大象传媒

I was a private, attached to 21 Field Dressing Station as an electrician, and we assembled at Gosport for the D-Day invasion. With me was my driver Sammy Bates and our vehicle, a 30 hundredweight Chevrolet supplied by the Canadians.

We embarked onto an LCT in the middle of the night, which left port as flotilla leader. The seas were very rough and everyone on our craft was sick apart from myself and one sailor. We were scheduled to land on Sword bearch one hour after the first landings, but as we were approaching, we started getting shelled from some German guns on the Normandy coast that had not been silenced. We had to stand off for a while, until we were signalled from the shore that it was safe to go in. We came into the shoreline under fire, with the shells from our own ships going onshore over our heads. Amazingly, our Australian skipper managed to get our LCT right up onto the beach to give us a dry landing, but our vehicle got stuck in a shell hole as we tried to make our way up the beach. An armoured bulldozer came to our rescue and pulled us out so that we could drive up to the top of the beach. As we arrived on the skyline, I saw 3 Lancashire Fusiliers laying dead alongside us. I said to my driver that we were sitting ducks on the skyline, so we decided to go along the beach road to look for the landmark assigned for setting up our FDS site, a water tower near Hermanville. We drove along the road looking for the tower until we were stopped by 3 soldiers, all blacked up, who leapt out of the bushes and asked "Where the hell do you think you're going?" We found out that the tower had been demolished and that if we carried on any further, we'd be in amongst the Germans, so we turned round and went back.

As luck would have it, we ran into one of the FDS despatch riders, Stan ?, (a lance corporal) who was looking for us. He escorted us back to the site being set up in an orchard near Hermanville. We immediately started setting up our electrics and lighting to all the tents in the field dressing station, in the order of reception, operating, resucitation and the recovery wards. I remember the bulldozers were mounding embankments around the tents to try to protect them from bursting shells.

At the time, we were being shelled by the Germans, while at night German planes would also come over to bomb us. My job was to keep the generator going and look after the electrics, although when everything was going OK, I also helped the medics.

One other thing I found time for was to dig a slit trench for Sammy and myself, for our own protection. This hole, about 3 feet wide, 8 feet long and 6 feet deep, reinforced with some railway sleepers we found nearby and covered with some groundsheets we managed to scrounge, was our 'home' for the next few weeks. Not that I spent much time in it to start with. So busy was I with various jobs that I did not sleep for 6 days, eventually dropping off standing up in a trench.

In helping the medics, I got involved in various tasks. During the first few nights, I assisted in collecting the bodies of dead soldiers, which we could only line up in a nearby field, till they were three deep after only three days. Not just whole bodies, but also detached limbs, which we bagged in hessian and left with the people we assumed they belonged to. We didn't have time to get emotional about the carnage.

I remember one poor soul being brought in with hole as big as your head in the region of his stomach, but I've no idea what happened to him. How the medics operated in these conditions I will never know.

I also had to try and bring shellshock victims back to the station. I was asked to take them back to a particular tent, and I would link my arms with one on either side, with others linked to their arms in turn. However, by the time I had got to the tent, all had dropped off the line in panic at the shellfire, apart from the two linked to me, which I managed to bring in.

After four or five weeks, we even had to open up a maternity ward, to assist in pregnancies among the local population. We reckoned about 12 babies were born with assistance from 21 FDS!

When the storm struck the Normandy beaches, this affected the flow of supplies to us, and I remember that all we had for a while was tea and hard, square biscuits that we had to soften in the tea. Once supplies started to flow once more, I remember what seemed like a delicious tinned bacon roll.

As well as casualties from our own troops, we also tended German wounded, although it seemed that the SS wounded frequently refused treatment from our medics, some of them even spitting at the doctors.

Eventually, we were able to move out, following up behind the troops as they advanced, setting up the dressing station anew at each halt, until at last we arrived in Amiens, where we were able to take over a hospital from the Germans, although it was still full of German wounded and nursing staff.

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