D-Day

Dog-Day. Yesterday was indeed part of Bean and two raindrops. Today you get all of her, looking rather questioningly at me. 

We were having a lovely walk and she was sniffing for hares when I called her back for a photo-shoot. With no treat. No wonder she looked askance.

80 years ago today Mum’s 23rd birthday must have been overshadowed somewhat by news of the D-Day Landings in Normandy, France; not only because of the magnitude of the event, but because she was a nurse at one of the hospitals which was established to receive wounded military personnel.
 
She was a nurse at St. Thomas’s Hospital based in London for some of the Second World War, but in 1944 she was an established member of the team working at St. Thomas’s Hospital Hydestile in Surrey. It was here that St. Thomas’s evacuated many patients away from the bombings in London. And it was here that some of the wounded from the D-Day Landings were treated.
 
There was a series of hospitals in southern England which received the wounded after they had been rescued from Normandy, triaged on the coast and then sent to the most appropriate facility.
 
What made Hydestile notable was that, for the first time, antibiotics were used to treat injuries en masse. The hospital received men with open fractures. Mum told me harrowing stories about the extent of some of the wounds, and the fact that until that campaign most of those soldiers would certainly have died from infections.
 
2.3 million doses of penicillin were manufactured prior to D-Day, specifically to enable Allied hospitals to treat those with open wounds. They saved hundreds, possibly thousands of lives.
 
It was no easy option like it is today: no tablets to swallow four times a day. These men were given injections of the drugs close to the site of each wound, several times a day. They would develop large solid swellings in the location of the injections, which had to be pierced again and again to get the drugs into their systems. Mum said that the pain they endured from the injections was as bad, and sometimes worse, than the pain of the wounds themselves. But it saved their lives…


We take so much for granted.


Incidentally Mum was a Pacifist all her life. She refused to join any of the armed forces during the War, despite being born into a family dominated by service in the Royal Navy. Before her nursing training started in 1941 her war effort was as a Land Girl. What she witnessed at Hydestile confirmed her belief that all war is evil, and unnecessary.