Danger UXB: The Heroic Story of WWII Bomb Disposal Teams by James Owen

Author:James Owen [Owen, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: UXB, World War II, Technology & Engineering, Military, Science
ISBN: 9780748113422
Goodreads: 30170115
Publisher: Little Brown UK
Published: 2009-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

When Jane Woolhouse opened the door to her husband he didn’t look himself. His glasses were broken and his face seemed distorted. His hair was matted and bedraggled, and his denim overalls were dirty. He wasn’t the Bert that she knew. She put on the kettle and ran a bath.

He appeared very dazed, and could only tell her that he wanted to go to Dover. While he had a wash she folded his clothes. They were heavy: the pockets were filled with earth.

Bert had travelled with another soldier and it was from him that Jane learned what had happened. ‘He’d kept from me that he was doing bomb disposal, and it wasn’t until then that I knew that he was doing the very dangerous job that he was doing.’ All he had told his wife was that he was doing demolition work.

He returned to barracks the next day. There he had an interview with an officer, who told him that the best thing for it was to get straight back into bomb disposal, as if he had fallen off a bicycle. But something was wrong with Bert: ‘I kept shaking and things weren’t right with me . . . I kept wanting to get away.’ He was confined to barracks for a week after being caught trying to catch a train at Victoria Station, and then sent under escort to the psychiatric ward of Sutton Hospital.

Woolhouse was kept under supervision for two months at Sutton. The ward ‘was a bloody madhouse’ and while Bert knew that he was not mad, he ‘was terrified in case I had to go back into the Army because I realised that I wasn’t the same as I used to be’. In Jane’s words, his nerve had been broken.

He was treated by a woman psychiatrist, Nellie Craske. There were pills and graphs, and she talked to him about his childhood, and his sex life, which he found surprising. When Jane was allowed her weekly Sunday visit Dr Craske asked her about the same taboo subject. The doctor explained that Bert did not want to go back to the Forces, and that she wanted to know what sort of marriage he might be returning to.

What Craske did not mention was the controversial nature of the treatment that she had prescribed for some of her patients. With the psychiatrist William Sargant, she was studying experimental ways of treating ‘war neuroses’ - what had once been called shell-shock. Men who had broken down under the stress of war were being given insulin to induce in them a state of semi-coma as a way of calming their ‘anxious, depressive or hysterical symptoms’. Sargant would go on to conduct secret trials of mind-altering drugs on soldiers at Porton Down.

Bert had had the good sense only to pretend to take the pills that he was given by Craske, and was perhaps fortunate to be discharged from the Army by a medical board at the end of 1940. Two other sappers injured at Dagenham were given the same dispensation.

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