We climbed back to Tennyson’s Monument again and there we saw them round the Needles. As far as the eye could see were ships, ships, ships, the horizon black with them whichever way you looked. A great armada that thrilled your very soul. And still that night after dark the lights on the ships were steadily going past … I slept fitfully and dreamed the whole night of only one thing, the invasion, and I knew before any radio announced it that we had our feet in France.
From then on, Monica had ‘no time to think’. Within twenty-four hours casualties started to arrive on the island. Red Cross boats were ferrying patients day and night, with urgent cases dropped off at Yarmouth. Monica raced up and down to the quay, unloaded patients, reloaded them on to hospital ships and carried donors to give blood to those who vitally needed it. The sights were pitiful: burns, fractured skulls, shot-away faces. Some of the victims were mere boys, dazed with suffering.
At 8.30 p.m. on 6 June, the first, solitary patient appeared, covered in wet sand, in Nancy O’Sullivan’s empty Surrey hospital. ‘We devoured him.’ And when she came back on duty next morning the wards were unrecognisable. Every bed and every corridor was filled with casualties: ‘It was the real thing.’ From then on she was working flat out to patch up the wounded as they arrived.
In Portsmouth, teenager Naina Cox was working in a big dry-cleaning firm that dealt with service uniforms; she had just completed a Red Cross course that spring. At 2 p.m. on D-day she was summoned by her commandant to come up to Queen Alexandra’s Hospital and help with casualties. Quickly, she ran home to tell her mum, scrambled into her uniform and headed up the hill to the hospital. There she found the wards had run out of space; the corridors were lined with stretchers. As an inexperienced junior, Naina was given the job of cleaning up the patients. Many were bloody and grimy, but fear had also struck at their bowels, resulting in fouled bodies and garments. For several days Naina washed the excrement from hundreds of traumatised soldiers. ‘[They] were so completely exhausted they didn’t care one jot what happened to them … As I worked … I was thinking, “How long will it go on? If I come tomorrow and the next day, will I still be doing this?” ’ But she barely hesitated when the sister asked her to perform the same task on the German prisoners’ ward. In a stinking Nissen hut, the terrifying enemy lay festering and utterly demoralised: dirty, unwholesome and glazed with defeat. ‘Some of them were only kids, they weren’t really much older than me. One of the rules of the Red Cross is that you are there to help everybody. I’m glad I didn’t refuse to help those men.’
During that terrible first week as the Allies battled to gain their foothold in France and German forces retaliated, planes were crashing on the Isle of Wight, and bodies were washed up on its pebbly shores. Sometimes Monica Littleboy accompanied stretcher cases across to the mainland hospital. ‘I saw sights [there] which I hope I may, please God, never see again. They were burned so badly as to be unrecognisable, only the burning eyes could one see, and as we loaded our stretchers I could feel those eyes following me round the ward. I tried to smile at them; my smile was stiff and I felt sick and though I was so full of sorrow for them something inside me just seemed horror struck.’
Maureen Bolster was equally appalled when she met a shell-shocked lad just back from the fighting. He was trembling and could barely speak. ‘Poor kid, all he could say was, “Make me forget it, please make me forget it. I’ve just got to.” I felt quite sick with pity … What that kid had seen was beyond telling. For one thing he had seen his special pals blown to pieces.’
A soldier who must face fear and horror deals with it in a number of ways. Above all, he has been trained to obey orders, to kill or be killed. If he feels pity, tenderness or sensitivity to his fellow man, he must learn to suppress it in the interests of winning the war. He cultivates a veneer of brutality; he develops black humour, bravado, cynicism, impassivity. He forces himself to forget. Instilled from boyhood, such qualities are all part of growing up to be a man. By contrast, the reactions of Maureen Bolster, Monica Littleboy, Naina Cox and many other women show the vulnerability of women exposed to war’s horrors. Pity, compassion and distress at the pointlessness of human suffering are the emotions of an entire sex unhardened to inhumanity; more than that, a sex as indoctrinated with susceptibility as men have been with their stiff upper lips.
It is impossible to say whether women are by nature more humane and tender-hearted than men. Probably they are not, but it is safe to say that mid-twentieth-century society assumed passivity in its women, just as it expected vigorous action of its men. Built into the 1941 National Service Act was the precondition that women would not make use of lethal weapons, would not kill. Aggression and heroism were left to men. But for many of those soldiers, D-day proved traumatic; seasick and terrified troops floundered up those beaches past the bodies of their drowned and dying comrades. And the wounded survivors of that bitter fight returned to have the unheroic shit swabbed off them by meek teenagers like Naina Cox.
*
That June, Helen Forrester was laid low by a bad bout of influenza, followed by the onset of rheumatism in her legs. For over a month she stayed in bed, sustained by letters from Eddie, who had survived the invasion. Written in haste from the battlefield, these were jokey and loving, soldierly and plainspoken. ‘We’ll get married next leave. Be ready.’ With anguish he described how one of his oldest friends, hit by a sniper’s bullet, had died in his arms. Slowly convalescing, Helen read the letters, waited and hoped, and – together with most of the population – listened to the BBC’s nightly broadcasts. By mid-July, British and Canadian troops were attempting to strike to the east of Caen with a massed tank assault. But Operation Goodwood was a flawed campaign. Concealment had failed; the RAF had tried to bomb German defences to oblivion, but had aimed inaccurately. And commanders had not predicted the chaos that would ensue as too many troops attempted to cross too few bridges across the river Orne. Over two days the British and Canadians suffered 5,537 casualties.
By the third week of July Helen was recovering, though still weak. One rainy evening her father brought her the Liverpool Echo to read in bed. At the back of the paper she came to the public announcements. There was a more than usually long list of deaths.
Almost without thinking I ran my finger down the names.
And there it was.
‘No,’ I whispered. ‘No! Not him!’
Had a malign fate selected her, vulnerable and demoralised as she already was, to be robbed of everyone she ever loved? What kind of punishment was this?
I could not speak, could not cry. I just wanted to die myself.
Compelled by an instinct stronger than her own wellbeing, Helen staggered into her clothes and lurched out into the rain. A strange momentum propelled her forward as, soaked to the skin, she strode insanely along the blacked-out lanes, through Meols, Hoylake, West Kirby, Caldy. ‘ “Eddie,” I cried, to the slashing, unheeding rain, “Eddie, darling.” ’ Helpless grief tore at her. Somehow, she found the energy to stumble the 3 miles to the western vantage point of Caldy Hill. There she gasped and stopped, straining into the dark obscurity of the Atlantic Ocean. In its depths lay Harry O’Dwyer’s bones. In the blackness above, somewhere, Derek Hampson had met his fate. And in distant France, the war had killed another love. Now, among the shattered remains of all her hopes, Helen was left with just one: that for Eddie Parry it had been a quick death.
Mud and Warpaint
As the invading forces moved southwards and eastwards across France, the army relied on the kind of back-up that women were expected to give. Once the beachheads were established, it was possible for the FANYs to bring ambulances over to Normandy by landing craft. Wrens like Ena Howes, who had supervised the telephone exchange at Fort Southwick, had a role to play setting up communications. She and two others were shipped across to Arromanches and driven along bomb-cratered roads to their base in western Normandy, where they holed up in an empty medieval house and slept on the floor with their gas-ma
sks as pillows. ATS girls were sent out to Normandy to run mobile army canteens. And WAAF nursing orderlies were put on board Dakotas and flown out to France to escort the wounded back to Britain, frequently under fire. For nurses were, as ever, vital.
Iris Ogilvie, a Welsh nursing sister with the RAF, aged twenty-nine, was among the first British women to land on the invasion beaches, just five days after D-day. Many years later Iris wrote a detailed account of her work setting up mobile field hospitals and helping to evacuate the injured. She had offered her services after her husband, Donald, a bomber pilot, had been killed over Holland in June 1943. ‘I was devastated. He had died for his country and I didn’t care what happened to me. I knew I wanted to make some contribution myself.’ Initially, Iris was not made welcome. When the medical orderlies heard that she was to become one of their number, they reacted with unconcealed hostility: ‘We don’t want any b--- women in this outfit.’ And the commanding officer of the unit was disbelieving. ‘They’re not going over, are they?’ he asked as she and her friend Mollie set off for Normandy. He raised objections, telling them: ‘We can’t cater for you to have toilet facilities on your own.’ Iris was not worried by such trivia.
On 8 June the nurses were briefed and handed their emergency packs: twenty-four hours’ worth of rations, including chocolate, biscuits, compressed and ready-sweetened tea cubes, chewing-gum, a compass, four cigarettes and four sheets of toilet paper. Iris also brought with her a small waterproof bag for her Elizabeth Arden make-up. Like Vera Lynn, she was reluctant to be seen without her warpaint. ‘I wasn’t going to land in Normandy looking a sight! Bright red lipstick did wonders to pull one’s face together.’ On 12 June they stepped ashore on Juno beach. The beach-master gaped at the sight of the diminutive, fair-curled Iris appearing off the landing craft and said, ‘Good God.’ He escorted the sisters into the nearest underground shelter, and there the troops raised a welcoming cheer: ‘Watch out, Adolf, you’ve had it now!’ called out one.
Reunited with their colleagues, the nurses’ work began. Casualties were patched up and accompanied to the makeshift landing strip to be evacuated on Dakotas which were being used as air ambulances. In the early days Iris and her team sent 1,023 cases back to England. The unit kept close to the advancing forces, following them to Cussy, near Bayeux, then eastwards to Camilly, and they were often in danger. Their convoy was attacked; shrapnel fell on their tarpaulins, and a damaged aircraft nearly crash-landed on the tents. While in Bayeux, press photographers persuaded Iris and Mollie to pose for propaganda images, neatly dressed in skirts, giggling over the latest frivolous hats in a Bayeux shop window. The picture was staged, for consumption by a public who wouldn’t have relished the reality: tin hats, battledress trousers and the total exhaustion of nurses dressing burns, giving bedpans and tending injuries round the clock. Just 10 miles away the Battle of Caen was raging. Three days after the fall of Caen on 9 July Iris Ogilvie entered the city, where over a thousand people had been killed; ‘the smell of death was everywhere’.
*
QA Joy Taverner was twenty-two years old when she too made the crossing from Portsmouth to Arromanches five days after D-day. She had been waiting for months to put her training into practice on the battlefield. Joy was a clever, self-sufficient, strong-willed young woman, but the experiences that war would throw at her over the next twelve months would test every fibre of her being.
The Taverners were a closely knit, talkative, working-class family, Irish by blood. Joy had grown up in the villagey atmosphere of Golborne Road, down the hill from Portobello market in west London. There her parents ran a successful newsagents and tobacconists shop. Her father – ‘the guv’nor’ – was a mason; Churchillian in his way, he would stand importantly at his shop-door, thumbs thrust into his waistcoat pockets, complete with fob watch and cigar. For Joy, it was a good Christian upbringing, a childhood surrounded with affection. Her mother kept house and cooked for the extended family of brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins who lived and worked there under one roof. From an early age Joy loved animals. There were chickens in the back yard, dogs and cats ‘of every kind’, mice in her pocket and, Joy’s favourite, Marmaduke the lizard. Her ambition was to become a vet.
War broke out when she was seventeen, and those dreams had to be abandoned. Instead Joy trained to be a nurse at Hammersmith Hospital, working there throughout the Blitz. Twice the hospital was hit. In 1943 she joined the QAs. That winter, along with fifty other recruits, she was sent to Peebles near Edinburgh to be drilled for conditions on the battle front: cross-country runs and gate-vaulting were the order of the day, until the nurses were considered fit enough to work alongside Monty’s boys. The QAs had officer status and had two pips on their shoulders.
In spring 1944 Joy was sent down to the Portsmouth area to await the invasion. Joy herself takes up the story:
Finally we were put on an LST* and tied up in the Solent for three days waiting for the Mulberry to be taken over and for troops to take over the beaches. Finally we went to the Mulberry and one of the trucks with all our kit and belongings went over the side into the sea!
Eventually we landed and were sniped at by Germans. One of our doctors was killed and an orderly was shot and we had to amputate his leg at the side of the road. We had to be careful because everywhere was mined. Notices (‘Achtung Minen’) were on the roadsides. Lots of dead bodies.
We went to St Lô and put tents up in a field as a front-line hospital. In the operating theatre for three days and nights – only having a few hours off. Polish men, Germans and Canadians came in – as well as our own troops. I had only the clothes I stood up in so washed my underwear – wrapped them in tissue paper and dried them in the camp oven!
As military personnel, the QAs had to demonstrate that they could cope with battle conditions. They were under constant shelling. No special arrangements were made to accommodate the nurses, but the soldiers were tolerant and agreed to stand armed to protect them if they needed to relieve themselves in the middle of a field. Some of the matrons regarded it as a question of honour to be able to drink the men under the table. By now, the romantic grey and scarlet uniform had been replaced by khaki battledress; Joy’s matron took it very much amiss when she heard that her nurses had been mistaken for ATS and insisted – absurdly, in Joy’s view – that the nurses wear their scarlet capes over their khaki slacks.
With new cases being trucked in constantly, Joy and the other nurses were surviving on cups of tea and sheer adrenalin. The mud was indescribable. The new wonder drug, penicillin, had just come in, and was being used for the first time. In August, the two German Panzer armies were caught by the Allies in a pincer movement at the Falaise gap. Many of the forces drummed up by Hitler at this point in the war were unfit veterans, Poles, ‘Osttruppen’ recruited from Soviet prisoners of war or very young conscripts. Joy nursed them all, often having to comfort wounded German teenagers calling out for their mothers. Many of such cases had lost blood, but if there happened to be an SS officer on the ward, they could be brutal. Fearful that the donor blood might come from Jewish sources, the SS forbade transfusions. Joy, outraged, made use of her own officer status to overrule such inhumanities.
Later, she tried to capture her feelings in verse. The lines she wrote stress the frustration she felt as a nurse, constantly confronted with suffering and yet so often incapable of giving help:
Day followed night and then another day
Of mangled broken boys.
Irish, Welsh and Scots
Jerries, Poles and French –
They cried in many tongues as needles long and sharp
Advanced.
Their blood ran very red and so they died.
Yet her uncomplicated faith in a loving God helped her endure the suffering she saw every day around her.
It was while Joy was on the road with the Allies that she fell in love. Captain Pip Knowles was a handsome surgeon doctor working in Joy’s field hospital. He was captivated by
her pretty looks and chatty manners. The intensity of their relationship mirrored the intensity of the work they were both doing; the physical demands of caring for hundreds of casualties called upon all their reserves, and, not surprisingly, the strain was sublimated into feverish levels of emotion – the more so, since this was forbidden territory. Pip Knowles was married, with a child. Joy’s daughter now says that her mother’s religion and respect for family meant that she would never have made any claims on her lover, but there is little doubt that this man was the ‘big love’. When Captain Knowles was transferred to another hospital, Joy applied to go there too. The canny matron, rightly suspecting her young nurse of ulterior motives, turned Joy’s request down. The lovers wrote instead and snatched time when they could. Sue, Joy’s daughter, found the love letters after her mother’s death but felt that they were too private to read. ‘There are photos of them in a field, somewhere in Normandy. They look like blissful teenagers. She’s got her arms round his neck … there’s no doubt it was an intimate relationship.’ But the odds were stacked heavily against Joy’s affair with Pip Knowles. They parted, their great love derailed by a sense – on both sides, perhaps? – that it was sinful, illicit.
The Allies battled their way across northern Europe. News of the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler boosted morale; surely, now, the end must be near? At the end of July the American army began to sweep across northern France, and on 23 August Paris was captured. 3 September saw the liberation of Brussels and on the 4th British forces entered Antwerp. In the army’s wake, military hospitals were set up. That autumn and winter Joy and her fellow nurses made their home in a converted convent in the small town of Eeklo, west of Antwerp. This, after living under canvas for months on end, was luxury. The nuns made them welcome. Belgium was a welcome respite from mud and horror. And it was while she was there that she literally bumped, in a snowstorm, into her future husband, Sergeant Ron Trindles.
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