Flying Angels(35)

   “Ten minutes,” the pilot said a little while later. The copilot took out a map and confirmed that they were almost at their destination, while Pru and Ed, and Charlie, the other corpsman, got everything set for their pickup. Her heart was pounding as they got ready to land and start another day. The sky was slowly turning purple with pink streaks starting across it. The pilot brought down the landing gear as they descended, and Ed smiled at Pru.

“It’ll be a good day,” he predicted, and as they touched down on an old rutted runway, with the loaded litters lying on the grass beside it, she hoped he was right.





Chapter 9


Pru’s and Emma’s last flights came in right behind each other that night. They’d been flying missions for fourteen hours, and were both more tired than they were willing to admit. Ground crews got the wounded to where the transports could land, and the planes either came back for another load of wounded or moved on to another destination. It was a continuing process. They had changed pilots once several hours before, but the medical crew remained the same until their day’s work was done. Lifting the litters and sometimes carrying the men, moving them, dealing with their severe injuries was backbreaking work and emotionally draining. Whenever possible, they talked to the wounded to reassure them and keep them alive. Some were unconscious, or heavily drugged, but many were awake, frightened, and in pain. It required constant concentration and rapid decisions that could cost or save their lives. There were no hard-and-fast rules. Pru and her crew, and the others, were willing to try anything to save the boys.

   When they went into particularly dangerous areas, they were assigned fighter planes to go with them and protect them. But often they flew alone. They were a legitimate target for the enemy since the C-47s bore no red cross to indicate their medical mission. Since they carried both cargo and men, they were fair game for the enemy. There were no polite rules in this war, no gentlemen’s agreements or humanity or compassion. Hitler’s armies and his allies had one primary goal: to destroy them and in addition, to sink morale.

When they left the airstrip after a halfway decent day, Pru walked along next to Emma with a tired smile. Neither of them had lost a patient, so far, which made it a successful day for them. It was all they cared about.

Ed had manually held an eighteen-year-old soldier’s entrails in place for one of their flights that day and saved his life, while talking to him about Ireland when he was a boy, just to keep the soldier’s mind on something else. The ambulance drivers and medics took over once they landed back at Down Ampney, their home base. With the last man off both their flights, Emma and Pru were free for the night, until the next day when it would all begin again. They had to have tremendous fortitude to face it every day, but that was what they were here for. And neither of them, nor their fellow flight nurses, would have wanted any other job. This was why they had enlisted, not to sit at a desk or walk down a hospital corridor. They had come for the rough work, and there was plenty of it.

“Are you up to stopping in to see the Americans I met last night?” Pru suggested. Emma hesitated and then nodded. She was bone-tired but wanted to be a good sport. She didn’t know where Pru got her energy from. She was game to go anytime, even after a fourteen-hour day with critically ill men depending on her. If anything, it seemed to energize her and give her superhuman strength, except when they lost one, and then the bottom fell out of her world. It was true for all of them. They took the losses very personally. They remembered all the boys they lost, and always met afterwards to discuss whether the situation could have been handled differently, for a better result next time.

   “Yeah, why not?” Emma said, matching Pru’s long strides with her shorter ones. “They looked nice enough.”

“It’s a good thing the Americans are sending us their nurses,” Pru commented, and Emma bristled.

“We’re just as well trained as they are,” she said, and Prudence smiled.

“Yeah, but they haven’t been in it as long. They’re fresher. We’ve been at it for four and a half years. They’ve been at it for two, and they’re only training them as flight nurses now. It’s a whole new game for them.”

“True,” Emma said. She couldn’t deny it. She felt as though she had grown up here, or maybe just grown old. It was hard to feel young with what they saw every day, so much tragedy and loss of life, such a waste of human beings, lives that were cut short, and dreams that ended with a single bullet or a bomb.

They walked to the nurses’ barracks since they weren’t in a hurry, and it was nice to get fresh air after a day with the smell of blood, burned and torn flesh, vomit, and disinfectant all around them. They both took deep breaths of the evening air and the smell of the earth.

   There were clusters of women in uniform outside the dormitory, and as they walked past them, Pru and Emma could hear American accents mixed with English ones, from all walks of life. There were a group of Australian nurses banded together, laughing at something. And as they walked into the building, Pru spotted the women she had met the day before. They had notebooks in their hands and had just come in from their day in the classroom. Pru stopped to talk to Alex, and then introduced Emma to all the girls she’d met.

“So did you learn all about the RAF today?” Pru asked them with a wry grin. “Tell them to hurry the hell up. We need you in the air with us, and you won’t need all those protocols once you get up there. You know as much as we do, or you wouldn’t be here. And I hear your air evac training is hell on wheels.” They all laughed and agreed with her.