Secret Men of War

While there many ship battles between the Q and U boats, unfortunately due to everyone’s disappointment, many of the Q ships were sunk without a trace. In the South West, ships of various shapes and sizes were transformed into trawlers, steamers, schooners and cargo ships. These would have been secretly transformed into men of war. These ships were given the nickname of Q ships. The original story goes back to the original ‘Q’ numbers that were being given to some of these special service decoy vessels. They decided to hide the weaponry under dummy lifeboats or if that didn’t work, they hide them under fake funnels and awnings. But the most effective process they used was painting the weaponry so that they could hide their cache. The whole concept behind these ideas was to lure the U boats into attacking the decoy ships, which would unleash their hidden weaponry. The men’s courageous story’s were little known to the public as their considered their missions as being secret.

Decoy 'Q' Boats

During WW1, Britain had a secret weapon, which were the decoy ‘Q’ boats. These boats were being built in the dockyards of Devonport and on the other South West ports. This was to be Britain’s secret weapon and would be the answer to tackling Germany’s new weapon; the submarine or what they called the U-boat. Thee fighting vessels were a great trick of disguising and cunning the enemy but the fact that they were actual ordinary ships which were being built as decoys.

Battle lines

The British army became very fearsome of Germany’s brand new weapon. The Germans strategy was to starve Britain and to defeat Britain’s ships by sinking very single one of them. The biggest casualty that this war had faced was the rule of war, which sank without a trace. Britain had a huge problem coming there way and the only solution the saw fit was to outwit the Germans with a more clever and sophisticated plan by using the Q ships. There was more than 200 boats and these were disguised and sent into action against the U boat enemy.

U-Boat 

Decoy 'Q' Boat

Silver Lining

Now over the years a sliver lining has become very apparent in the modern era by creating a massive difference in medical treatment for modern warfare. Now for example in Afghanistan, what they call a ‘Chinook’ helicopter, this specific helicopter can arrive to evacuate any casualties with a Medical Response Team on board. The whole purpose of this is too make sure that an Accident and Emergency doctor, nurse and medical technicians will be working on the wounded from the very moment they pick up the soldier and stabilize the injury for all of 40 or so minutes back to the hospital.

Now going back to 1914, there was no such thing as A&E doctors or any of the techniques and technology that we use today. But WW1 focused more on creating ideas and technologies and evolving the trauma medical care. Thinking like this has made significant results not just in war but has improved civilian injuries such as industrial accidents.

The Great War will always be remembered to this day as a time of great sacrifice. I feel that the public, communities and even veterans will remember advances in military equipment, the unprecedented deaths and casualties that scared Europe to this day and early developments of first aid.

I found that the discovery of these fundamental first aid techniques still remain to this day for example, triage. I feel that if the war didn’t lead to the first aid innovation, we wouldn’t have more effective ways of dealing with common injuries. But I feel from what I have researched, from the terrible challenges that these men faced, this new first aid would lead to life-saving medical breakthroughs.

The Journey of the Wounded

The stretcher-bearers would collect the wounded from ‘no man’s land’ and they would be transported to the Regimental Medical Post where the RMO’s would stabilize the wounded. They would have then moved the wounded to a Field Ambulance. The journey would be about 1000 yards or even more and the conditions were quite terrible as the ground was very rough and the wounded if they were lucky, had to make do with being in a horse drawn ambulance if it was ever available to take them to the nearest station. Now for safety and shelter, the wounded and medical staff had to make do with tents as these were needed to hold about 200 beds and they needed surgeons to staff the recovery tents and to perform much needed operations.

Once the wounded were stabilized and safe to transfer, the staff would move them, by rail, to certain hospitals in major port cities. There aim was to make sure that the wounded would be able and fit to return to their active service as soon as possible. But however, if the wounded were too baldy injured, the staff had the unfortunate decision to send the wounded back home to Britain.

WW1 Medical Kits

During the WW1 there were 3 types of medical equipment that were available to the soldiers in the field.

‘Small First Aid Kit’ was the very first basic kit of field dressing. Typically soldiers would be required to carry this in their special pocket of the uniform. Protection of these med kits was extremely important, so they created a sealed waterproof package with 2 identical gauze dressings inside. The concept being is that the soldiers own dressing was used on him if he was unlucky enough to need it.

‘Medium First Aid Kit’ is considered to be very similar to a Stretcher-bearer’s haversack. A stretcher-bearer was a very important role during the war as it was the soldier’s job to follow the advance behind and bring the wounded back into their home trenches and into the aid station. They considered this to be a very dangerous job as the soldiers would call it ‘going into no-man’s land’ even when the battle was over. Stretcher-bearers were not armed at all, so the pick of people who wanted to carry out this job, were to be very specific. They wanted people who had religious/moral objections to killing. The haversacks would contain a more varied selection in dressings, which included a larger gauze shell dressing which would be used to cover shrapnel wounds. Stretcher-bearers had to receive medical training before they took up the job, but the training had improved considerably. Normally there were 18 stretcher-bearers per battalion consisting of 700 men.

‘Top First Aid Kit’ came from the Regimental Medical Officer. A qualified doctor who oversaw the care of the battalion. This particular officer would be the subject of dangerous exposer to shellfire and other hazards on the frontline. On the frontline about 740 British RMO were killed during 1914-1918. RMO’s were considered to be very similar to stretch-bearers as they were also unarmed. They had what they called a ‘wicker pannier’, which was a larger range of medical equipment, which included splints, syringes (with either ampoules/morphine). The most important job for them to do was to stabilize the wounded and to make sure that they were ready for transportation back to the rear lines. RMO’s would have been the very first qualified doctor’s in the war but unfortunately only a tiny few even had prior experience with the wounds that they would have to deal with in the war. Most medical personal were general practitioners, so they hardly had any experience of these kinds of casualties as they mostly dealt with coughs and sneezes rather than machine gun wounds.