N.Z. NURSING SISTERS

Grey River Argus, 26 February 1943, Page 2

N.Z. NURSING SISTERS

WORK IN NORTH AFRICA. (N.Z.E.F. Official Correspondent). QSARA (Libya) Feb. 18 (Delayed). Further west than many of our fighting troops have yet advanced, are eight New Zealand sisters nursing wounded and sick soldiers and airmen from the Eighth Army’s battlefront. With a staff of New Zealand doctors and orderlies they have turned an abandoned Italian hospital and the flat, sandy stretches on the edges of this village—one of the last Arab fishing ports on the Libyan coast—into a modern, wellfitted clearing station capable of handling the most serious wounded and sickness casualties. Throughout our advance of the last three months the New Zealand sisters have served in forward desert medical stations usually nearer the front than any women working with the Eighth Army. Now they have moved with our last rapid advance over the bombwrecked road beyond Tripoli to within a few miles of the Tunisian border. Nearly a year ago Sisters V. Hodges, Dunedin; Joyce Tyler, Auckland; Jessie Watson, Tauranga; Ann Berry, Christchurch; Nora Newton, Christchurch; Mavis Murray, Tirau; Jean Bond (Carterton; and Mitzy Tapey, Christchurch, joined a New Zealand casualtv clearing station then working behind the New Zealand lines in Syria. During the El Alamein battle they remained with the general hospital in Syria, but with the beginning of our advance into Libya the casualty station became partly a mobile unit and the eight sisters joined it. First at Tobruk, then Agedabba, they worked through long days and nignts in tent operating theatres and wards, nursing the wounded.

While our forces were preparing for the inland sweep that drove General Von Rommel’s army from the last defensive line in Libya, the New Zealand casualty station was close behind our forward line where the sisters withstood just as many hardships and dangers as the great majority of our troops. Bombs aimed at nearby landing grounds fell close to their quarters, and the edges of almost every road they travelled on were heavily mined. Convoy after convoy brought back wounded when the battle began, and with sick soldiers, and airmen arriving from transport units and landing groups for tens of miles along the coast, the Sisters’ normal day began before dawn and ended at nine at night. Usually they live and work in tents, but now for the first time since early in November, their quarters are wards in white stone buildings. Improvised beds —stretchers on petrol tins and old boxes —and clean linen from a laundry built on the spot are providing comforts which wounded soldiers seldom know outside base hospitals. A typical comment from a patient at this New Zealand station was that of a Yorkshireman from an English armoured regiment who said that the sisters were the first British women he had seen in nearly twelve months and that his surprise at seeing them in the desert became almost an unbelief when they produced sheets for his bed.