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They were Prepared 05
HOLLAND
Arnhem
AFTER France and Belgium had been cleared by the liberating army, the Germans made a determined stand at Arnhem, cutting off North from South Holland. It was greatly feared that the north would be flooded, and also that epidemics would spread throughout the whole country. More teams were called for—and sent—among them the G.I.S. Mobile Hospital and Laboratory unit, and shortly afterwards the Kitchen and Canteen units.
After brief halts to set up small hospitals and deal with any patients that came their way, the medical unit reached Arnhem, where the other G.I.S. sections were already at work.
Fighting was going on three miles away, and the nearby ground was sown with mines and strewn with debris. The task of the voluntary workers in this area was to provide food at several centres for Dutch people who had been taken for forced labour and were now trekking back to the south, and for Displaced Persons of other nationalities who, at the moment, were nobody's concern. The Dutch people in the neighbourhood were starving, cut off from all sources of normal supply, but the team were in honour bound not to deflect food from the people who were being passed from one transit camp to another; and it called for strong self-control and character to ignore the hungry young faces that peered into their windows, and the insistent hands that beat on their doors: the penalty for weakening was to be sent home by the authorities and so be debarred from doing further relief work.
The feeding supplies at the team's disposal were dried peas, army biscuits, small tins of evaporated milk (each to be used for twenty-five persons) and small tins of meat and vegetables (each to serve ten persons)—not a rich diet, but, made into soup, acceptable to the half-starving.
A Dutchman brought news of potatoes in an abandoned airfield. Twenty unexploded bombs and some undetected mines were sharing the site with the potatoes, as well as coal and wood, which were badly needed to supplement the team's fast dwindling stock of fuel. Members of the team set out on a conducted tour of discovery, and got food and fuel without mishap, and so were able to vary the meals for the people waiting to be fed. Though the team were surrounded by bins, baths, and buckets of soaking peas and biscuits, they never had more than a cupful of water to wash themselves.
At the beginning of May rumours began to circulate. One day news was brought that the whole of the Netherlands was free; next day the news was denied. The team's wireless set had broken down; the Germans had confiscated all local sets. Then one night the noise of guns gave place to the more cheerful sound of fire-works. Eight members of the hospital team hurried to a Red Cross section to hear the broadcast midnight news. The Germans had surrendered.
Early on the morning of May 8th—VE-day —the G.I.S. teams left Arnhem and travelled into North Holland, six hours after the German capitulation. German troops, sullen and still armed, were walking and cycling in the flag-bedecked streets through which Allied troops, with relief workers in their wake, were being cheered on their way by the rejoicing Dutch people.
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