SOLDIERS SAVED

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 June 1942, Page 4

SOLDIERS SAVED

BRAVE RUSSIAN GIRLS MANY HAVE GIVEN LIVES. WOUNDS DRESSED UNDER FIRE. LONDON, March 17. Every Russian soldier knows that in spite of his splendid winter equipment his chances are slight if he is hit badly enough to be immobilised and is left lying in the snow for any serious length of time, writes the London “Daily Telegraph’s” Moscow correspondent. The soldier also knows that no army in the world ever had so many stretcher-bearers or, above all, so many field-dressers right up on the battlefield itself. Among them there are scores of thousands of girls, largely student volunteers. The Red Army does not use women for fighting, but, wisely, and on a grand scale, for these hard tasks of mercy. Many of these cool, devoted and efficient girls perished by enemy fire or by fdul murder when captured during the Russian retreat. KIT STRAPPED TO BACKS. On the battlefield they proceed in a series of short rushes, with their first-aid kit strapped to their backs, to any point where they hear a badly hit man cry out. One girl, Tonia Serova, stayed, facing death, with five wounded men whom she dragged to a peasant hut and covered with potatoes. The Germans found them and said, “Leave tb’em until next morning for shooting.” Tonia went out and found an old man with sledges in the forest. She then dragged the sledges, one by one, making a gap in a fence under the nose of the German sentry, and got away with all the Russians on the sledges. Then she found a lorry and, with the driver, scoured around, getting more wounded. The Germans caught her with nine wounded men hidden under branches in the lorry. The Nazis put a wounded German officer on the lorry, struck the girl and the lorrydriver in the face with a whip in an attempt to get information from them lz and told them to drive the officer back; to the German base. i

TRICKED GUARD.

But they tricked the German guard by pretending to run out of petrol, and the driver stabbed him with a “Finnish knife.” Then they maded a dash for the Russian lines with the officer as prisoner. In the first stages of the Finnish campaign in 1939 general orders to geons were to operate as near as possible to the front line and then close up wounds. This put too much strain on the judgment of young surgeons. ’Therefore excision of the surface of infected tissues was ordered, and the wound left unstitched and packed with plaster of Paris. But now when the girl front-line orderlies get their men back to a major dressing base and if the case requires it, the wound is superficially excised and then is covered with white sulphamine powder —known as white “M. and B.” Hundreds of thousands of lives and limbs have been saved by this method, which by temporarily sterilising mummifying tissues has beaten the Russian distances. A fascinating story lies behind the fact that Russia was ready or almost ready to use sulphamine on a mass scale when Hitler started his attack. Great Paris professors perfected the sulphamine treatment in Flanders and East France. Then when their country was beaten they got through a report of their results to an eager group of Russian surgeons with the world-famous Professor Yudin at their head.