大象传媒

In 1938, Reg, a trainee radiographer was working at the Leeds General Infirmary where he met his life long friend Joe Knapton. This in his own words is his story of his recruitment and RAMC training.

War clouds were gathering. I met Joe who worked in the path lab in the LGI. I was by now fully conversant with the X-ray and photographic equipment.

Why didn't I join the T.A. he asked. "There's going to be a war." A unit was being formed, the core of which would be the LGI staff. The colonel was to be an ex-consultant and two other consultants would be lieutenant-colonels. The registrars were to be majors. He was already a corporal and full of enthusiasm. They needed radiographers. "It's quite good fun. It's better to be doing the job you want to do than to be put in the infantry" and of course he was quite right.

So in April 1939, I went along to a 'parade' as they were called. I remember poking the RSM in the chest and saying "Look here Mr Hunter" which really made him mad. However I joined and went to camp with the force First Northern General Hospital, Royal Army Medical Corps. It rained the whole week. It was a deluge, the ground was a swamp, the food terrible. It was bitterly cold and we were permanently wet under canvas. Within my tent, believe it or not, were privates Night, Day, Moon and Love. I was the only one out as a Gill.

I was to take my Part 1 Radiographer exam in October 39. I had joined the civil air guard in the hope of becoming a pilot in the RAF but I never even had a flight.

Experts said that so long as Britain and France stood firm there would be no war. Chamberlain had said so at Munich. So in August 1939, I had cycled to Rhyl and on September 1 1939 I heard on the youth hostel radio that all TA personnel were to report to their barracks at once.

I caught the first train to Leeds. At the barracks, we were told to report to Meanwood dance hall where we assembled in utter confusion. We were issued with 2 blankets and slept on the floor. No-one slept much. The floor was very hard and it was cold and uncomfortable. Next day we were marched to Becketts Park College and formed up into squads. Fortunately we were issued with Panyas sacks and told to fill them with straw. It made the floor sleeping more tolerable. The next day September 3rd, we were told that Chamberlain's ultimatum to Hitler to withdraw his troops from Poland had been ignored. We were at war.

There was a bitterly cold winter in 1939 at Becketts Park. The snow was quite deep. We were given embarkation leave and set off by train for Southampton. We crossed to Le Havre by troopship.
We arrived in France on a bitterly cold day and were stood on the dockside, large notices said "KEEP YOUR BOWELS OPEN AND YOUR MOUTHS SHUT, WALLS HAVE EARS" and all this sort of thing.

Very few of us had ever been to France before. For most, it was a strange experience -a bitterly cold experience. We were hungry. It was very difficult to organise rations in advance and keep secrecy I suppose.
After an hour or two of standing about on the docks we embarked on a train. It was probably one of the oldest trains still in existence. It had wooden seats and 8 of us were cramped into a compartment with all our gear, kit bag, valise, haversack, waterbottle, repirator, tin helmet, spare boots. It's unbelievable how much gear we had. We were frozen stiff. There was no heating in the train and after an interminable wait, it set off, we knew not where.

We travelled for hours and hours but for me there was a certain thrill that we were in the country our fathers had fought in and on much the same route, I believe. Le Havre was one of the routes protected against German submarines and very popular and, though we didn't know it, we were following the route used by most re-inforcements in 1914-1918. From Le Havre through Rouen and up to the camp we eventual arrived at 36 hours later, having had 1 meal and no sleep. We arrived in the small hours of the morning at what we found out eventually to be Etaples.

Now Etaples had been an enormous Great War camp at which new arrivals from Britain had been equipped and sent up to the line. Troops from the line came down for a "rest camp". It was no rest camp in 1939, believe me. When we arrived there was just a field of snow. It was 2 a.m. and bitterly cold. We were hungry enough for cannibalism but no-one in my compartment looked edible. We "detrained' as they say in the military manual. We were lined up and told to march quietly. No singing -presumably because the inhabitants of Etaples were all asleep and they didn't want them to know how many re-inforcements had arrived. I think the Germans would have known anyway -if they were at all interested in medical corps troops. I suppose, if large numbers of medical troops arrived they could estimate the size of the rest in France at the time.

We marched to this place and there were 15 or 16 Nissan huts. They were round things with a wooden floor a stove, and corrugated tin roof. No beds of course, but by this time we had got quite use to that sort of hardship. It was nothing to the intense cold. Even in the Nissan hut with the stove running, those more than 5 feet from the stove found that their boots were frozen to the floor. To get them off the following morning you had to borrow a mallet and actually hammer them from the floor. We put on every stitch of clothing that we had, spare everything, 2 or 3 pairs of socks, balaclava helmets, scarves people had knitted for us and tried to sleep which was virtually impossible. It was pure misery.

Even in the daylight we couldn't see much of the surrounding countryside. The only standpipe on the site was frozen solid and was just one enormous icicle. So next morning we had to get up fill our paneckins or mess tins with snow to melt the snow down on the stove and shave in that way.
Very uncomfortable and difficult to do with frozen fingers but just one of the hardships. Eventually the catering staff, the Sergeant cook and his underlings had got something going and we got some sort of thin hot soup and some bread. French bread at least was available from the village and made a big difference.

At midday we were paraded and told that this site, this icy wilderness, was to be the 18th General Hospital and that marquees had to be erected, roads built and electricity laid on. Pharmacies, X-ray departments, Path Labs were to be built and equipped. That was our job and it had to be done very quickly. Getting all the right equipment in the right place was an enormous logistics problem for the quarter master sergeants.

At that time I was a lance corporal, probably the worst position in the army because, although you got an extra 2d per day, there was a lot more responsibility. You were blamed for everything that went wrong by the corporals and Sergeants without any privileges at all. I was ticked off by the Sergeant Major for 'fraternising' as he called it. An NCO was not allowed to be friendly with the chaps that were in his squad. Ridiculous! A First World War idea I think.

I had 6 men, one shovel and one pick and it was my job to build the road from the main gate up through the camp. Well, the snow had to be shifted, the ground was iron hard. One pick was quite incapable of making the slightest impression on the ground and we made very little progress.

In the meantime several lorries had gone down to the railway sidings in Etaples and brought back masses of canvass. 80 bedded marquees are enormous, comparable with the largest ones you'll ever see on a fairground, and the tent pegs are sized accordingly, probably 3ft tall, about 4ins across with iron points at the bottom.
These were supposed somehow to be hammered into the ground to take the guy ropes. So far as I know there was only one person there who had ever put up a marquee before! Quite typical of the army.

You know we spent all those weeks between September 1939 and the end of the year, marching up and down and doing useless drills. Ceremonial drills for stretcher bearers are complicated. It takes half an hour to sort out 200 men into equal size to carry stretchers but we were never told how to retrieve a casualty who might be lying pinned to barbed wire, or in a bush somewhere, or on uneven ground.
Why we weren't given an outline on how to put up a marquee in all the time we were waiting I don't know. I can only think that the Generals thought we were going to have a repetition of the First World War where everybody bundled into trenches, they shot at each other and the war would be run like that. Of course it turned out to be a very different kind of war.

Luckily we had a Pioneer Corps which duly arrived in a camp next to us and they were given the job of making the road and giving us a water supply and so on. Most of us had to pitch in on the marquee building business and the ground continued to be iron hard right through January and February when the hospital was being built. The mallets were so big some of the puny men could hardly lift them. The ground had to be levelled, tarpaulin laid down and the canvas laid out in a specific way. Two men to a guy rope, one man to a peg. When eventually the poles were placed in exactly the right position and you hauled on the ropes the whole thing rose from the ground to roughly its right shape and then strategic pegs were hammered in. Eventually you got something that looked like a tent. The sidewalls followed. These used smaller pegs only 2 inches thick and 2 feet long.

We were a 2000 bed hospital so you needed 20 of these, plus the tents for the specialist departments, Pharmacy, Path Lab etc.

X-ray had a nissan hut and the men in it were thrown out and put under canvas. It was my job to make it a going concern. I was given two 4kw petrol generators which I'd never seen before, one for lighting the key departments, path lab and of course the officers mess, the other for the X-ray machine which arrived some time in February. Again I'd never seen anything quite like it. It was a field X-ray machine and there were lots of problems getting it assembled and working. The radiologist, Major Lees was a nice chap but I hardly saw anything of him. He appeared from time to time, said "How are you getting on" and so on and disappeared again.

I was told to report to the 17th general hospital at Camiers about 7 or 8 miles away. They were an established regular medical unit and in their own opinion were far superior to us.
I went there and reported to Sergeant radiographer who said "Oh you're that bloke from the 18th. Well, I'm supposed to test you to see if you can manage a field X-ray set. Have you ever used one before?" I said "No Sergeant I've never seen one before". He said "There's nothing to it really, 90KV, 30 milliamp set. You know what I mean when I say that." I said, "Well yes I do".

He said "You won't have a lot of trouble with it until you start x-raying spines and things when you'll find it very much under powered. You'll have to strap the patient down because of the time it takes for the necessary power to be delivered and the generator starts to cough because you're overloading it. Limbs are no problem. Anyway have a go".
I had one or two patients in with cuts bruises bumps and things and one or two fractures. I had a go and turned out some reasonably good x-rays, developed them in the X-ray department in the darkroom and he said "O.K. you can shove off now". I said "Thank you Sergeant", and shoved off back to Etaples as a Lance Corporal.

Two days later the Sergeant Major sent for me and said "You are now a Sergeant". I was stunned but he said "Go to the Quarter Masters store and draw your stripes. Put them on your arm and come back to the Sergeants mess." which I did. He said "You'd better go back to your department and come back at about 6 o'clock" so I went back to the mess and with a certain amount of trepidation, opened the door. There was an immediate howl from all the assembled people "It's his turn to buy the beer!"

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