A hug after more than eighty years, when the ashes of a world destroyed by the Second World War have remained the memory, strong and indelible, on an island like Asinara that preserves its thousand stories, small and large.
One of these saw as protagonists Guglielmo Massidda, then a marshal of the navy, head of the Punta Scomunica semaphore and his son, Gian Franco Massidda, former guardian of Punta Scorno now 90 years old, for all the sentinel of the sea of a paradise, a treasure chest of memories and human feelings.
In the summer of 1940 he was only seven years old when he and his father spotted a French military plane, a Loire Nieuport, crashing on the island and immediately rushed to provide assistance. The word enemy was almost not contemplated on an island where life flowed slowly. The 22-year-old French army pilot, Eliè Mèhault, was forced to make an emergency landing in the area between Trabuccato and Cala Reale, 30 meters from a small church. He was saved by a miracle. Marshal Guglielmo with his son Gian Franco were on a motorcycle and were heading to Cala Reale .
"That day, after picking me up from Cala d'Oliva, the village where we lived with my mother, my father headed towards Cala Reale to visit his brother Umberto. When we reached the place, our attention was drawn to a gray military plane that was flying at low altitude in obvious difficulty." The fear that something serious was happening took over. "We were scared by the plane that was "coughing," - says Gian Franco - and was going lower and lower, so my worried father got back on his motorbike to reach the landing site."
Upon arrival, the military plane was already on the ground, resting on its belly, with a twisted propeller and damaged landing gear. The pilot, who had emerged from the cockpit, showed a bleeding wound on his chin. "I'm French, I'm French!" He shouted and raised his hands in surrender. "My father was wearing a uniform and he was scared, but he didn't hesitate for a moment to treat his wound with a handkerchief." He said he had taken the wrong route. He was headed from France to Algeria and, passing through Corsica, suffered an engine failure that forced him to make an emergency landing on the island of Asinara. He was taken prisoner and, after two days in Asinara, he was transferred to the prison of Sassari and remained there until the end of the Second World War. Eliè Mèhault died in "his" France in 2005 at the age of 88.
After 85 years, Gian Franco Massidda and his daughter Marina met Bernard and Catherine Mèhault, the pilot's 77-year-old son and 70-year-old daughter-in-law. Not a casual meeting. But born from the emotion given by an old faded photo with the image of the French plane. It portrayed that emergency landing that the 22-year-old pilot had managed well. "It happened last summer, on the occasion of the permanent exhibition, already inaugurated at the Asinara National Park on July 31, 2012, together with the Crama, reopened every year at Cala Reale for the season, inside the Casa del Parco", explains Marina Massidda. An exhibition of photographs that illustrates a historical period, between 1915 and the 1940s.
"In this exhibition, we were struck by the photo of a military plane, identical to the one we have," Catherine explained emotionally, "and in which we were able to recognize my father-in-law. So I did everything I could to track down the owner of that image that is so dear to us." At the Hotel Libyssonis, the embrace between Bernard and Catherine Mèhault with Marina and Gian Franco Massidda, a moment full of emotion, a meeting to share a memory, a piece of history of an island that, like a book, continues to preserve pages of hope and solidarity, even in the midst of a world conflict.
