'Propaganda'

This story was added to the People’s War site by Anne Wareing on behalf of Lucy Culshaw and has been added to the site with her permission…

I was employed as a shorthand typist, later to become a medical secretary after I had ‘earned my colours,’ at Broadgreen Hospital in Liverpool during the war. When the convoys of wounded soldiers, sailors and airmen started arriving back in this country after D Day office staff were called back to the hospital, usually late at night, to interview each man in order to complete a form for the War Office, MPM47 and a card for the Red Cross so that relatives could be informed of the whereabouts of their loved ones. We worked through the night until each man had been interviewed and if we were lucky and there was a vacant bed in the Nurses Home, we were allowed a couple of hours sleep before reporting back to our desks at 9.00am. Any complaint about lack of sleep was met with “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” we certainly did!

One night I reported back to the hospital Medical Superintendent for duty, having been called out by the local policeman and was told that we were to interview German POW’s. My heart nearly stopped, at the age of twenty I was under the impression that all Germans were monsters. On entering the ward I was confronted by two of our soldiers, armed with machine guns, one at each end of the ward and a ward full of German wounded looking absolutely normal. I stared in amazement and vividly remember thinking to myself — they look just like our own men. I walked the entire length of one side of the ward asking “Do you speak English?” to which they all replied, “Nein”. Arriving at the end I thought, if they don’t speak English how do they know what I said? I set off again and this time managed to get their name, rank and number, which is all that was required. One tried to explain he was in the parachute regiment and actually drew a parachute on one of the forms for me together with his service number, which had a 7 in it and it was the first time I’d seen the continental way of crossing the number 7. Another one kept asking for seife, which turned out to be soap. I had the form until recently when I gave it to one of my sons together with my old ration book and other wartime memorabilia.

The moral of this story is — we all laughed at Herr Goebels the German Propaganda Minister, but we must have been indoctrinated by propaganda ourselves somewhere along the way into thinking Germans were monsters. What a waste of life and time war is.

Lucy Culshaw 18th April 2005

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