Jane Elizabeth Drean

I trained at St. Joseph’s Hospital here in Victoria and got my RN [Registered Nurse] and then worked, as they say, in the hospital, put over … then came down and went to Esquimalt. And then went up to Vernon and then came back down; and then in June, we went overseas to England. There were 54 of us. And we were stationed with No. 15 Canadian General [Hospital Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps], which was a big 1,500 bed hospital. We were just 500 beds. And then that’s where we were sort of emergency for Dieppe. And so the casualties, they were brought back and were brought up into Bramshott to No. 15. And then we moved to another little village called Cuckfield, which was on the main London to Brighton road. And we set up a hospital there and handled casualties from bombings and one thing or another. And then the Italian campaign was going, and so we handled some of the casualties that were sent back from Italy and then they moved us up to near Birmingham, Marston Green, where we were at Nissen huts, one thing or another. And then we continued on the same sort of work. And from there, we were sent up to Yorkshire in tents to toughen up for D-Day. So there we were in tents with our six-hole lavatories and one thing or another, and we had to go on little route marches with packs on our back to toughen up. So then they came down and we were sort of split up, and went to different hospitals and waiting for D-Day. And then eventually, just after D-Day, it was a few weeks after D-Day, we went, but 15 Canadian General had already been sent to Bayeux. So we followed them and we were stationed with them for a little while. And then we went to St. Omer, where we set up where the Germans had had a hospital. And that was interesting because some of the basement or the underground areas were sort of made into sort of a second little hospital in case of bombings. It was really interesting. And there we handled, they had forays into Dunkirk, which they never conquered, and we handled casualties from that and casualties from the front. From there, we went to Oostende, which was on the border of Belgium, then we were there for a time and again handled the casualties coming through, that came down from the field surgical units, casualty caring units and then to us. And from there, we went just to s’ Hertogenbosch in Holland and I was there only about two or three days, and was sent up to Nijmegen where they handled casualties from that devastating crossing there in Nijmegen and Arnhem. And then, with a friend ... he was from Montreal, we were sent to a few surgical units in Barneveld in Holland and we were very well up in the front then and handled the immediate casualties that came in and then sent the less serious ones back to casualty clearing stations, and kept only the seriously injured ones in the field surgical unit until such time as they could be transferred.