大象传媒

This story was told on behalf of Frank Edwards by his daughter Grace Hawker, and has been added to the People's War web-site by Heather McGrouther of the 大象传媒 Coventry & Warwickshire CSV Action Desk Volunteers with her permission. All parties fully understand the terms & conditions.

This was a story that I found amoungst my Dad's effects, after he died in December 2001. The story was enclosed with a letter that my Dad received from an old friend called George Powell, who he was a Prisoner of War with in an Italian Hospital. George is happy for his story to be added to the web-site.

The hospital in Mantova was a fairly modern building having been completed just before the war and was regarded as a showpiece amoung the local population. It was designed and built in the form of a horizontal wheel, the outer rim of which was the perimeter walkway with wards leading off forming the spokes with the hub containing all the ancillary functions necessary in running and maintaining the hospital such as the laundry, boiler room, offices etc.

There were two floors as far as I could ascertain, with the upper floor containing consulting rooms, operating theatres and X-Ray rooms.

Although the hospital was a fine building, it was very poorly equiped due to the shortage of essentials caused by the war and the Allied blockade, the Germans giving preference for their military needs to the exclusion of all other considerations, wounded prisoners of war being ignored completely. This resulted in no anaesthetics for operations, no bandages or dressings, infact nothing at all was being replaced as suppliers ran out even of life-saving drugs and medicines.

We as prisoners, although patients, spent much of our time rolling bandages which had been washed in the hospital laundry. When the fabric bandages became too threadbare to be of any further use, doctors and nurses had to resort to the use of paper to dress wounds!

In the face of all adversity, the Italian doctors and nurses performed heroics, the doctors performing minor surgery with razor blades and ordinary scissors, sterilsed with whatever was available, and the nurses, all Red Cross Volunteers, went about their duties in a cheerful manner. As well as medical and surgical items, food was a scarce commodity. The catering was handled by nuns of a religious order who had a convent and chapel in the spacious grounds of the hospital. Breakfast consisted of a bowl of coffee flavoured milk and a bread roll, lunch was a bowl of thin soup and a further bread roll, whilst the main meal of the day, at about 6pm was a sumptuous bowl of soup containing some vegetables and a few small pieces of unidentifiable meat which we conclude could possibly be goat flesh, plus a roll and a half!

Needless to say, we all lost weight. Again, because of the Allied blockade, we did not receive any Red Cross parcels so could not supplement our daily rations until some time later when the British soldier's inate cunning rose to the challenge...

To read what happened next please type: Who stole the bread rolls? Part 2 - Frank arrives in the "search" box above.

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