Medic: Saving Lives - From Dunkirk to Afghanistan

by John Nichol

  Maud’s letters, so matter-of-fact and mundane but underlaid with so much anxiety, are filled with the white noise of war. Cutting through the chatter is the interminable hum of human unhappiness and hardship that was the common condition for those left behind to wait and worry. Heroics were not what she wanted, just her man back, her husband and the father of her children. She looked glowingly to the future, when they would all be together again, while struggling with the cares of just getting by in those terrible times. ‘Julie [the baby] has lost two ounces in weight,’ she wrote, ‘but I expect she will be all right now her cold has gone. Bobby is still waiting for his tooth to fall out. His teacher told him she was very pleased with him last week, and today the headmaster did as well. He’s one of the best readers in the class. He went for his first lesson on the piano on Monday, and his teacher brought him home and came in to mark the notes on the piano keys. Bobby knows the right hand notes now off by heart, so that’s not bad, as it’s only Wednesday. He’s not a dull child, is he, dear? Even if he won’t do as he’s told first time. But he’ll grow out of that.’

  The severe winter weather had exposed problems in the house caused by bomb damage. ‘When that snow melted last week it all came through the roof in the bay window where the shell had made the slits.’ She was going to keep worrying the authorities to have it fixed. ‘While I was sitting here quiet last night, dear, that mouse popped out again and I couldn’t help thinking you came down and kept it company on your leave xxx. Wouldn’t it be all right if it was that night now? Well, it will come again, and I’ll have to look forward to that instead of back.’ She signed off, ‘Good night, darling, and God be with you, and take all the care you can love. Lots of love and kisses.’ There was a domestic PS – ‘Do you want your hankies sent on to you, darling?’

  A week later she wrote again after a letter arrived from him. She was very thankful to know he was safe and tried to get a hint from him of the degree of danger he was in. ‘Is it as stiff [tough] now as it was the first time, love?’ she asked. She was optimistic. The papers were full of news of Soviet tanks racing through Poland towards Germany’s eastern border. ‘The Russians are running away with it again, eh? Perhaps it won’t be so long after all before we meet. As long as they don’t whip you off to Burma after.’ Bobby was doing well at school – ‘he’s third from top in his class and, as the first and second boys are turned eight, he’s doing well, isn’t he, love?’ He had also just joined the Cubs, and she had to dig in her purse for 9s 10d to buy his jersey and scarf. She had also spent 11s on material for a coat and hat, ‘so that’s another pound spent. It doesn’t take long to go, does it?’ The weather had taken a turn for the worse, the streets of Northfleet were ankle-deep in snow and she was worried about bursting water pipes. But the romance had not gone out of her life entirely, for all these problems. She thought of the past. ‘There was a lovely moon here last night and it did look pretty on the snow. Like when we were courting and used to sit down in it and declare we were not cold, though we froze to the ground almost.’ She thought of the future. She had seen a mate of his, and her husband could have his old position back driving the St John ambulance when the war was over. ‘But you won’t rejoin directly, will you, dear? Wait a few weeks, then you can, love.’ And then she reverted to the present, and her longing for him. ‘I freeze at night with two eiderdowns and Bobby to try to warm me, so I bet you are cold there, sweetheart. Do you sleep in slit trenches this time? Sleep, I said, but I meant try to sleep, Eric. And how many blankets do they allow you? Well, darling, keep touching that bit of wood, and then look forward to warming my feet again. Take care, love, great care. Love for ever, Maud.’

  Loving wife that she was, she kept worrying about him getting cold wherever he was, so in her next letter, on 26 January, she offered to send him his winter underwear and to knit him some gloves and a woolly hat. ‘Whatever you want, it’s up to you to ask for.’ Julie was talking – well, she had said the word ‘Dad’, ‘as plain as you like, Eric’. And Bobby was getting on with his piano exercises, ‘but his fingers are hardly long enough yet. Still he keeps at it.’ Maud was taking the opportunity to learn the piano herself but was finding it hard going. ‘I can’t read the music quick enough yet. Still I’ll have a go.’ Relations were coming at the weekend as long as the weather wasn’t too bad, and she looked forward to the company. ‘It gets lonely sometimes, Eric.’

  That loneliness was still getting to her after the weekend because, by Monday the twenty-ninth, she was miserable. Bobby was next door with neighbours, the baby was asleep, and she sat down and wrote to Eric how last night she had got a ‘silly’ notion in her head that it would be so nice ‘to go to a dance or something’. Just to get out of the house and feel alive! ‘Instead we went to bed and froze and couldn’t sleep at all.’ But it was him she worried about. ‘Shall I send you some long pants and thicker vests, Eric? I expect you can do with them as, gosh, it’s cold enough here. All the sinks and bath pipes are frozen this morning. It’s about the coldest I’ve known it. Good luck, darling, and God bless you, Maud.’

  The letter was never sent. Before she could pop a one-and-a-halfpenny stamp on the envelope and post it there was a knock at the door – the one every serviceman’s wife dreads. Trembling, she pulled open the thin brown envelope that the telegram boy handed to her and read the words that brought her to her knees: ‘Deeply regret to inform you 11006144 L/Cpl H E Harden RAMC was killed in action 23 January.’

  *

  The news had been slow coming from the front. There was not then the instant communication of today’s wars, in which relatives know within hours if a loved one is dead or seriously injured. Nor was there a force’s welfare officer to break the doleful tidings and, if possible, soften the blow, just a lad from the Post Office on the doorstep, who didn’t wait for a reply because, what was there to say? But when the details of Eric’s death trickled through – if it was any compensation, and how could it be? – it was clear that he had lost his own life while actively, bravely and selflessly saving those of others. Operation Blackcock, on which he was engaged, had begun on 14 January, aimed at clearing the Germans from the so-called Roer Triangle. It was an essential operation, ahead of an all-out Allied assault on the fortified Siegfried Line, Hitler’s ‘West Wall’. The advance was slow and difficult, against fierce opposition. Snow, covering the fields and roads, hindered progress. On the morning of 23 January, a Tuesday, the small riverbank town of Maasbracht had finally been cleared of enemy by the men of 6 Commando, and 45 Commando, who had arrived in the area only a few days earlier, came from the rear to march through the line to take up the offensive. Harden – ‘Doc’, as the men called him – was with the support section bringing up the rear.

  Lieutenant Robert Cory was leading A Troop and remembered the townsfolk, exuberant at having been freed from German occupation, rushing out with apples and gifts to thrust into their hands. The troops of 6 Commando had dug in, and cheered their comrades as they ‘advanced to contact’ at the next objective, the village of Brachterbeek, half a mile down the road. They approached cautiously, expecting resistance. To their relief, the Germans had withdrawn without a fight and, once again, there were effusive greetings from liberated Dutch families, emerging from their houses gleefully but with warnings that German soldiers were still close by. Very close, in fact. The commandos were spread out in open formation and moving down a road towards a railway station on the edge of the village. Dressed in their ordinary brown smocks and green berets, they stood out against the snow like coconuts on a shy. ‘We were easy targets,’ said Marine John Haville, one of the troop, ‘and we were walking into a trap.’ Just past a crossroads, the land around them flat and without any significant cover, they suddenly came under heavy and sustained rifle and mortar fire. ‘We were completely exposed,’ Robert Cory remembered.4 ‘Just to our right were two large potato clumps, some fifty yards apart, and on our left a large electricity pylon with its wires hanging down on the ground. My se
ction dived for cover behind the first of the potato clumps.’ From there his men loosed off some rounds at shadowy figures moving in the distance, but to no effect. The Germans were in white winter camouflage suits and could barely be seen against the snow.

  Cory decided he had to move his men forward. Not only were they in poor cover, he had every reason to believe A Troop’s forward section had reached the station and was already in close-quarter combat with the enemy. They needed help. His men fixed bayonets, ‘and on my order we went for it.’ With covering fire from a Bren-gunner, they dashed forward across the open ground. Two men, Marine Wales and Marine Wheeler, went down almost immediately, and then Cory himself was knocked over by a bullet in his left arm. ‘I picked myself up but was then hit three times in my left leg by a machine-gun burst and went down face first in the snow.’ The rest of the section fell back, ducking down behind the nearest potato clump.

  The lieutenant was in no-man’s land, twenty yards out in the open, his face deep in the snow, and unable to move or even turn himself over because of his injuries. He thought he was going to suffocate, and would have done if his sergeant had not crawled to him under continuing heavy fire, cut away his equipment and turned him on his back. ‘He then bound on field dressings which the others threw to him from behind the clump. During this time he was constantly under fire and I kept telling him to get back under cover, which he quietly refused to do until he had done all that he could for me.’ But evacuating the stricken Cory from this firestorm was another matter altogether, and he was forced to lie on his back in the bitter cold waiting to be rescued, the blood freezing in his toes and severe frostbite setting in.

  Eric Harden was pinned down too. Along with Captain Dudley Coventry and the rest of A Troop’s command section, he had pulled back to a brick farm building by the crossroads to set up an aid post. The Germans had a machine-gun post in a windmill nearby and from high up were raking the ground in between. As he peered from behind a hedge, the medic could see the three wounded men in the killing zone ahead of him. It was a hundredyard dash to them, he calculated, perhaps one hundred and twenty. As smoke from mortar shells drifted along the road, he saw his chance and sprinted across the open space with his medical pack, knelt to treat one of them, then crawled to the second and the third. Cory, the last, remembered his astonishment at finding Harden beside him, jabbing morphine into him as small-arms fire whined overhead and bullets kicked up the snow around them. ‘Then he said he was going, but he would be back. I told him that on no account was he to do so.’ From the farm, Haville, who was setting up a defensive mortar position, was watching Harden’s coolness and dedication in admiration. ‘He showed no regard for his own safety.’ What was extraordinary was the length of time he was out there, exposed to the enemy’s machine guns as he went from one man to the other. Haville didn’t look at his watch to check the time, ‘but it was a considerable period. And then, to cap it all, he came staggering back carrying Marine Wheeler over his shoulders.’

  After zig-zagging his way through the torrent of gunfire, Harden eased the wounded man off his back and on to the ground, made sure he was settled, then turned to go back. He was ordered to stay. The captain was calling up tank support to retrieve the wounded, and for a smokescreen to be laid down. He instructed the medic to wait. Harden fretted. The back-up was slow in coming, and even when it arrived it failed to do the job. A tank went forward to pick up the casualties but was beaten away. The smokescreen simply provoked even more determined firing from the enemy, resulting in more casualties. It was the classic battlefield dilemma, where trying to save lives would only jeopardize others.

  Harden refused to be put off. Men were dying out there. He knew that if the wounded were left out in the snow much longer they would die. Quietly but firmly, he urged Haville and another commando, Dick Mason, to come with him as his stretcher-bearers. ‘We discarded our equipment and weapons and went with him,’ Haville recalled. ‘Doc carried the stretcher and was wearing his red cross armband, but that did not stop the Germans, who immediately fired on us with machine guns. As I ran through the snow I could see the bursts of fire kicking up the ground in front of my feet and I wondered what I’d let myself in for. But we continued running, keeping as low as possible till we reached the wounded.’

  They strapped Wales on to the stretcher, Harden took the front shafts, with Haville and Mason at the rear, and they ran at a crouch for the farm, as mortar shells exploded beside them and a trail of bullets burst behind their heels. Harden’s step never faltered, though he had been hit. When they reached the safety of the aid post, there was a large shrapnel tear and bullet holes in his smock. After a short rest, said Haville, ‘we went out again to recover Lieutenant Cory.’ The lieutenant, slipping in and out of consciousness, had no idea how long he had been lying in no-man’s land, only that he had ordered ‘Doc’ not to come back for him. But, suddenly, there Harden was beside him again, with a stretcher this time, and Haville and Mason to help him carry it. They lifted him on and, just as before, with Harden at the front and the other two behind, they ran for the farmhouse with their load.

  Some forty yards short of safety, Haville heard a click as if something had passed his left ear and saw Harden, ahead of him, stumble and collapse, the stretcher almost falling on top of him. Cory remembered being dropped to the ground and finding the two rear stretcher-bearers down beside him. Haville crawled forward to Harden. ‘I saw that a single bullet had entered the back of his head and made its exit by way of a small round hole in the centre of his forehead without shedding a drop of blood. He must have died instantly and without pain. I realized the click I had heard was the bullet passing between Dick and myself.’ On being told what had happened, Cory ordered them to leave him and seek cover. They ignored him. ‘I told him we would get him back somehow,’ Haville recalled, ‘though we were in a serious situation. It was obvious that an enemy sniper had his sights on us, and it would have been fatal to stand up and carry the stretcher. Dick eased up the front of the stretcher, I pushed from behind, and we crawled along using it like a sled on the hard snow. It was very strenuous, but we made steady progress. The sergeant major crawled out from behind a hedge and helped us over the last few yards.’

  They had made it. So had Cory and Weston (though Marine Wales sadly died from his wounds). But Harden lay dead on the battlefield. As darkness fell, the enemy gunfire slackened off after a tank destroyed the machine-gun nest in the windmill, and the forward sections of the troop returned, bringing with them the Doc’s body. He had been ‘a very gallant comrade’, as Haville put it, ‘and a wonderful example of courage and devotion to his fellow men’. He was buried with full honours in a field beside a convent in Maasbracht, along with Marine Wales and other men who died in the battle. His comrades were there to mourn a man many of the younger ones had seen as a father figure, to whom they told their woes. They couldn’t believe he had gone. ‘We laid him to rest reverently, with our prayers and affection, a cross inscribed with his name, rank, number and unit and the date of his death,’ reported the unit chaplain, the Revd Reginald Haw. He had tried to take Harden’s wedding ring from his finger to send to his widow but could not slide it off, and it was buried with him.

  *

  Back in Northfleet, a devastated Maud struggled with the news of his death. ‘He was all I lived for,’ she told those who came to comfort her. The family future she had constructed in her mind, the dream that had kept her going, was shot to hell. She knew that this war made widows of hundreds of thousands of women just like her, but that knowledge could not ease the pain. ‘The poor boy did his bit, and bravely too,’ her parents told her, seeking consolation. Be strong for the sake of the children, they urged her, though she knew that well enough. Every night as he lay in bed, little Bobby whispered ‘goodnight’ to his daddy, and her heart ached. The post brought shoals of letters of sadness and regret, alongside the pro formas from Buckingham Palace and the War Office. The last letters she had posted to Eric – the
ones quoted from above – came back through the door, the envelopes overprinted with the cold stamp of officialdom: ‘It is regretted that this item could not be delivered because the addressee is reported deceased.’ But it soon began to dawn on her that his was no ordinary death. A week after the official notification, Eric’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Gray, wrote from Maasbracht: ‘His death has hit us all very hard, for he was trusted, loved and respected by all ranks of the commando. He lost or rather gave his life to save lives of our wounded. Three times he went out to bring in casualties who would have died but for him. I shall always be proud of having had Harden in my unit. He was a very brave and gallant man, and his devotion to duty and his comrades was a fine example to us all. I have recommended him for the Victoria Cross and hope that he will be granted it.’

  More tributes arrived. Captain Coventry wrote of Eric’s ‘heroism and calmness’ under fire. ‘He was a friend of every man in my troop and of the whole commando. If there were more men like your husband in the world, the war would be over by now, or never have started in the first place.’ From her cottage in Dorset, Annette Cory, the wounded lieutenant’s wife, penned her deep sympathies and debt of gratitude. ‘Your husband was killed bringing my husband in. If it had not been for him, my husband would have died.’ Months later, when he was at last on the mend and his arm was out of plaster, Cory himself wrote from his military hospital bed, overcome with emotion. It was impossible ‘to convey the gratitude and admiration I feel for your husband. To owe someone your life is to owe them the greatest thing on earth, but not only did he save my life but gave his own in doing it. He was a great man. We were all proud to have him with us. His memory will always be alive and an inspiration to us all.’