Minefields And Miniskirts Australian Service Nurses

by Siobhan McHugh

The over-riding concern for most of the army nurses was the condition of their own troops, ”the boys”. Their injuries, from shellfire, explosions, gunfire and mines, were horrific - so bad, in fact, that in any other circumstances many would never even have had to be treated, because they would have died before reaching a hospital.

Army nurse, Trish Ferguson, recalls: “As soon as there was a contact, a siren would go all over the hospital as far down as the beach, and anyone who was off-duty would either turn up or phone in and see how many wounded there were and if they were needed. When the wounded boy came in on a stretcher, there’d be someone standing by with scissors and you’d cut straight through their shoelaces right up their clothes so you could lift them up and examine their back before they were even put on the bed. The back was examined and then the front and the anaesthetist would be there to put the drip in and straight away the pathologist would take the blood for cross-match and everyone else had their own jobs to do, and the boys would be inside scrubbing the theatre, and you’d take the patient through to the theatre within twenty minutes of them being wounded.”

Once, while routinely cutting through an injured man’s shoelaces in triage, Trish Ferguson was appalled when his foot came away in her hand; only the boot had held it in place. Sometimes the injuries were less obvious: shell fragments had to be meticulously removed, along with bits of mud and scrub, before a minuscule perforation of the abdomen could be detected. Few of the nurses had ever seen anything like it before. Despite the seriousness of their injuries, the soldiers’ survival rate was very high; only about 2.6 per cent of those admitted to hospital died, about half the mortality rate in the Second World War.

The Australian women earned only two-thirds of what a male officer of similar rank earned. The American nurses, who had equal pay, were aghast at the discrepancy, but the Australians made no protest; after all it was the same back home.

Army nurse Colleen Mealy reckons that seeing the women in a clean starched uniform, however unglamorous, was reassuring to the injured men: “You had to look the part, just for our boys to come in and say ‘we’re home, we’re right, somebody’s looking after us’.”

RAAF Nurse, Del Waterman, accompanied the injured troops back to Australia. Sometimes coffins had to be transported in the body of the plane with the injured men. “One time which was particularly sad, we had two brothers, and one was alive and one was in the coffin,” Del recalls. “He just said to me, ‘Look after him Sis, that’s my brother’.”

Programmed to put others first, the nurses soldiered on, shouldering the enormous emotional burden of their sick and dying ”boys”. For the women who had known the harrowing intimacy of sharing someone’s last moments, there would be no forgetting. As ”Dusty”, an American army nurse, tried to explain: “That act of helping someone die is more intimate than anything, and once you have done that, you can never be ordinary again.”