D-Day Casualties

Heroes Remember

D-Day Casualties

Transcript

You were just getting rumours and you knew... and also the planes were going over and you knew something was on. And then, I can’t remember the first... I don’t remember what day the first casualties came back, but I remember we did a lot of dressings and... getting our wards ready so we’d be all ready for them and the wards had to be emptied because all the patients we had were sent off to other hospitals or back to their units so that we’d have empty beds for the casualties when they come in and they came in by train and then by ambulance to our hospital Interviewer: So you had an empty hospital one minute. Next minute it was full. Pretty close to that. Interviewer: What was that like? It was a lot of hard work but I think it was what you would call organized confusion because it may be confused, but the army always seemed to know what they were doing because that’s their training and they anticipated and that’s why they need to be practicing and why the... and I think that is why the troops do so well is because they practice and they can anticipate a lot of things that are going wrong.

Description

Ms. MacAulay describes the effects of D-Day as organized confusion.

Kathleen Jean MacAulay

Ms. MacAulay was born in Meadowville, Nova Scotia on January 2, 1917. She attended school in Meadowville in a one room school for grades 1 - 10. Then she went to nearby Stellarton for grade 11 and New Glasgow for grade 12. After attending Maritime Business College for a year, she left and went to Halifax to train as a nurse at the Victoria General Hospital. Ms. MacAulay graduated as a nurse in 1941 and enlisted to go overseas. Ms. MacAulay made the four day voyage on the Queen Elizabeth and landed in Scotland. Shortly after arriving, she was sent to Bramshott where she worked in the operating room and in the ward from Oct. ‘43 to July ‘44. From there, she went to Whitby for a short period before heading over to Normandy. Ms. MacAulay ended up in Germany at the end of the war and was there for part of the occupation. She met her husband, a Canadian soldier, in Germany and was married to him in Jan. ‘46. She returned to Canada aboard HMS Rodney in June of ‘46.

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