British Nurse WWII Books

QUIET HEROINES and A NURSE’S WAR

The nurse stories and reviews in this blog have been about American nurses of WWII, but of course there were medical units from other Allied countries, as well as enemy medical people. Often fighting alongside Americans were the British, and these are two remarkable books written by a nurse from England. A Nurse’s War is the memoir of Brenda McBryde, who lived through the bombing attacks in England, beginning in 1939, and became an army nurse, to serve until 1946.
Once when I was speaking to a group about the brave American nurses in my book, I began stating that ” the war started December 7, 1941, in Hawaii.” A woman spoke up to say that the United Kingdom was bombed in 1939, and she was there. Never again did I make that stupid remark.
While going through nurses’ training, Brenda McBryde tells of the local preparations for war, evacuating patients to countryside hospitals, gas masks issued to civilians, and air raid shelters. She tells of the war activity heard over the BBC, knowing that they could be invaded soon, as German bombers destroyed the airfields.
Graduating in April 1943, she promptly became an army nurse, assigned to an army hospital in Scotland, as the war took over the surrounding countries. Two weeks after D-Day in 1944 nurses landed in France, to care for the thousands of wounded British soldiers. Descriptions of wounds of war and the intensity of the work to treat the fighting men, is the strength of Brenda’s writing. She and the other nurses continue this through the fighting in France, Brussels, and Germany. British prisoners were released to their hospital, and soon the war ended. Caring for the thousands of refugees, civilians and military from many countries, is thoughtfully related.

After this memoir was published, hundreds of wartime nurses wrote letters with accounts of their own experiences. Quiet Heroines, Nurses Of The Second World War, describes countless stories of sacrifice. An excerpt from the book cover states: “The early disasters in France and the providential escape from Dunkirk; the blitz at home and the scars of Greece, North Africa, Malta and Italy; the brutal horrors of Hong Kong and Singapore; and the ordeal that so many nurses suffered in the Far East as prisoners of war” are described from first-hand sources .
At times American nurses and British nurses tell of the same experience, such as at Anzio, and being on the same hospital ship Newfoundland as it sank, bombed by the Germans. For years British nurses had served in countries in the Far East that were taken over by Japan, and as the troops and civilians tried to escape, many were imprisoned or murdered. At the end of the book are listed, by name, the nurses who died at sea, killed in action, murdered by the Japanese, or died in internment camps.
These two books by Brenda McBryde are similar, yet very different, from most of the books by and about American nurses mentioned throughout this blog. She describes wounds and treatment explicitly at times, in ways that are necessary and sympathetic. Looking at the Second World War through her eyes, as a British nurse, is very informative and moving.