A familiar face at the Salmon Arm Cenotaph will be missing this year.
Longtime MC Harry Welton and wife Sandra Baker will be observing Remembrance Day overseas this year.
The couple will visit Sicily and Malta on their two-week tour, both areas that experienced heavy fighting in the Second World War.
While in Sicily, Welton is planning to visit a Commonwealth War Cemetery that has a direct link to Salmon Arm.
Known as Operation Husky, the Allied Invasion and Battle of Sicily took place between July 10 and Aug. 17, 1943.
Several years ago, Welton, a life member of the Royal Canadian Legion, made it his mission to uncover history about every person listed on the local cenotaph.
The names of Neskonlith Band members, August Soule and Charles Leon are listed on the cenotaph. Still, their remains are buried in a Commonwealth War Cemetery near the picturesque town of Agira.
Both Soule, who served under the name Saul, and Leon enlisted at the outbreak of war and underwent three years of training in England.
Both Salmon Arm natives were attached to the First Canadian Division that sailed to Sicily in June 1943.
German submarines shadowed the Allied convoy along the Atlantic Ocean and through the Strait of Gibraltar into the western Mediterranean, where they attacked the convoy Three ships were sunk and 58 soldiers and sailors were killed.
Soule and Leon made it to Sicily and in late July were involved in fierce fighting with the German army, a battle in which the two men paid the ultimate price. Soule was 23 and Leon was 20. The bodies of the 562 Canadians killed in Sicily were buried on the site near Agira.
The couple’s second stop on their tour goes back two years in history to the siege of Malta that raged from June 1940 to November 1942.
The Mediterranean island was almost bombed into oblivion in the two-year battle for control between the Allies and the German and Italian air forces.
As a result, the island’s cities, towns and ports were destroyed beyond recognition and more than 1,500 civilians were killed. At the end of the war, Britain’s King George VI awarded the George Cross to the people of Malta to “bear witness to the heroism and devotion of its people” during the great siege.
Baker’s interest in visiting the island whose rulers included the Romans, Moors, Knights of Saint John, French and British is in part, due to the many fortresses, megalithic temples and the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, a subterranean complex of halls and burial chambers dating to about 4000 B.C.
More importantly, Baker wishes to see where her father, Gordon Baker, served in the Second World War.
Knowing his brother, Merv, was imprisoned in a German prisoner of war camp somewhere likely in eastern Germany or Poland, Gordon nevertheless enlisted at the age of 17. He chose the Royal Navy because “he had no intention of walking all over Europe,” says Baker.
An electrical artificer, a member of the armed forces who is skilled at working on electronic, electrical, electro-mechanical and/or mechanical devices, Gordon served on a minesweeper in the Mediterranean.
Gordon, the rum bosun on his minesweeper, was also in charge of providing a daily amount of rum to the sailors on his ship. It was a Royal Navy practice that was abolished in 1970.
Baker has a photo of her father taken in Valletta, the capital of Malta, in April 1945, just weeks before Victory in Europe was declared on May 8.
As well as seeing where her father was during the war, Baker is excited to see the National War Museum in Malta, whose collections include the last remaining Gladiator biplanes. They are called Faith, Hope and Charity.
