can’t see them very well ‘cause of my eyes but I know how they move. I’m counting on you to spot them now.”

Within five minutes I slowed again and stopped at the side of a large open field.

“I think an owl is coming this way, being chased by crows,” I said.

The pack was about a half kilometre away and as if on cue, the one large bird and its many pursuers headed right toward us. As they approached the car, flying about 5 - 10 metres above the bare field, I could see the large bird was not an owl and was bigger than any winged creature I’d seen in the past.

Once I recognized it I said, “Crying out loud, it’s a bald-headed eagle.”

The eagle and smaller black birds seemed to be heading right toward the windshield of my car. They cleared the fence line and were instantly upon us, but instead of scooping us up with his mighty talons, the bald eagle flew across the road and over another bare field, being harassed all the way by a score of sworn enemies darting this way and that. We sat silently for several seconds, craning our necks to see the birds disappear into the distance.

I took a breath. “Wow. That was something.”

My father said, “I’ll say. I’ve never seen a bald eagle as close up as that.”

I recall that day often. It was a good day for my father and I. The toughest decision we had to make was which back roads to take and whether we wanted a second cup of coffee or dough-nuts with that. Not all rides together were as sweet.

"It was a good day for my father and I." circa 1980s

One day, as spring approached in 2001, I felt my father’s decision, to be buried at sea or beside his wife Edith in Norwich, had to be made, not in a hurried fashion, but at least before the frost left the ground at the cemetery on Quaker Street. My thinking was, once the frost was gone my family could get together and inter our mother.

Father and I had looked at grave sites and stones (singles and doubles) on more than one occasion by then, likely knew more about kinds of fonts and their sizes than we cared to know, so while sipping coffee in my car and following our noses along some country road I turned to him and said, “What do you think you’ll do?”

“I’m going to think about it some more,” he said. And he didn’t go into detail.

I likely said something along the lines of ‘no hurry, no worry, Dad. We’ve got lots of time’, because I didn’t want to rock his boat or seem impatient. I feel that was the best move I could have made at the time, even though I didn’t know then what I know now about how important his days in the Navy were to him.

Today, I would say the following about his idea to be buried at sea: It was related to the most significant, life-changing years or events in his life.

The where, when and why related to his idea or desire I will never fully know or understand. For example, he may have been relaxing on a Vancouver Island beach (at HMCS Givenchy III, a Combined Operations training school or base on a spit of land outside the town of Comox, B.C.) between training sessions in 1944 or ’45, when the light bulb turned on in his mind. He may have been at a Navy reunion in the 1960s or ‘70s and talking to buddies from RCNVR and Combined Operations. He may have been writing his Naval memoirs at his home in Norwich in 1975.

Gun-toting guard on duty at Comox. Photo 1944 - 45

Relaxing (centre) on the beach, HMCS Givenchy III, Comox.

Photos from the collection of Doug Harrison,  1944 - 45

Whenever or wherever the idea was born, it was kept alive for many years because ‘all things Navy’ were never far from his mind. Not only did my father write 40 pages of memoirs but he wrote many stories about his experiences in Europe (e.g., re Combined Ops training in northern Scotland and southern England) and during three major Allied invasions or D-Days, i.e., in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, in 1942 and ’43. These stories he contributed to his local paper, The Norwich Gazette, and to three books about Canada’s role in Combined Operations that were published in the early 1990s. As well, my father and mother attended several Navy reunions and often spent weekends with couples that shared common Navy bonds with father.

Until 2010, the year I carted some of my father’s ashes to Halifax, I was blissfully unaware of most details related to his Navy background. In fact, I believed at that time he had been a member of the Merchant Marine and spent his time in ships ferrying supplies across the Atlantic Ocean to England, and I knew almost nothing about Combined Operations and the landing crafts used to drop troops and all the materiel of war upon foreign beaches, often in the thick of extremely hazardous conditions.

There is a reason for my ignorance: My father and I didn’t talk about such things. And I didn’t read many of his scores of newspaper columns.

Photo of a dated photograph from The London Free Press by GH

Today, eleven years after his death, we seem very close (at least in my mind) and I am aware we have very much in common. When he was alive, however, we kept very busy with our own lives, including our homes, hobbies, sports and hundreds of other activities, and very seldom shared serious conversations about important matters. Such is life, my father would say.

About my ‘no worry, no hurry, Dad’ attitude in 2001, I say I got lucky.

As well, I say my mother’s death broke the history of silence between us and helped make the impossible possible.

"Yup. Sometimes things work out pretty good." (But don't get too cocky) GH

More to follow.

Please click here to read Bury Me At Sea (2)

Unattributed Photos GH

Story Time: Bury Me At Sea (2)

"Bury Me At Sea": A Father's Final Voyage

A WW2 Navy veteran's request becomes a son's great adventure

Previously from...

The Bombshell and the Pain

I was then about twenty years older and still didn’t have a good, concrete suggestion or idea concerning how my parents could each have their final wishes related to burial satisfactorily fulfilled. However, with the aid of my youngest sister Jane and younger brother Kim, I began to walk my father through the initial steps of my mother’s burial arrangements, and later, armed with advice from a good friend about how to deal with my father’s wishes, I felt the entire matter could be resolved fairly easily.

And, yes, the matter was eventually resolved, far better than satisfactorily. Each parent received the burial they desired and deserved.

Fulfilling their conflicting wishes, however, turned out to be much more complicated and harder work than I imagined and would lead me to stand one day about ten years later, very tired and quite alone, on a slippery shelf of rock beside the Atlantic Ocean with a wooden boat full of ashes in my hands.

(You missed Part 1? Please click here to view the first instalment of "Bury Me At Sea."

* * * * *

Mother’s Death Breaks the Silence

Sunday, November 19, 2000 -

I visited my mother at Versa Care, an ‘old age home’ outside of London. I was accompanied by my older son David and his son Jackson. Jack was only about two years old at the time and will not likely recall the uncomfortable scene.

My mother was almost totally uncommunicative because of Parkinson’s Disease, dressed in her well-worn burgandy housecoat and pajamas, and I lifted her head and shoulders carefully so she could see Jack in David’s arms. She was quite stiff and I don’t think she recognized any of us.

I recall her shared room was quite small, didn’t smell the best, and had a window to surrounding barren fields. My mother was in her last days and we didn’t stay very long.

Sunday, November 26, 2000 - 

I went for an early morning run with friends and afterward stretched and cooled off outside the Running Room store located at the corner of Richmond and Hyman streets in London. A Running Room staff member exitted the store and unexpectedly spoke to me.

“Your wife called and left a message. You’re supposed to call home.”

So I called home, suspecting all was not well. My wife Pat gently told me my mother had died. My demeanour changed during the few minutes I spent speaking to Pat and a friend asked if I was okay as I walked toward my car.

“My mother died while I was out running,” I said, without stopping. And I was soon home.

It’s true, the best laid plans can go awry. My mother died on the day I’d planned to take my father to see her for the first time at Versa Care. He wanted to see her and I know she would have wanted to see him, because during their last visit together, at Trillium Retirement Home (mother’s last place of residence) in their hometown of Norwich, they had been very happy to see and visit with one another. Their conversation had been close, heart-felt and - to a degree - animated, and when it came time to go my mother declared she wanted Doug to stay longer.

“Don’t leave me,” she said.

My parents' wedding picture circa February, 1946

But there was nothing to do but go.

And on November 26, instead of taking my father to see his wife I visited him with tragic news.

Once home from the Running Room I asked siblings who lived nearby - and already alerted that our mother had died - to join me in the trip to my father’s small room at London’s Psychiatric Hospital on Highbury Avenue.

Before I visited my father, however, my brother Kim Douglas and I drove to Versa Care to see our mother for one last quiet visit. The two hours that passed there were likely full of dramatic weight from front to back but I can only recall four things.

First, my brother and I had to wait to see our mother’s body and have it released to a funeral home because a coroner had to see her before we did. Because mother was the third person to die at Versa Care during the week, her death had to be investigated. I doubted anything suspicious had happened. Parkinson’s had done its job. But I minded what seemed like a very long wait, and all the while I felt helpless, and out of sorts.

Second, when I had a private minute or two beside my mother’s bed, I stroked her arms as I’d done when she was alive but drifting away, and noticed her arms and hands looked in many ways like mine. We were indeed mother and son.

Third, when I lifted her in my arms and placed her upon a waiting gurney I realized how light and frail she had become. Surely she weighed less than ninety pounds.

Finally, I watched intently as the back door of a waiting hearse closed and she was taken away. As the car turned onto the county road I felt I’d seen my mother for the last time.

(I didn’t know at the time, but family members would be given the opportunity to see her momentarily just hours before she was cremated.)

The next thing I recall about the day's events is the walk my sister, brother and I shared in the hallway leading toward my father’s room at London Psychiatric Hospital on Highbury Avenue. We were dressed in our Sunday clothes and I was anxiously wondering what to say and how my father would respond.

But I needn’t have worried. He was braced for bad tidings. He was aware we were going to deliver serious news before we even reached his door.

“I could hear your leather shoes and the way you walked coming down the hall,” he said. And together we mourned our shared loss.

The countless remaining events of that day in November, 2000, are nothing more than a blur. I spent hours tracking down the whereabouts of an older sister and dealing with an all-knowing uncle and controlling aunt. I welcomed an array of guests to our home, fielded numerous phone calls and attempted to sort out many inevitable and pressing details. On more than one occasion I felt overwhelmed and recall snapping at a brother-in-law who just offered a small bit of advice.

However, later that day and through the next week my family (including our marriage partners) can be described as supportive and helpful. Together we made many necessary arrangements concerning the preparation of Edith’s obituary, her cremation, and a family gathering or wake in the family home according to her wishes. Without incident we assembled to read and act upon her last will and testament.

That being said, at some point, perhaps in early to mid-December, I realized storm clouds were very likely upon the horizon. Burial plans would have to be made, a grave site purchased, a grave stone engraved, and I recalled my mother didn’t want to be buried alone. About that she had been adamant. 

As well, my father still wanted to be buried at sea, as he had wished and vividly expressed twenty years earlier.

Most of the pressures I felt on November 26 paled in comparison to what I thought lay ahead during discussions with my father.

Fortunately, while anxious thoughts filled my mind I received two gifts that brought some relief.

The Italy Star, one of a few among my father's WWII medals

More to follow.

Edith and Doug, an early Christmas together circa 1953

Please click here to read Bury Me At Sea (1)

Unattributed Photos GH

Story Time: Bury Me At Sea (1)

Bury Me At Sea: A Father’s Final Voyage

A WW2 Navy veteran’s request becomes a son’s great adventure

Staff photo from The Brantford Expositor, Dec. 1943

Introduction: 

I have composed a few stories while organizing material for my blog "1,000 Men, 1,000 Stories: Canadians in Combined Operations" beginning in February, 2015. I describe the stories as "written along the way" as I grew more interested in research related to my father's 'Navy days.' He was a proud WWII veteran of not only the RCNVR but of Combined Operations from June, 1941 to September, 1945, one of about 950 - 1,000 Canadian sailors to initially volunteer for the unknown. Thus the blog and a goodly number of stories of my own, to help myself and others get from the unknown to the known. Curious, I say.

Preface:

“It would cost a small fortune today to retrace the places I

had been to and seen under the White Ensign.” (1941 - 45)

Leading Seaman Coxswain - Gordon Douglas Harrison

“I can afford to retrace the miles I travelled to bury my

father at sea in 2010. But I don’t know if I possess the

strength and determination to find the exact spot on

Pennant Point, south-east of Halifax, N.S.” (2104)

Son of a Leading Seaman Cox'n - Gord Harrison

Bury Me At Sea (1)

The Bombshell and the Pain

The Navy was in my father’s blood and when he spoke his mind, on a Sunday afternoon during the early 1980s, about wanting to be buried at sea, his voice rang with surprising intensity and passion. His plea was made forty years after his service with the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve (RCNVR) had ended, and produced the same shocking result inside my parents' house in Norwich, Ontario as a firecracker thrown into a crowded elevator.

My mother spoke next from her seat at the dining room table with equal intensity and passion. I can hear her voice to this day.

“What is going to happen to me?” she said. “Am I going to be buried alone? I want to be buried with my husband, not alone.”

The expression on her face was pained and riveting. “Husbands and wives are supposed to be buried together,” she said.

Uncomfortable silence reigned momentarily. My wife Pat and I looked back and forth at one another a few times, eyes as big as saucers, and expertly glanced out the nearest windows, in search of our two sons (they had earlier run across the street to play at a school yard), while wondering how to respond to what my parents had just said.

My father likely didn’t realize he was only adding fuel to the fire when he stood, collected a postcard from a nearby shelf and gave it to me with some explanation. I looked for the first time at a now well-known photograph of the statue of a Canadian sailor that stands outside The Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, a city to which he had travelled (I learned later) in 1941 to continue his training, begun a few months earlier in Hamilton, with the RCNVR. Seeing the photo helped me understand my father was doing a bit of thinking about his past connection with the Navy, but it certainly was not a salve to the wound he’d opened in the heart of my mother, his wife of forty years.

Statue at base of Sackville St., Halifax: More details here

I cannot recall one word I added to the ensuing, prickly discussion, but during the drive home I expressed the feeling to my wife that I was supportive of both parents because I loved them equally and wanted each to have their final wishes fulfilled. I also cannot recall having even one sensible idea concerning how the conflict between my parents could be resolved.

Within the year, I believe, my mother tried to deal with her seemingly imposed lot by pursuing a plan to be buried at her mother's grave site, situated in the Norwich Cemetery, about six blocks from my parents' house, but the idea was rebuffed by at least one of her three brothers. Whether my parents ever got closer to resolving the issue together, I do not know. I didn't often think heavily about the day of my father's bombshell and mother's pain in the ensuing years but was forced to revisit the issue shortly after my mother died on the morning of November 26, 2000.

I was then about twenty years older and still didn’t have a good, concrete suggestion or idea concerning how my parents could each have their final wishes related to burial satisfactorily fulfilled. However, with the aid of my youngest sister Jane and younger brother Kim I began to walk my father through the initial steps of my mother's burial arrangements, and later, armed with advice from a good friend about how to deal with my father's wishes, I felt the entire matter could be resolved fairly easily.

And, yes, the matter was eventually resolved, far better than satisfactorily. Each parent received the burial they desired and deserved.

Fulfilling their conflicting wishes, however, turned out to be much more complicated and harder work than I imagined and would lead me to stand one day about ten years later, very tired and quite alone, on a slippery shelf of rock beside the Atlantic Ocean with a wooden boat full of ashes in my hands.

More to follow in this short but mighty story.

My parents did occasionally put their heads together

My parents' grave stone in Norwich, Ontario

I did bury my father at sea on a Sunday in June, 2010

Now older and wiser than in the 1980s? GH

Please click here to link to Gord's Journal: "Buried my father at sea"

Unattributed Photos GH

Photographs: Operation Baytown, Invasion of Italy, 1943 (1)

Invasion of Mainland Italy, September 3, 1943 and Landings

at Charlie Beach, by Canadian 80th Flotilla Landing Crafts

NA 6149 - Original wartime caption: A picture which shows the complete

accord with which Allied soldiers have been received by the people of Sicily.

This Sgt. Major of the Highland Division held no terrors for this charming

Sicilian who greeted him with grapes, and a ready welcome to Messina.

Credit - Photographer Chetwyn, Leonard Production date - 1943-08-30

No. 2 Army Film and Photo Section, Army Film and Photographic Unit

Imperial War Museum (IWM)

Introduction:

According to news reports of the time the Canadian Navy was represented in the Mediterranean in 1943 (serving in Operation HUSKY, the invasion of Sicily beginning July 10, and Operation BAYTOWN and AVALANCHE, the invasion of Italy beginning September 3 at the toe of the boot and September 9 at Salerno on the shin) by 400 Canadian sailors, many in RCNVR and Combined Operations. The Imperial War Museum (IWM), London, England, claims to possess over 11,000,000 WWII photographs and I was very happy to locate a good handful related to Operation BAYTOWN taken by productive photographers, a few of whom will already be familiar to readers who have found good collections of pictures shared on this site re Operation TORCH and HUSKY already. 

Lt. L. Chetwyn (link to his collection - Chetwyn, Leonard) provides the first and last two photographs in the series in this post and Sgt. Palmer, also a member of No. 2 Army Film and Photo Section, Army Film and Photographic Unit, provides the rest. More photographs will be shared from this series in a second post.

Based on the first two photographs the series looks like 'all sweets and goodness' but that's before the bombardment of the toe of the boot began in the early morning of September 3rd.

"(We) attacked Italy at Reggio di Calabria across Messina Straits... there was no resistance. The air force had done a complete job and there wasn’t a whole building standing and the railroad yards were ripped to shreds. How long we worked across the straits I cannot really recall, but perhaps into October." (From "Dad, Well Done" Navy memoirs by Doug Harrison, RCNVR/Combined Operations, page 35)

And now for one last look at the "sweets" before the bombardment. All photographs are found at the Imperial War Museum (IWM):

Heading - SICILY : "SWEETS" FOR THE SERGEANT MAJOR

NA 6150 - A picture which shows the complete accord with which the

Allied soldiers have been received by the people of Sicily. This Sgt. Major

of the Highland Division held no terrors for this charming Sicilian who

greeted him with grapes, and a ready welcome to Messina. 

Photo - L. Chetwyn, No. 2 AFPU (IWM)

Heading - FIRST PICTURES OF THE INVASION OF THE ITALIAN MAINLAND

NA 6151 - From Messina, Sicily, medium guns of the Scottish Horse

bombard the Italian mainland prior to the initial landings. Photographer -

 Sgt. Palmer Production - 1943-09-03 No. 2 Army Film and Photo Section,

Imperial War Museum (IWM)

About 'the Scottish Horse' as mentioned above on side B of photo NA 6151. At Wikipedia we can glean some details re so-named artillery regiment:

"The Scottish Horse was a Yeomanry regiment of the British Army's Territorial Army raised in 1900 for service in the Second Boer War. It saw heavy fighting in both the First World War, as the 13th Battalion, Black Watch, and in the Second World War, as part of the Royal Artillery." (More details @ Wikipedia)

Howitzers of the 79th (The Scottish Horse) Medium Regiment during a

training exercise, Banffshire, Scotland (May 1941) Credit - Wikipedia

Please click here to read more from the Regimental Scottish Horse Archives.

Heading - THE ALLIED LANDINGS IN ITALY, SEPTEMBER 1943: REGGIO, TARANTO AND SALERNO

NA 6152 - Reggio, 3 September 1943 (Operation Baytown): British

artillery bombards the Italian mainland from Messina in Sicily prior to

the initial landings at Reggio. Photo - Sgt. Palmer No. 2 AFPU. IWM

Heading - FIRST PICTURES OF THE INVASION OF THE ITALIAN MAINLAND

NA 6153 - From Messina, Sicily, medium guns of the Scottish Horse

bombard the Italian mainland prior to the initial landings.

Photo - Sgt. Palmer No. 2 AFPU. IWM

NA 6154 - Seated on a wall overlooking the harbour (at Messina)

troops watch the Invasion craft leaving for Italy.

Photo - Sgt. Palmer No. 2 AFPU. IWM

About the invasion craft leaving for Italy, one sailor manning a landing craft mechanised (LCM) as a member of the 80th Flotilla of Canadian LCMs writes: 

 It was no different touching down on the Italian beach at Reggio di Calabria at around midnight, September 3, 1943 than on previous invasions.

Naturally we felt our way slowly to our landing place. Everything was strangely quiet and we Canadian sailors were quite tense, expecting to be fired upon, but we touched down safely, discharged our cargo and left as orderly and quietly as possible.

In the morning light on our second trip to Italy across seven miles of the Messina Straits (7 miles equals a round trip? GH Editor) we saw how the Allied artillery barrage across the straits had levelled every conceivable thing; not a thing moved, the devastation was unbelievable and from day one we had no problems; it was easy come, easy go from Sicily to Italy. (From "Dad, Well Done" by Doug Harrison, page 114)

NA 6155 - The scene as amphibious "Ducks" enter the water at Messina,

loaded with men and equipment. Photo - Sgt. Palmer No. 2 AFPU. IWM

NA 6156 - The scene as amphibious "Ducks" enter the water at Messina,

loaded with men and equipment. Photo - Sgt. Palmer No. 2 AFPU. IWM

Please note the large stone or cement blocks at the lower left corner of the above photo. There were such blocks in a photo re WWII and landing crafts in the Allied Invasion of Sicily WWII Museum in Catania when my son and I visited Sicily in 2023:

The landing craft above seem to be going in the same direction as those

in Sgt. Palmer's photos. Same day (Sept. 3, 1943)? More details needed. 

Below are my own photographs taken from the beach at Mili Marina, south of the city of Messina, Sept. 2023, 80 years later:

Was this spot in Mili Marina used by Allied forces to embark to Italy's

mainland on Sept. 3, 1943? It's very possible. (Or a spot close by).

Compare the coastline and background hills of Italy at Reggio di Calabria (straight across the strait) in the following photos and that of the children with the best (stone) seats in town:

I am opposite Reggio di Calabria in late September, 2023. GH

Photo Credit GH

Pictures taken by Sgt. Palmer continue:

Heading - THE ALLIED LANDINGS IN ITALY, SEPTEMBER 1943: REGGIO, TARANTO AND SALERNO

NA 6157 - Reggio, 3 September 1943 (Operation Baytown): Amphibious

DUKWs loaded with men and equipment, enter the water at Messina in Sicily

to cross to the Italian mainland. Photo - Palmer, Roy H. No. 2 AFPU. IWM

NA 6158 - The scene as amphibious "Ducks" enter the water at Messina,

loaded with men and equipment. Sgt. Palmer No. 2 AFPU. IWM

NA 6159 - The scene as amphibious "Ducks" enter the water at Messina,

loaded with men and equipment. Sgt. Palmer No. 2 AFPU. IWM

Heading - THE BRITISH ARMY IN NORTH AFRICA, SICILY, ITALY, THE BALKANS AND AUSTRIA 1942-1946

NA 6160 - Infantry marching through the streets of Messina to embark

on Invasion craft. Photo - Leonard Chetwyn, No. 2 AFPU. IWM

NA 6161 - Infantry marching through the streets of Messina to embark

on Invasion craft. Photo - Chetwyn, Leonard, No. 2 AFPU. IWM

My son and I marched "through the streets of Messina" as well! It is a city that demands a return visit.

Literally from "the streets of Messina." GH

More photographs will follow in the near future.

Please click here to view Articles re Combined Operations, "Norwich Sailor Sees Action"

Unattributed Photos GH