Medic: Saving Lives - From Dunkirk to Afghanistan

by John Nichol

  But the dug-out began filling up as the road to the rear was cut off by enemy bombs. ‘I had battle exhaustion cases yelling and moaning in one corner, the lightly wounded on blankets in another and the serious cases needing transfusions in another. Some casualties had to stay in the ambulances in which they arrived.’ Over the battlefield now hung a heavy fog, and when Helm peered outside all he could see was coloured tracer bullets hurtling too close for comfort. He was anxious. He desperately needed fresh blood supplies, and the weather would slow their arrival. He was worried too about the mental condition of some of his patients, particularly a young lieutenant, lightly wounded, exhausted but in a highly excited manic state and desperate to get back to the fighting. He had taken his objective with the remnant of his platoon – just seven men – and had then been pushed back by lack of support. It took a lot of persuasion to get him to rest for a few hours. He was, Helm concluded, ‘a candidate for an award for bravery or a case of acute battle exhaustion. If he survived, that is. He seemed very near his limit.’ The doctor himself ‘plodded on’, as he put it, the fog cleared, the ambulances got away, the blood arrived. ‘The CO looked in at 8 a.m. and we must have been a sorry sight. It was raining, I was wearing a German mac and I hadn’t slept for thirty-six hours.’ This was military medicine in the raw, and no training could ever have prepared him for it.

  Not every medic could deal with the stress, and Helm was called on to help out at a regimental aid post where the stretcher-bearers had become very jumpy and were close to battle exhaustion. It was not surprising. They were often out in the open and exposed. They became casualties themselves. One was sitting in his jeep waiting to load stretchers when a mortar bomb dropped through his lap. By an astonishing twist of fate, it did not explode, but the momentum still sheared off his leg above the knee and his hand at the wrist. The doctor braved the gauntlet too as he was driven over to the aid post through a heavy German bombardment on the pillion of a dispatch rider’s motorbike. ‘We heard the distinctive whine of “moaning Minnie” and “sobbing sister” mortar bombs coming our way and dived for the ditch. This area was like a First World War no-man’s land, with many unburied dead soldiers lying around. I landed next to one of our men, who had clearly been dead for several days.’

  He found the section of nervy stretcher-bearers frantically digging in and joined them in scratching a shallow depression for himself in the ground. He tried to rally their flagging spirits. ‘I reassured them that three quarters of the noise was from our own guns and that they were working themselves into a state of exhaustion by telling each other what hell it was.’ In a few weeks, Helm, who in training had been in a funk over the use of live ammunition, had now morphed into a battle-hardened pro who was earning the pips on his shoulders. ‘To my surprise,’ he noted modestly, ‘the presence of even such a young and inexperienced officer as myself was able to provide a degree of reassurance and leadership.’ He got the men to act as a team, not just building their own individual scrapes to take cover in but working together to dig a trench big enough to take stretcher-cases. ‘This positive work for a purpose other than their own safety seemed to steady them, and all but one came out of his personal trench and set to wholeheartedly, with interruptions when I gave the word to dive for cover.’ With the ground prepared, the doctor and his new unit waited for casualties. ‘I lay on my back in my dent in the ground, looking up at the firework display of tracer shells and bullets arching up at enemy planes and then curving down towards us. It was a dry and warm night and surprisingly I managed a few hours’ sleep.’ As the sun rose, he watched RAF Halifaxes and Lancasters pouring cascades of bombs on to the German positions on the outskirts of Caen. Soon after, he and his men abandoned the trenches they had so laboriously dug when under fire and moved on, all that effort for nothing. But that too was the nature of being a medic in a mobile war such as this.

  Pressing on, they crossed a minefield, Helm’s least favourite activity –‘at least with shells and mortar bombs you can hear them coming and run for cover’ – and set up in the grounds of a château, where, with the battle deadlocked for a while, they stayed, unusually, for several weeks. Helm constructed a proper dug-out for himself here, digging a deep hole and roofing it with an old bedframe on which he piled clods of earth as protection against airburst shell fragments. Everywhere around was the detritus of war – broken trees, a burnt-out Sherman tank with the driver’s blackened skeleton still in his seat, dead horses and dead Germans lying just as they had fallen. Whenever the guns stopped, what struck Helm was the complete, deathly silence. In a field, a little foal was walking in a small circle round its recently killed mother. It had worn a path in the grass and refused to leave her.

  The similarity of the scenes around him to the trenches of the First World War was brought home to him when he took a motorbike into the town of Bayeux, where his doctor father, Cyril, had come out of retirement to take command of the tented hospital. Of all people, Dr Helm Snr had an inkling of what his son, who arrived caked in mud, was going through. Thirty years earlier, he had endured the unspeakable as a junior medical officer in northern France. His aid post had taken a direct hit from a shell, and the RAMC orderly he had been standing right next to simply disintegrated. He had lain among half a dozen bodies in a cellar of rubble listening to the shrieks and moans of the dying until he was rescued. At Hill 60 on the Ypres salient, he had toiled for two nights and three days without sleep, and without even lying down, as shells rained on his advanced dressing station and the already wounded were hit all over again. He had treated men choking to death on chlorine gas until he was evacuated sick himself.17 This new war was different from the trenches, mobile and fast-moving. But the suffering it caused and the heroism it called for, they were unchanged.

  The cost – that butcher’s bill again – was particularly high at Caen, as attack after attack on German positions was repelled. Medical orderly Len Brown buried seventy-three dead comrades in the soft, fertile earth around his aid post. The fighting was so intense that tanks had to be sent forward to pick up the wounded. It took a massive and merciless air strike by fleets of bombers eventually to dislodge the town’s defenders. Brown made his way along the town’s shattered streets, holding aloft a red cross flag. As he saw the bloody faces of those who surrendered, ‘for the first and only time in my life, I felt pity for the Germans. They were all in.’ But Dunkirk, where he had lost numerous friends and very nearly his own life, had been avenged. Another medic, Lance Corporal Eric Harden, who was attached to a Royal Marine commando unit, wrote to his wife back in England, ‘Well, darling, we have Caen at last. Perhaps we can get going now.’

  And get going the Allied armies duly did, though it was not until mid-August, two months after the invasion began, that the German forces in Normandy finally cracked and fifty thousand of their troops were encircled and surrendered at Falaise. Their physical condition was instructive. Lieutenant Colonel Debenham, a veteran of the fighting in North Africa and Italy, walked into a captured enemy field hospital and turned up his nose at what he saw. ‘Three hundred Boches,’ he recorded in his diary, ‘herded in stables on straw. Lousy. Food scarce. No evacuation facilities. Amputations common. One belly [casualty] had been wounded eight days ago and not operated on. Another, a captain, had abdominal wound, bowels protruded, pushed them back himself, held in with a belt, went on fighting for six hours until he had to pack up due to a second wound.’

  It was clear from this that there were brave men on both sides. But there was a huge and significant difference in the medical treatment they had received. In another captured hospital, nearly all of the 1,700 German soldiers were suffering from chronic sepsis, infections of the bone and septic joints. A quarter of them needed urgent blood transfusions. It was like stepping back into the First World War, said one senior British surgeon. He concluded that ‘the German standard of war surgery was very much lower than our own.’18

  German doctors appear not to have been tutored in modern tech
niques for suturing wounds, had no penicillin to treat gas gangrene and other infections, and transfused blood from man to man rather than drawing on blood banks. In their field hospitals, there was an acute shortage of surgical instruments and sanitary equipment. Scissors sometimes had to be used as scalpels. ‘Medicines were scarce too, and there was no attempt to develop antibiotics; auxiliary personnel were also in short supply and poorly trained,’ according to one expert.19 An underlying problem may well have been that the Nazi regime had given low priority to medical care, ‘gambling their all on the science of killing, and ignoring or under-estimating the value of preserving their own army in the field,’ as a British report put it.20 It is commonplace among some military historians to suggest that the German war machine was far superior to that of the Allies in the Second World War. Its equipment was better (notably its tanks), its generals more daring and its ranks often more disciplined and better trained. The Wehrmacht lost because the political follies of its Führer left it fighting on too many fronts, until it was finally overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers. If that analysis is true, then the one notable exception was in military medicine. The skills of Allied doctors and medics far exceeded the enemy’s, and the fact that more men in khaki were saved from death and patched up to return to the fray gave the armies of Eisenhower and Montgomery a clear advantage.

  *

  The advance of the Allied armies into the heart of France meant that one of the RAMC’s most unusual doctors could come out of hiding. In the spring of 1944, Major Geoffrey Parker, who had served as a surgeon through the campaigns in North Africa and Italy and was back in London recovering from a bout of jaundice, suddenly found himself pitched into a completely different type of warfare. SOE, the behind-the-lines Special Operations Executive, desperately needed a French-speaking doctor to join a group of Resistance guerrillas operating in the Jura mountains of southeastern France. The forty-two-year-old Parker, who spoke French fluently, was talent-spotted. At a hush-hush meeting at SOE’s headquarters in Baker Street, he was briefed that he would have some two hundred wounded men and women in his care, scattered among remote farmhouses and in hiding places in the forest. ‘The local doctors do what they can,’ he was told, ‘but the risks to them and their families if they are caught treating the maquis are frightful. That is why we need to send you.’21 He would get an extra ten shillings a day on his army pay as danger money.

  A few days later, clutching a Colt automatic pistol and an identity card in the name of Henri Martin, a commercial traveller in pharmaceutical products from Brest, he was sitting in the back of a blacked-out Dakota and preparing to parachute into the unknown. A diamond shape of fires flared in the blackness below and he jumped. On the ground to greet ‘Parsifal’ – his code name – was a cheering mass of a hundred Resistance fighters. ‘They were mostly boys,’ he recalled, ‘with a few skirted figures which could be taken for girls. Every imaginable variety of clothes – layers of them – and all very dirty. Boys and girls alike carried revolvers, loosely stuck in the belt. All had daggers, and a privileged few carried British and German tommy guns. They looked underfed, and I was to discover later that quite a few were suffering from the effects of under-nourishment and vitamin shortage – sore and bleeding gums and unsteady gait when carrying the lightest of loads.’ There was work to do here.

  Parker’s first job was to set up a field hospital for the maquis, and he selected a school building in what was thought to be a safe village. ‘The grapevine operated with fantastic speed, and all through the next day pathetic and smelly bundles of half-starved men were coming in by car and cart in twos and threes, without any organization on my part. All of their wounds were infected and fly-infested messes needing to be cleaned up and redressed. Some open compound fractures had to be re-plastered, but nothing could be done about the bad position of some of the fractures, as no anaesthetist was available. There were no abdominal or chest cases; those that had occurred had died of their injuries.’

  But then word came that the SS and the Gestapo were making a sweep through the area, killing and arresting as they went, and he had instantly to pack everything and everyone up and head for the hills. With eighty wounded in a handful of steam-lorries, he drove deep into the Jura. Abandoning the lorries, they then set off on foot up rock paths and along forest trails, closely pursued by German forces. Bullets from behind sent him ducking for cover behind a tree. ‘It wasn’t a very big tree. I pressed hard against it, and wet my pants. I could feel bullets thudding into the other side and others whining past. I don’t know how they missed the overlapping bits of my anatomy. I was terrified.’ The firing stopped, and he calculated that the enemy soldier who had been shooting at him was out of ammunition. ‘I jumped out from behind my tree and there was the poor devil less than fifteen yards from me. He was bending forward to get another magazine from his belt and I shot him in the stomach. He clutched at his middle and pitched forward without a sound. I fired at him again but he didn’t move. I had killed him with the first shot.’ The remainder of the German patrol retreated, and Parker, shaking, fled to rejoin the rest of his band as they climbed higher and higher.

  For weeks they played hide-and-seek in the mountains, always on the move, staying clear of the patrols that kept coming after them, sleeping under the trees and the stars, living off rabbits and berries. One of his companions was a man they called the Executioner, whose job was to deal with anyone suspected of tipping off the enemy of their whereabouts. Parker had to look the other way when a farmer caught telephoning the gendarmes was made to dig his own grave and then dispatched with a bullet in the head.

  From their radio operator, they heard the news of the Allied landings in Normandy. ‘The effect on morale was enormous,’ Parker declared, but the reality was that the fighting was about to intensify. Arms were dropped in by parachute, and the maquis, their time come, went on the offensive, harrying German forces wherever and whenever they could. The doctor now took to going out to collect wounded guerrillas hidden in villages and bringing them back to the hospital he had set up in the mountains.

  It was also his job to buy desperately needed food – dangerous work, because it took him into towns where the Germans were. In a marketplace early one summer’s morning, he was followed. The firm hand of a black-uniformed Gestapo officer was on his shoulder and a brusque voice demanded his identity papers. It was the moment he had dreaded. ‘My mind took a few seconds to react to the reality and horror of it.’ He knew full well that his name – ‘Parsifal’ – was on a wanted poster pinned up at the town hall, along with those of four other maquis commanders. A reward of a million francs was being offered for their capture, dead or alive. Parker collected his wits, produced his fake papers, told his cover story, refused to panic, kept his cool. ‘I could feel the sweat in my hair under my beret, and wondered if it would start to trickle down my face, and show the stark terror that was in my head and heart. If they had made a body search, I would have been a goner. I had my automatic pistol on a string under my shirt.’ But his performance was convincing. The German lost interest and sent him on his way. ‘Very good, sir,’ a relieved Parker grovelled. ‘And thank you very much.’

  The doctor was now properly set up in a hospital of sorts in the granary of a farm at the top of a steep mountain track. Casualties were bedded down on straw, and when the word got out, more arrived on stretchers every day. There was running water from a nearby stream and a small lake to bathe in. As Parker scrubbed himself clean for the first time in two months, he caught sight of himself in a mirror – with considerable shock. ‘My eyes seemed lost and sunk in their sockets, and my cheeks were hollow. In fact I have never been so fit in my life, not in the athletic sense, but in the stringy way necessary to survive this life on the run.’ In this more settled environment, Parker was able to carry out something more than basic emergency treatment. He was able to perform ‘open sepsis’ surgery, leaving wounds to heal in the now accepted RAMC fashion, and improvised a Thomas splint fro
m a bent nail, an old dog collar and some rubber tubing which allowed a man with a gunshot wound to his sciatic nerve to hobble back to his unit and carry on the fight. To his consternation, he was called on to give his medical judgement on a new recruit, a young woman who claimed she wanted to join the Resistance because the Germans had raped her. He was asked to examine her, and could find no bruises or injuries to corroborate her story. The Executioner took her away.

  By now, the Germans were on the retreat, and Parker’s group increasingly went on the offensive. He joined them on the nighttime ambush of a convoy, at which a young fighter named Georges was badly wounded with gunshots to his abdomen – the worst kind. In his hospital in the granary, Parker had had no success at all with these types of injury. He couldn’t get the area free enough from germs to risk operating, and his only anaesthetic was a short-term one and unsuitable for lengthy surgery. All his casualties with wounds in the gut had died. Things did not look good for young Georges, even had he been in the granary. Out in the open and at night, his chances were even slimmer. Parker examined the boy. ‘Fumbling around in the darkness, I drew up half a grain of morphia from a glass ampoule into my syringe, and took out a small torch which I could hold in my teeth while I slowly gave him an intravenous injection. When it had taken effect, I pulled up his shirt and found three bullet holes in the left lower part of his abdominal wall. Then I gently turned him on to his side and put a finger into his rectum. When I withdrew it, there was blood on my finger, indicating that he had a penetrating injury in the bowel.’ Surgically speaking, Parker knew the situation was a simple one. ‘Either the boy was going to die from internal haemorrhage, probably within the next half-hour, or he would stop bleeding as the result of a combination of shock, lowered blood-pressure and the morphia injection. If the bleeding stopped, then, given reasonable surgical conditions, I could operate with a fair chance of success, as I had done in North Africa and Italy earlier.’ The crucial issue was where to find a suitable operating theatre out here in the wild.