259419 Pte. Alfred Francis British Army East Yorkshire Regiment from:Barnsley  This story is by Alfred Francis: On 10th of July 1943, we set off from a port in Egypt and landed at Syracuse in Sicily under heavy bombardment from the Germans. The ship we sailed on was HMS Orion. Our platoon had been sent out to mop up some Germans. On 15th July 1943, en route from Carlentina to Lentina, I was taken prisoner after crawling on a road that ran in a wooded valley. We came to a bend in the road and could go no further when a German officer came up with his pistol and captured us! From there he took us to a farm in the vicinity where he put us in a barn full of hay. After a day or so nothing had happened, but we thought they would fire the barn and burn us. Eventually the Italian farmer came to let us out and then took us to the valley where we'd been captured. We found the British army there with injured Germans. Somehow we found our way back to our battalion, where we found out our ambulance driver had been killed by the same Germans who had captured us. I was a stretcher-bearer during the Sicilian campaign, which lasted just 30 days.
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