Prisoner of War
The Dieppe Raid
Prisoner of War
Transcript
They come along and they took all the
wounded out, and Ted went with me and
they loaded us into box cars,
it said 8 horses, 20 men on the side,
that was in French. God I don't know
how many of us were in there but it was
packed and we went from Dieppe to
Rouen and they had a big
surgical hospital in Rouen.
Interviewer: Did you know at that time
Mr. Gorman the full extent of the disaster?
Pretty well. You could, coming off the beach,
I don't think I saw anything,
it was like blocked out you know, and that.
But when I was sitting on the lawn there at
the hospital you could tell,
you could see it was bad you know.
And then when we got down to the
railroad station, the tracks, and they loaded
us into box cars and they were all wounded,
there was a fellow laying next to me,
poor guy was, he'd been shot in the
stomach and he was screaming for water.
Well nobody had any water and that,
the poor guy. He died on the way in,
on the way to Rouen.
We were overnight going to Rouen and
we went into the hospital at Rouen and
they had on one wall they had two lines,
two rows of double deck bunks and
on the other side was one row,
double decker bunks.
And anyway Ted, he found me a bed
and got on the lower bunk and
I couldn't lay down, I had to sit up.
And he was helping other guys,
this guy was an angel in disguise you know
and he was helping other fellows and
whatnot and then the next day,
they gave out a bit of food,
some soup I think it was and that and
Ted got me a bowl of soup and it ended
up that night he had no place to sleep,
so he slept at the other end of my bed,
we slept feet to face.
And then the next day they started taking us
into the operating room and Ted was helping
and he got me in there and
I sat up on this operating table and
the doctor he took what shrapnel he
could see, out of my knee and that and
there was just little pellets more than
anything and then he looked at my arm
and it came in there and there was
part of it, that shrapnel,
was sticking out here and anyway,
he put a pair of forceps on it and
he pulled the sucker out.
Well god, I swore at that man,
I called him every rotten son of a gun
in the world, I really cursed him and
they had no antiseptics or no
anaesthetics and paper bandages,
anyway, he cleaned it up as well as he
could and then they put me on a
great big airplane, aluminum splint,
my arm was up like this.
When he was finished, he patted me on the
shoulder and he said, “On your way sonny.”
He knew every bloody word
that I had called him.
Description
Little could be done at the Dieppe hospital. As German Prisoners of War, the men were loaded into train boxcars for an overnight journey to a large hospital in Rouen, France for treatment by German doctors. Mr. Gorman’s friend, Ted Broadbent, accompanied him. He speaks of his friend’s kindness to the injured, refusing to tell anyone of his own injury which eventually resulted in Broadbent’s hospitalization in Germany.
Meta Data
- Medium:
- Video
- Owner:
- Veterans Affairs Canada
- Duration:
- 03:54
- Person Interviewed:
- Donald Gorman
- War, Conflict or Mission:
- Second World War
- Location/Theatre:
- Europe
- Battle/Campaign:
- Dieppe
- Branch:
- Army
- Units/Ship:
- Essex Scottish Regiment
- Rank:
- Lance-Corporal
- Occupation:
- Signalman
- Date modified: