Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind (25 page)

With the Germans in control of the hospital, the first job for Bill Simpson was to make a list of all the patients. In the days that followed the situation began to change. Wounded prisoners started to arrive from across the region, including Leslie Shorrock, who arrived just in time to experience the declining rations that resulted from the Germans taking away the hospital’s entire food stores, leaving them with nothing but stale bread.

The shortages of food may have been a problem for the wounded men and the hospital staff but it was nothing compared to the shortages of medical supplies. At one hospital there was no access to x-rays for an entire month. Elsewhere prisoners were treated in a hospital which was without any anaesthetic. Instead, in a throwback to the early days of the nineteenth century, the patients were made to drink cognac to dull their senses prior to operations. Even before the shortages the use of anaesthetics had been restricted to giving injections rather than the preferred use of gas. The dangers of an explosive, inflammable gas bottle in use so close to the battlefields could not be contemplated. This did not make the work of the anaesthetist any easier. If patients received too much they risked stopping breathing, with the tongue falling back to choke them. Too little anaesthetic and the patients, though unconscious, would not relax their muscles fully, making the surgeons’ work increasingly tricky.

Furthermore, both doctors and nursing staff were forced to begin to use medicines with which they were less than familiar. Scrounging from the Germans, or using what could be found from the French or Belgians, they sometimes found themselves embarking on uncertain treatments. Every army seemed to have its own way of treating wounds and, as a result, its own medicines for the purpose. At one hospital, staff found themselves administering a purple antiseptic liquid to open wounds, similar to the Lysol they normally used, but they could not be certain. Elsewhere doctors used Rubiazal, a French version of the more familiar Prontosil, to prevent infection in wounds. One patient died because the doctors’ lack of knowledge about the drug resulted in them over-administering. They were also forced to improvise. Another treatment for open wounds was acriflavine tablets dissolved in water.

One commodity that needed to be kept in constant supply was the blood needed for transfusions. The BEF had refrigerated stocks of whole blood and stocks of dried, powdered plasma. It had been believed the whole blood could only be stored for fourteen days until further research showed its life span was four weeks. As the shortages began to bite, some doctors continued to use stored blood that had been extracted up to seven weeks earlier. With these precious stocks dwindling, desperate measures were used, including the direct transfusion of blood from healthy men to patients. With no stocks of blood or plasma available, it was the only solution for the hard-pressed doctors. Using a Joubelert machine, the donors whose blood group matched those of the needy patient were joined to the recipient. The constant need for blood took its toll on the donors, in particular those whose blood type made them universal donors. It was not just the blood loss that affected the donors – in one hospital they were also given a bottle of champagne each as a reward for their efforts.

Conditions within the hospitals led to tragic scenes in which wounded men drew their last breath in an unfamiliar, and sometimes hostile, environment. The plight of the dying, and the need to offer them some dignity in their final moments, made a lasting impression on all of those who witnessed the scenes. Sent to hospital for treatment to a wounded hand, Second-Lieutenant Peter Wagstaff later wrote of entering a ward to find a dying British soldier: ‘The poor devil was unconscious and there was nothing I could do. I felt so utterly inadequate, so useless, but that I had to stay with him until the last. And when he had gone I remember trying to give him that semblance of repose by closing his eyelids; his left eye closed without any trouble but the right eye, in spite of all my gentle attempts, kept springing open. I could not even give him that simple service.’
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As the 51st Highland Division withdrew to St-Valery-en-Caux, their casualties mounted. Two entire field ambulance teams were at work within the perimeter; 152 Field Ambulance had its dressing station within the town and 153 Field Ambulance collected wounded men in the nearby village of Blosseville. A local French doctor, Dr Aureille, treated some of them within his own home because of the lack of hospital beds. Hoping to find a place of safety for his wounded, one of the British doctors, Major E. Walker, made a reconnaissance of St Valery. To his dismay there was nowhere he could safely transfer them to – too much of the town was burning or unsafe. Unfortunately for Major Walker the wounded were already in ambulances, sitting out in the open, totally exposed to enemy fire. There was nowhere for them to go, they could neither move forward nor go back. Hopelessly exposed, they soon came under mortar fire that hit one ambulance, killing the men in the back. Even as the bearers tried to remove the wounded from the ambulances, the Germans continued to fire on them.

There were simply not enough established hospitals to take all the patients. As a result, the wounded were treated in whatever buildings were deemed suitable. Conditions were such in one hospital that the wounded men who were able to walk were forced to use an open latrine above which they had to perch while holding on to a rope suspended from the ceiling. At Le Touquet the wounded were housed in the local casino, with operations taking place in what had been a rich man’s playground. Within the casino’s plush rooms the figures of French nuns who were treating the wounded seemed strangely out of place. They were joined in Le Touquet by captured British medics, among them Ernie Grainger and his comrades from 10th CCS who had been marched from Belgium: ‘We were on the wards with German medical staff. The patients were a mixture of French, German and British. There were lots of French colonial troops. The Germans didn’t treat the French Africans very well at all – they were just left to die. I don’t know why. They were segregated, we weren’t allowed to go near them to give any treatment. I guess their attitude was “What the hell are you doing here fighting us?” But the Germans were still treating us well.’

The role of the religious orders cannot be overstressed during this period. All across the region Catholic nuns provided medical services for the wounded soldiers, often in their own establishments that had been taken over for the military. One detachment of the RAMC reported how the Germans transferred them to a French Catholic college where all the wounded were given beds with mattresses and neither medical staff nor patients were interfered with by their captors. Others in hospital noted how gas gangrene patients were rapidly separated, so that the stench of their wounds did not affect the rest of the patients.

Geoff Griffin, wounded as he fought to hold back the Germans from the Dunkirk perimeter, was one of those whose hospital treatment was as good as could be expected in the circumstances. He was initially taken to a convent in Bruges, where he heard French-speaking doctors discussing the possibility of amputating his arm. He argued against it, insisting they attempt to save his arm in order that he might one day be able to return to his pre-war job as a coach-builder. They informed him that the shoulder joint was shattered, the muscles severed and there was just skin holding his arm in place. But as a result of his pleadings, they agreed to attempt to save it.

From the convent he was sent to a military hospital staffed by British medical personnel. On the staff were British nurses who were married to Belgians. Griffin noted their names – Mrs Somerlink, Jenny Williams, Helene Boudens, Madame Lams – so that some day someone might be able to repay their kindness. Although the German guards prevented the nurses bringing food to the soldiers, they did not interfere with medical care, meaning the men were able to begin the long, slow process of recovery.

The misery and physical incapacity of the prisoners was reflected by the measures Griffin was forced to go to in order to help his fellow patients. With food in short supply, one of the guards allowed him to scrape the insides of the soup pot, although it was not easy: ‘encased in plaster from neck to waist, with my left arm at an angle of ninety degrees, it was no easy task climbing into boilers to extract perhaps a tiny bowl of soup to share amongst twenty starving men’.
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Although large numbers of the German medical staff showed the utmost respect to the wounded men left behind in the aftermath of the defeat of the BEF, others held them in contempt and deliberately mistreated them. In July 1940 the first reports of the poor treatment given to some of the British wounded began to reach London via the Red Cross in Switzerland. The Swiss stressed that the reports came from more than one source and that the British were being badly treated and often given no care at all by their captors. Even those friendly civilians who attempted to give water to the wounded prisoners were forced away. A Madame Odier of the Red Cross reported that the condition of wounded British soldiers in French hospitals was ‘deplorable, because of lack of food’.
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The following month reports from the still neutral Americans also reached London. When a representative of the American embassy in Brussels had attempted to visit the wounded receiving treatment in Belgium the Germans refused permission for the visit. Using information gleaned from local sources, the embassy staff were able to report: ‘Owing to lack of food, the condition of British wounded prisoners in northern France was deplorable.’
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At the hospital in Boulogne rations were no more than a daily issue of soup and biscuits. Furthermore, two-thirds of the British medical supplies were confiscated by the Germans, as was the hospital’s entire stock of cigarettes. At Malines Captain Ironside – the son of General Ironside, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff – died as a result of his mistreatment. Despite his cries for help, the assistance that could have saved him was not forthcoming. Instead the other wounded men in the hospital had to listen to his cries while being forbidden to help him.

Between June and October 1940 around a thousand wounded Britons were treated at the College of St Augustin at Enghien in Belgium, where Allied doctors used whatever French and Belgian medical supplies were available. There were too few beds so some patients had to sleep on stretchers, and they were constantly hungry. However, that was not the worst of the problems for patients and staff.

Dr Peters, the German administrator, quite wisely left the treatment of the wounded to the Allied doctors and medics. However, by leaving one particular German in charge at the college, Dr Peters ensured that the treatment given was not as good as it could have been. Feldwebel Walter Scharping was a middle-aged man from Stettin on the Baltic whose behaviour made life a misery for some of the patients. He stopped some of the wounded from receiving any treatment at all, leaving them in a fly-infested room. The list of his offences did not stop at refusing treatment. He was even seen to punch one patient, and the wife of the local mayor, who was attempting to make arrangements for the Red Cross to assist the wounded, reported: ‘I myself saw him kick one of the prisoners with his feet in the belly and drag him into a cellar . . . On another occasion I saw Scharping beating the interpreter . . . Scharping hit the prisoner with a book on the head.’
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When one prisoner escaped from the hospital and was later returned, Scharping also beat that man, leaving him with severe bruising. The German told civilians he wished he had a machine-gun to make his prisoners march faster. At another hospital this behaviour was matched by a German guard who fired a machine-gun at any prisoner who dared to approach the hospital windows.

In one particularly vicious display, Scharping was seen to beat up a patient and then force French prisoners to join in and complete the beating. Such was his control of the hospital, the Frenchmen were unable to refuse his orders. The German’s attitude towards the patients was also shown when the local population attempted to bring in food for the wounded prisoners to supplement their meagre rations. As a result he simply stopped giving the men their rations. Such was the vindictive nature of Scharping that he left bread to rot rather than issue it to his hungry patients.

However, one thing that was clear was that he did not discriminate – he treated British, French and Belgian prisoners with the same severity. Others made deliberate efforts to discriminate in their treatment, seeming to attempt to cause resentment and factional disquiet among even the sick and wounded. In one case two wounded Britons were forced to clear out latrines by hand, while French prisoners looked on. If it was disgraceful that the Germans discriminated between wounded soldiers on the grounds of their nationality, it was even worse when French medical staff behaved in the same way towards their allies. One man reported how he and his fellow wounded had their wounds dressed by a French medic. He attempted to get all the British men discharged from hospital while offering impeccable care to his fellow Frenchmen.

One of those who suffered discrimination was Ernest Lister, a member of a supply company of the 51st Division. He was wounded while driving an officer from his company. Lister was unconscious for three days and then awoke in a hospital at Bruyeres, near Epinal. He discovered he had been wounded in both the leg and head and that while unconscious he had undergone trepanation. He was then transferred to St Dié. When he arrived at the hospital it was discovered that he was British. Lister later reported the treatment he received from the German officer who received incoming patients: ‘His attitude seemed sympathetic. At that time I was wearing the jacket of an old French uniform. The officer asked my nationality in French which I understood sufficiently. When I replied that I was English he threw the charts and photographs away and went on to the next case.’
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