Medic: Saving Lives - From Dunkirk to Afghanistan

by John Nichol

  It wasn’t just with the enemy that the doctor had problems. He sometimes had to face down his own army superiors and their tendency to believe that he – along with all MOs, probably – was a soft touch. He was presented one day with a deserter, a man who would have been court-martialled and shot in the First World War. That sanction had disappeared, erased from the Army Manual by an act of parliament in the inter-war years. Pleydell was asked for his professional opinion, sat the reluctant soldier down in the back of an ambulance and, as shells flew by outside, tried to persuade him back into battle. ‘You must go,’ he said. ‘We’re all in the same boat, and if everyone does the same as you, we will all be in the bag [captured].’ But the only thing the man could say was: ‘I can’t, I just can’t.’

  The doctor reported to the colonel that he was going to evacuate the man ‘with a bad case of battle fatigue’, a diagnosis that was greeted with undisguised contempt and hostility. The second-in-command’s suggestion was that the man should be forced into the front line ahead of men with bayonets drawn ‘so that he advances in front of them, minefields or no minefields’. To send him back down the line to safety would destroy morale and encourage more deserters, Pleydell was told in no uncertain terms. ‘They’ll all be going off sick.’ The doctor stuck to his guns, ‘right or wrong’, as he remembered it. He turned out to be right. After the man was sent away, it became a daily ritual for the colonel to taunt him, ‘How many deserters have you sent back to-day, Doctor?’ But, Pleydell recorded, in vindication of himself, there were no more, ‘and slowly the colonel forgave me’.

  The fact is that he knew how easy it was for courage to desert a man. ‘We were all scared in different ways and at different times. The sound of machine-gun fire at first light was unnerving. My courage was flickering, present one second, absent the next. Just a matter of trying to control fear, panic and cowardice.’ He remembered when his unit was surrounded and shells had come very close, and two officers beside him threw themselves to the ground. ‘For some reason, I remained standing. The expressions on their faces as they looked up and saw me looking down on them were priceless. For one brief second, I felt ten feet tall. The next minute, I was a coward again!’ But Pleydell was doing himself a disservice. It was not the act of a coward to volunteer, as he now did, for secret behind-the-lines operations, with L Detachment of the Special Air Service Brigade, the newly formed SAS.

  He joined in June 1942 as medical officer of the hundred-strong unit after a taste of life in a military hospital at Suez, which he found unexciting to the point of depression. Doctors en masse, he decided, were ‘such a dull lot, with a self-satisfied air of stupidity. Few of them know what fighting is. They forget there is any excitement in life, any thrills. Just sit around on one end of a microscope or stethoscope.’ That wasn’t the life for him. He craved action, and got it in a series of daring raids that took the fight into the enemy’s backyard. For weeks they would motor in modified jeeps packed with machine guns, ammunition clips but little else, through remote seas of sand and across mountains, to bypass the enemy’s defences. Then they would pop up as if from nowhere to destroy an airfield or a vital fuel dump. ‘It was a hit-and-run, hide-and-seek type of war,’ Pleydell recalled.

  We would make long detours south of the battle line and then loop up north to within striking distance of our target. In the deepest parts of the desert, the distances were so immense and maps so unreliable that we took our bearings by sun and stars and plotted our routes from tables based on Greenwich Mean Time. Camouflage had to be expert so that when we hid we were not detected, even at close distance. Slow-flying enemy aircraft would follow our tracks to our hiding places, and they presented a real threat. Water discipline was essential as supplies were sometimes very limited. You had to eke out your water bottle in sips.

  In his letters to his girlfriend, Pleydell revealed as much as he was able to about this new clandestine life of his. To his delight, he told her, he had total medical responsibility for the lives of the men in his troop – ‘odd after hospital, where you had to sign six forms before you looked at a patient!’ Evacuating the wounded from the depths of the desert was next to impossible, and, apart from a single orderly, he was on his own. If he had to operate, he would administer the anaesthetic himself before getting on with the job in the back of a truck parked in the middle of nowhere, ‘with very little shade and no shelter from sand or wind’. But he had the very latest in medical science to draw on. There was plaster of Paris for binding wounds Trueta-style and, for transfusions, ‘dried’ plasma – not as good as ‘whole’, oxygenated blood for instant powers of healing but easier to keep and transport and still a powerful tool. ‘I get priority in my demands,’ he reported. Most revolutionary of all, he had what he described to his girlfriend as ‘a very rare drug for injecting into abdominal wounds which it is hoped will save lives’. He was referring to penicillin.

  They drove over every different type of desert terrain. Across the vast sand seas, they stuck to a steady and monotonous 40mph for hour after hour through the night until they lost all sense of motion. The sight of a discarded cigarette-end in the sand was the only sign of progress. ‘Occasionally a driver would fall asleep and you would see the lights of his vehicle drift away, before he could be recalled.’ Then there were towering dunes to negotiate. ‘You had to drive fast up the slopes without somersaulting over the top. Fatalities could and did result in this way, since there were no shadows to indicate the peaks of the dunes, which followed each other in huge successive waves. The dunes were usually packed hard on the windward side and soft and falling on the leeward side. A drift of sand would blow from the peaks, so that they fell in small avalanches.’ But then they came to mountains and caves where, when they stopped to rest, the doctor found prehistoric paintings, a neolithic arrowhead and Greek and Roman pottery. All this brought out the philosopher in him. ‘The greatest solace in the immensity of the desert was the sense of communion with the universe, and the stars as they rose and set. There were vast Wagnerian sunsets, which reminded one of Turner, and which mesmerized the senses. The feeling of the insignificance of our existence came as a balm which soothed anxieties and, perhaps, helped us to come to terms with life on our tiny planet.’

  Coming to terms with death, however, was tougher. A highlight of SAS operations – for all the wrong reasons – came in September 1942, with a 200-man attack alongside French special forces, the Long Range Desert Group and the Special Boat Section (SBS) to blow up ships and dock installations in the Italian-held port of Benghazi. It was a disaster. The men trekked 1,500 miles through the desert but news of the raid had leaked, and their column of forty heavily armed jeeps ran into an ambush on the outskirts of the town. They were forced to retreat and then pursued into the desert by fighter planes and bombers. Fifteen jeeps and twenty-four trucks were lost. Four men were killed and a number wounded as they battled their way out.

  With the aid of morphine, Pleydell fixed a broken thigh bone in the back of a lorry covered in camouflage netting and dealt with the second-degree burns on the chest, abdomen, arms and legs of a man who had driven over a mine. As wind rattled through the canvas cover of the lorry and dust swirled around, he amputated a leg – a remarkable feat in such a confined and unsterile space – fed two pints of plasma into the patient’s veins and then had to drive like fury to catch up with the rest of the convoy as it made its escape. The men he had just operated on were lying in the back of the lorry in front of Pleydell’s red-cross-emblazoned jeep, ‘and each time the lorry hit a bump I could see three legs and one stump being flung up in the air and falling back.’ He had to stop, climb in the back and tie their legs down with a rope. They drove on, but the men’s faces were caking over with yellow dust thrown up as they sped across the desert and he had to stop yet again to bathe their faces and allow them to breathe.

  With the convoy still under attack, Pleydell had more casualties to deal with. ‘I had a case of multiple wounds, not too bad; another through t
he lung, for which there was little I could do; one with a compound fracture of the humerus, radius and ulna, with the arm shattered in two places. I left the arm on. All the bad injuries had two pints of blood plasma and I waited until they were stronger before operating.’ His most difficult case was a man who couldn’t pee – ‘retention of urine due to the perineal urethra being shot away’. The doctor struggled. ‘Because I was unable to find the proximal end of the urethra, I eventually had to perform a suprapubic cystotomy [cut a secondary drain from the bladder]. It was the devil. I was wondering if I should open the peritoneum but I had two scalpels and two Spencer Wells [artery forceps] and I was alone. With nobody retracting, it’s damned difficult to see what you are doing. I did not dare risk any bleeding, as I could hardly have reached the bleeding point and tied it off. I did muscle splitting with blunt dissection and luckily got down to the bladder with no bleeding.’ The medical jargon in his letter to his girlfriend would not have disguised the drama from her nor his bland assertion that ‘the responsibility of being in sole charge of the wounded is quite a mental strain, you know.’ As a nurse, she would have known every move he made, felt his dilemma. A man’s life was in his hands. He had to operate to save him, but the operation, in poor light in the back of a truck and with no one to assist, could well be fatal if he got it even slightly wrong. Pleydell had wanted excitement rather than the dull routine of a hospital, but this was more than he could ever have bargained for. His skill and his nerve were stretched to the limit.

  He pulled it off, only to be hit by an even greater dilemma. When he rejoined the convoy, it rapidly became clear that, with so many vehicles put out of action by the bombing, there was no room for stretcher-cases. Four of the wounded would have to be left behind. It was the Dunkirk and Crete dilemma all over again. The doctor’s natural instinct was to stay with them. But common sense told him this ‘wasn’t my job’. As the sole medical officer on the trip, his duty was to remain with the main fighting force in case of more casualties up ahead before they made it back to base. He left the four wounded men in the care of his orderly and, with the rest of the convoy, he drove off into the night for the long trek home. All the walking wounded he took with him made it back, and he was happy about that. Only later would he discover that the four he had had to leave behind were picked up by the Italians, as he had hoped, but all died from their wounds. The medical orderly who stayed with them died too, in a prisoner-of-war camp.

  That long-distance raid took its toll on the doctor. His eyes had taken a hammering on the drive and were now constantly bloodshot. ‘After all those night drives, the dust whipping in behind your goggles, and the glare of the sun on the white sand in the day, I had solar conjunctivitis.’ He was transferred to a base hospital to work, hated every minute of it and hankered for the desert he had fallen in love with. What kept him going was the sparkling morale of the wounded men he treated, but he feared for their futures.

  They treat me as one of themselves and they rag me quite a bit, but to hear them joking and laughing though their arms and legs are shattered makes me want to ensure that they don’t get the same treatment as their fathers had after the last war. I don’t want to see any more men at street corners with last war ribbons and an old gramophone to keep them company. If people living in luxury at home could see these men, then stop and think for a moment and consider what the future holds for them, I think it might bring a lump to their throats. But, in a few years’ time they will be forgotten and people will think what a nuisance they are – and why remind us of a war that is over and done with? Please God, I shan’t forget.

  *

  For the Allied forces, the desert bloomed. It was here that, after the multiple defeats and retreats of Dunkirk, Singapore, Greece and Crete, the first indication came that the tide of war was turning. Montgomery’s defeat of Rommel at the second battle for Alamein was, in Churchill’s thunderous phrase, ‘the end of the beginning. The bright gleam of victory – a remarkable and definite victory – has caught the helmets of our soldiers, and warmed and cheered all our hearts.’13 The grand rhetoric cut no ice with the nurses who had seen with their own eyes the cost of that victory arriving at Cairo hospitals in convoy after convoy of ambulances from the front. ‘We had far too many mutilated young men in our care for us to feel like celebrating,’ said Sister Margaret Jennings.

  The poor, wretched, dirt and blood-caked casualties were carried in, stretcher after stretcher of them. Some had been half roasted alive in their tanks, others so badly mutilated that it was amazing they were still alive. Our training had scarcely prepared us for the horror of it all – some with parts of their face missing, others with deep abdominal wounds, legs hanging by threads of tissue with bones protruding. The urgency of the task lent skill to our fingers. One by one we worked our way through them all, washing them, dressing their wounds and putting them between clean white sheets. Bleeding was stopped, transfusions given, plaster of Paris applied over Thomas splints, and pain-killing injections given. The expressions of relief and gratitude on their faces as they saw they were being tended by female nurses was unforgettable. They never complained. We were working night and day but the courage and fortitude of those lads was such an example and inspiration to us that we forgot our weariness.14

  But a strategic corner had indeed been turned in the war, and attack now replaced defence in Allied military planning – and, as the fight was taken to the enemy, medics were right up in the vanguard. From North Africa, Captain Martin Herford took his place in 200th Field Ambulance in July 1943 for the invasion of Sicily, 250 miles away across the Mediterranean Sea, the first stage in the re-conquest of Europe. After his flight from Greece two years earlier, it felt good to be going in the opposite direction at last. It was half past midnight, the sky red with phosphorus flares put up by the German defenders, when he and his unit clambered down into one of thousands of landing craft and made for a beach close to the town of Syracuse. The opposition, softened up by a naval barrage from out at sea, was slight. He had expected to find himself pinned down by German fire. Instead he was able to stand at his leisure and drink in the sight of fields of ripening grapes and tomatoes ahead. There were apples and figs on the trees, the early morning sun shone brightly and the smell of jasmine hung in the air.

  He sensed that this was the lull before a very bloody storm, and he was right. Two miles off the coast lay a hospital ship, the SS Talamba, white-hulled and fully illuminated with prominent red crosses on each of her three funnels. She had been receiving a steady flow of casualties from the shore all day. That evening, a flight of German dive bombers, having been beaten off by the guns of a British cruiser they were attacking, picked on her instead. She sank, with doctors and nurses scrambling to get their patients into lifeboats. A surgeon who was amputating a soldier’s leg as the bombs fell bandaged up the stump at top speed, strapped the man to a stretcher and in desperation lowered it over the side into the water. He hoped it would float, and it did, unlike the Talamba herself, who slid stern-first to the bottom of the sea. On land, resistance was growing. Having surrendered the beach areas, the German forces were massing on the hilltops in the mountains ahead. Those fields and vineyards, the sight of which had brought out such rapture in Herford, proved close up to be sown with a deadly crop of land mines.

  With a lorry and two light ambulances, he went forward with the first wave of the assault on the German positions. A procession of tanks, heavy artillery and infantrymen crept along narrow and winding mountain passes where every village was a stronghold and the fighting was long and fierce with heavy loss of life. Though he could have chosen to be in the safety of a casualty station in the rear, Herford got on his motorbike, just as he had done in Greece, and went looking for casualties to treat and evacuate. Mortars exploded around him as he sped along tracks and struggled over rough ground. Showers of earth and gravel hit him, stinging his face and hands, but his luck held. His presence was an undoubted tonic to the fighting men and, by being so clos
e to the action, his prompt treatment was credited with saving many lives.

  Sometimes, he was too close. He was evacuating casualties from a wooded hill held by Canadian infantry when German soldiers rushed them. Weaponless, he could only throw himself to the ground as the Canadians fought off the attack. ‘Bullets whistled overhead; the air was thick with the acrid smell of gunpowder as spent cases sprayed from the breaches of the Canadian guns,’ wrote his biographer.15 ‘His ears were deafened by a barrage of thunderous rifle cracks.’ The attack was repelled and the Germans pulled back, leaving several corpses behind. In the nearby forest, stretcher-bearers found a number of Allied soldiers wounded in the initial assault, and Herford was able to put to good use the blood-transfusion equipment that was now for the first time being carried in army ambulances.

  In that fierce, inch-by-inch battle for Sicily, it took six weeks in the hot summer sun before the German and Italian forces finally abandoned the island. The Allies lost close to five thousand men killed, with a further nineteen thousand wounded. But this was just the start.