SUNDAY, July 11, 1943. At the army’s Algiers HQ, the Glasgow Herald’s special correspondent, Gerald Norman, is putting together a report for the following day’s paper on the Allied invasion of Sicily, which had began at dawn on the Saturday. “The assault on Hitler’s ‘Festung Europa’ [Fortress Europe] has begun,” he writes.
The First Lord of the Admiralty, A.V. Alexander, praises the nation’s seamen,”who have just taken the largest armada of merchant ships and naval craft straight across Mussolini’s Roman lake and landed our forces in Sicily - a wonderful feat.” Home Secretary Herbert Morrison says July 10 will go down in history as the day when for millions of oppressed people, “hope deferred begins to give way to realisation.”
That Sunday, tributes to the work accomplished during the war by the Royal Navy and the Merchant Navy are paid at churches across the land at special morning services of thanksgiving and remembrance. A large contingent of naval ratings (pictured) and WRENS attend the service at Glasgow Cathedral.
A Glasgow Herald leader on the Monday says the news from Sicily gives the “tortured peoples of the Nazi-occupied lands ... their first great lift of the heart ... The invasion of Sicily is something far more than the turning of a leaf, or the beginning of a new stage of the war. From this moment a change comes over the entire conflict, and with it the second full demonstration of the Allies’ perfected technique.”
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