Doodlebug in Chiswick

During the summer of 1944, my father was up in Scotland serving as a doctor with the RAMC. He was training for the invasion at Walcheren. During the same time, my mother was living in a ground floor flat in Chiswick, together with my, just over, two year old sister, Nita.

Some time late in an evening in June 1944 (shortly after D-Day), after she and my sister were in bed, the air raid siren went. She heard a V1 flying bomb overhead and also heard the engine cut out. My sister was at this time still sleeping in a cot, which was next to mother's bed.

As the doodlbug's engine had cut out, she said she knew that the bomb was going to fall near her, so she very quickly grabbed the pillow from her bed and jumped into my sister's cot, with the pillow and herself on top of my sister. The V1 then hit the block of flats, which collapsed on top of the two of them.

The memory, which regrettably stayed with her all her life, was that as the wall of her bedroom was blown out on to the street, the ARP Warden was walking up the path to the front door (no doubt to tell them to go to the shelter). As the blast struck him, the poor man's head was blown off, but to her horror he continued to take several steps towards them. The reality, of course, is that all of this only took fractions of a second, but any incident such as this always happens in slow motion.

The building collapsed and my mother and sister were buried under tons of rubble. Although Mother was seriously injured, she was eventually dug out alive. Her instinctive reaction to try and save her daughter, actually saved her as well, as the cot was just strong enough to create a pocket around them both. At the same time, my sister was also rescued, without a mark on her, as the combined cushioning of the pillow and my poor mother had totally protected her.

Happily, although always physically scarred from the injuries she received, by the superb efforts of a young Canadian doctor, her almost severed arm was saved and she made a complete recovery. Some fifty odd years later, a lump of brick that had been too deeply embedded in her skull to be removed, popped to the surface and could finally be removed.

Her recovery was quite fortuitous for me and my younger sister, as it allowed us to be here to know the story. After a couple of days wandering around without parents, my father was able to get down from Balbeggie (near Dundee) and collect my sister, who had been taken to a collection point nearby, but appeared to have been overlooked after that.

After mother had made a sufficient recovery to be discharged from hospital, it was possible for her and my sister to travel up to Balbeggie, where a local publican and his wife were kind enough to put her up, whilst father carried on training with his unit, but he was close enough to ensure that she could be nursed back to health. The licensees of the pub couldn't show enough kindness and generosity to their guests and mother was forever grateful to them for their immense kindness.

The 52nd Lowland Division trained as a Mountain Division and was left up in Scotland during the Normandy invasion as part of the feint to convince Hitler that there was a second front due in Norway.

After father trained for months in East Anglia to be able to land his unit by glider, when the time came to do so in earnest, the powers that be resolved that the landing was unsuitable for airborne troops and they were rushed down to Tilbury and landed at Ostend by LCT.

The air transportable nature of the Division, linked to their use for mountain warfare, meant that equipment and especially transport, was specially adapted to these purposes. The medical unit that father commanded comprised half a dozen Austin Champs and Jeeps, some of which had operating tables, on hinges, that were enclosed whilst travelling. They would pursue the front line as a highly mobile field dressing station. Having drawn to a halt in close proximity to the line, the tables would be swung open over each side, with father standing in the space thereby created in the middle.

This, in turn, meant that there was a stable operating platform with an injured soldier on each side, who could be rendered immediate surgical aid, with father simply turning from one to the other. Having stabilised the injury, the injured man could be removed to the nearest field hospital.

His recollection of the very heavy fighting that they were engaged in at the Battle of the Rhine in early 1945, was that, having operated non-stop for seventy two hours, he felt that by the end of this stint, he was doing more harm than good. One point that stuck in his memory was that he treated twenty six men in succession who had had their left leg blown off by shoe-mines, but none with their right leg similarly afflicted, which always struck him as rather odd.

Similarly, he learned not to administer morphine until after the wound had been tied off. The shock of the explosion had closed off the arteries, which was the reason the soldier was alive when brought to the table. As soon as morphine was administered, the arteries relaxed and immense blood loss followed. Having lost his first patient to this, he was able to save the remainder by only administering analgesia after the arteries had been tied.

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