Medic: Saving Lives - From Dunkirk to Afghanistan

by John Nichol

  Welsh Guards officer Captain Hilarian Roberts had been below in the Galahad with his men, breaking the dispiriting news to his platoon sergeant that the vessel’s rear ramp was jammed and getting off was going to take a long time. The sergeant heard planes, yelled, ‘Get down!’, and the captain hit the deck. ‘There was this enveloping thud, and a huge flame that was billowing straight at me and then over me. I experienced an extraordinary slow-motion feeling of being burnt. I watched my hands go the colour of sickly white-grey washing-up gloves. The skin peeled off like talons of wax. My hair was on fire, and I tried to beat it out with those now useless hands of mine.’4 He had no doubt he was a dead man. ‘Well, that’s it, it’s finished, its all over,’ he thought to himself as a cloud of black smoke descended. His last physical sensation, he realized, would be the smell of his own flesh burning. But the instinct to survive kicked in. The main impact of the blast had gone over him, not through him, and it was this that saved him. ‘I’d have been dead if I hadn’t been flat on the ground.’ Bizarrely, he was covered in feathers, the remains of someone’s sleeping bag.

  He stood up and began to feel his way to the stairs, though the pain in his skinned hands made each touch agony. He could sense people around him in the same state – shocked, hands dripping, faces beginning to blacken all over. There was a logjam on the stairs but, through the darkness, he heard the steady voice of a senior NCO: ‘Keep calm… one at a time.’ Roberts found it reassuring and so took up the cry himself: ‘Keep calm… one at a time.’ It seemed to work in suppressing the panic that could have engulfed them all and made escape even harder. ‘Eventually, we came staggering out on to the deck, and then I suppose the adrenalin, the immediate instinct to get out, began to wear off, and I felt as sick as a dog.’ He clawed his way down a rope ladder and was lifted into a rescue boat. In the water around, patches of oil were blazing. Above, strong winds fanned the flames and Galahad’s fuel tanks and ammunition stores exploded.

  Sergeant Peter ‘Pierre’ Naya of the RAMC was down in the Galahad’s hold, also preparing for the long and slow process of disembarking, when the planes struck and a massive orange fireball erupted around him. A twenty-year army veteran, he had never experienced anything like this. ‘It burnt blokes, it killed blokes. Everywhere there was the screaming of men in agony, pain, shock, fear, panic.’5 His own backpack was in flames and burning the back of his head. ‘I couldn’t see a thing; all I could smell was burning metal and flesh and acrid smoke. The heat was scorching my lungs.’ Some were lucky. On the mess deck, another medic, Andy Poole, had slipped away from his quarters without permission and was waiting to get lunch when the ship’s Tannoy blurted out the call of ‘Action stations!’ He barely had time to heed it before he was blown to the floor, the lights went out, electric cables sparked and flickered overhead and smoke and flames filled the area. ‘I saw one of the Chinese cooks just flying through the air towards me, on fire.’6 Instinctively, Poole’s hand went to his groin, ‘to make sure I still had my bits’. He was intact there, and so was the rest of him – but the man sitting next to him was a wreck. ‘He was really badly burnt by the flash. I have no idea why him and not me. Just the vagaries of war, I suppose. Somebody up there was looking after me.’

  He began to do the job he was trained for. He shook the bodies around him for a response, quickly felt for their pulses, then, when he got nothing, moved on to the next one.

  I crawled over bodies of the dead and made my way out into smoke-filled corridors. There were horrors at every turn. I passed the ablutions, where there was a guy on the toilet, except he had no legs. He must have been sitting there when the explosion caught him. He was dead. Then the hold door flew open and a blast of flames and intense heat, plus exploding ammunition, came at me. A figure stumbled out, on fire from head to foot. We couldn’t get near him because of the heat. If I had had my rifle with me, I would have shot him, as there was no way he could have survived. But he dropped lifeless to the floor anyway.

  Those who could were groping their way upwards, towards daylight at the top of the stairs. Naya grabbed an injured guardsman by the belt and yanked him up, rung by rung. ‘He was in agony, but I knew I had to get him up on deck. He kept screaming, “Mind my leg!”, but I could see he’d already lost it.’ Out on deck, he put his arm round the soldier and half carried him away from the smoke, the injured man trailing a line of blood as the shattered stump dragged across the deck. Everywhere Naya turned, there were terrible sights. Where lads had grabbed hold of red-hot handrails, the skin of their palms had peeled off like kid gloves and bunched in folds over their fingers. Areas of the body exposed at the moment of the flash suffered most – the face, neck, ears, hair and hands. ‘Some were completely burnt from the neck up – no hair, no eyebrows, skins black and swollen. Many would carry the scars all their life.’ But those covered up weren’t unaffected either. Terrible burns were caused by the plastic all-weather clothing many of them were wearing to keep out the cold and wet of the Falklands. They literally fried as the fabric caught light, melted and stuck to their skin. ‘It was pitiful to watch men running and rolling around and trying to tear off their clothes, in such pain, such terrible pain.’

  Naya’s every instinct shrieked at him to get off the Galahad, but his sudden thought was that he could be the only trained medic left on the scene. All the doctors had gone ashore before the attack. He looked around and couldn’t see any other medics at work. He couldn’t just run. Lives depended on him. ‘So I got stuck in with what medical kit I had to hand – a single pair of scissors! Everything else had gone, blown to pieces.’ Down on his knees on the blistering-hot deck, the flames just feet away and explosion after explosion still rocking the air, he started to cut away at the badly burnt clothes of a casualty. Others were drawn towards him. ‘I became a focus for people. They knew someone was there to help.’ NCOs were beginning to get a grip on the situation, calming the distressed and organizing lines of injured men for him to see. Naya needed splints for broken limbs and smashed his boot down on a wooden pallet lying on deck to make some. Guardsmen who had managed to avoid injury pitched in with the dressings and intravenous drips from their own packs. ‘Everyone rallied round.’ He issued orders – ‘Grab this, do that.’ A drip in here, a splint on there. Do what you can then move to the next one. As he went from casualty to casualty, he didn’t even have time to look up. ‘I remember trying to put a figure-of-eight bandage round some poor bugger’s legs and a field dressing over a fellow’s stumps. I used some webbing straps as a tourniquet and a bayonet to tighten it. Then I looked up at the poor devil and saw his face was swollen to twice its size, like a pumpkin, and was completely black with the flash burn.’

  He worked at a frantic pace, utterly absorbed in what he was doing. ‘It was decisions, decisions. Could I leave this one? What were the chances of saving that one? Who’s next for the helicopter? How much time have I got?’ Over everything hung the fear of another attack from the air or the ship blowing up beneath him. Evacuating everyone was urgent. A navy ‘three-ringer’ – a commander – offered his services to the sergeant, and together they tried to strap a lad who’d lost a leg into a harness dangling from a helicopter. It wouldn’t work, so they lashed him to a pallet and wrapped the harness round that, but when the helicopter began to lift him he rolled off in agony. They got him up and away in the end, but Naya could never quite recall precisely how.

  Andy Poole had also made it on deck now, and the vision of hell he saw was hard for a nineteen-year-old to deal with. ‘The smell of burnt flesh was terrible, and the screams of the badly wounded made you shudder. Cries of “Medic!” could be heard everywhere. Others were jumping over the side into rafts and landing craft that came alongside, but I had a job to do. There were men still on fire, men with legs missing, men dying. Someone came up to me and said, “You’re a medic, do what you can,” and filled my hands with syrettes of morphine.’ He got stuck in.

  Outside, in the sea and on land, a massive rescue ope
ration was underway. Helicopter pilots cut blindly through the smoke and hovered feet from the fires as their crewmen were winched down into the inferno to snatch men from death. Hilarian Roberts’s life raft was one of several that began to drift back towards the fire, but a helicopter came low and used its down-draught to push them away from danger. This was not a case of ‘every man for himself’. On the contrary, those who had swum or rowed to safe waters turned back to help those still in danger. From the shore, scores of soldiers and sailors, all drawn to the scene by an unspoken compulsion to help comrades in distress, waded out into the freezing bay to grab the injured and carry them on their shoulders to land.

  On the beach, Steven Hughes set up an emergency RAP for the flood of casualties coming in on helicopters and staggering from landing craft and life rafts. ‘There were guys with burns who would have been stretcher casualties, had there been any stretchers. They were walking up the beach and collapsing. Bodies in bright orange survival suits were lying everywhere. Out in the bay plumes of smoke were rising from the burning ships. It was a horrific scene.’

  While his team got to work, he jumped into one of the now-empty landing craft lined up on the beach and told the bosun to take him out to the Galahad. He stuck his last remaining cigar between his teeth and drew on it nervously as they neared the inferno. ‘I was aware she was a potential time bomb.’ They sailed in alongside the stricken vessel, and one of his men tried to heave himself on board but was beaten back by the flames. By then, most of the casualties had been lifted off and so Hughes’s craft pulled clear and began rounding up life rafts and ushering them to the shore.

  Bill Bentley was with a group of medics who positioned themselves on a cliff above the cove and waved with their stretchers to alert the helicopter pilots to bring some of the casualties to them for treatment. It was the shortest flying route, and the choppers could unload their wounded and go straight back to the ship for more. The injuries were horrific, he recalled – terrible burns, limbs blown off, people burnt black all over. One guardsman had lost a leg, but it was another wound that was puzzling – his throat was ripped wide open. Bentley discovered that the explosion had hurled the young soldier through the wall of the ship into the sea, blown off his leg and set him on fire. Suffocating in the smoke and in terrible agony, he was sure he was going to die and had pulled out his multi-purpose pocket knife to end it all quickly by cutting his own throat. But, instead of the sharp blade, which would have done the job, he had mistakenly been hacking away at himself with the tin opener. A helicopter got to him in time, blew out the flames with its down-draught and put a blast of fresh air in his face before picking him up and carrying him to shore.

  On the blazing hulk of the Galahad, Naya had been working flat out and was thankfully now tending to the last few survivors. One of the last to get away was a young soldier in great pain from his burns. The medic could do nothing for him but resort to the traditional soldier’s standby in an emergency. ‘I lit a cigarette and put it in his mouth.’ A grin of pleasure creased across the youngster’s bewildered, exhausted face. ‘He stood holding his blackened and bleeding hands in the air and puffing merrily away.’ He wasn’t the only one in need of a smoke that day. Hughes, for one, had his cigar. It was said, too, that the moment they hit the beach, some survivors had a cigarette for the first time in their lives, to calm the adrenalin pumping through them.

  Naya, who was awarded a Military Medal for his devotion to duty at the risk of his own life, reserved his greatest praise for the helicopter pilots who kept on coming to haul away the wounded. ‘They performed miracles. They were unbelievably brave. They saved over three hundred lives that day.’ Finally, after he’d been kneeling on that deck for more than an hour, it was his time to get away. Everyone else had gone, but so had all the life boats. ‘For the first time, I looked over the side of the ship and, for the first time, I saw how far we were from the land. It would be a long swim. I’d survived the fire and now it looked as if I was going to drown. I knew I’d last no more than five minutes in the icy water. If I jump, I’ve had it, I thought.’ But if he stayed on board he was going to be a dead man anyway. There were more explosions from the decks below. Bullets from the ammunition stores were whizzing around, and he had no helmet – it had been lost in the original blast – to protect him. He began to remove his boots and take a chance, a slim one, in the water.

  Suddenly a naval officer came out of the smoke and gesticulated to me. A chopper was coming. I have never been more grateful to see a pilot in my life, and as I was pulled on board I put the sign of the cross on his visor. He just smiled – he was so young. As we veered away from the ship I began to tremble and shake like a leaf. I’d survived, I’d got my hands, my legs, and I was in one piece. I was almost the last one off the Galahad. When I got ashore, the first person I saw was our RSM. I was so pleased I gave him a hug and a kiss, and all the other boys too. He shouted something at me but I could barely make it out. I didn’t realize until then that I’d gone deaf out there.

  Poole was also among the last to be taken off the floating inferno. The medics of 16 Field Ambulance had had a literal baptism of fire. Not all had come through. When roll call was taken, three were missing, presumed dead.

  One of them was his best mate, Kenny Preston, a bubbly Lancashire lad, a drinking companion and ‘a good laugh’. Before they left the UK, Preston had said he didn’t think he’d be coming back, and now that premonition had come true. ‘I’d seen him on Galahad a couple of hours before the attack,’ Poole remembered. ‘We chatted, and then I said, “See you on land.” But I never saw him again. This was my mate I’d been chatting to only a few hours ago. I was stunned, as most of us were. But I thought to myself that, had I stayed below decks where I should have been instead of sneaking up to the mess hall, that could have been me. And now there was still a job to be getting on with. There would be more wounded to deal with. We had to press on. Our lost comrades would have expected no less.’

  *

  Hughes, reassured that the last man was off the Galahad, was also back on land and had returned to his main aid post at the Fitzroy village hall. The more serious casualties had been brought here, and he dispensed shots of penicillin into the backsides of a long line of Welsh Guardsmen before dispatching them to the hospital at Ajax Bay. Here the news of the attack had come like a thunderbolt. There was talk of fifty or sixty men dead and many hundreds injured.

  Rick Jolly and his teams prepared for a tidal wave to hit them. The helicopters began to clatter in, and every possible hand was at the landing site to bring the stretchers inside. Each new patient seemed to be in a worse state than the last. There was no let-up – the numbers rose incessantly, passing the hundred mark, then nudging towards a hundred and fifty. No one could tell how many more were on the way. What was technically classed as a ‘mass casualty situation’ was developing rapidly. The real danger was that it would swamp and then submerge the Ajax Bay facilities. Jolly arranged for as many as possible of the walking wounded to be shipped out straight away to be treated in the sick bays of navy vessels in the Sound.

  The sickest could not be moved and, about them, difficult decisions had to be made. Priority would have to go not to the most serious cases but to the ones with the best chance of survival. ‘We had to do the best we could for the largest number, and recognize that some were so badly injured they would take up too much time and resources to treat and thereby reduce the chances of many others.’ To Jolly fell the task of playing God, making those awesome life-and-death choices. He turned away half of those who arrived at the hospital doors. They had flash burns over 10 per cent or less of their bodies – they would have to wait. ‘I expected some ranting and raving, perhaps even accusations of betrayal or flint-heartedness. However, the young Welsh Guardsmen were stoical and even cheery as we broke the news to them. They stood near the doorway, blowing on their tattered and painful hands to keep them cool. Strips of skin hung from their fingers like thin, wet muslin, and their
faces were blistered and raw, the hair singed short. By God, they were brave.’

  Their selflessness touched him deeply. ‘Each man seemed to know of someone else more seriously injured than himself and wanted him treated first. “Don’t worry about me, sir,” they would say. “What about Evans (or Williams or Jones)? He’s the one that needs you, not me…” ’ In the end, seventy had to be turned away from getting immediate aid. They faced being loaded back into a landing craft and ferried to ships in the Sound, being taken out to sea again when their minds were still full of the maritime horror they had only just escaped. The bumpy crossing over the waves would be physically as well as mentally agonizing. Only afterwards would they get something to soothe their pain, some balm for their burnt extremities. ‘I watched them as they marched away into the night,’ Jolly remembered, guilty still about the decisions he had to make on other men’s lives, ‘still blowing on their hands as they went, still maintaining good order and discipline, and with not a single word or gesture of dissent’.7

  Jolly now had his casualty list down to manageable proportions. The frenzied flow from Galahad and Tristram (which had also been hit, but nowhere near as badly as Galahad) had eased. He was left with ninety or so to treat. Even so, he needed everyone on the base, from cooks to navy divers, to chip in and help with ward chores while the medics put their expertise to use. ‘At times like this we worked for thirty hours non-stop. The conditions were filthy dirty, and we were cold and wet. Our number-one priority was hot, sweet tea. That came top of the list, just after keeping surgical instruments clean.’