Injury and Triage
Having signed up with the Royal Fusiliers in 1939 aged just 22, by the time Allied invasion forces had reached Italy in September 1944, David Bye had risen to the rank of Lieutenant in the Royal Norfolk regiment.
He deployed to Athens in November that year, right into the centre of a civil war, raging within the main conflict. Surrounded by communist separatist forces, the British became in David’s words “sitting ducks”. David Bye received his life-changing injury on December 12th when a mortar exploded near to him. It destroyed his lower face, the soft and hard tissues of the lower jaw. It nearly cost his life. Evacuated to Barletta in Italy, he was received by the Number 1 Maxillo-facial unit, one of a number of mobile plastic surgery field hospitals sent with expeditionary forces to Europe and North Africa during the war. Number 1was commanded by plastic surgeon and future president of BAPS, Major Richard Battle. Overwhelmed by injured soldiers, Battle’s small team, including another future President, Raoul Sandon, would have provided emergency care to stabilise the patients with more significant wounds, giving them the best chance of later reconstruction.
David Bye had lost the skin and soft tissues overlying and including the central section of lower jaw bone (mandible) and oral cavity. He also lost part of his tongue. Speaking, and more importantly eating were very difficult. Unable to close his mouth, David would have been bothered and embarrassed by the constant dribble of saliva. Finally, there were the devastating consequences to his appearance.
David spent Christmas that year in Barletta before being sent on to Naples by train for onward evacuation back to Britain. Skinny, no doubt malnourished by an inability to eat properly, the “Empire Clyde” hospital ship eventually docked in Glasgow. He was met on the dock side by Plastic Surgeon Archibald McIndoe, there to triage the men and organise their onward destination for reconstruction. David recalled McIndoe saying “We can do something for this chap”. And with that, he was sent by train to the 26 bedded Albert Ward of the North Staffordshire Royal Infirmary in Stoke on Trent. The unit and its director of plastic surgery, John Grocott, were already well-known to both McIndoe and Sir Harold Gillies. They trained Grocott pre-war and designated the Infirmary part of the Emergency Medical Services plastic surgical effort during World War Two.
Read more about David Bye’s Reconstruction
Image on this page: IWM (NA 20862) Fighting in Athens: Reproduced from the Collection of the Imperial War Museum under creative commons licence