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It was a long, slow haul backing the tanks out. Fear replaced the compassion. Now I was afraid of the hurt that would come to me pulling me out of the turret for transport down the line. So far forward, there were no ambulances and a Dingo armoured car had been wirelessed for. It reached me at the top of the hill and I was wedged in on its rear deck above the engine. Len Clark insisted on accompanying me. By that time I had completely lost consciousness. It must have been a couple of hours of driving at speed before the fresh evening air suddenly revived me. My head was on Len’s lap. He was distressed but I comforted him by insisting “I’m going to survive this Len,” and he answered “And may God help you Doug.” I had vague recollections of passing through a casualty clearing station, bandaging, injections and asking for the bottle.
It was not till much later I learnt that our infantry had closed in on the enemy attacking us. Alas, Van Niekerk had been killed in the action. Because he was not in the N.M.R. I was unable to find his home address or I would have written his parents as soon as I was capable.
The casualty station had stuck a D.I.L. label on me and rushed me to a large casualty unit vacated by a German ambulance corps a few days earlier. Arriving very late at night I was shocked at the shambles that prevailed. Germans were usually very humane when evacuating casualty and hospital units leaving them more or less intact. The chaos that existed here now not only indicated the rapidity of our advance, but also our heavy casualties. The building, which I visited in later years was four floors and very old. The ground floor and a basement were almost packed to the ceiling with wounded. They were in stretchers on the concrete floor; all beds were taken and there was barely room for orderlies, doctors and nurses to reach every patient. The two top floors acted as staff quarters and kitchens. There was no room at the inn for me and I had to be taken down to the basement which was dimly lit and gave the appearance of being an old church crypt.
What I was seeing was only part of the problem. There was a small airstrip only minutes away and a plane from Naples came to take walking wounded, once every morning, back to the large British General Hospitals based in Naples itself. The majority of patients here, again mainly Tommies, were too ill to walk to the plane or were having emergency surgery. There was, for all the background disinfectants, the telltale stench of battle still there, the anxious faces, faces in coma or anaesthesia; nurses jogging around with trays of bandages and orderlies with their bedpans. It was the R.A.M.C. at its best in conditions at their worst. I had long lost my beret and the splinters of the shell that had peppered my scalp made me appear as if someone had broken a bottle over my head, and tiny outpourings of blood leaked downwards in thin lines making me appear half-crazed. My stretcher was jammed in between two beds waiting to be found a place somewhere. In the end there was only space in the crypt. My left eye had a splinter in the surface and it made movement of the eyeball difficult and painful, but through it all I could see an army surgeon working his way through a line of new casualties towards me. At a distance he seemed vaguely familiar.
He would check over each casualty, refer to their medical notes and add his own instructions to them and then struggle to the next soldier.
As the surgeon got closer I recognised whom it was. It was ‘Hoddy’, Captain Hodson from the 101st and 92nd General Hospitals in Egypt, whose team had sewn my back up after Alamein! Hoddy was shocked at my appearance but recognised me immediately with “You again”. He glanced at my notes and said, “I told you to go home. Now look at what you have done.” Hodson asked a few questions and said “You had that big scar on your back. Did it hold?” The orderly had sat me up for him and Hoddy drew me gently forward and ran his fingers down the centre of the scar on my right scapula, muttering “Excellent! We thought it might break down.” He took up the notes, such as they were and he wrote on them, saying to me comfortingly “When you get to Naples they’ll know what to do. You’ll be alright.” Then he squeezed my shoulder and moved on. In all that chaos of hundreds of casualties stretched across the whole peninsula so late at night, I had miraculously encountered the very one military surgeon who knew my history, having tended me two years previously amongst the masses of casualties pouring into the hospital based at the Suez Canal after Alamein.
Another injection put me to sleep again.
About 3a.m. I heard two loud crashes which seemed to me, lying in the darkened crypt half awake, to sound like mortars exploding on the roof. A moment later, it was as if a powerful electric shock had entered me through the crown of my head, which was now bandaged anyway. A torrent of energy began to pour through me. It was as if I was wedged between two great electrodes, one applied to the vertex of my skull and the second to the soles of my feet, and their current traveled through me. It was more like a force that lit me up similar to a luminous bulb and persisted for two to three minutes. It did not frighten me; far from it, because the luminescence was accompanied by exhilaration. I felt the exhaustion driven from me and a mounting of the force led on to an ecstasy I had never known before.
The phenomenon now settled into a sensation of fire, a subjective fire certainly, but incandescent nevertheless…a fire that warmed, energised and refreshed me. And then it left me and the darkness of the crypt closed in. The occurrence was not at that point revelatory and at the time I read nothing into it.
Almost immediately a clamour then arose at the main entrance to the ward and orderlies hastened in with lamps shouting urgently “Walking wounded! The plane is here to take walking wounded! Walking wounded only.”
Suddenly I remembered something Dr. Hodson had said to his medical orderly, “You must get him back to the 92nd as quickly as possible.” I remembered the two bullet wounds in my legs were flesh wounds and I could probably walk. The energy phenomenon of fire passing through me had restored my vigour and I decided the whole episode had been preparing me to get to Naples post haste. I sat up. The orderlies had just bypassed me. I swung my legs out of the stretcher, slid out of it and moved down the narrow corridors between the beds to the door of the ward where other orderlies had assembled to aid the walking wounded out of the casualty station to the waiting ambulance.
I staggered up to the ward exit dragging some of the bandages that had become loosened behind me and covered my D.I.L. label. Reaching the steep steps into the courtyard an orderly stepped forward to help me.
Wednesday, 5th July ’44 — San Felice
Netted in and pulled out at eight on operations. Made excellent progress and passed through towns where wine and flowers and eggs were showered on us. Then we struck a bit of trouble. Jerry began shelling the demolition but we were OK until someone let him know where we were. We suspected some houses as ‘O pips’ and plastered them. Then we got the order to advance. I volunteered to act as link on the 38 set (walkie-talkie) with the infantry. The 88mm shells came down and mowed us. One hit the tank just as I was climbing it. Didn’t damage the tank but I’m in a mess. After a nightmare of a ride the guys got me back to a C.C.S. Len with me all the way. Was dosed up with morphia and operated on before midnight.
A further criticism of Corporal Bell was that during the action while I was out of the tank he had not placed the co-driver in the wireless operator loader’s vacated position which meant that his tank could not use its 75mm gun. Thus practically half the firepower of the troop had been lost for most of the period of our ambush. This alone would have been an offence warranting a court marshall. In fact no action was taken and a very bad example had been set by Bell’s cowardly action.

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