Medic: Saving Lives - From Dunkirk to Afghanistan

by John Nichol

  Harden’s sergeant major and friend, Harry Bennett, was unstinting as he wrote on behalf of ‘the lads of A Troop’. ‘I was close to him in the action, and his courage was truly magnificent. Mercifully, his death was sudden, with no pain. His face had its usual serene look still, which it always had in life. He was one of the greatest men it has ever been my pleasure to meet. He was my right-hand man. Nothing was too much trouble for him if it would help the chaps, even out of the action. He was always helping with the cooking and rations, apart from his own job. He was always cheerful and full of life.’ The troop was on the far side of the Rhine before Bennett had had the chance to write and, as they had battled on after Harden’s death, they had missed him terrifically. ‘He is always in our thoughts. We are always talking of him. There will never be another “Doc”.’

  Dick Mason felt he had lost not just a friend but a mentor. ‘He was a father to us all. We could talk to him and tell him all our troubles, and he would not say a wrong word about anyone. It is men like him who will make a better world.’ Eric’s closest chum, a Cornish medic named Sid Gliddon, told Maud how they spent hours together when they were off duty, chatting about their families and thinking about their lives after the war. ‘He was coming down to Penzance and I was coming up to see you all. How much we had planned to do!’

  All this soothed Maud Harden as she struggled to cope with her husband’s death. To Mrs Cory, she wrote with great generosity of spirit that she and the lieutenant must not reproach themselves about Eric’s death. ‘I find two things to bring slight consolation in the whole sad affair. The first is that your husband’s life not only was saved but that he is making progress. I feel Eric did not lose his life in vain. The second is that my husband was killed outright and did not know. He knew how much I dreaded this happening, so I am thankful he was not mortally injured and lying there thinking of us.’ His bravery did not surprise her. ‘I can easily picture him acting as he did. He must have known what he was doing at the time, and he did it willingly. He died as he lived, a brave, straight, true man.’ She poured out her choking mixture of anguish and pride to the Reverend Haw. ‘He had everything to live for, yet it counted for nothing when his comrades needed his help. He loved his two children so much, yet, that others might live, he was taken from us. As a son, husband and father as well as a soldier, he was everything good. I thank God for the eight years of our life we spent together.’ But, for all her pride in him, there was understandable sadness that he had put his comrades before himself and his family.

  The award of the posthumous Victoria Cross for ‘her very gallant husband’ was gazetted on 8 March 1945. ‘His complete contempt for all personal danger and the magnificent example he set of cool courage and determination to continue with his work, whatever the odds, was an inspiration to his comrades,’ the citation read. Maud was told in a War Office telegram delivered to her at home.

  The decoration nearly didn’t happen. Maud showed the original letter from Eric’s commanding officer to his sister, who rather foolishly tipped off the press that her brother had been recommended for a VC. The subsequent newspaper reports sent officialdom into a predictable spin. It wasn’t just that far more VCs were recommended by COs than were actually awarded and the sifting progress was notoriously rigorous. More damagingly, protocol was being flouted. Charges were levelled of pre-empting the King, who had to approve the award, and there was a period when it looked as if a piqued establishment might deny Eric its highest award for bravery. Maud was mightily embarrassed and pained, especially since, quite unfairly, she was suspected of being the leaker. In the end, good sense prevailed and the VC was confirmed. In the House of Commons, the War Office minister Sir John Grigg used the occasion to pay a tribute. He had seen the account of Harden’s courageous actions, ‘and I do not remember ever reading anything more heroic’. But he then went beyond the individual to the service he represented as a whole. ‘The medical services have been beyond praise in this war. The number of lives and limbs saved by the devotion of doctors is beyond measuring.’ It was a moment the forgotten army of medics would cherish, as they cherished Harden’s VC. At last, they had been recognized and remembered for a myriad unsung deeds of gallantry and self-sacrifice.

  A year later, at Buckingham Palace, George VI pinned the bronze, square-edged cross with its purple ribbon on the jacket lapel of eight-year-old Bobby Harden, standing at attention in his best suit, his hair slicked down, his mother at his side, in a smart hat and with a fox fur over her shoulder. They had come up on the train from Northfleet – in a third-class carriage. Even for a dead hero, rules were rules, and a third-class rail warrant was all the Palace, its courtiers at their most condescending, would offer the widow and her son. The ordinary people of Britain showed themselves more generous. Eric’s story captured many imaginations, and a memorial fund in his name raised £10,000, with which Maud bought her house and paid for the education of Bobby and Julie.

  To her everlasting regret, Julie, who was six months old when her father was killed, has no memories of him. But his presence filled her life as she strove to find out all she could about him and to make sense of his death. She visited his grave in Holland and followed in his footsteps by joining the St John Ambulance Brigade. Six decades on, she says, ‘I am intensely and immensely proud to be my dad’s daughter.’ She was right to be. He had the heart and soul of a true medic, who heard his comrades’ cry for help and could not and would not desert them while there was breath in his body.

  *

  Would there ever be occasions again for heroes such as Eric Harden? At the end of the Second World War, it looked unlikely, as a new era of warfare began which appeared to change the role of military medics utterly. RAF doctor Aidan MacCarthy, a prisoner of the Japanese, was there to witness the future. He was a slave labourer working in open-cast coal mines on the outskirts of the city of Nagasaki, dealing as best he could with sickness and injury among his fellow PoWs but helpless as their condition deteriorated daily. As American bombers appeared in the sky with increasing regularity, they were switched to digging air-raid shelters and then to carving out a huge pit, which he had no doubt was intended to be a communal grave for the prisoners when their guards massacred them. It was into the shelters he had dug with his own hands that he flung himself on 9 August 1945 when the vapour trails of two B-29s were seen overhead. ‘A couple of our men did not bother to go into the shelters, staying on the surface and crouching in the shadow of the barrack huts. One of them shouted to us that three small parachutes were dropping. There then followed a blue flash, accompanied by a very bright magnesium-type flare that blinded them. Then came a frighteningly loud explosion, followed by a blast of hot air and then an eerie silence.’

  One of the PoWs stuck his head out of the shelter, glanced around and then ducked back in, a look of incredulity on his face. The others rushed to the exits to see for themselves.

  Our camp had to all intents and purposes disappeared. The wood had carbonized and turned to ashes. Bodies lay everywhere, some horribly mutilated by falling walls, girders and flying glass. Those people still on their feet ran round in circles, hands pressed to their blinded eyes or holding the flesh that hung in tatters from their faces or arms. We could suddenly see right up the length of the valley, where previously the factories and buildings had formed a screen. Left behind was a crazy forest of discoloured corrugated sheets clinging to twisted girders. Most frightening of all was the lack of sunlight. In contrast to the bright August sunshine a few minutes earlier, there was now a kind of twilight. We all genuinely thought this was the end of the world.5

  MacCarthy took to his heels and ran for the hills, past an endless stream of burnt, bleeding, flesh-torn, stumbling people. In the first intact village he came to, he stopped running. The doctor inside him reasserted itself, and he set to work, splinting and tying up broken bones. Many injuries were beyond treatment. Melting glass had burnt into bodies and fused with their bones and tissue. A mysterious black rain beg
an to fall, and people who had otherwise escaped the blast began to collapse with sickness. The PoWs were rounded up by the Japanese secret police, marched back into Nagasaki and put to work picking through the carpet of human bodies and laying them out for cremation. A few days later, the prisoners were assembled, to be told that the Emperor had surrendered and the war was over. ‘We were all in a state of shock. We cried, hugged each other, shook hands, dropped on our knees and thanked God.’

  This new, terrifying weapon, the atom bomb, would fundamentally change the whole nature of warfare between the major international powers. In the post-Second World War years, the burgeoning nuclear arsenals on either side of a divided world seemed to make a nonsense of conventional soldiering. If what MacCarthy had witnessed was the future, then medics would be better training as undertakers for all the good their life-saving skills would do.

  8. A Long Way from Home

  The Second World War had been a triumph for Britain’s military medical services. They were better equipped, better trained and better used than ever before. Their success was exemplified by the tale of nineteen-year-old Trooper Thomas Toughill of the 11th Hussars, whose survival from devastating injuries in 1945 was every bit as astonishing as Sergeant Major Stockton’s would be in 2006 (see Chapter 1). Just weeks before the end of the fighting in Germany, Toughill was in the driving seat of a Daimler armoured car on the far side of the Rhine, following the tracks of a German Tiger tank. He reached up to pull down the protective steel visor. ‘Suddenly,’ he recalled, ‘there was a thunderous roar and I was engulfed in flame, along with a terrific impact on my arm and face.’1 He looked down and saw his broken arm lying in his lap and the middle finger of his left hand, still in the glove, lined up beside it, detached. The ammunition in the armoured car was going to explode any minute, so somehow he levered himself out and knelt, gasping in pain, on the ground. ‘Then I saw five Germans looking at me from a hedge ten yards away. They raised their rifles, and I tried to turn away from them. But I felt a burning pain on my leg and another on my hip, followed by a terrific blow in my back and a plopping sound in my chest as the last bullet went clean through me.’

  He dragged himself into a ditch and slumped there. Blood was seeping out of him and he was feeling hazy. He was dying. That he didn’t was down to a corporal who skidded to a halt in a jeep, picked him up in his arms and carried him to a waiting ambulance. His last memory before blacking out was of being on a table with an orderly cutting off his uniform. He emerged from ‘a tunnel, a beautiful tunnel with music being played’, three days later, to hear a voice shouting, ‘Nurse! Nurse! He is waking.’ He was trussed up like the Invisible Man. ‘My right arm was in plaster from the shoulder right down to my fingers. My left hand was bandaged like a boxing glove, my chest had heavy padding on it and my face was bandaged where my ear had been severely burnt. I had no voice at all because of a shrapnel wound in my throat.’ But, against all expectation, he was alive.

  Toughill’s wounds were extensive and immense. Thirty years earlier, in the First World War, his death would have been a virtual certainty. He survived because, though he was right up in the front line, an ambulance had managed to get to him, and doctors, who could easily have given him up for dead, persisted in doing their job against the odds. Transfusions had put the lost blood back into his body. Ample supplies of penicillin kept infection at bay. A year of hospital lay ahead. His arm wouldn’t mend properly and was a prime candidate for amputation. In 1916, there would have been no question of saving it. Now, the doctors put him in traction to straighten the broken bones and did so. Then came months of painful skin-grafting. A sliver of steel was pulled from Toughill’s eye, and it was 1948 before the last piece of shrapnel was removed from his calf.

  Toughill was living proof of the medical triumphs of the Second World War. Afterwards, with high-level compliments heaped on the service in the House of Commons, there was a certain amount of back-slapping and self-congratulation. ‘Our present-day army is not one of foot-slogging cannon fodder, obeying without thinking, but of skilled and experienced technicians used to controlling and repairing complicated machines, including the human body,’ declared one report proudly in 1946.2 Much had been learned medically in the war – about controlling pain and infection, about the correct treatment of traumatic wounds, about blood transfusions, burns, general health and hygiene – and it added enormously to the fund of knowledge bequeathed to the newly created National Health Service. Civilian medicine was a huge beneficiary of the war. But military medicine now rested on its laurels. The learning seemed to stop, and little thought was given to updating medical techniques. When British forces parachuted into Suez in the fiasco invasion of Egypt in 1956, most of the glass bottles of blood they carried smashed on landing. New experimental transfusion bags sent from the United States, made from polyethylene and shatterproof, had been left behind in the RAMC storeroom because the brigadier they were delivered to had no idea what they were.

  The logistical lessons of the Second World War were quickly forgotten. Air evacuation of casualties, though limited in scope, had been a great success in the last months of the conflict in 1945. At an airfield in Brussels, the lines of Dakotas were an inspiring sight as they arrived every few minutes to fly wounded servicemen home. So impressed was Lieutenant General Sir Neil Cantlie, Director General of the Army Medical Services, that he had no hesitation in predicting that ‘ambulance planes’ would be essential for future wars. They had been repeatedly requested in the war that had just finished, but turned down because of shortage of resources. This same ‘hoary’ argument, he said, had been made to deny special hospital ships for the Crimean War and road ambulances for the Boer War, until public opinion clamoured for them and their provision became standard practice. The same would apply to ambulance aircraft. Cantlie was backed by Field Marshal Sir William Slim, whose jungle army had depended on air evacuation of casualties when fighting the Japanese in Burma. The army’s adjutant general had made a similar point during the war after witnessing events in North Africa,3 and the self-same lesson came over loud and clear from the Italian campaign – the medical services needed their own fleet of aircraft. The pleas all went unheeded. There would be no dedicated air ambulances. (Shamefully, sixty-five years on from the end of the Second World War, there still aren’t, and the debate goes on over battlefield helicopters exclusively for medical use.)

  In fact, the whole process of medical evacuation, one of the war’s great organizational successes, went into reverse when the entire flotilla of hospital ships was scrapped and not replaced. This was par for the course. In the new world of the nuclear Cold War, no one could see any point in them. As the implications of arsenals of Armageddon weapons took a hold on military thinking, planning for a conventional war was pushed aside. Even the long-drawn-out and bloody conflicts of Korea and Vietnam were perceived as essentially side issues against the very real possibility of a global nuclear conflagration. For the British military establishment, battlefield medicine had become largely an irrelevance and an anachronism, a dead speciality, killed off by doomsday weapons. Who needed it, or would ever have reason to make use of it again?

  It was no coincidence that, in this period, medics even became a source of black comedy, a good laugh. ‘Attention! Attention! Choppers incoming. Wounded incoming,’ rang out the tinny loudspeaker announcement, sending ultra-cool, wise-cracking, khaki-clad doctors and nubile nurses racing from whatever they had been getting up to in their tents to scrub up and prepare to operate on badly injured men on their way from the battlefront. This was M*A*S*H,4 Hollywood’s anarchic take on life in a field hospital. The parched hills the ambulance helicopters scooted around to land their casualties were supposed to be those of Korea in the 1950s during the war with the communist forces of China, in which more than 35,000 American servicemen and 1,000 British soldiers died. In fact, they were filmed in California in the 1970s, and the hard graft inside the operating tent was accompanied by hard drinking and perpetu
al partying outside.

  For civilians on both sides of the Atlantic, director Robert Altman’s 1970 feature film, and then the long-running TV series, with more than 250 episodes, which aired from 19725 to 1983, would become an enduring – and utterly misleading – image of how the military medical services went about their work. Its macho surgeons and willing nurses were a mockery, but slick and funny for all that. The generation that had fought in the Second World War was not much amused, but the show’s irreverence appealed to the new wave of hippies, cynics and peaceniks. It was anti-authoritarian in tone and anti-war in the message it gave out. It was a satire on the perceived lunacies of military life and a subversive assault on the unpopular war in Vietnam, where the helicopters were then flying for real, not just for the movie cameras, and nearly 60,000 young Americans died and 300,000 were wounded. When the Vietnam conflict ended in humiliating military defeat for the US in 1975, the zaniness of M*A*S*H underlined the commonly held view that wars like this were history. Then, for the people of Britain, out of the blue, something happened that changed this popular pacifist perception. And it was definitely not funny.

  *

  Corporal Johnnie Geddes had just arrived with his wife and children at his mother-in-law’s home in Newcastle in April 1982 when a one-word telegram dropped through the letterbox. ‘Normandy,’ it read.6 History and tradition are the glues that bind fighting men to past glories in the hope of inspiring them to future success, so the secret codeword that summoned him and the other men of the Parachute Regiment to their most difficult post-war expedition to date was an apt one. He got straight back into the car and drove the length of England through the night to report to barracks. As with the Normandy landings of 1944, this was to be another venture across the sea to the beaches of a foreign land, but there the similarities with the invasion of France ended. This time those hostile shores were more than 7,500 miles away, on the other side of the world.