Extracts from the Audio Memoirs of Major LWA Lyons - Italy - Part Three - 1944

When we got to the New Zealand casualty clearing post, we were lined up on stretchers in the snow by the side of the road, still only with our wet blanket. There was an RAMC Captain and a ‘QA’. You know what a ‘QA’ is, a Queen Alexandria’s Imperial Military Nursing Service nurse. He was instructing her,
‘Head injuries first…just get head injuries into the tent, so they can be dealt with first’
She looked at me, well decorated with Jim Showers blood.
‘Yes that sort of thing’ said the Captain.
So I was carried into this huge tent and put on the ground. Another QA in battle dress said,
‘Well go on, rack him up.’
So two orderly’s racked me up on trestles, the sort of thing they use in the army for making tables. Everybody was shivering, and some people’s teeth were chattering, it was terribly cold. Some of them had been there an awful long time. I thought this might be how they sort them out. Those that survive are lucky and the others you don’t have to bother about, because they’ve pegged out anyhow.

Then it got dark and no lights were put on anywhere. Another QA came around looking at people’s faces with one of those pencil torches. If she had any doubt she would open an eyelid and look at the man’s pupils. Occasionally she would flash her torch toward an opening and, orderlies would take out the body.

Shortly after darkness, they came and took me into the operating area. It was heated by some sort of Calor gas. It was marvellous, the warmth was so welcome. I lay there under my wet blanked and just enjoyed breathing in this warm air. Then they took my blanket away, and took me into the theatre. When I came round it was daylight. I found my left arm was strapped to my chest with Plaster of Paris. My leg was in plaster from the foot up to the groin. There was a plaster artist who was drawing the fern, which is of course, the 2nd New Zealand badge. I tried to draw the Red Eagle of the Punjab, which is the 4th Indian Division’s badge.

When we had finished these things we just lay there, in the comfort of this warm tent.

Later an ambulance came to take me. These were 3rd line base wallahs, that plied between the Casualty Clearing Station, and the Base General Hospital at Caserta. By comparison the stretchers and everything was so clean. The ones used by the 1st line were not only soaking in blood, but here and there where people had been dragged off, there would be the odd small chunk of flesh, and of course there was excrement spread all over the place. They had no time, the front line people, to clean them up. They just had to keep taking people as they came in.

But now I was wrapped in a beautiful blanket, I had pyjamas on too… oh it was sheer luxury. So I was taken to the Base General Hospital at Caserta. 2BGH had been with the 8th Army throughout the desert campaign. They started of in Alexandria at the beginning of Wavel’s first show, Operation Compass. Then they moved to Benghazi, then to Tripoli and Tunisia and here they were again at Caserta. The officer’s ward here was a pretty big one. One of the things I remember was that the lights never went out. In the middle of this ward a passage went through into a gap. Beyond this there must have been a door for occasionally there was a whiff of fresh air. In the evenings Major Fowler would do his round accompanied by a little Scots Captain. They came around with this QA who was all “made up”, and not in battle dress but in a proper uniform with the red cape and all that, and wearing a natty pair of desert boots. Fowler would look at some people and say,
‘We can’t leave it any longer I’m afraid, it’ll have to be tonight’
Over in the opening to the passageway there was no lighting. The glow of cigarettes could be seen, being smoked by the orderly’s as they waited with the stretcher. Fowler would nod in their direction. One would then see two cigarettes drop to the ground with slight sparks as they were trampled out, and over they would come, trundling the stretcher. The chap would be taken away to return perhaps only 10 minutes later, minus a leg. Then there were others, who pleaded for another night,
‘Well yes perhaps, but this is it…we can’t delay any longer’
All this was going on whilst the well “made up” QA was looking around at all the new arrivals, to see if there was anybody she fancied.

There was one boy opposite who had come in from Anzio, and was taken away, to come back with both his legs off. I think on one he’d still got his knee and the other was higher up. When he came around the next day he started shouting and yelling and crying, it went on for days on end. Eventually the QA got fed up with this poor boy crying, so she…this really, I must say I found terribly funny…it wasn’t…well you know, tragedy—comedy. This QA went up to him,
‘What are you shouting and crying about now for. Do you think you’re the only person in the world who’s had both his legs off!’
It worked. He stopped crying. It was just the tough tactics she knew would work.

There were some people on our ward who were on penicillin. The medicos didn’t think much of it because two people opposite had terrible rashes on their chest and neck. It wasn’t used all the time. They were using mainly a system of M&B 693 Sulphonamide powder. This would be packed into wounds and then a plaster placed on top sealing the wound in and allowing it to stew in it’s own juice for a while, anything up to a month. The results were extremely good. The only trouble is that if you have a plaster on your leg, or your arm for that matter, sooner or later the limb withers slightly, and every time you move the leg or whatever the most appalling whiff is released. So there are all these people giving off awful smells from their wounds. It was a pretty foul atmosphere in the officer’s ward I can tell you. When you are on this M&B 693, you needed to keep drinking lots of water, and they keep examining your urine for traces of blood, because apparently it could damage the kidneys.

Once I was established in this ward, officers would come down from our end and from my brigade to see me. They all came except Peter Rick, my greatest friend. As he hadn’t been I suspected he must have been killed or wounded. Whenever I asked about him people just changed the subject. I think they had been told not to mention him because I had had no shock, and they didn’t want any to set in. At the other end of the ward there was this room where they put people who either had bad shock or who were not making any progress. This was called the “Dieing room”. One day Khamla Khant, my little Gurkha driver, came to visit me, and I asked him how Rick Sahib was killed. He told me that he was coming to visit me in the main dressing station and was shot in the back by a sniper while driving over the Rapido. I had a bad reaction to this and lost interest in almost anything. After a couple of days they came and put me in the dieing room. There was a boy in the bed next to mine, and he was doing a lot of crying. He was a young officer of about 18 years old.
‘What are you crying about old boy’ I asked him.
‘They’re going to court martial me. They say I shot myself in the leg. They are coming out tomorrow from the Judge advocates generals department to take a statement’
He was facing a charge of wounding himself before the battle.
I asked him what his defence was.
‘I’m going to say I accidentally shot myself in the leg’
‘Which side do you have your revolver?’
‘On the right side’ he said,
‘So you drew it from the right side and shot yourself in the left leg…I suppose they have made a note at what angle the bullet went in and came out?’
‘Yes they’ve done all that’

The interest I had in this poor chap seemed to bring me around, and it wasn’t long before I went back on the ward.

2BGH had taken over Caserta Palace, the place where Emma (Lady Hamilton) and Nelson would stay for the weekend with the King of the two Sicilys. It had been a hotel for some years, and the waiters were kept on when the place was taken over to be used as a hospital. They wore penguin suits with the regulation napkin over their arm, and come round taking orders for the meals. The menu seemed extensive, but was in fact bully beef, done up in different ways. Any how it was quite nice having them there… Ayeties, they were so friendly.

Then I had the plaster taken off my chest. A ½ inch ridge had formed at the back of my shoulder, where the shrapnel had pushed out a lot of bone and tissue. The nurse would come wearing a mask soaked in Eau de Cologne and burn this ridge down with acid. This was done many times and gradually they got it level.
The little RMC Captain would come around and explain to people what was wrong with them. He told me that 8 inches of bone in my leg had been shot away, but that I would still be able to walk since there are two bones in that part of the leg, although the other bone had had a chip knocked out of it. The force of the shell piece going through my shoulder had broken most of my ribs down one side, my collar bone and split the shoulder blade into 4 pieces, as well as knocking a hole through the ball and socket. But he said that I should be OK.

It was now my Birthday and the unit cook baked me a cake. Maurice Fortune and the rest of the chaps came down to join the party. On the 15th of March, one month since I was wounded, I had both my plasters removed and new smaller ones put on.

1944 was a leap year and the nurses would jokingly propose to anyone they fancied.
I had a South African Lieutenant on my left who was serving with the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, awfully nice chap. There was a Grenadier Guards man to my right, also very nice, but terribly reserved. Being near the passageway his bed was in the draught, where as the rest of us were in the stink hole. There was a really good-looking young woman from the Red Cross, who came everyday through the corridor that divided the ward. She would stop and chat to the Guards Captain. She looked so smart in her uniform and had her hair swept back off the face, which was the fashion in those days. Everyone loved her, but she only spoke to the Guardsman. Some chaps thought this mean of her, but I realised that he being near the passage, was in the air slipstream, whilst we were all in stink land, and the poor girl could not stand the smell. One day she turned up with a small fishing net, like the ones children use to catch tiddlers. We in stink land, spent the afternoon wondering what she was going to do with it. A week or so later the Padre put a small union jack sticker on my bed, meaning that I was to be repatriated to the UK. Eventually a large convoy of Ambulances took those for repatriation to Naples, and the 67th Base General Hospital, which was in a warehouse on the docks. This was a very noisy hospital. There was a battery of 3.7 inch Anti Aircraft guns parked up right next to the hospital, and they opened up almost every night. The night before we were to embark on the hospital ship, my Gurkha driver, Khamla Khant came to say goodbye…bless his heart. He brewed enough tea for the whole ward; milky tea, of course, with sunt (cinnamon). It was much appreciated by all.

So next morning they started to load all the patients onto the ship. We were placed on a lower deck and on gimballed cots. We then heard air raid sirens and this clever Charlie told everyone how a hospital ship had been bombed, when docked at Anzio. He said the bomb had gone right through the deck and exploded, killing everybody on the lower decks. This of course was a load of codswallop.

Standing on the deck was an officer of the Scottish Rifles in full dress uniform, looking absolutely immaculate. I wondered why he was on a hospital ship. But as the air raid got under way, and the bombs could be heard busting on the docks, he fell onto the deck screaming, and started to claw at the steel plates. Two orderlies came and led him away. He had got shell shock, although in WWII it was called being “bomb happy”.

The nurse who was looking after me said she had been torpedoed twice when on hospital ships, but had been rescued easily on both occasions.

On my right was a chap who never spoke and had many screens around his cot. An orderly told us that he had had his lower jaw shot away, and his tongue was now down on his chest so that he could not speak or swallow. He was fed by a tube, and it seemed that his life was more or less ruined. I felt lucky to have been let off so lightly.

An RMC Captain appeared and told everyone, that in the event of an emergency those with at least one leg and one arm would have to fend for themselves to get up the stairs, as the nurses and orderlies would be busy looking after the others.

A few days after we set sail, rumours started that the most dangerously ill were to be put ashore in Algeria, and I was surprised when POW’s came and put me onto a stretcher to be transferred ashore.

Once ashore, we were taken by ambulance to up to a fine villa in the hills that overlooking Algiers. There were nine officers, although two died soon after we arrived. On fine days we would be wheeled on to a splendid balcony. A local businessman had placed the villa at the disposal of the army. After two weeks we learned that a Royal Navy hospital ship had arrived to take us back to the UK. I can’t remember the name of the ship (it may have been the Oxfordshire). She was an old Bibby liner that I had seen going through the Suez Canal when I was a boy. Bibby liners were all rather old fashioned, but entirely first class and very pukka. The ballroom was now the officer’s ward, and there were now naval officers as well as "Pongos" (the naval term for soldiers). The voyage was without incident until we had passed through the Straits of Gibraltar and had entered the Bay of Biscay. A naval surgeon came with orderlies and dressed us up in “hospital blues”. (Every nation at war has an agreed uniform for wounded personnel, as part of the Geneva Convention. The British uniform was white shirt, red tie, and blue jacket and trousers). We wondered what this was all about, as we were wheeled on to the deck, and were told that it was for us to get some fresh air. After some time we were taken back to the ward. Some of the chaps, who had been taken onto the deck on the other side of the ship, said they had seen the periscope of a submarine. We had been wheeled out, apparently, to prove to the German submarine commander that we were a hospital ship. Two days later we were taken out again onto the deck, this time in heavy rain. This time the actual U-boat surfaced, and cruised past us about 60 yards away, with two German officers watching us with binoculars. Every day after this the naval chaps told us the U-boat was astern of us. The submarine stayed with us until we turned off to go up the Bristol Channel. The Naval officers told us that the U-boat commander was hoping that we were to go though the channel, where they could have submerged and towed along behind us safely, instead of having to go all the way around Ireland and Scotland to get back to their base.

So we arrived back at Bristol to the strains of a boy shouting ‘News of the World’. We were disembarked and were greeted by members of the Salvation Army who were handing out packets of cigarettes.

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