Ship Receives Casualties.

Heroes Remember

Ship Receives Casualties.

Transcript

The two doctors on our ship had arranged to convert the ward room into a sick bay or hospital ward and of course we had our own sick bay on the ship and as the landing craft, empty landing craft tank came out from the beaches they brought some of the first casualties to our ship, starting around noon hour and in total we got about 58 casualties. They had multiple wounds from what Dr. Shwagger told us later of any kind. So the difficulty with this, with the landing craft, normally with our landing craft we could hoist our landing craft up and bring things up to deck level, but the LCT's were very low craft right at water level to us. So it was difficult with these casualties to try and get them from the low level of the landing craft tank, up to our deck level so we could transport them into the ward room or where ever. But we managed to rig up wire baskets and these wire basket stretchers. We rigged them up in such a way that they didn't dump, as they were being hoisted, but it was, that part was fairly difficult getting the casualties from the landing craft up to our upper deck and into the ward room. But we took on about 58 of these casualties, which were tended to by our crew and other people in the crew were designated to provide them with comfort and help the doctors and so on. So about 4 o'clock in the afternoon, we received orders to proceed back to Southampton, at flank speed with these casualties.

Description

Mr. Gorsline talks about the ship receiving casualties from the D-Day landings.

John Henry Gorsline

Mr. Gorsline was born on November 12, 1924 in Collingwood, Ontario. He joined the Navy in November of 1942 on his 18th birthday. Mr. Gorsline served aboard the HMCS Prince David as a radar operator and returned to civilian life in September 1945.

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