Waiting Onboard For Casualties (2 of 2)

And then I had one army major in another stretcher and I said, "What happened to you sir? " "Well," he said, "I was all through the North African campaign, through the Italian campaign and they drew me back for this show," and he said, "I was on the beach a half an hour when a big shell went off close to me and broke my back." So he said, "I guess I'm out of it for now." So after this, about two o'clock in the afternoon, why, we had finished unloading the second barge and I wouldn't like to say maybe we had seventy or eighty wounded, dead, dying or wounded on board. So we stuck out and went back, we were heading for South Hampton but when we got there, there was an air raid on and we couldn't go in, we had to wait until the next morning. So I went down to the medical station and had another visit with this army major.
We were there about 48 hours I guess and then we took a load of British soldiers in. And then we were back, see they had, they had to clear the beach and they didn't have much of a perimeter to start with you know. And then we took a load of Americans in to another beach, they were on a different section, down around Avranches they called it, we took a load of Americans in there. And then we went back, they sent us up to Barry, Wales for a boiler clean. As soon as we had our boiler clean we were down to the Mediterranean to get ready for the invasion of southern France.