“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.
* * *
—
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.
“I’ll be back in one minute, I promise,” she said to him. “I’ve got to give that man a shot, he’s been waiting for hours.”
“You’re American,” he said with a smile and a look of surprise. “I thought everyone here was British.” He was American too.
“Not everyone.” She freed her arm from his firm grip, hurried to administer the morphine, and returned as promised a few minutes later.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. He had dark hair and warm brown eyes. His leg was broken and in a cast, and he had burns on his arms and shoulders.
“I’m a nurse.” She smiled at him, anxious to make the rounds to check on her patients. She had thirty assigned to her, several of them severely wounded and waiting for transfer back to the States, but they’d lost two hospital ships the month before. The men they were caring for were all U.S. Navy and marines.