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This story was submitted to the People’s War web site by a volunteer on behalf of Maurice Gross and has been added to the site with his permission. He fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was a pharmacist by profession but was called up in 1942 and joined the Royal Army Medical Corps. After three months training at Crookham, I was sent to The Royal Herbert Hospital in Woolwich.

London at that time was full of military personnel, and soldiers, sailors, pilots and even German prisoners were among our patients. There was bombing every night and the hospital was staffed by VADs and Red Cross personnel as well as nurses. Although I was a pharmacist, I was not working as such except that every third night I was on call as an emergency pharmacist. The hospital also arranged parties of stretcher bearers to bring in casualties, and I was one of them even when you had been on duty all night, you still had to go on Parade at 6.15 the next morning.

At that time, from May —November 1942, I was in the Cookhouse and Medical Stores, and as part of my duties, I helped to prepare vegetables, I can remember having to pod about three hundredweight of peas as we had to feed all the patients and staff. I can’t remember there being any food shortages, and I think that we ate much better than civilians at that time.
The Colonel found out that I played tennis and I was ordered by the Regimental Sergeant Major to report with my racquet most afternoons, when we played mixed doubles with Matron and the VAD Commandant.

In November 1942 I was sent to Peebles in Scotland for further training. When we arrived in Scotland, there was a hitch with accommodation and we had to spend the night in a transit camp. My new unit formed up in a Lumber camp in the middle of the forest originally used to house unemployed people who were then put to work as Lumberjacks.
There was no running water, just solid ice in the bowls: we were given a sack and told to fill it with hay and heather to make ourselves a palliasse. We had three 6 foot planks laid across trestles and we put the palliasse on top and that and that was our bed. Our blankets always accompanied us - we had them wrapped around our kitbags.
Later, we moved to Nissan huts, but it was still very primitive and scabies was rife. Reinforcements came from the South of England, building up numbers until there were enough people to staff a British Medical Hospital .It took about a month to get the Unit up to strength and while this was happening, I was a private doing the standard Nursing Orderly training.
Scotland was used as a training ground for hundreds of soldiers, it was also the departure point for troops going overseas and at any one time there were soldiers of all nationalities on manoeuvres. There were many accidents.
A Unit similar to ours had taken over Peebles Hydro but when they went overseas, our Unit took over and I then undertook dispensing duties and because I was a strong swimmer, I supervised hydrotherapy with the injured troops.
We were there for about one year, we kept fit by marching and Montgomery ordered that everybody had to do cross country running every day. We played football and trained and I became a sergeant.

I was sent on a months’ course in Leeds and then heard that I was to be posted overseas. I went to Leeds again for injections and was kitted out with tropical gear. My wife joined me there for the last week before the Unit embarked at Gourock to go overseas.
By now it was November 1943; the allies had fought the Battle of Britain, and fought at Dunkirk and lost Singapore.
It took us seven weeks to reach the Mediterranean and when we were between Sicily and the coast of North Africa, we were bombed continuously for two days. The conditions were hellish as we were all below deck with very little water and it was incredibly hot. Our ship was hit and the bomb hit the mast and was deflected onto the deck, killing several men.
We were put ashore on the North African coast and ended up in a transit camp with many other units including some Marine Commandoes who were housed in about 25 large bell tents. One morning we awoke to find that the Marines had moved out over night without our hearing anything. But the walls of the tents had also disappeared; they had been taken by the locals who had scaled the high barbed wire without a sound.
While we were in that camp, we were plagued by yellow rats which just came out of the sand and ran over you while you slept hence the name ‘Desert Rats’.

We were moved on by ship to Bombay, where we wore our tropical kit for the first time (it now bore very little resemblance to the kit we had been issued with as it had been stuffed in our kit bags for months) However tailors and dhobi men washed and pressed and altered our uniform so that once again, we were a smart force.
I was posted to Allahabad on the Ganges and joined a British Medical Hospital there. This hospital looked after all the soldiers and airmen and their families. It was also a heatstroke hospital, looking after troops, particularly airmen who would have to work in incredibly high temperatures and who subsequently became very ill if they were exposed to such heat for too long .Aircraftmen could only work 20 minutes or risk getting heatstroke. If they did suffer heatstroke, then they had to be placed in ice cold water to bring their temperature down.
As a pharmacist, I had to make up a pint of saline every day for each man in the unit to drink to stop them losing vital minerals in the heat and suffering heatstroke.

I was then posted to Bihar, West of Calcutta, ostensibly for the invasion of Japan, but Bihar favoured the Japanese side, so we were not allowed to go out as it was not safe. We did not have any electricity and sat around hurricane lamps which attracted hundreds of moths, while only 3 miles away, the Americans had a huge camp with cinemas, a NAAFI. etc. Also they were issued with a crate of beer a week, whereas we only had 9 bottles as our weekly issue.

I went to Calcutta for 3 months and lived in a Rajah’s palace. At one time I issued one million doses of smallpox vaccine a night, and sent medicines over the Himalayas to General Slim’s troops in China.
On one night I remember, about 5000 soldiers were marched into a great field, and there, picked out by a searchlight, in a shimmering silver dress, was Vera Lynn. And she sang ‘The White Cliffs of Dover

In August 1945 the war in Japan had just ended, but not everybody knew and so when we landed in Port Swetenham, north of Malacca, I was armed for the first time. We took over the modern civilian hospital at Malacca. People were starving and had had no medical services for 3 years.
We soon got the hospital organised, and had 30 Japanese prisoners to help. We all wanted to go home, but we stayed there over a year. During that time, we used to go out in ambulances, to try to encourage the local people to come to trust us for their medical care and if they were very ill, we took them to hospital to be treated.
In the evenings, we would go out in teams with footballs and hockey sticks and badminton racquets, anything to get them to join us and start to trust us as many of them had been in hiding, living in the jungle for the last few years.

I worked in Malaya while everybody was leaving and was posted to the Indian Depot Medical Stores Department with about 30 sepoys to provide medical stores for units all over Malaya. In delivered these stores in a large American Chevrolet. It was very difficult as there were very few roads. Once, we had to vaccinate 1000 men against smallpox, after a man had died of it. Because of prickly heat, it was very difficult to see if the vaccine had taken and so we vaccinated all the men three times in two weeks.
At last I was demobbed and in 1947, arrived back in England with no house no money, no job and no car but with a wife and a daughter of 3 whom I had not seen before.

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