Medic: Saving Lives - From Dunkirk to Afghanistan

by John Nichol

  4. Bamboo Surgeons

  Making his way back from a foxhole on the beach at Dunkirk, Irish-born RAF doctor Squadron Leader Aidan MacCarthy had every reason to believe his life was charmed. Not only had he fled across northern France just a matter of miles ahead of the German front line but when the ship he boarded was holed on the waterline by a mine, he (and the boat) survived. ‘The captain ordered us all to the opposite side,’ he recalled, ‘and thus tilted, with the hole clear of the water, we made safe but slow progress across the Channel.’1 Back in England, he was posted as senior medical officer to an air base in East Anglia, where two hundred WRAFs, members of the Women’s Royal Air Force, were paraded before him in a hangar for an FFI (Free From Infection) inspection. ‘They were lined up in four ranks with an elderly officer standing in the front, and every one of them was stark naked!’ He ordered bras and pants back on at the double, but the story made him the envy of the base. The doctor’s good fortune was not to last, however. In the winter of 1941, he was sent to the Far East, where the forces of Japan were on the march against British strongholds.

  Another medic on that long sea voyage to the tropics was Private George Temple of the RAMC, who had taken a course as a theatre orderly and, more importantly, stayed on his feet the first time he stood around an operating table. ‘It was the removal of a gall bladder and all I could see was this heaving mass of raw red flesh. The lad next to me excused himself but I managed to stick it out.’2 He would ‘stick out’ a lot worse in the years ahead and perform more than the surgeon he watched that first day could ever have imagined from a mere orderly. The war with Japan would unleash unspeakable horrors and be the most testing time that any medically trained man or woman could ever experience.

  It would be very different from the European theatre of war, where captured doctors and medics had a reasonable expectation of being respected. Those who surrendered to the Germans at Dunkirk in order to take care of their wounded comrades did so with the knowledge that, under the rules of war, medics were entitled to be returned home once their job was done. It was some consolation for those who volunteered to go into captivity. There was no guarantee at the time that this agreement would be honoured, and few men could stake their lives on this pledge with absolute conviction. But, as the war went on, there were indeed a few repatriations from PoW camps in Germany, and, though life behind the wire was hard, medics in the stalags and oflags were generally allowed to do their jobs, albeit in very difficult circumstances and with limited resources. Not so on the Pacific front. Japan was not a signatory to the Geneva Convention on the humane treatment of prisoners. It applied the Bushidō code of the warrior, in which those who surrendered on the battlefield were beneath contempt. Nor did it see any honour in the work of those seeking to save the lives of men it considered to have forfeited their right to exist.

  From the very start, the Japanese showed no compassion. When Hong Kong, the British crown colony off mainland China, was overrun in Christmas week of 1941, British Army medical staff and their patients were among the first to feel the lethal and barbaric thrust of Japanese aggression. The Salesian Mission was the main medical store holding supplies for all the military hospitals and aid posts in the colony and was manned by a dozen RAMC orderlies, doctors of various nationalities, stretcher-bearers and nine women nurses, mostly from the St John Ambulance Brigade. Japanese combat troops took the building without a shot being fired or any resistance offered, and at first it seemed as if the red cross flag hanging in the entrance hall would be respected. Everyone was lined up outside and marched away. The women went in one direction and were released unharmed. But the men were ordered to halt and take off their shoes and tunics. Their identification cards, each marked with a red cross to indicate their status as medics, were taken from them, cursorily examined, then tossed aside, and the men were marched a quarter of a mile up a steep, wooded hill.

  In a small clearing, the killing began. Some were bayoneted and slashed with swords, others shot down as they tried to run away. The massacre was witnessed by Captain Martin Banfill, commander of the RAMC unit, who had been separated from the others and kept alive to be interrogated later. He lay on the ground, a Japanese boot in his face, listening to his men being slaughtered, the sounds of Japanese chatter and laughter mingling with blows and shots and the screams of the dying. He was threatened with the same fate as his men before being dragged away from the scene and, unaccountably, reprieved.

  Another survivor was RAMC Corporal Norman Leath, who had been struck by a sword on the back of his neck in an attempt to behead him. ‘It shot me into the air and spun me completely round,’ he recalled. ‘I fell to the ground face downwards, blood pouring into my eyes, ears and mouth.’3 His neck muscle was almost severed in two, several vertebrae were badly damaged, but his spinal chord was miraculously intact. He lay beneath the pile of corpses in a drainage ditch and played dead until it was safe to crawl away.

  After the war, apologists for the Japanese would argue that the Salesian Mission massacre was a one-off incident by a rogue officer. But a week later, as the fierce fighting for Hong Kong continued, there was not merely a repeat performance but an even worse atrocity at St Stephen’s College, a boys’ school that the British had turned into an emergency 400-bed hospital. It had around a hundred patients in the main hall and adjoining classrooms when, just before dawn on Christmas Day, two hundred Japanese troops broke in. The senior medical officer bravely tried to bar their way while also attempting to make a formal surrender. He was shot in the head and stabbed as he lay on the ground. Then the troops went from bed to bed plunging their bayonets into the helpless occupants. Fifty were dead within minutes. This time, the women nurses did not escape. A dozen of them were herded into an upstairs room and then taken away in threes and fours to be gang-raped. Some were murdered and their bodies mutilated (whether before or after death was never established). The men too were locked in a room and then brought out in pairs. ‘After the door was closed and locked again, the remaining prisoners would hear screams and shots, followed by more shots. Then silence until the next selection in half an hour or an hour.’4

  The Japanese ‘excuse’ for the killings at St Stephen’s was that troops had come under fire when they approached the building, and there was evidence that retreating British soldiers may indeed have had machine-gun emplacements made from piled-up mattresses and hospital blankets in the grounds and on the veranda. But the argument that this nullified the protection that doctors, nurses and patients were entitled to falls away in the light of the degree of brutality they were subjected to. They were non-combatants by any definition, and they were willing to surrender. They were dispatched and degraded with an indifference to human suffering that would be a remorseless feature of the Japanese conquest of the Far East. In doing this, they defied their international obligations. It is well known that Japan had not signed up to the clauses of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war and felt no obligation under that code. But it had ratified the articles of the convention explicitly protecting medical personnel (in 1907) and those agreeing to humane treatment of the sick and wounded (1929). Its cold-blooded flouting of these international obligations was deliberate – as those caught by Tokyo’s next onslaught against the British empire were finding out. As Japanese troops fought their way down the Malaya peninsula in a campaign of aggression, courage and ingenuity that had British and Australian defence forces in a full-scale fighting retreat, it was once again the wounded and those tending them who were easy prey, helpless as lambs to the slaughter.

  At a village called Parit Sulong, an Australian commander had no choice but to withdraw through the jungle, leaving behind 150 badly wounded men on stretchers. It was a tough decision to make, but there was no reason to think it would be a deadly one. Until then, there was a reasonable expectation that, as in the battles against the Germans in Europe and North Africa, the wounded would be treated humanely. The men lay waiting, wary but optimistic, some look
ing forward to the prospect of at least being able to wash and get out of the filthy, bloodstained battledress they had been in for weeks. Japanese troops drove up in trucks and immediately bayoneted and clubbed those who lay on the ground and were not quick enough or fit enough to dodge out of their way. The rest were herded, hobbling and helping each other as best they could, into a circle and made to strip naked. Requests for water were ignored as the captives were crammed into a shed, ‘a stinking, scrambling hell-hole, full of tortured, groaning, delirious wounded soldiers’, as one of the few survivors put it.5 Water and cigarettes were offered to their outstretched arms, snapped by a Japanese photographer for propaganda purposes – and then snatched away once he had his picture. The butchery took place on a riverbank, to which the men were brought roped together by the neck in a long chain of misery. Some were shot, some beheaded with samurai swords. Some were still alive when petrol was thrown over the pile of bodies and set alight. What was even more ominous was that these Japanese soldiers were not a rabble momentarily out of control but the Emperor’s elite, his Imperial Guard, as prestigious a regiment as Britain’s Grenadiers or Coldstreams. Mercy, it was now clear, was not on the Japanese agenda.

  This dire message was now getting through to the British command in the island of Singapore, at the tip of the Malaya peninsula. Word had also arrived there of the hospital massacres and rapes in Hong Kong. With a siege about to begin, the decision was taken that the many army nurses on the island must not be allowed to suffer the same fate. They were ordered to join the exodus of civilians clamouring for places on the ships in the harbour, and did so, many reluctantly, none too soon. Just a mile behind them, Alexandra Hospital and its eight hundred bedridden patients, with red crosses prominent on its roof, lawns and hanging from the windows, was in the path of the advancing Japanese imperial army. A hopeful and brave British medical officer, Lieutenant Wilson, fashioned a white flag of surrender and went to meet the invaders as they entered the hospital grounds. A bayonet in the stomach killed him, and a systematic slaughter began, ward by ward. In one of these, Gunner Ferguson Anckorn was drifting out of the anaesthetic after an operation on a badly mangled hand, saw Japanese soldiers and thought he was dreaming. He turned to the man in the next bed and asked what was happening. ‘He said, “They’re taking people out on the front lawn and killing them.” I said, “Oh I see,” and then went off again. The next time I woke up the Japanese were going from bed to bed with fixed bayonets.’ He was certain he was going to die and, as they got closer to him, he put his head under the pillow. ‘I was lying there, I couldn’t move anything and I didn’t mind being killed as long as there was no pain. But I didn’t want to see it happen.’

  For him, it didn’t. ‘When I came up for air they’d gone, and there were four people left alive in the ward.’ He survived, he believed, because he had his hand on his chest, the hand had a massive hole in it from his wound and blood was pouring from it. ‘They must have thought I’d already been bayoneted and moved on.’ Another survivor was an orthopaedic surgeon who stood up to a dozen rampaging Japanese when they pushed through the doors of his operating theatre. ‘We were lined up against the wall and they set upon us with bayonets.’6 A jab cut into his hand and leg, but his cigarette case miraculously deflected what should have been the fatal thrust. ‘I decided to pretend to be dead,’ he recalled, ‘and lay there for quite a while before they moved off.’ But, in all, more than three hundred men were killed in the atrocity. One of them, a corporal, was even impaled on the operating table. Ninety RAMC doctors and orderlies were among the dead, cut down while selflessly trying to protect their patients.

  As Singapore’s demoralized garrison surrendered, those who had fled were not out of danger. Sister Margot Turner of the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service7 was one of the nurses ordered to leave, and sailed in a small ship, the Kuala. As they slipped out of the harbour at twilight, she looked back at a skyline smeared black from burning oil and petrol tanks. The nurses were remarkably steadfast and brave amid the horrors of war. One had recently written home to her parents: ‘Don’t worry about me. I have no fear for myself and look on life as a great adventure with the unexpected round every corner.’ But the ‘unexpected’ was worse than any of them could have imagined. The next morning, the captain anchored off a small island and camouflaged the ship with branches and leaves to sit out the daylight hours. The disguise didn’t work. Planes found the Kuala and bombed her. With the ship on fire from bow to stern, Turner leapt overboard, without a lifejacket. ‘As I jumped, some man took off my tin hat, which was a helpful and kindly act,’ she recalled.8 It saved her life. ‘I went down very deep but I came up, unlike Miss Russell [her matron], who jumped with me, but I never saw her again.’ Around her as she surfaced the sea was full of dead, dying and swimming people, targets for the Japanese planes that swept over, their machine guns blazing at those in the water. Every time they came, she dived deep and, when they had gone, she struggled to land against a swirling current and crawled out exhausted. Though very groggy, there on the beach she nursed a wounded British soldier who had been hit by a bomb splinter and was unconscious. ‘I stayed with him until he died, then I slipped his body into the sea. I never discovered his name.’

  There was much work to do. With seven other nurses, all that remained of the fifty who had gone on board the Kuala, she tended the many wounded and sick among the three hundred survivors. They tore strips from their dresses to make bandages and fashioned tree branches into beds. They had a few morphine tablets, ‘which made the last hours of the mortally wounded more bearable’. For three days they kept going on rations of one biscuit and half a cup of water a day before a small tramp steamer passed by and picked them up.

  The joy of their deliverance was short-lived. In the night, this ship too was bombed. Hundreds of women and children were asleep down in the hold, but Turner was lying out on deck when a searchlight glared from the sky and, without any warning, there were two violent explosions. ‘All around us, people were dead and dying.’ Struggling up the gangway from below was a fellow nurse, her dress covered with blood. ‘She said the hold had taken the full force of one of the shells and was absolutely smashed.’ By now the ship was almost on its side and, once again, Turner found herself in the sea and fighting not to be sucked down to her death as it sank. ‘The cries and screams of the wounded and the helpless in the dark were terrible; dead bodies were floating everywhere; mothers wailed for their children.’ She and another sister found a couple of small life rafts and went looking for survivors.

  ‘We managed to pick up fourteen people, including six children, two of whom were under one year old. There was room for two people to sit back to back on each raft, each one of them holding a child in their lap. The rest were in the water hanging on to the lifelines. I instilled into all of them the importance of never letting go, but when dawn broke I found that two had disappeared. That day, with the tropical sun beating down on us, two more of the women let go and were carried away.’ Worse was to come. ‘On the second day the children went mad. We had a terrible time with them, and lost them all. I examined each of them with great care before committing their small bodies to the sea. The last one was a very small baby and it was difficult to know if it was dead or not. I thought, “This is some woman’s precious child; I must not let it go until I’m sure.” But in the end there was no doubt and it had to go with the others.’

  By nightfall, just Margot and one other woman were left, adrift in an utterly empty ocean. ‘We sat back to back on a single raft with our feet in the water. Our lifejackets had rubbed our chins absolutely raw, so we took them off and trailed them behind. The afternoon of the next day, our third on the raft, we saw some islands and paddled feebly towards them using pieces of driftwood. Mrs Barnett [the other woman] let her paddle slip from her grasp and, before I could stop her, she had plunged into the sea after it. I was much too weak to swim after her. I called and strained my eyes to catch sight of her, but
there was just nothing. I was alone.’ But she was fiercely determined to live. ‘I would hold on to life as long as it was humanly possible.’ That meant staying awake and focussed. She collected raindrops in the lid of her powder compact and ate seaweed that floated by. ‘Night came and I watched the stars and soaked up the rain that beat down on me. I thought of home and my family and the happy things in my life.’

  On the fourth day, she spotted a ship on the horizon. It came towards her, a warship – a Royal Navy one perhaps? But as it got closer, she saw Japanese faces. Hauled on board at the end of a rope, she was surprised to be treated in a kindly fashion. She was given tea and a drop of whisky, then bread and milk. Her painful sunburn was treated. She was left to sleep. Then, when the ship arrived at an island off Sumatra, she was carried gently ashore because she was unable to walk. On dry land, she heard English voices and realized she had been brought to a PoW camp. She had been through hell since fleeing Singapore a little over a week ago, ‘so much death, so much suffering’. But she was alive and, after dangerously infected boils in her leg were lanced (albeit painfully with a blunt scalpel), well. Moreover, as she listened to the stories of other nurses who had been brought to the camp at Muntok, along with civilian internees from more than sixty refugee ships the Japanese had sunk in the waters between Singapore and Sumatra, she realized that her ordeal had not been the worst.

  Sister Vivian Bullwinkel was an Australian nurse, one of sixty-five who had left Singapore on a ship named the Vyner Brooke which appeared to have escaped detection until Japanese planes found and bombed it. Less than a third of the three hundred passengers got away, in a pair of leaky boats, and drifted on the currents until they came ashore in small groups on Sumatra – now, like Singapore, in Japanese hands. Realizing they could not hope to survive on their own in this desolate land, a naval officer from Bullwinkel’s group went looking for help and returned with a patrol of Japanese soldiers. Ominously, they had brought no stretchers with them for the wounded. What was going on?