“We soon ran out of Steinman pins for fractures, and used ordinary four inch nails, and for our ligatures there was always the unravelled silken cord from parachutes. Gowns we had none, gloves we had none…” 

Lindsay Rogers was a New Zealander awarded the MBE (Member of the British Empire) and the Orders of Merit and Bravery of Yugoslavia for his part in treating Tito’s wounded partisans, often behind German lines, in WW2.  His autobiographical account is very well written: he gives a good account of the countryside, the people, the military bureaucracy, and the constant ethnic and political turmoil, without overlabouring the surgical parts of his story. This is good technique: surgery alone would make for a rather dry read. He finds the dramatic contrasts and illuminates them: peasant women singing ancient songs as, armed 24 hours a day with grenades and Sten guns, they negotiate the mountainous terrain on their way to kill the Germans and their Chechen and Utashi allies. As the book goes on the source of their hatred becomes clear, though Rogers remarks that “The German occupation merely fomented the existing troubles”. 

After the Germans were pushed out of North Africa, Rogers found life too boring in Tunisia, so volunteered to be inserted by the British SOE (Special Operations Executive) into occupied Yugoslavia in 1943. This nation was born after WW1, at President Wilson’s League of Nations conference. With the Italians already in the Balkans, Dalmatia, and Croatia, Hitler invaded on 13^th of April 1941. Churchill tried to unify the Greco-Balkan region into a single army, but found it could not be done. Ultimately it is Tito who achieves something approaching this ideal, but with him came Russian Communist power politics. Indeed, the climax of the book is the Anti-Fascist Youth Congress, attended by Tito, and Churchill, who learnt his speech in Croatian. Great cries of ‘Zivio Tito! Zivio Marshal Stalin’ make for an enthralling historical moment: “I knew the power of youth; I knew the power of resistance and the fever of hope which drove them on. Yugoslavia will be free.” As the war comes to a close, the British find themselves less and less welcome capitalists, and leave with some resentment at the lack of gratitude for their assistance during the war. 

The war in this region was brutal and there were many civilian atrocities: 

“…they lined up four hundred of the old people in front of the partisan headquarters and shot them all “because of the resistance.” Girls were taken, if found, and put into the German brothels for use until such times as nature or disease intervened. Then they were shot.” 

“I remembered a courier patient of mine who had escaped from a German unit. He had been caught by a patrol and taken to a headquarters and asked about the movement of partisan groups. He didn’t answer. They struck him on the face with their rifles and said “Answer, you dog!” He was only seventeen. They struck him again and again until he fell. He was pulled out and locked in a room. Next day the same thing happened. No answer. Then they tied his arms with wire to a beam above his head, and from his testes they hung a brick tied with copper wire. Gradually his bladder filled, but he couldn’t pass anything because of the wire. Gradually the weight strangled his genitals. The pain was terrific; not so much the blackened strangulated testes and penis, but the awful tension in his bladder. A sudden pain and the abdominal agony ended. His bladder burst and he swooned away. The next thing he recalled was a peasant lifting him down at night and carrying him into the darkness. Luckily I was near at hand and operated. But his gangrenous genitalia I couldn’t replace.” 

In the end, Rogers has to confront the Hippocratic oath. With wolves eating patients who had to be hidden in the forests for days or weeks; operating theatres hung with icicles as thick as thighs; gross surgical injuries; the enemy hunting them so that they used amputated limbs to put Nazi bloodhounds off the scent; and after seeing a hospital burnt to the ground, the remaining bones of the patients shrouded in white ash; he joins a patrol upon which they ambush some of the alleged hospital burners. Here he is euphemistic: “The forest rang with the music of victory, and five of the hospital hunting hunters were gone.” 

For your journal?: Take your pick of contemporary wars. Is there anything you have read of medical conditions there? Which has the better technology: weapons or surgery? What non-military ways are employed to debilitate the local population?  

References and Further Reading 

Rogers, Lindsay (1957) Guerilla Surgeon   Collins, London 

Medecins Sans Frontieres  www.msf.org