By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist
That
the entire US Military has been an all-voluntary force for the last 47 years
says something wonderful about America. Even during 1940 to 1973 when the draft
was in force, volunteers found their way to the American Field Services (AFS), an
all-volunteer medical unit. Formed initially in France in 1915, when on the
Western Front of World War I, volunteers evacuated the wounded in motorized Model-Ts
to a military tent-hospital in Paris, the AFS was reactivated at the 1939 start
of the European Theater of World War II. Charged with the hazardous duty of
driving American-made Dodge ambulances, AFS volunteers evacuated wounded
warriors on stretchers from World War II battlefields, and then tended to them,
no matter if they were comrades or enemies. In most cases the volunteers were pacifists
or conscientious objectors or rejects of the regular draft. Among them were
also idealists and romantics and boys of privilege, all of whom although
otherwise untouched by hardship or violence, answered their country’s call to
service. There were no draft dodgers, “losers” or “suckers” anywhere within
their ranks.
Pennsylvania blueblood
and aspiring actor, 30 year-old, Caleb Milne IV was one of those volunteers. Infamous
for staging a fake kidnapping of himself in 1935 to gain ransom money and publicity
in his bid for work as an actor, after nine years of purgatory and disinheritance
by his wealthy grandfather, Milne emerged a changed person with pacifism as the
central principle of his worldview. Six months after Imperial Japan’s bombing
of Pearl Harbor, Milne joined the AFS. While aboard a cargo cruiser that had departed
New York for North Africa, which was to be his and his comrades’ first field of
operation, Milne gave an accounting of his mates in a letter to his mother: “The
Group is an interesting mixture of people, thank God…[they] are a [congenial]
gypsy caravan of Harvard grads, glamour boys, and career men…I’d say 28 is the
average age although we have one who must be 60.” In fact, the youngest among
them was 19 year-old, Henry Bonner, a Harvard undergraduate. New York journalist,
23 year-old, Porter Jarrell, who failed the regular draft because of his flat
feet and poor eyesight, would emerge as a decorated hero in the end. Clifford
O. Saber, a 28 year-old mural painter prior to the war and eager to make a name
for himself as a war-artist, volunteered in the AFS because he saw it as the
quickest way to the front battle lines. His artwork is a 
valuable historical
record of the unit’s operations.
The “Group” as referred to by Milne, was the sole American attachment to British General, Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army in the North African campaign against German Field Marshal, Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Following broad-based training in first aid to desert navigation to ambulance maintenance, the group was deployed in October, 1942 to the front line at El Alamein on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, receiving its induction into the real war among a barrage of booming guns. Nevertheless, the AFS was quickly to earn a reputation for courage and fortitude.
Caught in a vice between Montgomery on the east and American and British Allied forces on the west, still the Afrika Korps was not done in until May, 1943. Throughout those long months, the drive across the top of the continent was a grueling one for the AFS volunteers. Ducking gun shots and bombardments and fearsome aerial attacks, as well as dodging holes and ruts in roads hidden in hub-deep dust in their thrust to deliver the wounded to evacuation hospitals, the volunteers then slogged back to the battlefield to take up their rescue work anew. Milne wrote to his mother, “…I jammed my coat-collar up and pulled my head down tight into my shoulders as the dark body swooped at me. It zoomed with a mighty roar over my head and I saw the sand lift and snap in a sparkle of machine gun bullets. Then it was gone.” But Saber didn’t escape so lightly. A bullet pierced the roof of his car and struck him in the back of the head. But luck was on his side when a surgeon saved his life. Ambulance driver, 21 year-old, Randy Eaton was shot and died instantly, though.
Although the Allied victory over the
enemy was in sight, the battle-hardened German 90th Light Africa
Division wasn’t going down without a good fight. Dug in on a strategic piece of
high ground in Tunisian mountains, the Germans pummeled Allied warriors wedged in
a ravine below. Milne and Bonner were caught in the crossfire. Jarrell set out
to assist his comrades. He reached Bonner, who was bleeding profusely from a
shrapnel-wound to his back. A cry for help set Jarrell clambering across the
rock-strewn ridge. A French Legionnaire wounded beyond saving in his care,
Milne lay bleeding from a shrapnel-wound to his leg and a dangling foot from a
broken ankle. Milne whispered to Jarrell, “I have a small piece in my back.”
Applying a tourniquet to his leg and administering a shot of morphine to his friend, Jarrell loaded Milne onto a stretcher and got him and Bonner down the mountain and to safety. Jarrell was later decorated by the British Special Forces for his gallantry. Bonner survived his wound, but the little piece in Milne’s back turned out to be large, and the damage it caused so extensive that despite the efforts of two surgeons, Milne succumbed to his injury. The date was May 11, 1943. A British flag draping his coffin, he was interred in a grave within sight of the mountain on which he was mortally wounded.
“What good sports most of them are,”
Milne had written to his mother of his AFS comrades early on in the heat of the
fighting. “I feel a very real sense of brotherhood in this work…It is sad that
this relationship comes as a result of a catastrophe rather than the remedy for
it.”
There were no draft dodgers, “losers” or
“suckers” among this group of great men!©
Major source material: WORLD WAR II MAGAZINE, GENTLEMEN’S WAR, Gavin Mortimer.
Images:
AFS MEN & BRITISH SOLDIERS – WWII, painting by AFS Volunteer, Clifford O.
Saber; photos of Milne, Bonner, Jarrell, and Saber.
#USMilitary,
#WorldWarII, #AmericanFieldService, #AFS, #WorldWarIIMagazine, #GavinMortimer,
#BernardMontgomery, #ErwinRommel, #Germany, #volunteers, #draft-dodgers, #“losers”,
#“suckers”
Multi-award-winning
author, Linda Lee Greene’s, CRADLE OF THE SERPENT: a 2018 AMERICAN FICTION
AWARDS CROSS-GENRE FINALIST – A reader writes, “Congratulation, Linda. You are an artist. It did not take me
long to realize that I was reading a book from a gifted writer. Wow! Your
sentences - they rise, they fall, they meander, they circle, they confuse,
tease and then just end as they should. As you describe, at times they flow out
of you on their own. There are so many unique wonderful descriptions in
your stories.”
Purchase
Link of CRADLE OF THE SERPENT: goo.gl/i3UkAV
Linda
Lee Greene would welcome contact from readers at the following:
www.gallery-llgreene.com - Online Art Gallery
http://Ingoodcompanyohio.blogspot.com - Blog URL
https://twitter.com/LLGreeneAuthor - Twitter URL
https://www.amazon.com/author/lindaleegreene - Amazon Author’s Page
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