Page 18 - The Gazette Autumn 2024

18 The Gazette QARANC Association
Eyewitness to history:
QA’s memories of Normandy
Launa Mary Stevenson, a 103-year-old QA who had landed on Gold beach several days after the D-Day landings, agreed to have her oral history recorded for our archives. Olivia Barnes went to meet her.
Making all the necessary arrangements with Launa’s daughter Dee, I was able to visit on 23 June in Exmouth. Launa talked for over two hours and would have carried on with other stories had not her daughter felt it was time to stop.
Born on Dartmoor in 1920, she trained as a nurse at The Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital and joined the QAIMNS/R on 21 February 1944. Launa was a keen church member and was approached by the Hospital Chaplain and encouraged to join the Guild of St Barnabas nursing sisters to go out to Africa and nurse in a leper mission. As war was raging, transport was proving difficult and while waiting, she described the following:
“My matron called me to the office one day she said, what you are doing sounds very commendable, but you see I am working for the British Government as the recruiting agent because D-Day is coming up and they will be short of nurses would you be interested in doing that, joining the Army”
Launa signed up there and then and was posted to Catterick and then she travelled to the New Forest where there were lots of troops, including Americans, waiting as
no one knew the date of D-Day, just that it was imminent. They set off for France and Launa remembers:
“The Royal Marines actually landed
us on the beach. It was still very active
by the way, we had to sleep in the hedge,
there were Messerschmitt’s around and
stuff going on so it was quite exciting and it wasn’t till the next early morning that we crawled out onto a field so that was my introduction to GOLD beach”.
I asked about her kit and what they had with them;
“I thought this was quite wonderful, each QA had a kit with a set of operating instruments, and they were all in their various compartments in this canvas bag and then it was rolled up and tied on neat enough to take your gas mask and your flat cap “
If the QAs all got together, they would have a full general theatre set. They had also been given a pack of food by the Marines that contained biscuits (“which would have broken even a dog’s teeth”), sultanas, fruit and chocolate but to Launa the most wonderful thing was being able to make a mug of tea.
They had been given strict instructions not to drink or wash in the nearby river, Water had to be brought over from England. The other reason for not going to the river was the fear of sniper’s and woman snipers at that, Launa recalls:
“And how do I know that because one shot at me, missed and the bullet went through my plate that was to hold my field stew and left a hole in it.”
I still smile at the thought that I had to treat them for their wounds when they had tried to kill me
The snipers were shot but not killed and sustained more injuries falling out of the trees than from the bullets. Launa
added: “I still smile at the thought that I had to treat them for their wounds when
they had tried to kill me”
There were six or eight QAs with her, three
to a tent, she seemed unfazed to be told to sleep with her helmet over her face as there was a
lot of shrapnel flying around.
The Hospital at Bayeux was set up in tents
and Launa was working in theatres. She felt her experience of nursing casualties from the Exeter Blitz and men returning from Dunkirk was a great help to her in dealing with the war wounded. Treatments were crude but effective, Launa remembers using maggots and powder sulphonamides on the wounds and the soldiers being very brave. Penicillin came later but was rationed. It was given every three hours and saved many lives, but the troops often regarded the injections to be worse than their wounds! Launa also found it difficult to go against her nursing principles of restricting fluids to these patients as the penicillin concentrations were to be kept high.
Many nationalities came through the theatres even Germans, one boy stays in her mind, gravely injured but calling for his mother. She stayed with him with a hand on his forehead softly saying “schlafen” (sleep) in the hope it brought him comfort or he might think