“Do Something about Those Slackers!”
MY FATHER NEVER EXPECTED he’d come face to face with General George S. Patton, the commanding officer of the army in which he served during the Second World War. But it happened, in a manner of speaking. Alex Barris, a lowly sergeant in the US Third Army, met “Old Blood and Guts” in much the same fashion as depicted in the 20th Century Fox biopic released in 1970. The circumstances were eerily similar. The tone of the general’s speech was much the same, and it contained a lot of the same expletives and phrasing as his pep talk to the US 6th Armored Division did, just ahead of D-Day. “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country,” Patton had begun his oratory on May 31, 1944. “You won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”1 Patton was notorious for speaking his mind in such commentaries. But the one he delivered to the US Third Army eight months later, on January 30, 1944, certainly stuck with my father, especially because Patton was ultimately my father’s commanding officer.
JANUARY 30, 1945—VECKRING, FRANCE
IT WAS NO SECRET that General George S. Patton could be a prickly commander if he didn’t get things his way. With battlefield credits that stretched all the way back through the liberation of France, Italy, and Sicily to his first invasion success at Casablanca in North Africa in 1942, few could argue with his record of victories. Still, none of the good press about his battle honours could completely expunge Patton’s infamous outbursts—slapping and verbally abusing two army privates during the Mediterranean campaign in 1943, when the men were apparently recovering from battle fatigue.* At the end of January 1945, “Old Blood and Guts” himself faced frustrating times. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lt. Gen Omar Bradley seemed unsympathetic to Patton’s plans to accelerate the Saar-Moselle Triangle campaign; what’s more, they appeared to deny him access to further armoured support when he felt he could finish the job in Saar-Moselle and take the war to the Germans in the Fatherland.
Undaunted, Patton launched a tour to meet and address officers in his command, including members of the morale-depleted 94th Infantry Division. In their case, the general ordered an outdoor briefing at Veckring, about seventy miles to the rear of the front line in France. Barris, as a technical sergeant in the medical corps, was rounded up in a kind of dragnet to be part of that ready-made audience for Patton. He remembered being hustled into a small valley, a natural amphitheatre full of colonels, lieutenants, and NCOs like himself, maybe 3,000 men in total. Four or five reconnaissance planes circled overhead, providing some sort of cover for what was about to happen on the platform holding a stand of microphones in front of the men. Fifteen minutes after all were present, a Jeep arrived with Patton standing erect, the sun glinting off his helmet and the pearl-handled revolvers he wore on each hip. He strode from the Jeep directly to the mic and, unintroduced, he spoke.
“You are soldiers in the United States Army,” my father recalled him barking in a rather high-pitched voice. “When we take a piece of goddam land, it’s the goddam property of the United States. And the way to take it, goddam it, is to get in there and stick ’em in their goddam guts. You don’t win a goddam war by letting the sons of bitches push you back. [I] don’t want any yellow bastards in this army giving up a goddam inch to the sons of bitches we’re here to kill. It’d be better if the goddam cowards disgracing our uniforms were killed rather than be allowed to go back to America to breed another generation of yellow bastards . . .”2
About an hour later, when he was finished berating the assembled officers and NCOs, Patton retraced his steps to his Jeep and, again standing next to the driver, swept past a dumbstruck audience. My father recalled that as the general exited the amphitheatre he made “no attempt to meet the eyes of any of his fascinated spectators, but stared straight ahead, as if he were there only to be seen, not to see.”3
The Veckring rant appeared to be the equivalent of slapping those two privates during the Mediterranean campaign in 1943—an attempt, perhaps, to embarrass the 94th’s officers into better performance. In effect, he was shaming them all—commanders, infantry, corpsmen, everybody—as malingerers, idlers, cowards, and non-patriots. In private meetings held with Maj. Gen. Harry J. Malony, CO of my father’s infantry division, Patton came close to relieving the general of his command, because, among other things, Patton claimed that the 94th was the only division in his army whose non-battle casualties exceeded its battle casualties. Patton had either been given misinformation or failed to recognize that the non-battle casualties—troops hospitalized with frostbite, trench foot, colds, fevers, pneumonia, and other debilitating side effects of endless days and nights outdoors in harsh winter conditions—were the fault of the Third Army command itself.
When word of Patton’s diatribe trickled down to the rank and file, men such as the corpsmen and front-line soldiers felt betrayed and hung out to dry. Since the 94th had arrived at the front lines in the Saar-Moselle Triangle in early January, Patton’s Third Army quartermasters had failed to supply its 94th Infantry subordinates with the appropriate winter fighting gear—insulated battledress and boots—or any kind of shelter. Such obligations were apparently not high on the general’s priority list; when Patton wrapped up his meeting with Malony on January 30, he left these parting words: “You’re doing fine otherwise, but goddammit, do something about those slackers!”4
It appeared Patton was blaming the effect and not the cause of the 94th’s sad state. In three weeks of sustained but tentative attacks during the coldest winter of the war, the Ghost Corps had advanced in all sectors along the base of the Saar-Moselle Triangle. American intelligence showed that the 94th, despite being hamstrung, had reduced the Germans’ panzer troops and armour effectiveness by as much as 50 percent. But casualties proved equally horrendous on the American side. On January 25, an attack against the German high-ground stronghold at Schloss Berg cost the life of a company captain and left a second lieutenant in command. As was often the case in this campaign, by day’s end it was privates leading squads and sergeants leading platoons.5 The war as viewed by those closest to ground level often looked vastly different from the war the generals saw.
JULY 21, 1861—BULL RUN CREEK, VIRGINIA
NURSES IN THE MIDDLE of American Civil War battlefields recognized that contrast too. One nurse attending to an artillery unit recorded in a diary that the day broke bright and clear, “bringing the two contending armies in plain sight of each other.”6 On one side of Bull Run Creek, near Manassas Junction, Virginia, just twenty-five miles from Washington, DC, the nurse with the 2nd Michigan Volunteers noted that the Confederate troops—some 20,000 of them—had dug themselves into high ground atop the southern bank of the creek. They had also felled trees to allow their gunners a clear view of Union troops—numbering 35,000—approaching from the north. When the 2nd Michigan settled into its place on the line in front of Bull Run, Franklin Flint Thompson, aged twenty, dismounted with the other Federal Army nurses and prepared their standard first-aid equipment: a haversack of lint, bandages, adhesive plaster, a water canteen, and, in some cases, a flask of brandy. Moments later, a Southern battery across the battlefield announced the start of engagement, and Nurse Thompson recorded impressions of the first major battle of the Civil War. It was July 21, 1861.
“A shell burst in the midst of the battery, killing one and wounding three men and two horses,” Thompson wrote. “I stooped over one of the wounded, who lay upon his face weltering in his blood; I raised his head, and [saw Willie L.] was mortally wounded in the breast, and the tide of life was fast ebbing away.”7
This scene was a microcosm of the way opposing armies clashed in the Civil War. Thompson’s diary noted that nothing could be heard over the explosions of artillery shells, the clashing of steel swords and bayonets, and the ceaseless roar of muskets. The nursing group suddenly had its hands full. Only a junior nurse, Thompson was immediately sent to retrieve fresh supplies at Centreville, seven miles away. The nurse returned to a field of dead and dying soldiers and was next told to gather empty canteens, dash to a nearby spring, and deliver water to the wounded, who were by then ravaged by thirst. Thompson was haunted by images of a field of men flailing and shouting, limbs torn and mangled, bodies crushed and lifeless, and the ground stained with blood everywhere. As a Federal Army colonel dashed along the lines of the remaining Michigan troops, encouraging them to re-enter the fight, he was, to Thompson’s horror, shot through the heart; with no time to carry him off, “we folded his arms across his breast, closed his eyes, and left him in the cold embrace of death.”8
Back at Centreville, Thompson and the other nurses sought refuge in a stone church, seconded by Federal medical staff as a field hospital. Outside the building, bodies, arms, and legs lay in heaps, while inside surgeons carried out amputations and impromptu suturing among rows and rows of wounded; the junior nurse counted twenty-one extracted musket balls lying beside the operating tables. With no skill as a surgeon, no haversack medical supplies left, and little water to dispense, Thompson could do little more than provide consolation, as illustrated in the diary when a wounded soldier lying on the floor beckoned the young nurse.
“What can I do for you, my friend?” Thompson asked, suddenly realizing it was the same Willie L. so horribly wounded in the chest at the start of the battle hours earlier.
“I wish you to take that,” the man said weakly, pointing to a small package sitting beside him. “Keep it until you get to Washington, and then, if it is not too much trouble . . . write to my mother and tell her how I was wounded, and that I died.”9
When Thompson drew nearer, the wounded man put his hand to his head to try to separate a lock of his hair with his fingers to send to his mother with the package. The two nodded in understanding, and as Thompson complied with this last request, the chaplain arrived and prayed for the man. Moments later, he died.
Thompson’s diary, published in 1865, offered post–Civil War America extraordinary insights into the perilous life of a nurse on the front lines, from the First and Second Battles of Bull Run to Antietam and the Peninsula campaign, to Fredericksburg and beyond. Thanks to Thompson’s vivid personal accounts of medical assistance given on now-famous battlefields and in Union hospitals, readers had probably never felt closer to the life-and-death struggles of soldiers wounded in war, unless they had experienced them first-hand.
But the memoir, Nurse and Spy in the Union Army, does not credit Franklin Flint Thompson. Following the subtitle—The Adventures and Experiences of a Woman in Hospitals, Camps, and Battle-Fields—it names the author as Sarah Emma Edmonds, a veteran of the American Civil War who, it was later learned, had successfully maintained two identities throughout the war, one as a woman, another as a man. Edmonds had fulfilled wartime service to the Union Army as a nurse, a soldier, and a spy. It wasn’t until twenty years later that she admitted to deceiving her way into the army as a man.
What’s more, Nurse Thompson, actually Edmonds, wasn’t American. One of six children, she was born in 1841 and raised on a farm at Magaguadavic, New Brunswick, in eastern Canada. In that rural environment, Sarah became very comfortable shooting firearms, riding on horseback, and, thanks to her mother’s home remedies, attending to illness and injuries in the country.10 However, when her father arranged for Sarah to marry a much older farmer, she ran away to the US; she settled in Connecticut and into a career selling Bibles.
In 1860 she moved to the Midwest, and the next year, when war broke out, she presented herself—disguised as a man adept in basic medicine—to a recruiter with the 2nd Michigan Volunteers. Since the entry medical exam tested enlistees only for basic vision and hearing, she passed easily, and when she notified the recruiters of her first-aid skills, she became a field nurse under the name Franklin Thompson.
Both she and the 2nd Michigan Volunteers with whom she served experienced their baptism of fire at Bull Run. For the next four years, Edmonds as Frank Thompson managed to navigate her way to the heart of a Federal Army regiment. She earned its trust as a nurse under fire, as a dispatch rider running messages to commanders along the front line, and later as a spy infiltrating Confederate strongholds in disguise—dyeing her skin, wearing wigs, and masquerading in men’s clothing. At different times she impersonated an African American, a peddler, and a laundress, all to gather Confederate documents and military strategy.
In the final pages of her memoir, Sarah Edmonds paid heartfelt tribute to Civil War nursing, and in particular to the woman who “twists up her hair in a ‘cleared-for-action’ sort of style, rolls up the sleeves of her plain cotton dress, and goes to work washing dirty faces, hands and feet . . . writing letters for the boys or reading for them, administering medicine or helping dress wounds. And everything is done so cheerfully that one would think it was really a pleasure instead of a disagreeable task.”11 The memoir sold more than 175,000 copies, and Sarah Edmonds donated all proceeds for the relief of those wounded at the front.12 To raise more money for a home for Civil War veterans, she wrote a second book and applied for a pension for her years of military service; but because records concluded that the “disappearance” of Franklin Thompson was due to kidnapping, death in action, or desertion, she had to campaign to prove her male identity. It took a government bill in Congress in 1884 to secure her a full soldier’s pension, the only woman to receive such an honour at that time.13
APRIL 25, 1915—YPRES SALIENT, BELGIUM
SARAH EDMONDS HADN’T SEEN WAR up close until Confederate shells burst around her at Bull Run; Francis Scrimger didn’t get his introduction until he arrived at an advanced dressing station (ADS) near Wieltje, Belgium. There, on April 22, 1915, he and fellow officer George Nasmith witnessed the Fourth German Army unleash poisonous gas against Allied troops in the Ypres salient. Even though his ADS was more than a mile from the creeping noxious gas, Scrimger, recently recovered from bronchopneumonia, soon felt his eyes tear up and his throat grow raw from the chlorine fumes. The following day, as both the German and Canadian sides dug in, then evacuated14 and then dug in again, the front line became disorganized, putting added pressure on infantry and medics. According to protocol early in the Great War, the wounded went from front-line trenches via stretcher-bearers to regimental aid posts (RAP), farther back via wheeled stretchers to advanced dressing stations, and finally well to the rear of the fighting via motor ambulance to casualty clearing stations. That was the prescribed procedure.
On April 23, however, when Scrimger caught up to his 14th Battalion, Royal Montreal Regiment, he made his first foray into the front-line trenches to try to administer first aid to the wounded there. He noted that the trenches were muck-filled and abnormally warm. The odour of cordite from spent shells and even some leftover chlorine fumes filled his nostrils. And when the sun set, there was an enforced blackout all along the line, with no cigarette smoking in the trenches’ exposed gaps. All the soldiers deployed here were hunkered down and speaking in low voices. For the thirty-four-year-old doctor, attending the wounded under such conditions seemed a long way from prescribed procedure.
“I was able to dress five badly wounded men under shrapnel fire without getting hit,” he wrote in his diary, remembering in particular, “the sound of shrapnel is very nasty. It comes with a wicked swish and sing. . . . I got rapped on the heel by a [piece of] shrapnel this afternoon, and thought my time had come several times, but was able to dress a number of cases—too many—one wound through the brachial plexus; during the dressing, shrapnel landed three times in the lee parapet.”15
Born in 1881, the second son of a Presbyterian minister, Francis Scrimger grew up in a modest and religious home in Montreal, but he didn’t hear the call that his brother Tudor did to follow their father into the clergy. Instead, Francis studied violin, enjoyed learning to speak French, and graduated with first-class honours in biology at McGill University. About 1900, during a summer vacation, he joined a geological survey in Manitoba. As his summertime commitment wound down, the cook in the party fell ill with what was believed to be either typhoid or appendicitis.16 Francis volunteered to stay behind and nurse the cook until he recovered. Francis came home suddenly intent on pursuing a career in medicine. In the first decade of the new century, Scrimger studied under such McGill luminaries as John McCrae and Edward Archibald, then spent four years at Royal Victoria Hospital and got his introduction to military medicine with the 2nd (Montreal) Heavy Brigade. When the Great War began, he joined the first contingent of the Royal Montreal Regiment and crossed the Atlantic with the First Canadian Division in October 1914.
Now in his first active command, in charge of the 14th Battalion’s advanced dressing station, Scrimger faced challenges they’d never considered in basic training camp back at Valcartier, Quebec. At the Wieltje ADS on this particular April night in 1915, he had only six stretchers available to him, as several had been broken or lost. But that didn’t matter, since the enemy shell and machine-gun fire seemed relentless. That meant no stretchers going out, no wounded being picked up, and none being evacuated farther back to casualty clearing stations. With nothing moving, no bearers were coming forward to replenish dwindling medical supplies either. Scrimger attended around the clock, with whatever he had on hand. In fact, he wrote in his diary that he’d worked forty-eight hours straight without sleep and hadn’t noticed.
By his third day at the front, when shelling let up, Scrimger had moved back to brigade headquarters, where he finally managed to catch a few hours of sleep. He was probably wakened by the German reconnaissance aircraft that swooped low overhead, because he recalled that shortly afterward more enemy artillery shells and gunfire were suddenly pouring into their position. But Scrimger didn’t have time to worry about it; he was on the move again to an advanced dressing station—just behind the front line that his battalion was holding—in a farmhouse nicknamed “Shell Trap Farm.”17 The place would quickly live up to its moniker.
The ADS farmyard consisted of an abandoned house and a dugout barn surrounded by a water-filled moat. One narrow roadway provided the only way in or out at ground level. But travel on the road proved too hazardous; it was well within the range of German guns, and any movement on the road immediately drew fire. A stretcher-bearer party sent down the road toward St. Jean had been lost in one German barrage.
On April 25, when enemy shelling intensified, Scrimger—as the senior officer on site responsible for thirty to forty personnel and wounded—decided the position was no longer tenable. He gathered the wounded in the safest room of the barn to await a nighttime convoy of ambulances. Among the wounded was Harold McDonald, a captain with the 3rd Infantry Brigade; he had been hit in the neck and shoulders. Moments after Scrimger dressed McDonald’s wounds, a German shell hit the building and set it ablaze. Everyone had to vacate the barn on the double or be lost, and the only safe way for the wounded to escape was to crawl out of the burning building, slip down the sides of the moat, and swim to safety on the far side.
“The staff were forced to abandon the building [to] leave me there as an apparently hopeless case,” McDonald told a reporter later.18
“I got the wounded out,” Scrimger wrote in his diary, “among them a staff officer.”19
“Scrimger carried me out and down to the moat fifty feet in front, where we lay half in the water,” McDonald continued. “[He] curled himself ’round my wounded head and shoulder to protect me from heavy shell fire.”
Scrimger later noted in his diary that the Germans poured in seventy-five six-inch shells, five of them within fifteen feet of the spot where he and McDonald lay hunkered down on the bank of the moat, and “we were half smothered in mud.”
“[Scrimger] stayed with me until the fire slackened,” McDonald said finally, “then the stretcher-bearers carried me to the dressing station.”
With the Second Battle of Ypres ongoing and the tenuous situation all along the Ypres salient for weeks after the evacuation at Shell Trap Farm, it’s little wonder that neither man considered the events of April 25 again until Col. R.E.W. Turner, of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade, assembled the troops, including Capt. Scrimger’s No. 2 Field Ambulance, behind the lines. It was raining that June day as Turner announced that Capt. Francis Scrimger would be awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions, including the evacuation of the wounded at the barnyard advanced dressing station near Wieltje.
When he heard the news, Scrimger’s former teacher and now comrade-in-arms Edward Archibald tried to explain the man’s actions: “Scrimger’s behaviour during this time is not to be explained merely as that of a brave man rising to the occasion. It was a revelation of another side of his character,” Archibald wrote. “There is in him a rigidity, a fixity of purpose which made him inexorable in going through with anything he had made up his mind to do. Nothing inspired him to effort like opportunity or difficulty. The German army might try to prevent him from doing his job; he would go on with that job until he had finished it or been blown to pieces.”20
During the summer of 1915, Scrimger went on leave to England, to Windsor Castle, to receive his Victoria Cross. Remarkably, when the modest recipient of the Empire’s highest military award emerged from the ceremony, he bumped into none other than Harold McDonald.
“There he is!” said McDonald, who was seated at a restaurant, in the midst of an interview with a reporter. “The man that saved me!”21
The reporter invited Scrimger to join them and got the scoop of his life—not only the story of a soldier-in-peril saved, but also of the medic-in-peril who saved him. They had both lived to tell the tale.
SPRING 1915—THE ROAD FROM PARIS TO BOULOGNE, FRANCE
THE ACTIONS OF MEDIC FRANCIS SCRIMGER at Shell Trap Farm in Belgium exhibited the “fixity of purpose” of a medic bent on saving one life. The innovation of medical officer Cluny Macpherson behind the lines in France illustrated his dogged efforts to save many.
On an evening in late April 1915, a Daimler staff car and three touring automobiles threaded their way through military traffic moving away from the Western Front. The four British motorcars whizzed past the slower vehicles as if life depended on their quick passage. It did. At the steering wheel of the Daimler, on loan from the British War Office, was the thirty-six-year-old principal medical officer of the 1st Newfoundland Regiment. Capt. Cluny Macpherson pressed his four-cylinder automobile as much as he dared, given the lumbering wartime traffic around him and the top-secret cargo piled in the motorcar’s front and back passenger seats.
“It was a real cutting-out dash,” Macpherson wrote later. “[I] had [ten] great rolls of Tri-acetyl-cellulose film, each [roll] one-by-one-hundred metres long packed in wooden cases.”22
Barely out of Paris and heading toward the seaside port of Boulogne, one of the three touring cars began to sputter. The chauffeur signalled to Macpherson that his vehicle wouldn’t be able to continue and pulled off the road. Rapidly and gingerly, the medical officer in charge of this mini-convoy orchestrated a transfer of the cargo from the disabled car, redistributing the boxes equally between the other two touring cars. Not much farther along, another of the cars broke down; Macpherson took its wooden boxes and added them to his already laden Daimler. Darkness didn’t slow the convoy, but the weight of the boxes full of precious cellulose eventually proved too much for the third car. It too pulled to the side of the road. With no space left in his car, Macpherson made specific note of the breakdown location of the third touring car, instructed its driver to remain with the vehicle to keep its contents secure, and carried on into the night.
“I made all haste for the coast in the Daimler,” Macpherson wrote, “stopping only at Abbeville about 2 a.m. to wake up transport depot [staff] and have a lorry sent back to pick up the cases from the disabled touring car.”23
At that hour of the morning, Capt. Macpherson faced a nearly impossible task. First, he needed to persuade the NCO night guard at the British ordnance headquarters in Abbeville to wake his superior officer to hear the plea of an Allied captain wearing Newfoundland Regiment insignia, which he’d likely never seen before. And then he had to convince that ordnance CO to dispatch an empty truck back down the road into the Norman countryside in the middle of the night—all to retrieve a mysterious box of cargo that he, Macpherson, urgently needed delivered dockside at Boulogne for immediate shipment to England. Nevertheless, Macpherson succeeded. The lorry was sent and the captain got to Boulogne with his precious cargo. He and all ten boxes, safely stowed aboard, left on the morning steamer for Folkestone.24 The clandestine operation had taken a couple of days, but it had given Allied commanders the chance they needed to organize a response to the German army’s sudden breakthrough along the Ypres salient on April 22 and 24, 1915.
Just days earlier, Cluny Macpherson, newly dispatched by the governor of the Dominion of Newfoundland to offer his medical services to the Royal Army Medical Corps, had arrived on the Western Front. As a member of the St. John Ambulance Brigade, he’d been asked to visit base hospitals in France to assess ambulance transport in the vicinity of the fighting near Ypres, Belgium. At one of the base hospitals, he’d shared a meal with two British professors working nearby at the Imperial College of Science and Technology. The German chlorine gas attacks on April 22 and 24 dominated the conversation. Medical personnel and scientists on the Allied side seemed desperate to come up with a rapid and effective response.
“I’d be a good guinea pig for testing,” Macpherson told the professors. “When we made chlorine in a test tube [at school,] I lost my voice for a week with laryngitis.”25
It turned out that Professors H. Brereton Baker and William Watson had already begun work on an antidote to the murderous toxic gases, at their college laboratory. The confusion of the battle along the Ypres salient had delivered into British hands a German soldier involved in the gas attack. In addition to the information gleaned from the captured German, the RAMC had secured his primitive gas mask, made of veiling and cotton waste. Macpherson joined the two professors analyzing chemicals in the veiling in order to come up with a prototype defence for expeditionary troops. He found an equivalent veiling at a French millinery shop and, in addition, made an overnight dash to London and back to retrieve two steel cylinders of chlorine so that the three men could begin gas mask trials. The experiments nearly killed them.
The prototype mask mimicked the surgical mask that doctors used to prevent respiratory contamination during operations. But to provide adequate protection for breathing, the defensive mask had to be held against the user’s face, using both hands to keep the layer of cotton firmly pressed over his mouth and nose. The mask gave no protection for the eyes. Despite these apparent shortcomings for use by combat soldiers, Macpherson, Baker, and Watson went to some trenches outside the town of St. Omer, donned the prototype masks, and released some chlorine. The results, Macpherson reported, were disastrous. Watson was so badly gassed they had to rush him to a nearby Canadian military hospital for treatment. When he visited Watson at the hospital later that day, Capt. Macpherson also saw some of the casualties of the actual Ypres gas attack. It was clear that the two scientists and the medical man would have to revise their design completely.
Macpherson had anticipated the problem, however, and offered an idea he had toyed with on his trip to England to get the chlorine cylinders. He had drawn a pattern for a mask that didn’t just cover the soldier’s face but his entire head, like a hood. Made of Viyella cloth, the design called for a mica window to allow the soldier to see and a breathing tube through which he could exhale. Indeed, while visiting Watson at the Canadian military hospital, Macpherson had persuaded a nurse matron to cut out the pattern and sew the mica window into the resulting hood. When all seemed lost at the lab that day, Macpherson pulled out his alternative prototype. “Try this!” he suggested to his colleagues. “An anti-gas helmet.”26
Eager to try anything that might solve the problem, they then impregnated the cloth hood with the chlorine antidote—hyposulphite of soda—and gave it to a Royal Engineer, a Col. Harvey, to try it on. At the end of the laboratory, the scientists had prepared a small, glass-partitioned booth for further experiments. Harvey volunteered to be the guinea pig; he would wear the helmet inside the chamber while Macpherson and the professors released chlorine gas around him. With the hood firmly placed over his head and tucked into his tunic, Harvey entered the chamber and walked about as the poisonous gas was introduced. After five minutes, Harvey called out to the professors, asking why they hadn’t yet released the gas. And with that, he pulled off the hood.
Capt. Macpherson dashed to the door of the chamber, threw it open, and immediately sprayed the bare-headed Harvey with hyposulphite of soda. Moments later, when he’d recovered from the shock, Harvey explained what had happened. While inside the chamber with the helmet on, he said, he’d only been aware of a slight smell of chemical. That’s all. Harvey volunteered for a second trial. Inside the chamber again with the helmet firmly secured on his head and chlorine gas flowing around him, Harvey worked at a bench and walked around in the enclosed area for thirty minutes, apparently unaffected by the gas.
The successful trial caused great excitement around the lab. Suddenly the military brass arrived, including Charles Foulkes, Britain’s chief advisor on gas warfare; William Robertson, the chief of the Imperial General Staff; and Arthur Sloggett, the director general of medical services (DGMS) in the field. Sloggett watched a demonstration of the helmet in awe. “Why, man, one could fight in that!” he exclaimed and asked where the helmet had come from.
“That officer gave it to me,” Professor Baker said, pointing at Macpherson.27
“Where did you get this?” Sloggett queried Macpherson.
The Newfoundland medical officer retraced his helmet’s evolution—a drawing on the trip from London, the nurse matron’s sewing the prototype together, and the trials in the chamber with Col. Harvey. Macpherson added that his experience transporting patients with similar headgear as protection against cold weather in Labrador illustrated that the material could be breathed through while preventing penetration by the chlorine. This sparked a confab among the brass, and just as quickly curt instructions from Sloggett.
“Young man, you’re for London,” Sloggett told Macpherson. “Quick with your packing!”
His new orders came with such priority that Macpherson was transported across the Channel in a Royal Navy destroyer. With him Macpherson carried a letter to the DGMS within the UK, Sir Alfred Keogh, in London, requiring the medical service to give Macpherson all necessary assistance to mass-produce the helmets with all possible haste. The Committee on Gas Protection was organized under British Army surgeon Col. William Horrocks, with Capt. Macpherson suddenly in sole charge of turning out the helmets.
“They sent me to perhaps the most red-tape-bound institution in the [British] Army, the Royal Army Clothing Factory,” Macpherson wrote later. “[They] asked for a ‘sealed pattern,’ of which I had never heard. I just went ’round London and cornered the market in several commodities and poured them into [the] factory.”28
He bought up all the essentials—khaki Viyella, mica, ammonia vaporole, and hyposulphite of soda. It was over this last item that he butted heads with the tanning industry; without hyposulphite of soda the tanners couldn’t treat the leather for army boots. But on Macpherson went. The work of cutting and sewing together the helmets soon outgrew the official production centre, so he expanded the process of dipping and parcelling the helmets at the three biggest laundries in London. Without consultation, he put out a call for women volunteers. Soon he had hundreds from every walk of life offering their services; he organized three eight-hour shifts of women working at each laundry, only paying the forewomen at each location. Macpherson had a task to accomplish, and accomplish it he would. Along the production lines, however, a serious problem emerged—a design flaw.
“We found mica [the goggle portion of the helmet] very hard to work with,” Macpherson wrote. “It cracked and therefore leaked. . . . I begged to be allowed to replace the mica with photographic film, but [British Army] Staff Duties would not allow it, because film was explosive!”29
Macpherson calls it a coincidence, but one night while his anti-gas helmet production was in high gear, he took an evening off, responding to an invitation to attend a scientific lecture by his friend Harry Batterbee. The subject of the presentation was a new film product called triacetyl cellulose, or as Batterbee described it, “non-flammable film,” for an entertainment industry that had experienced debilitating fires in movie theatre projection booths, where hot projecting equipment regularly ignited the nitrate-based cellulose film stock.
The non-flam film made Macpherson sit up. Here was the very solution to his cracking mica problem. And who manufactured this miracle material? Eastman Kodak in the United States and two companies in France—one in Lyons and the other, Pathé, in Paris. Overnight, Macpherson was back across the Channel, knocking on the doors of the two French firms manufacturing triacetyl cellulose.
At the Paris operations of the Lyons firm, where Macpherson and an interpreter, Col. Keddie, arrived the next day, they learned that the French War Office had just assigned the firm’s entire output of non-flam film to the production of dope (waterproof varnish) to cover the wings of French military aircraft. Even as Macpherson examined samples of the product, French air officers entered, challenged the Newfoundland captain and his aide, and ejected them from the plant. Next, at Pathé, company officials told Macpherson they could offer him nothing. When Macpherson and Keddie threatened to go over their heads to the French War Office, the Pathé people asked how much film the captain would need. Macpherson and Keddie consulted in a corner.
“[Alfred] Keogh has authorized me to get enough for 200,000 helmets only,” Macpherson told Keddie, adding, “Even though the helmet is at the experimental stage, I have every faith in it.” And so Macpherson suggested they request enough film for a million helmets.
“You’re new to this business,” Keddie warned Macpherson. “[Changing the order] could have dire consequences.”30
“I’ll take the responsibility,” Macpherson said. “Let’s ask for enough for one million.”
Pathé accepted the order, and by five o’clock that afternoon the plant had the ten unlabelled wooden cases ready for loading. Thus Capt. Cluny Macpherson found himself at the wheel of a Daimler leading a convoy of touring cars, all heavily laden with boxes of non-flam film and motoring northward with dispatch into the night, toward a rendezvous with a steamer waiting in Boulogne harbour. The next day, safely back in London with his top-secret cargo, Macpherson went right to his desk to write up a full confession for his immediate superior. Col. Horrocks was appropriately appalled by Macpherson’s temerity and sent him up the line to DGMS Keogh to explain his activity in France and his unilateral decision to alter the size of the non-flam film order.
“And did you manage to get enough for the whole 200,000 helmets?” Keogh asked.31
“When I found out how difficult it was to get any,” Macpherson answered, “I thought it better to get enough for one million.”
“How dare you do such a thing?” Keogh exploded.
“I thought it in the public interest,” Macpherson said, and before his superior could say another word, he added, “Let me answer that question in a week’s time.”
“All right then. I’ll see you in a week’s time.”
In the week Keogh had granted him, Macpherson took over the Great Hall at St. James’s Palace in the City of Westminster. With record speed, he directed his factory staff to build wooden stands and rollers to receive and dispense the rolls of triacetyl cellulose. Then his army of women volunteers organized to cut the film to the exact size required to replace the mica and fill the visor in each anti-gas helmet with the new non-flam film. As his workers began to stockpile the new military gas masks, Macpherson said the entire palace reeked of acetone. Seven days later, he returned to DGMS Keogh’s office.
“Well, Macpherson, what can I do for you today?” he said.
“My week is up today, sir, which you so kindly granted in which to answer your question about the one million eye pieces,” Macpherson explained.
“You go to hell, Macpherson!” Keogh laughed.
Sensing the meeting at an end, the Newfoundland captain saluted his superior officer and turned for the door. But Keogh called him back. “Why the devil didn’t you get five million?” he asked sarcastically.
Capt. Macpherson’s strong belief in the invention, his fearless approach to manufacturers of top-secret materials, and his audacious willingness to plunge ahead no matter the rules or bureaucratic barriers had generated a life-saving device in the middle of world war. All were calculated risks that, in his view, were well worth taking. “My helmet,” Macpherson wrote later, “had well proven its value in the week.”32
As if his globetrotting between Britain and the Continent during those few critical days after the German gas attacks weren’t enough, Cluny Macpherson made numerous additional trips back and forth, establishing two impregnation depots for the helmets in Abbeville and Calais, France. Next, the eager captain took on the challenge of finding protection for Allied soldiers against flame-throwers that Allied intelligence anticipated the Germans might introduce along the Western Front. But Macpherson wasn’t allowed to stay in the region long enough to see these devices developed; he was soon deployed to Gallipoli to rejoin his Newfoundland Regiment, just as the Allied evacuation there ended. But the stress, sleeplessness, and strenuous pace had taken their toll. In October 1916, Macpherson was sent home to Newfoundland to assume responsibilities as director of medical services in the army; at age thirty-seven, he was the youngest DMS ever.
Over the course of the Great War more than twenty-two million of Macpherson’s anti-gas helmets were manufactured. Had he patented his device or sought publicity for it, both the medical and military worlds might have paid greater attention to him. But, as the long-time physician quickly pointed out in his notebooks of the day, “[I] belong to a profession which does not register nor patent its discoveries, but gives them freely in the cause of humanity.”33 Dr. Macpherson received numerous other honours and distinctions during his medical career, among them Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, Honorary President of the Newfoundland Council of the St. John Ambulance, Honorary Vice-President of the Newfoundland Council of the Canadian Red Cross, Fellow of the British Royal College of Surgeons, and on and on. Especially important to Macpherson, however, was an acknowledgement from fellow surgeon and British officer John Rees.
“Put a young Colonial who knew nothing about London or Army or manufacturing in charge of a job where speed of production was all important, and it worked,” Rees said. “That young chap knew nothing about red tape except how to cut it when it tangled him.”34
Historians and military peers further agree that Dr. Cluny Macpherson’s innovation, born as a sketch in desperate pursuit of a life-saving solution, not only short-circuited military bureaucracy at a time when a solution was most needed but also delivered a far greater dividend—the stuff of legends, bestselling espionage novels, and blockbuster movies. They suggest that his anti-gas helmet design and its quick production “saved the Channel ports which the Germans fully expected to occupy as a result of their surprise gas warfare.”35
AUGUST 10, 1944—GRAINVILLE-LANGANNERIE, FRANCE
EARLY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, the family members of Second World War veteran Bob Ross gathered at the family home in southwestern Ontario to commemorate the sixtieth wedding anniversary of Bob and his wife, Jean; in doing so, however, they also ended up celebrating the initiative of another quick-thinking medic in the battlefield.
Among the invited guests for the anniversary celebration was Bob’s lifelong friend and army buddy Jim Brittain. But Brittain wasn’t just a casual participant that day; the Ross family requested his presence as the guest of honour. Indeed, during one of the tributes to their parents, the Ross offspring said, “If it weren’t for Mr. Brittain, we wouldn’t be here.” It was true.
In August 1944, the Allied armies of Canada, the United States, and Britain had gained a significant toehold in France. The Normandy invasion had advanced from the D-Day beaches inland toward the city of Caen. At the time, Privates Ross and Brittain were serving with the Lincoln and Welland Regiment (L&WR)—the former as a rifleman and the latter as a medic. The regiment had roots in southwestern Ontario going back to the formation of local militias during the War of 1812, so when it mobilized in 1939, many of its enlistees knew each other as neighbours or were in fact related. Gord Brittain, Jim’s young brother, joined the L&WR two days before he did; they both lied about their ages, but Gord didn’t like his potential assignment as a medic, so when Jim joined, with a resumé displaying some St. John Ambulance training, brother Gord convinced him to take his spot.
“I’d like to be in the medical corps,” Jim Brittain announced to the medical officer in charge.
“We just lost a volunteer,” Capt. George Lewin said.
“That was my brother,” Brittain explained.
Lewin, who’d been a doctor in private practice before enlisting himself, looked over the new volunteer’s papers, noticed the St. John training, and concluded, “You’re in.”36
Training at Niagara-on-the-Lake proved pretty basic—inoculating troops, cleaning and dressing cuts, setting broken arms and legs, and processing urine samples. After a stint on the Pacific coast, the regiment landed in Newfoundland; while stationed there, Brittain and his medical squad not only attended to the needs of the eight hundred troops in the Lincoln and Wellands but also provided basic health care to civilians at the neighbouring outports Gambo, Dark Cove, and Middle Brook. One of Pte. Brittain’s first tasks was helping a family bury a stillborn baby in a shoebox.
On December 12, 1942, when the regiment was stationed at the Lester’s Field barracks in St. John’s, the L&WR medical unit responded to an emergency at the Knights of Columbus Hostel. The downtown facility, used by servicemen as a sleeping, dining, and recreation centre, was ablaze. Brittain attended to the burns of some who’d barely escaped and helped bury some of the ninety-nine who died. “In a way, it prepared me for what was coming,” he said.37
Overseas, Operation Totalize—the early August push through Caen to cut off the German retreat at Falaise—had positioned Brittain’s battle group near the town of Grainville-Langannerie. On August 10, 1944, the L&WR conducted a recce operation onto higher ground—Hill 195—just outside the town but well within range of enemy artillery fire.38 Brittain couldn’t recall which was hotter, the blistering sun or the German fire from mortars, machine guns, and 88 mm artillery. Brittain remembered an incoming shell striking an L&WR Bren-gun carrier. When the smoke cleared, four men on the carrier had severe head wounds, and off to one side he spotted Pte. Ross next to the wall of a building. “People were rushing by him,” Brittain said. “I thought he was standing upright in a slit trench. But no, his leg was off at the knee.”
There were stretchers leaning up against the building nearby, but the shell blast had shredded the canvas and shattered the stretcher arms, so Brittain grabbed a stick to use as a tourniquet and applied it to Ross’s groin as tightly as he could, to stem the bleeding from a main artery. “I remember having to get a door and laying him on it. I remember him wanting to have his [detached] leg on the stretcher with him,” he said. “Which I did.”
Shelling in the area continued for several days. Those fighting on the hillside recalled running low on ammunition, food, and water. L&WR troops who survived the engagement afterward referred to Hill 195 as “Butcher Hill.” Medics such as Pte. Brittain just remembered the carnage—eight killed in action, more than forty wounded, and two more who died of their injuries later. But not Bob Ross. When the shelling ceased, he was safely evacuated, treated, and shipped home. But Jim Brittain’s service as a medic had just begun. The Lincoln and Welland Regiment remained at the sharp end of the fighting with the 10th Infantry Brigade, 4th Canadian Armoured Division, all the way through Belgium and northeastward, pushing German troops closer to the River Rhine.
During Operation Basher, on March 10, 1945, the L&WR reached the south side of the German town of Veen. Pte. Brittain was attending to wounded in a tent. “A shell landed and shrapnel came through the canvas and got me,” Brittain said. The hot steel tore into his shoulder and created a sucking wound, “where the air goes in and out of the chest and your lungs collapse. . . . But I was in a medical area, and they laid me on my back with bandages.”39
Within hours Brittain had taken his first ride aboard a DC-3 transport aircraft, which airlifted him back to south England; after surgery and convalescence, he was transported home aboard the hospital ship HMCS Letitia. Since, among other skills acquired in the army, he’d become the regiment’s chiropodist, after the war, Brittain used a veteran’s allowance to attend podiatry courses in Cleveland, Ohio. He then returned to Ontario, where he built a peacetime practice in Oshawa and eventually St. Catharines. He kept in touch with wartime comrades, including his medical platoon mates and the officer who led the medical unit, Dr. George Lewin (who later delivered Brittain’s son, Ron).
For his part, Bob Ross, who recuperated from the loss of his leg in France, never forgot Jim Brittain, the medic whose quick action had saved his life. And nothing less than guest-of-honour status seemed appropriate at the Rosses’ sixtieth wedding anniversary party.
AUGUST 19, 1942—DIEPPE, FRANCE
KNOWING—AND ACTUALLY MEETING AGAIN—a patient who had survived by your hand no doubt helped overshadow memories of those who did not. The success of having saved Harold McDonald from further injury and possibly death at Shell Trap Farm would almost certainly have helped Francis Scrimger soldier on through the crushing loss of so many others at Ypres in 1915. Learning, long after Falaise, that Bob Ross had survived evacuation and surgery likely buoyed Jim Brittain during his own recovery from wounds sustained at the Rhine in 1945. It’s difficult to imagine, however, that the medical personnel who came through the crucible of Dieppe found any solace in those they saved, since there were nearly a thousand they could not.
Wesley Clare, a medical officer with the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry (RHLI) during the August 19, 1942, raid, probably knew the grim numbers before anyone else. As a prisoner of war by midday, he saw most of the casualties strewn across the Dieppe hospital grounds under German guard that evening.“I would find out that 545 soldiers from our brigade had died that morning,” he wrote, “[including] 197 from my regiment, the RHLI.”40
After completing a medical program at Queen’s University in June 1940, Clare enlisted in the army the day he finished his last Medical Council of Canada exam. Less than two months later, he’d finished basic training and was en route to England, arriving in time to witness the final days of the Battle of Britain. During his first year overseas, he served with field ambulance units in south England. Then, in March 1942, the 4th Canadian Infantry Brigade needed unmarried medical officers to replace three who were married. He qualified and was posted to the RLHI for two months of dawn-to-dark commando training—climbing cliffs, marching double time, and making assaults from water to land—on the Isle of Wight. In June the officers, including Clare, learned that the objective was the French seaport of Dieppe. For the rank and file it would remain a secret; meantime, Clare tried to keep his medics on their toes.
“I held a surprise inspection of the medical kits, checking the shell and first-aid dressings, triangular dressings, etc.,” he wrote. “We had been issued two hundred syrettes of morphine for more than five hundred men, which had to be divided among twelve stretcher-bearers. As this was to be a raid—in at dawn, out at noon with the tide—we were taking minimal supplies.”41
However, it wasn’t until after all the members of Operation Jubilee—about 5,000 Canadians, 1,000 British troops, and 50 US Army Rangers—had boarded their respective ships for the crossing that ammunition, supplies, and actual maps of the target were issued. The surprise attack was compromised when some of the Dieppe-bound assault vessels engaged an armed enemy convoy, alerting German coastal defences. The in-and-out raid had a series of less obvious objectives,* but the overt action intended to seize, occupy, and then withdraw along about a mile of open beach in front of the town. Clare’s medics came ashore with the RHLI at a stretch of ocean front code-named “White Beach.”
“We landed late, after daybreak,” he pointed out, emphasizing that all the RHLI landing craft were one to two miles out at sea when they were launched and were therefore visible and exposed all the way in. “We landed in chest-deep water and had to crawl up a rough beach under heavy fire.”42
The armoured support also landed late at White Beach. Strategy called for the Calgary Tanks to land on “Red Beach” simultaneously with the RHLI and the Essex Scottish to silence pillbox guns and help the infantry breach the sea wall in front of the town. The delays at sea threw off the timing, and the daylight at about 6 a.m. put inbound tank landing craft (TLC) and infantry landing craft (ILC) in plain view of the German shore batteries well before the Canadians reached the beach.
Aboard his landing craft with C Squadron in the third group of landing Calgary Tanks, Capt. Laurence Alexander prepared his two medical vehicles and staff of four—Cal Halmer and Carl Morrison operating the Blitz ambulance; Sgt. Lea Rutledge, Capt. Timmy Cameron, and Alexander himself on the carrier. Both vehicles’ motors were running. They just had to wait their turn to disembark behind two tanks and then they could join the assault.
C Squadron’s troubles began the moment TLC No. 8 purposely ran aground on the shore and dropped its front unloading door. The first Churchill tank down the ramp immediately got stuck in the deep chert rock: when a tracked or wheeled vehicle tried to climb the chert slope, it soon dug itself down, literally stopping in its tracks.43 It couldn’t go forward or backward. Worse, it prevented anything else from exiting the TLC, so all four vehicles began taking direct fire. Three engineers who leapt from the landing craft to help the tank crew were mowed down by machine-gun fire. Some first-wave tanks had managed to surmount the chert, but most suffered the same fate as the C Squadron tank crews—sitting ducks on a wide-open beach. TLC No. 8, with its one tank and two medical trucks, was ordered off Red Beach to find a better landing spot; it moved west to White Beach to try to disembark the tank and trucks in front of the Dieppe Casino.
“As we drew nearer we were caught in a terrific hail of fire from shore batteries, field guns and a constant hail of machine-gun fire and bursting shrapnel,” Alexander wrote later. “When we were within fifty yards of shore, all hell broke loose. The call for stretcher bearers was heard in all directions.”44
Alarming though it was, the call was not foreign to Capt. Alexander. Just sixteen when the Great War drew Canadian troops to Flanders in 1914, he had volunteered as a stretcher-bearer and suffered respiratory damages in gas attacks during service along the Western Front. Nevertheless, Alexander had fulfilled his wartime commitment and had returned to obtain his medical degree in Manitoba. He had married and settled in Saskatoon to establish a medical practice with his brother. Before the Second World War, he had moved to Calgary on his own, providing medical care at city hospitals and at the Stoney-Nakoda First Nation reserve. So, when war broke out in 1939, he had both wartime and peacetime medical experience to offer. In 1941, at age forty-three, he became a medical officer with the 14th Canadian Army Tank Regiment, the Calgary Tanks.45 In front of White Beach now, and with motors running again in his two vehicles waiting to get to shore, Alexander left his carrier to respond to the call for medics aboard TLC No. 8.
“On reaching the upper part of the [landing craft], a shell exploded,” Alexander said. “[It] knocked me back to the bottom of the boat, but I was unhurt. I climbed again, when another shell hit and blew me the opposite direction—right off the boat.”46 Airborne, he somehow grabbed hold of an engineer, who pulled him back aboard. But the effectiveness of the entire TLC was now in question. As the ship’s crew released the front unloading door to deliver its cargo of the tank, Blitz ambulance, and carriers, an enemy shell blew apart the door cables and rigging, effectively jamming the door beneath the bow. Like so many of the tanks stuck in the chert onshore, the landing craft became a stationary target for the German shore batteries. TLC No. 8 then took a third direct hit; there would be thirty more in the minutes that followed, either killing or wounding the entire ship’s crew. Among the wounded, the captain issued an “abandon ship” order and jumped into the water. By this time Alexander had managed to pull himself into what was left of the superstructure near the bridge. From there he heard calls from below to reverse engines.
“No living people above the deck,” Alexander shouted to the tank and naval crew below. Then he heard a cry for help from a nearby catwalk; he ran toward the voice, only to discover the catwalk “crowded with dead and dying men—all wounded, not one uninjured man.”47
All this, and the chief medical officer hadn’t even stepped off the landing craft to attend to the men in his own outfit, the Calgary Tanks, or the infantry taking fire on the beach. No doubt torn, he continued to attend to those around him on the TLC as it swung around and floated sideways onto White Beach. He later wrote that machine-gun bullets beat “a constant tattoo on the boat” and that inside the boat “was a sheet of flame.” He continued feverishly binding the wounds, only to find his patients killed moments later by the next volley of incoming shells. It was approaching 8:30 in the morning. In the moments when he was able to survey the scene outside the vessel, Alexander spotted the tank of his squadron leader, Lt.-Col. Johnny Andrews, sinking in the surf between the TLC and the shore; the cover of its turret was gone and survivors were attempting to get to smaller boats or wade through the surf to join the infantry assault, but they were all cut down by sniper fire.
Of the Calgary Tanks that did make it onto the beach, a handful from B Squadron in the second wave were scattered between the shoreline and the sea wall, where the Germans had constructed an anti-tank ditch. Stephen Bell, the wireless radio operator in a tank labelled “Backer”—the second Churchill tank to leave TLC No. 4—said the incoming tracers and shell explosions looked “like the fourth of July.” His tank received a direct hit coming down the ramp. The concussion knocked out Bell’s radio, blew the lids off the tank’s turret, and left three of the five-man crew in the turret temporarily unconscious. Driver Earl Snider managed to move the tank forward only about twenty feet from the water’s edge before it, too, got bogged down in the chert. Bell counted at least fifteen enemy shell strikes on their tank; one lifted the sixty-ton vehicle into the air and dropped it back down again.
Backer’s crew had no alternative but to evacuate the tank and join the fight outside. Bell set up the tank’s Besa machine gun, using the stalled tank to shelter his one side; he and another gunner took turns returning fire from German positions. But the disabled vehicle simply drew more artillery shells that ricocheted off the tank body into its crew. Bell took shrapnel in his back and was bleeding from his ears, so he stuck pieces of field dressing in each ear. Gunner Bill Willard took hits across his foot, knee, and shoulder. Gunner Charlie Provis died from a bullet wound to the head. Then a mortar bomb exploded on their position.
“Willard got opened up right from his breastbone right down to his crotch,” Bell said. “All we had was a first-aid kit, so [driver] Earl Snider and I got a couple of safety pins. We stuck everything back in and pinned him up.”48
With little ammunition left in the machine gun and recognizing the need of others around them, Bell and his tank commander, Dick Wallace, began dragging the wounded from the beach behind them to what little shelter the tank offered. One man couldn’t be dragged because his arms were so badly wounded. Wallace told Bell to get a blanket, but by the time Bell returned the man was dead. By eleven o’clock some of the navy vessels attempted a return to the beach to retrieve the wounded, but many of them were hit and sunk as they came in. Despite every effort, nothing could be done to fight, to retreat, or to save lives.
For the rest of his life Stephen Bell was haunted by what he saw that morning. “You could ask anybody who was on that beach and they’ll tell you. The water was like red ink with blood,” he said. “Bodies? You have no idea. Like cordwood, just floating, arms and legs and guts and heads. It’s unbelievable. The water coming in was foaming red with blood.”
Capt. Laurence Alexander never did manage to leave TLC No. 8. Eventually an infantry officer managed to restart the landing craft’s engines and free it from the stones on the beach. A French hospital ship pulled alongside, allowing Alexander to offload his casualties. Shells from shore batteries, mortar positions, and German dive-bombers continued to explode around the crippled landing craft until, finally, HMS Alresford, a Royal Navy gunboat, nudged the landing craft out to sea and helped steer the battered vessel back across the Channel to England.
Ashore nearby on White Beach, RHLI Capt. Wesley Clare and his aid men could do little more than crawl their way over the chert to the scores of wounded in front of the sea wall. Eventually one of the abandoned TLCs drifted ashore, and Clare gathered his medics and wounded in the lee of the vessel to carry on the task of saving lives. A number of smaller landing craft attempted returns to pick up the wounded; most were either deterred or destroyed by heavy bombardment from the shore. Now Clare faced an additional threat—sea water was lapping farther up the beach with the morning tide and engulfing his position. It was just after 11 a.m. when Clare made a final decision.
“There were eighty to a hundred men huddled behind our now burning landing craft, and as the tide came in, it became obvious that we had to surrender before the wounded drowned,” wrote Clare, the senior officer in the position. “I tied a triangular bandage to a rifle, and we surrendered.”49
Though nearly two hundred men from his Royal Hamilton Light Infantry regiment had died in the Dieppe raid, Capt. Clare couldn’t let that thought interfere with the job at hand. In his first hours of captivity, he triaged some of the wounded who soon filled both the nearby Dieppe and Rouen hospitals. Stephen Bell and Earl Snider assisted Clare in getting wounded comrades the treatment they needed; they managed to get Bill Willard, whose torso they’d stitched up with safety pins, into a hospital bed; Bell said when they pulled off his shirt, one shoulder was a mess of compound fractures.
Meantime, the rest of the Dieppe prisoners of war—nearly 1,300 men—were transported to a prison camp outside Paris. Among the POWs were 250 walking wounded, but with all of their medical equipment confiscated, Capt. Clare and two other medical officers from the 4th Brigade had to make do with paper bandages, paper dressings, and a few makeshift instruments. Several weeks later they would all be transported to a German prison camp in Ober Silesia to face an entirely new set of medical challenges, in what would be nearly three years of imprisonment at Stalag VIII-B.
Back in England, at 11:30 on the same night as the Dieppe raid, Capt. Alexander and the survivors of what was left of TLC No. 8 were towed to a berth at Newhaven. “Oil, water and blood were over everything,” he wrote in his journal, “and the days following were full of gloom.”50 Of his original assault group of 117 military men and thirteen naval men, Alexander’s unit returned to England with only thirty military and three naval men alive, and most of them were wounded. Alexander himself had shrapnel wounds on his ankle, an injured tailbone, and a cracked jaw. His two ambulance medics, Carl Morrison and Cal Halmer, had arm and leg wounds but would survive.
Meanwhile, hospitals around Newhaven worked for two days and two nights—the surgeons at one hospital worked non-stop in its operating theatre for forty hours; another hospital attended to 401 wounded, 80 of them requiring surgery.51 Despite the horrific overall losses—3,367 of the 4,963 Canadians in action became casualties—Alexander wrote that he could take some solace from knowing that twenty-eight tanks had made it ashore, albeit to be ultimately captured or destroyed, and that “we had succeeded in landing at an impossible point.”
ON OCTOBER 2, 1942, the London Gazette published details of two investitures planned for Buckingham Palace later in the month. For their actions during the Dieppe raid, Capt. Laurence Alexander would receive the Military Cross (MC) and Lt.-Col. John Begg the Distinguished Service Order (DSO). In a rather clinical entry in his diary, on October 27 Alexander recounted that he and Begg walked across Green Park to the palace and, joining a number of other medal recipients, were led into different rooms according to the type of decoration. There a set of hooks was attached to each man’s tunic to receive the medal. Beginning at 11 a.m., the award winners were processed—marched to a raised platform in front of an audience, there to await the King, and then called forward by name. They were expected to bow and to step forward to have the award hung on the hooks by the King.
“Which beach did you land on?” King George asked Alexander as he placed the MC on his chest, “Red or White?”
“Both,” Alexander said.
The King asked about the casualty numbers and if Alexander had managed to get them all away safely. Then, apparently, Lord Louis Mountbatten whispered something to the King about what had happened to Alexander’s tank landing craft. Finally the King asked what had become of the casualties.
“Many were blown overboard.”
“It was a dirty show. Good work. Congratulations,” the King said.
They shook hands. Alexander walked off the platform, and as he exited the presentation hall, a royal assistant removed the medal from the hooks on Alexander’s tunic, put it in a case, and handed the case to him. To complete what felt much like an assembly line, a photographer had Alexander and Begg pose outside the palace gates and took their picture. Capt. Alexander continued to serve in the medical corps right through the liberation of Sicily, Italy, Belgium, and Holland in 1945. He would receive further decoration for his innovative use of Jeeps as ambulances. It was all appropriate recognition for saving lives in the battlefield.
But Laurence Alexander might suggest that he enjoyed an even greater reward than any medal or citation ever delivered. After the war, when Doc Alexander returned to Calgary to restart his civilian private practice, some of his army comrades pitched in. Former Calgary Tanks trooper Raymond Gilbert, captured and imprisoned after the Dieppe raid, came home to Alberta wondering what had happened to his regiment’s onetime MO.
“[Doc Alexander] called me up and said, ‘Ray, I’m opening an office. I need some patients,’” Gilbert said. “He [brought] my first [child] into being, and my second.’”52
Tough for a military medal to match that.