STRAIN OF BATTLE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24753, 1 November 1941, Page 13

STRAIN OF BATTLE

THE STRETCHER BEARERS HEAVY WORK UNDER FIRE GREECE AND CRETE (From the Official War Correspondent with the N.Z.E.F.) . CAIRO. Sept. .16; For 24 arduous, wearying hours a day the stretcher-bearer is at the, call of front line troops. He may be on his feet almost endlessly, stumbling back to ' the dressing stations under the dead weight of injured men, trudging forward again, perhaps carrying watej for his comrades. to fetch back fresh’cases. But his doggedness saves lives. Here Private McAllister, who was a fibrous plasterer in Auckland before the war. tells how the bearer’s work is clone.

It wasn't easy, in all those month! we had of desert training, to picture what our job in action would really be like. Stretcher bearers went through their instruction in first' aid and methods of handling wounded men, and we did actually apply what we knew to several cases of injury 1 through accidents; but naturally we had no chance of working under the «• strain of battle. \ %■ Still, we were to be thankful later k on for that training, A great, deal of ’ it was infantry drill and exercises with / the rest of the battalion, and the tough? emng that gave us meant that half * , our battle was won. I can tel] you; that the weight of a man, even.*' little chap, gets prettv heavy when yon have to go out and bring them in at all hours of the day and night. ■> It was not until the battle of Crete \ began that the bearers in my company , had to work at full pitch. When we, were in northern Greece, in the posi- , tions near Servia, the company was in reserve, and so we were ■ never j. « called upon, but bearers up in the , line were getting a fair enough experience in carrying wouded over : rough mountain tracks. During the ! withdrawal through Greece, however, we had a few cases to attend to. 7 i Endless Work r

In Crete the story was different.. with the men who were fighting,- there ’ was no start or finish to a day, be- > cause we had to carry right on. We-* were lucky to get any sleep. We might jf sit down for a while behind a bank," 0 and then the call would coma again. Jr.],, it didn’t, the Jerry planes would wake V us up just the same. We were able, to get most of our cases out in daylight, but we always went round the line at night to see how things werev-* going. There was not a great deal of work to do in my area on the first day. '; After carrying a few wounded back 2 to a dressing station which had been set up under a culvert on the road, we went out in the afternoon ana found a lot of donkeys running, loose.v, among the 1 olive groves. Our eyes lit up at the sight of them, because we knew how useful they would be in our job. It seems funny now to .think of chasing donkeys in the middle of a battle, but we corralled the animals and took them back—together with;.‘a lot of wounded parachute trdops as trial passengers. The fellows called me “O.C. Donkeys,” and at one time I had seven of them. We used the animals wherever, we could. *,: i f yWell, the days became tougher and 1 tougher, and as I said it was,impossible to tell where they started or My mate and I went out on as many*as eight or nine calls in the daylight hours, carrying wounded back under, all sorts of conditions. Twice we had to dig out. men who had been buried in their weapon pits by mortar bombs.' I remember one, chap who was buried up to his neck, but escaped with a shaking and a burst ear drum, _We used Jerry’s own shovels -to dig him out. ■■ .i

Attitude of Enemy

On one of these occasions we .had ? to crawl up a ridge, dragging the , stretcher between us.' We. must have shown ourselves on the skylipe, .because machine-gun bullets began xo spatter around us. Sometimes we could not get a stretcher ■’ np to a wounded man for two or three hours, on account of air bombing and y machine-gun and mortar fire, and ; one of us would go ahead alone to . give the man a shot of morphine, and we would lake- him out ‘ when things ~ were quieter. •• v .• '/■. ' • I think,, though, that the Germans . respected our duty whenever they -knew just what we were doing. For instance, - one day when we were taking a fellow back from Galatos hill across; a stretch of flat country, a-Messerschmitt dived down and banked -over us. We just kept walking and hoping for the best. He came down and had .a, damned good look at us, but he clidn t open fire. ■ Normally we carry rifles for the pro? tection of the wounded, but we handed them in as spares because we simply couldn’t have used them. All we carried were stretcher, water bottles, and medical haversack, although whenever we could we took extra water .up to the - boys in the line. We learned that/| there are three really important things >:| in our job; Know how to apply a tour- | niquet; malic your man comfortable; VI and get him back to a dressing station J ? as soon as you can. With g bombs dropping everywhere you know where the next one will and the wisest plan is to get a wounded / man out quickly. .. So it went on, day after day. until the final hectic afternoon when the Jerries broke through near Galatos. f I remember taking a walking wounded | case back to the dressing station, and 1 ' on the way forward again I met an- £ other man, who had been hurt by a mortar bomb. He said the Germans J; were breaking through, and I saw swarms of them about 500 yards away,: t just starting to 6ome in among our boys. I’ll never ' for|";t thdt ;:jight. * Still, we drove them back later -in the ! evening. . ' , ,' 1 1 1

Never a 'Whimper' • ' One thing my job taught me the gameness of the boys. I never heard a whimper from all the wounded men I saw-even that chap buried up to his ,neck was cool and calm/although naturally he was a bit dazed. And there was a fellow with one leg pretty -well blown off. According to all the rules of the game he should have been unconscious. But plucky! Why, I remember .that my mate and I were out of cigarettes, but this chap had some, and he showed us which pocket he was carrying them in, and told us to help ourselves. S :

Our job was tough enough.-V?We became dead tired at times, yet somehow we managed to keep going. But it was up there among those fellows sitting in the front line that you found real toughness. ,