大象传媒

Last September I was in Rome which was part of a 60th anniversary Battlefield tour of Italy I had taken, and naturally when in "Roma" I visited the Vatican.
This brought back a very vivid memory of when I was first there in 1944. My Div the 78th BattleAxe ad been pulled back after some fierce fighting at Lake Trasimene and were on our way to Egypt in July for rest and refit.

On our way back we rested at town called Tivoli and we were given some leave to visit Rome before going on south to Taranto
to board ship. A Polish ship incidentally, called "The Batory" part of another story.

Many of our men went looking for the "Fleshpots of Rome", however I decided it was too good a chance not to miss any sightseeing so I palled up with another squaddie from the Argyll's who had the same idea as mine and we took in the sights finishing up at the Vatican.

While looking around we joined up with two US soldiers and all finished up inside admiring the paintings, fresco's, architecture, etc., while we were deciding what to do next, a priest who was watching us came over and started talking, he was an American so was very interested in the US boys,he also asked my friend and I lots questions( Nothing that we couldn't answer) He then told us to wait a moment as he felt sure there would be someone else who would like to have word with us.

He disappeared through a door and we waited for a while and we were just deciding to whether we should go, when the door opened and the priest (who I found out afterwards was a Papal Nuncio.) came through and said here is the person who would like to talk to you. Il PAPA!.

We were flabbergasted as Pope Pius Xll came towards us, we were not sure what to say but he made us feel at ease, naturally the one of the first questions he asked were any of us Catholics, the one of the two US men was, but not the rest of us which I think disappointed him a bit.
To cut a rather long story short, he was very interested in who we were and what we had been through and very pleased that we had taken time to visit the Vatican and spoke to us in reasonably good English and Italian to one of the US men for about 10 minutes.
Before leaving he gave us a Blessing and a medallion each which he hung around our necks.

When we left the Vatican and were walking down one of the streets we decided to go into a bar for a drink. One of the Americans (I wish could remember their names)who spoke Italian showed the medallion to the waiter and told him what had happened and who we had seen. He told everyone and pandemonium broke out with everybody coming up and shaking our hands
Drinks were on the house.

It was quite an honour for us to have had this unexpected audience with the Pope.

As I said all this came flooding back to my mind as I stood inside the Vatican again after all those years, and I wondered what became of those three other men I had met on this one brief occasion. I hope they made it!

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