Tiny picture that told a story after 70 long years

A small photograph of an American soldier’s sweetheart survived the war and was found 70 years later when the sergeant’s visor cap was being restored for the National War Museum in Valletta.
“The cap was in good condition. I was inspecting the seam to see if it was all intact and just as I lifted the leather band, I saw a tiny, black and white photo held tight by the spike of a button.
“I wondered who the woman could possibly be,” Claire Bonavia, the principal conservator at Heritage Malta, told this newspaper.

The visor cap is part of the complete army uniform that war veteran Herb Tollefson donated to Heritage Malta’s national collection when he visited the island last year to celebrate his 96th birthday.
The trip followed another in December of 2013, when Mr Tollefson came here looking for friends he had made when deployed on the island to repair aircraft during World War II.
He made an appeal via the Times of Malta, which led to the war veteran meeting the son of his wartime buddy and late police sergeant John Mifsud. Since John Mifsud Jr also lives in the US, the two flew to Malta in July last year.

It was then that Mr Tollefson donated his US Army Air Corps uniform,...