Nancy Thorne wanted to know more about her soldier father’s war experience
CBC – Nancy Thorne grew up knowing her father, Ronald Yeomans, was a respected Second World War veteran.
And Nov. 11 was always a huge day for the west Saint John family of seven.
“He was usually the person in front of the parade, carrying the flag. I always remember that, he was always at the very front. And I had other uncles who were in the parade. It was a big family day until the parade was over.
Even so, she knew little about her father’s experiences in the war. It was his policy not to talk about those years he spent in Europe as a young man. Thorne knew he had lost friends and suspected the experience had not been a good one.
So she was surprised years later when his resolve suddenly crumbled at a family dinner under direct questioning from his granddaughter, Cindy Thorne.
This Saint John woman travelled to Italy to retrace her father’s steps during the Second World War. She found the rooftop where he was stranded for days fighting the Germans.
Nancy listened, astonished as her father began talking about the Christmas he spent in 1943 as a 22-year-old soldier fighting in Ortona, Italy.
“We were just at the dining room table and it was after dinner on a Sunday night,” she recalled. “It was just close to [Remembrance Day] because she was working on a school project and she asked him to tell a story about the war.
“And he chose to tell the story about — it was Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing day — that he spent on the roof of a building in Italy. Ortona. And that it was freezing cold, he talked about the cold and the rain.”
The story stayed with her, she’d never heard of Ortona, on Italy’s Adriatic coast, or the brutal battle fought there by Canadian soldiers during the war. Or that her own father had been at the very centre of it, wet, freezing and fearing for his life.
It all came back, many years later while Nancy Thorne and her husband Bill were vacationing in southern Italy with Saint John friends John and Gail Rocca. John Rocca, an Italian by birth, remembers they were on an excursion at the time to his hometown, Reggio Calabria, a city on the Strait of Messina.
“And as we were walking down the street [Nancy] mentioned that her father must have landed in Reggio on his way from Sicily to Ortona,” said Rocca. “Well Ortona didn’t mean anything to me. And then she tells me the story about her father being on the rooftop for three days. That’s when I said, ‘Well, we’ve got to go find that building, that rooftop.'”
