Aftermath: Mobile Field Hospitals

Transcript

Copy [Handwritten: Form 540. January ’45. Appendix “L”]

Mobile Field Hospitals

By

Victoria Chappelle

On D-Day plus 7 the glabbergasted captain of a Tank Landing Craft was informed by one of his officers that two women had come aboard. “They say they’re nurses,” said the officer and hurriedly retreated. Feeling that the war was getting a little out of hand, the Captain went to investigate and found two very composed young women in the blue War Service dress of the Royal Air Force standing by their kit.

That night they occupied the cabin which the captain had surrendered to them, ignorant of the fact that all over the vessel they had practically supplanted the invasion as a topic of conversation. The next night, at 11 p.m., the first two British nursing sisters to land with the liberating troops – members of the Princess Mary’s Royal Air Force Nursing Service – set foot on the Normandy beachhead and added a fresh paragraph to nursing history.

The noise was ear-splitting, the beaches crowded with dimly seen figures. But the corporal who had been detailed to guide them to the transport, which would take them to their Mobile Field Hospital, was quite nonchalant, although he urged them to walk as rapidly as possible away from the ships, because he remarked rather obviously “That beach ain’t safe.”

Scrambling into a lorry they started on their first journey into France. They had gone perhaps fifty yards when the vehicle gave a terrific lurch and slithered into a shell-hole, whereupon the driver, offering incoherent apologies, stopped a lorry in a passing convoy and on they went again. It was exactly 3 a.m. when they reported for duty and the sleepy C.O. of the Advanced Surgical Unit, which had gone over on D-Day, turned out of his tent and the slit trench dug within it. In that dank hole, despite the unending noise and much to their own surprise, the two sisters slept.

On D-Day plus 14, they were joined by a third colleague and five days later by a fourth, both of whom had flown from England. The nursing staff of one Mobile Field Hospital was complete.

Today the R.A.F. M.F.H’s are well established. Each staffed with its complement of doctors, four nursing sisters, and nursing orderlies, they have closely followed the R.A.F. as the latter have moved up from the beachhead to each battlefront in support of the troops.

From the moment they landed to the time when, months later in Belgium, their tents were finally exchanged for buildings, all the sisters have lived like soldiers. Nor would the have had it otherwise.

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