Sound: Able Seaman remembers the Italian campaign

Able Seaman Joseph Pedersen, RNZN 2337, joined the New Zealand Division of the Royal Navy in 1940. He trained at HMS Philomel in Auckland before going to the United Kingdom for more training. He then joined HMS Walker on convoy duty in the North Atlantic as an ASDIC rating. In 1942 he was posted to the destroyer HMS Lookout on which he served in the Mediterranean and in the Allied invasion of Sicily in September 1943, as he describes here.

Transcript

'These landings in Sicily and bloody Italy, they were tremendous. They reckoned they had about two thousand ships there. Well, you consider all that. There was the mine sweepers first, and then there was the destroyers and sloops and frigates and there was the cruisers. We were with the cruisers most of the time, but you couldn't see the battleships, but they were there. Because you could hear their shells whistling above you. But what got me was - the whole of the beach must be, what, ten miles long ... The British section was about as big as Orewa beach but then the Yanks was about three or four times as big as that. They were further down, on the flat. We were up in, sort of sat in the hill. There'd be waves of planes - the whole horizon, you'd see dots coming over and they'd be planes. There'd be groups of hundreds of them. Be a hundred there, a hundred there, a hundred there, a hundred there. And then behind that, there'd be another hundred and a hundred. Right from the horizon. They were pattern bombing... God, it was a wonderful sight to see...'