Medic: Saving Lives - From Dunkirk to Afghanistan

by John Nichol

  There was a hospital in a town five miles away, but also, a man who had scouted it informed the group, a garrison of thirty soldiers and two SS officers lodged in the town hall. A plan was agreed: they would drive to the town in two lorries. One would take armed men to surround the garrison and stop any Germans leaving, the other would ferry Parker and his patient to the hospital. It was still dark when they descended on the town and the doctor pulled into the hospital courtyard, to be met by two nuns and a night superintendent. ‘We have a badly wounded man, and I’m going to operate on him,’ Parker explained. ‘Oh no you are not,’ the superintendent replied. ‘I absolutely forbid it. Your presence here will endanger the other patients.’ Parker’s response was to take out his dagger. ‘I went up to him and pointed it at his stomach.’ But the man did not flinch, replying that he was going to die whatever he did. ‘If I try to stop you coming in, you will kill me, and if you do operate here, then the Germans will certainly kill me when they hear about it in the morning,’ he told Parker.

  The doctor thought for a moment, then viciously clubbed the man hard in the face. As he lay groaning on the floor, Parker told him, ‘I’m very sorry about that, but it is the best I can do for you. I’m going to lock you in your office and, when the Gestapo arrive in the morning, you can tell them you tried to stop me and that is what I did to you. I hope they won’t kill you.’ The mother superior now led Parker and his men to the operating theatre. The hospital’s resident doctor was roused from his sleep and, at gunpoint, invited to be the anaesthetist. ‘What if I refuse?’ he asked. ‘Then you will be killed immediately,’ Parker told him, ‘and I shall have to manage without you.’ ‘You’ve talked me into it,’ said the young doctor with a laugh. And so Major Geoffrey Parker RAMC, alias Parsifal, alias Henri Martin, began the most curious medical procedure of his career, in the dead of night, surrounded by armed guerrillas and assisted by three white-robed nuns.

  With a scalpel, he opened up the lower abdomen and found three holes in the intestine. Two were simple perforations and he stitched them easily, but the third bullet had devastated three inches of the large intestine, and destroyed its blood supply. Part of the colon would have to be removed, and the two ends brought outside the body as a temporary colostomy. After an hour, the job was done and Georges was wheeled out of the theatre.

  ‘What are you going to do with him now?’ the mother superior asked. ‘Take him back to the forest, I suppose,’ Parker said, though he knew from experience that transporting a man immediately after abdominal surgery could be fatal. ‘He’ll just have to take his chance.’ ‘Would you like to leave him here with us?’ the mother superior asked. ‘Of course I would,’ the doctor replied, ‘but he would be murdered in a matter of hours.’ But the nun had been busy. ‘While you were operating,’ she explained, ‘we took a bed down to the cellar. Nobody saw us do it, nor is anyone likely to go down there. If the Germans ask, we will say that you took him away with you.’

  And that, Parker recorded, ‘is what we did’. The Resistance unit pulled out of the town and returned to the mountains, leaving Georges behind. In the back of the lorry, Parker reflected on the insanity of what he had just pulled off. ‘I realized it made no sense from a military point of view. If a German motor patrol had come through the town while I was operating, we should have been shot to pieces, and all for the sake of one man.’ He had no better explanation for the risk he had taken and the extra lives he had endangered (including his own) than that he felt he had to. The doctor in him, the life-saver, outweighed the soldier. ‘I couldn’t stand seeing another man die up there in the forest like the other three stomach cases under my care had.’ In the end, the Germans left the town a few days later, none the wiser about the operation that had taken place under their noses. As for Georges, with the fighting in France ending, he was taken to a hospital across the border in Switzerland, where his temporarily severed colon was properly closed, ‘and he went on his way rejoicing’.

  The doctor had one more brave, life-saving act to perform before his own war was over. He was in the city of Lyon in the days immediately after the Liberation and saw a large crowd mobbing two young women whose clothes had been torn off them, their heads shaved down to the scalp and painted with black swastikas. ‘They were spattered with mud and barefoot.’ They had, he learned, slept with German soldiers in return for extra rations. Now they were going to pay for their collaboration with the enemy. Parker pushed his way through to the girls. ‘I told the gang surrounding them that they were a pack of bastards, behaving worse than the Germans, that they were no more civilized than the Boche and should be ashamed of themselves.’ Some of his men from the forest were with him and they pulled him away. ‘We know and respect you,’ they told him, ‘and we are proud of you, but most of that crowd have no idea who you are and what you have done. You’re lucky they didn’t have you swinging from a lamp post. Please don’t do anything like that again.’ But the truth was that, sometimes in war – as we will see in the next chapter – men, and medics particularly, were too brave for their own good.

  *

  Geoffrey Parker’s war alongside the Resistance fighters in France was unusual in many ways, not least because, as a doctor, he went into it armed, prepared to shoot and to kill, and, on his own admission, did so on more than one occasion. But for most medics on the battlefield, this was an issue about which they were never clear-cut. Airborne medical officer David Tibbs trod this tightrope and unwittingly slipped off. In a battle with dug-in German forces, he crawled forward, waving a red cross flag, to a soldier who had been felled by a sniper but from a distance seemed still to be alive. When the doctor got to him, the man was dead, at which point Tibbs did something stupid. ‘Without thinking I stripped off his bandolier of ammunition and flung it back to my guys.’ The watching German sniper interpreted this as crossing the line from non-combatant to combatant and did not hesitate. ‘There was a tremendous crack,’ Tibbs recalled. ‘I felt a violent shock, like electricity, in my right arm and found myself lying on the grass.’ The bullet had gone through his shoulder and, bleeding profusely, he just managed to squirm away on his side into cover before the sniper could fire again.

  Had Tibbs broken the rules? Indeed, were there any rules that would ensure a medic’s safety? In the late autumn of 1944, Marine commando Dr John Forfar was part of a Combined Operations assault against heavily defended German strongholds on the Dutch island of Walcheren in the estuary of the River Scheldt. The Marines hit big trouble. Mortars and grenades raked them as they advanced and, in his report afterwards, Forfar recorded that the sand ran red with their blood. The troop commander was missing, and the doctor went forward alone to try to find him. Suddenly, over a sand dune, came a lone German soldier wearing a long greatcoat which flapped at his knees as he walked. Forfar froze. As he wrote later, ‘a medical officer in this position is in something of a dilemma. The handgun I carried was for self-defence and I had to decide what constituted self-defence.’22 There was little time for philosophical ruminating or a rummage through the terms of the Geneva Convention. ‘I decided that if it was his intention to take me prisoner I would resist and that if he showed any hostile intent I would shoot.’ The doctor’s resolve was never tested. As the man drew nearer, Forfar could see something deranged about him. ‘He was looking at the ground and muttering to himself and I could now see he wasn’t even armed. His mental state was clearly disturbed and I don’t think he even saw me as he walked on into the captivity he may have been seeking.’ ‘Shell shock’, that syndrome so redolent of the First World War, was the doctor’s diagnosis.

  He was glad he had held his fire, but he soon found out that others in this battle were not so merciful. Forfar found his troop commander lying face down in the sand with a bullet through his eye, and with the help of three stretcher-bearers, tried to lug him away. ‘As we were lifting him on to the stretcher, five German soldiers appeared over the ridge of a sand dune, opened fire and killed a sergeant who was coming to help
us. Then they continued to fire on the stretcher party as we weaved our way among the dunes to the safety of the RAP.’ It seemed no quarter would be given, not even to those who went on to the battlefield with the sole intent of saving lives. In this fight to the finish with Nazi Germany, the scene was set for a supreme sacrifice.

  7. Bravest of the Brave

  ‘Goodnight, darling, and God bless.’ Lance Corporal Eric Harden signed off his almost daily letters home to his wife, Maud, ‘Your ever loving Eric, xxxx.’1 The manager of a butcher’s shop in the Thames estuary town of Northfleet, near Gravesend, he was as solid and likeable a fellow as you could hope to meet. He loved his life with his wife and young son, Bobby. There was so much for an energetic person like him to do. He played the violin expertly, but also football for the town and tennis for his local club, swam like a fish, cycled and camped whenever he could get out into the Kent countryside. Son of a stevedore, he was as well rounded and accomplished as any working man could be. He also had a good heart, which was why he enlisted in the St John Ambulance Brigade, went up to London as a volunteer air-raid warden during the Blitz and, eventually – though, as a slaughter-man, he was in a reserved occupation – defied his family’s wishes and, in 1942, aged thirty, insisted on joining up.

  He did not take instantly to army life. To Maud, his wife, he complained of the bullying NCOs on the training grounds in Devon, and told her how the recruit who slept in the next bunk to him had been worked so hard on a route march that he collapsed. ‘The NCO would not attend to him and would not let anyone else do so, so the poor fellow just laid down there and died. That doesn’t sound right, does it, Maud? The devils ought to be done for manslaughter.’ There were mutterings of mutiny, but these evaporated a few weeks later, after an ecstatically sunny day out on a glorious beach near Plymouth with rocks and rolling seas, ‘the best place I have ever seen in my life. I wish you were here with me, duck,’ – his favourite term of endearment for Maud. ‘After the war we shall have to see if we can’t get there ourselves.’ His own war took a turn for the better when, after basic training, that St John Ambulance experience came into play and he was transferred from the Royal Artillery to the Royal Army Medical Corps, which for a while took him close to home, to a hospital in Woolwich. But then came a series of postings with his field ambulance unit to remote training camps in Yorkshire, West Wales and Scotland – and more of those letters to Maud.

  He told her how he slept on a straw bed and was warm enough with four blankets and his greatcoat on top, ‘but gee, sweetheart, I would gladly have your cold feet on me once again. That will be the day, won’t it, dear?’ His medical training was advancing. ‘The MO is going to let me do some injections next week. I pity the first one or two I start on, but somebody has to be the first ones.’ He asked her to send him his Home Nursing and St John Ambulance books. From Bournemouth, where he was getting work experience in a doctor’s surgery, he was missing her terribly, and made plans for her to come and visit him. He tried to be a good dad as well as a good husband and sent detailed instructions and a diagram showing Maud how to make a catapult for little Bobby.

  Then there was a literal change of pace in his life. In September 1943, he was attached as medical orderly to a Royal Marine commando unit and, on a 200-mile route march along the south coast of England, he followed on foot behind the men with his first-aid kit to pick up and treat any drop-outs. ‘Who looks after me if I drop out?’ he asked plaintively. But that was part of being a medic. It never seemed to occur to anyone that they might get sick or hurt too. They were expected to be invincible. This link-up with the commandos was very much to Harden’s liking. He had applied to join the recently formed Parachute Regiment and was disappointed to be turned down. Now he was to get a shot at a permanent transfer to the commandos, and he was in his element, all those initial misgivings about the army dispelled.

  The training in the Scottish Highlands in mid-winter was the toughest imaginable, beginning with a seven-mile speed march in full kit, to be completed in an hour. It left him gasping and feeling ancient compared with the rest of the lads, who were in their early twenties. He was also issued with a rifle, which he hadn’t had since basic training and, though it felt odd to be armed after so long as a non-combatant, he was soon scoring top marks on the range with a tommy gun. He put himself under the cosh to pass the course, mastering cliff assaults and hand-to-hand fighting and learning survival and demolition skills. There was a notorious ‘death slide’ to conquer, down a rope over a torrent while under fire with live ammunition. The weather was diabolical. It was so cold that in the morning boots had to be thawed out over candles before they could be put on. ‘You have to be made of iron,’ he told Maud, and he was. He made the grade, got his precious green commando’s beret and was happy. ‘I like this life,’ he wrote. ‘It just suits. Goodnight, sweetheart, God bless.’

  But Maud was in despair. She worried that by joining this elite task force he was placing himself in greater danger than he needed to – and she was right. She was pregnant too, as a result of one of his weekend leaves, which made her feel even more anxious for him. But he was supremely optimistic about the future. Maud shouldn’t worry about money, he told her. He had savings from his extra pay as a commando and, though there was going to be an extra mouth to feed, ‘as long as she grows up to be as good-hearted and lovely natured as you, I won’t mind a bit.’ He planned to have his photograph taken in his uniform so his little girl could be proud that she was ‘a commando’s baby’.

  On D-Day in June 1944, the men of 45 Commando, Harden’s unit, were among the first off the landing craft and on to Sword beach. It was ten days before he had the chance to write home. ‘Well, sweetheart, how is the garden looking now?’ he asked Maud, as if he himself had been on a picnic. ‘I suppose it’s full of roses and I suppose the lawn wants cutting.’ A week later he let a little light in on what he had been up to.

  Eighteen of us were cut off from the rest and bang in the middle of Jerry land. We decided to wait till dark to get out but Jerry opened up on us just before dark so we had to get out quick. I took five chaps with me and led them back to our lines, about five miles cross-country on our bellies. I’m glad we learnt all that field craft now – it came in handy. Only three of us made it, and when we reached our lines our own men opened up on us and wounded one of the chaps. But darling, don’t you get worried over this sort of thing. You know me, duck, don’t you? I take everything as it comes and it doesn’t worry me a great deal.

  Maud was not so sanguine, especially since, a fortnight later, she gave birth to daughter Julie. Eric was as proud as Punch at the new arrival. ‘I can’t keep my mind off her,’ he wrote. ‘Gee, Maud, you have got your hands full now with the lot of us, haven’t you, duck?’

  He made it home to their house in Colyer Road, Northfleet, for Christmas 1944, but it wasn’t the best of times. The Germans had launched the Battle of the Bulge, their major counter-attack in the Ardennes, and the certainty of an Allied victory in the very near future seemed to be receding. London was hit by Hitler’s revenge weapons, the V-2 rockets, and their trajectory to the capital from their launch pads in Holland brought them perilously close to Northfleet. On top of all these worries, the weather was bitterly cold, and there seems to have been some slight disharmony in the Harden household. The garden gate was off its hinges and Maud wanted it mended, but Eric didn’t get round to it. Nor had he fixed the washing line in the garden. He apologized to her in a letter on New Year’s Day from his base on the Sussex coast, where 45 Commando was preparing for a new mission. ‘I just can’t get down to odd jobs somehow.’ Perhaps he’d be better ‘when I’m finished with this lot, eh?’

  He knew how hard it was for her coping with his sudden arrivals on leave for a few days and then departing again. ‘Poor old duck, you can’t get used to me going each time, can you?’ This time, he had a feeling he would be away for a long time and, though he had raised her hopes of another weekend at home before he went, t
his was not possible. ‘There it is,’ he wrote. ‘That’s the army all over. I think it will be a very long time before I see you three again. I expect we shall be there until it [the war] is all over. Three months at least, perhaps six.’ He promised her he would be careful. ‘Don’t worry too much, darling. I’ll look after myself.’

  That letter was dated 12 January 1945. Eleven days later, Lance Corporal Eric Harden was dead. For his heroism, he was awarded the Victoria Cross. No medic had been so honoured with the highest medal for valour since Captain John Fox-Russell in 1917, and none has since.

  *

  The special mission Harden, medical orderly of A Troop, had embarked on with 45 Commando was to clear a pocket of German resistance on the Dutch–German border. Today, six decades on, a fast, modern motorway from Antwerp to Maastricht sweeps across the River Meuse,2 through this flat and featureless countryside and away into Germany. Next stop Cologne. But in that harsh winter of 1945, as German troops dug in to defend the borders of the Fatherland, every frozen field was fought over and every village became a miniature Caen. At Christmas, Eric must have given Maud some inkling of where he was going because, in a letter to him after he left, she asked him to let her know in a way that would get round army censorship of the post. ‘I wonder if you are where you thought you were going,’ she wrote on 14 January. ‘When you write, Eric, say, yes you were right if you are the ones who have started the new breakthrough in Holland. On the wireless, they only mention infantry. The commandos don’t get any credit, do they?’ She missed him. ‘I haven’t yet got used to the idea of you being gone again.’ But she was thinking of him. ‘What sort of a landing3 did you have, dear? I hope it was better and safer than before and hope you won’t have to creep through cornfields after not having any sleep for a week. Has the grub improved since the last time?’