Bomb Effects Still Felt

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31802, 5 October 1968, Page 3

Bomb Effects Still Felt

Almost to the present day, people had suffered from the effects of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima during the Second World War, Miss K. Bland said at a meeting of the Pan Pacific and South-East Asia Women’s Association on Thursday evening. People were dying long afterwards from blood diseases, said Miss Bland, who visited Hiroshima six months after the atomic bomb was dropped. It had caused great winds and the whole city was destroyed by fire. “Although they said the grass would not grow again, it was already starting to grow when we were there,” she said. Now the supervising matron of the Nurse Maude Hospitals in Christchurch,

Miss Bland was speaking on military nunsing and her experiences in foreign lands. “As a military nurse you are nursing two masters, your nursing profession and its ethics, and your queen and country as a soldier. You are still nursing patients, but you are working in different countries, dealing with different people and diseases,” she said. After serving on a nursing ship, which was taking a number of prisoners-of-war to England, Miss Bland was posted with the occupation force in Japan. She Served as charge sister responsible for a ward of about 70 patients in what had been an old Japanese sanatorium. It was built of green timber which, after a time, started to warp and one of the projects of the occupation force was to rebuild the hospital. “At first, sterilisation was by a boiler on a primus. There was no bath but after a time we got a community

bath—there was never enough hot water so we would have to use the same water, one after another.”

There were fairly good fire precautions but, as the hospital was being rebuilt, someone kept trjdng to bum it down, Miss Bland said. “We didn’t know if it was a New Zealander paid by the Japanese or some Japanese workers wanting to be kept in work longer.” Entertaining As the British troops were not allowed to associate with the Japanese, the nursing staff also had the job of entertaining the troops. They called themselves “Amenity No. 1” and were in great demand as dancing partners, Miss Bland said. “We could never have kept all this up if we hadn’t each had our own Japanese housegirl.” From Japan, she went to England and joined the Royal Army Nursing Corps. The women ran their own corps completely and were expected

to do such things as drill and study military law. Miss Bland was a tutor sister for four years and a half in the army. For two years, she was stationed in Egypt, in the middle of the desert During leave periods she was able to go to different places. “We had what was called ‘indulgence passage’—if there was an empty seat in planes, ships or other forms of transport, you could have it, as long as you had enough money to get back.”