The Day My Dad Met Padre Pio
June 1945. As a young British airman stationed in Italy, my late father Wally Fielder joined a dawn expedition to visit a monk who had been drawing huge crowds with rumours of miracles, visions and stigmata. This is his account.
It was still quite dark as we clambered aboard the high-wheelbase three-ton military truck drawn up near the Nissan hut that passed for the cook-house of No 70 Squadron and the luminous hands of my watch glowed at just after 3.00am. By the early summer of 1945, the Squadron had been stationed at the dusty airstrip of Tortorella for some eight months and even though it had only a short time still to run, the war seemed endless to those of us cooped up in that arid dusty plain some five miles from Foggia in the ‘foot’ of the Italian mainland.
Some canned provisions were now handed in to the vehicle and finally the tail-board was swung up with a creaking and rattle of chains that threatened to rouse our sleeping comrades, despite our muted conversation. With a violent jerk we were off, bumping over the incredibly rough surface that formed the dirt perimeter of our airstrip, churned into a morass of of mud in winter and now caked into iron-hard ridges by the blazing sun and perpetual hot winds.
