Five days after their casual conversation about medical school, which was just something to talk about, Audrey and Lizzie were sound asleep in their beds in the dorm when the night duty officer went floor to floor pounding on the doors and an alarm bell sounded. Within minutes, everyone was up and in the halls. A hospital ship was lying off the coast at anchor. It had come in during the night, and the Germans had bombed it. It was sinking, and the nurses were needed on land and sea to help rescue the injured men who would otherwise go down with the ship. The C-47s were going to try to land on the coast as close as they could to fly the wounded in as quickly as possible. The officers who ordered them to their posts said the ship was burning and would go down soon. The Luftwaffe had clearly known about the ship and had bombed it mercilessly despite the visible red cross. A second hospital ship had been sunk at sea, heading for Southampton.
As soon as they jumped into their flight suits, Lizzie took off at a dead run for the airstrip with dozens of nurses. She saw Pru run past her and wondered if the men would already be there. Emma and Audrey were with them, and all the familiar faces. Every available nurse was heading for the hospital or the airstrip, ambulances were taking off at full speed. Lizzie’s crew got to their plane seconds after she did, and C-47s lined up on the airstrip for takeoff one after the other. They flew low and reached the coast quickly. They saw the hospital ship, and hundreds of men in the water. There were said to be fifteen hundred wounded on board with crew. It was pandemonium and the ship was listing badly as the German fighter planes returned to strafe them again and killed many of the men on deck and in the water. It was a scene of total carnage. Reggie tried to stay out of sight until the fighter planes left again, and then landed in a field as close as he dared get to the water. Ambulance crews and trucks of personnel grabbed litters and headed to the shore, where navy rescue boats were circling the ship, trying to grab men out of the water, and pull others from lifeboats.
The ship continued to explode from the fuel they had on board, and the scene on the shore was one of organized chaos. Ambulances were coming and going, rescue boats were circling. Rescuers and severely injured men and dead bodies were in the water. The rescuers worked steadily until dawn as best they could to save any survivors. There weren’t many. In the end, three hundred and ninety souls were saved. Fourteen hundred men had died. The ship sank before the sun came up, and steam continued to rise from it for hours. The rescuers were filthy and exhausted when it was over, and the hospital on the base was bursting at the seams. Their fleet of C-47s had to be used to transport hundreds of wounded to other bases and hospitals. Lizzie flew a hundred of them in four trips to the hospitals equipped to take them, and she lost several patients before they got there. Many were burned beyond recognition.
She saw Ed at the main mess hall for the base when she and her crew went there for something to eat when they were finished. It had been a hard night’s work and a tragedy of epic proportions, and a huge victory for the German air force. They had sunk two ships that night, and there had been only eighty-four survivors from the ship they sank en route to Southampton. The rescue crews were tired and angry over the merciless murder of so many men. Ed and Bertie, Reggie’s copilot, came to sit at her table when they saw her, and Pru joined them a little while later.
“Are you okay?” Ed asked Lizzie, and she nodded. Disheartened and sad, she kept thinking of the parents who would receive visits that day from officers, and telegrams for those of lesser rank, and all the broken hearts over their lost sons. She understood it only too well now.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Ed said with a savage look.
“I hope I never do again,” Bertie muttered under his breath. It was war at its worst and most cruel.
They all had the afternoon off. They were too tired to fly any more missions, and couldn’t get to the men at the front that day. The nurses sat in small groups talking about it, and all had double shifts at the hospital. Lizzie volunteered to help them. Ed went back to his barracks to sleep for a few hours. They were all exhausted.
Exactly a week later, to the day, the top secret invasion of Normandy began, and the wounded had to come in by ship to the British coastline, where the air evac planes picked them up and distributed them to hospitals. Every base was bulging with wounded. The army, air force, and navy were all collaborating, handling different aspects of the invasion. The ultimate goal was to recapture France, break the back of the German Occupation, and ultimately reach Paris. In the meantime, men were dying like flies in the sea and on the beaches. They were treating the wounded wherever they could find a safe place to minister to them on the beaches, as the landing craft continued to arrive, bringing more men to the battle and taking the wounded back to England. They pounded the German fortifications relentlessly as destroyers, cruisers, and battleships sat in the sea just offshore.
As soon as the landing craft arrived with fresh troops, the boats were loaded up with wounded men to send them back to the ships for treatment, and to eventually get them to where the air evac planes could pick them up and bring them back to the base. It was a giant operation, bigger than anything they’d ever seen before. They had specially equipped landing craft, where as many as a hundred and forty-seven litters could be stacked in tiers to bring them back to the ships offshore for emergency treatment. Because it was a water landing, with all the action on the beaches and in the water, there were no nurses involved in the operation, only physicians and corpsmen. The naval base hospital near Southampton was giving emergency treatment and triaging the injured to other base hospitals in England. The physicians and corpsmen were being killed and injured almost as frequently as the soldiers. It was a highly dangerous mission. There were injured men being evacuated from the beaches for seventeen days after the initial invasion.
* * *
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For weeks afterwards, the nurses of the air evac transports were doing double duty: flying their usual missions by day, to bring back wounded men from the front lines, and working extra shifts at night to care for the extreme number of wounded at the base hospital. There were men on litters and gurneys in the hallways, with nowhere else to put them. The nurses ministered to them where they found them. Corpsmen never stopped running, and there were injured men everywhere. The hospital was teeming with nurses, doctors, corpsmen, and orderlies dealing with a staggering number of wounded men. Louise was pulled off her regular shifts with the prisoners of war and assigned to the hospital with the other nurses. For the first time since she’d gotten there, she was treating Allied soldiers of all races. It was a breakthrough for her.
Alex was running frantically from one bed to the next, stopping every few feet for men begging for help or pain relief, with bandaged eyes and burned bodies and faces, amputated limbs, and shrapnel-riddled bodies. The invasion had been a success, but the number of wounded was staggering. Alex hadn’t stopped for hours, when a tall man on a gurney with his legs hanging off reached out and grabbed her as she flew by, hurrying to a man farther down the hall who was begging for morphine. The man on the gurney had a craggy masculine face and a deep voice as he held fast to her arm.