Edward Fox Women at War: 100 Years of Service

It's 100 years since the first pioneering women

joined the British Armed Forces.

Today, women serve alongside men

together in combat on the front line.

If you can do it and you want to do it, you should be able to.

To see how much things have changed...

-Love it!

-How do I look?

..five well-known faces revisit either their own...

Morning, ma'am. I'm the captain of HMS Puncher.

You called me ma'am. How sweet!

..or a family member's military past.

They just got stuck in!

It was exciting.

Always intense.

From defending land,

sea...

-I don't want to go that way.

-..and air.

These are the extraordinary stories of a century of women at war.

Today, actor Edward Fox discovers the sacrifices

made by women like his aunt Mary

who fought on the home front during World War II.

She was a bit like a very delicate, strict colonel.

He's bowled over by a veteran of the Women's Land Army

who still wears her uniform with pride.

Iris! It's brilliant!

And meets a woman who helped build the planes

that many have claimed won the war.

The Lancaster bombers.

-It's an extraordinary sight, isn't it?

-It is. It's so big!

-It's so big!

-Yes.

Edward also explores the vital roles that women have played

in non-combat roles on the front line, from this Army medic...

And then I was, like, thrown forward and then I lost consciousness.

..to the wartime nurses who saved his own father's life.

So, you can see the wound there. Quite big.

Gunshot wounds can be difficult because it could have hit vessels,

it could have hit nerves, it could have put your lung down,

it could have hit your heart.

In the 1970s, Edward Fox became a Hollywood star,

often playing British officers

in some of the biggest movies of the day.

The plan is called Operation Market Garden.

Market is the airborne element and Garden, the ground forces.

But his own wartime experience was very different

from the one he portrayed on the silver screen.

I can remember being given this military hat to wear.

And even now, I can sort of feel

the delight of wearing this military hat.

Born just two years before the conflict broke out,

Edward's early years were dominated by the shadow of war.

My mother used to put the wireless on for my brother and I

to listen to at night and it was the time when Mr Churchill,

Mr Churchill was giving his wartime speeches.

The vivid memory I have

is this magnificent voice talking to me,

directly to me,

and the message it was telling me

was that there was some trouble definitely, there was trouble.

But that I had nothing to fear.

To me, four or five years old...

..and I knew then I could go to sleep and all would be well.

But in reality, things were far from well.

As the conflict raged, Britain's very future hung in the balance.

And Edward's parents, both in their 20s,

were thrown headlong into the war effort.

Edward's father went to fight on the Continent

and with the men on the front line,

it was down to the women, like Edward's mother,

to keep the home fires burning.

I can remember the kind of time when there were many,

many soldiers, many of them Canadian, some Scottish, English,

a lot of the officers were always in the house.

My mother and my aunt, who is there,

entertained and provided food and drink and all of that.

Edward is fascinated by the various roles women have played

on both the home front and supporting troops on the front line.

From the First World War to today.

Drawing on the World War II experiences of close family members,

he wants to highlight the huge wartime contribution

of women over the past 100 years.

The conditions that women lived under during the war

is somewhat forgotten, but of course, it was crucial.

Whether that is looking after your children

or other people's children as well.

Or whether it's working in factories,

making parts for armaments of all kinds,

or working on farms,

doing more or less the same work as a man would do.

They just got stuck in to whatever needed doing.

And that was a commitment that women made in just as strongly for what

they could do in a wartime situation as men who, as men, would say,

"We go to defend our country and to fight an enemy."

The home front during World War II

stretched from the hearth to the factories and fields.

Women took on all manner of vital roles in the war effort,

from air raid wardens and bus conductors

to nurses and munitions workers.

Edward's aunt Mary was one of millions of women

who enthusiastically accepted the call to do their bit.

Mary was as tough as a man.

She was a bit like a very delicate, strict colonel.

But she would have no nonsense with anything.

She'd do anything.

Mary left London for rural Cornwall,

where women were needed in their thousands to help work the land.

Mary, being of the nature that she was, she embraced hard work,

embraced anything that she could do to...

..contribute to, again, the war effort.

And farming, of course, was vitally important

because the question of whether the country would have been able to

provide for itself with its own producing was crucial.

Mary was just one of millions of women desperately needed

to fill the labour shortages created by war.

From 1941, young women were conscripted

either in to support roles to the military

or to essential civilian work like food production.

Women's Land Army was created,

building on past experiences from World War I,

when the threat of starvation saw the mobilisation

of large numbers of women into agricultural roles.

Although she never officially joined the Women's Land Army,

Edward's aunt Mary worked on several farms in Cornwall

throughout the war.

Where, like many others,

she threw herself wholeheartedly into the urgent business

of harvesting crops and rearing livestock.

Mary died five years ago,

so to fully understand the contribution she made,

Edward's travelling to North Yorkshire to meet an ex-Land Girl.

This is lovely.

A lovely Yorkshire village.

Like Mary, Iris Newbould gave up the relative comforts of the city

for the tougher outdoor life of the country.

Gosh, you could be 25 years old!

-Aw, bless.

-You're beautiful.

-Not bad for 92, is it?

Wonderful!

Iris was stationed here in the village of Langton in 1943.

-You lived in this house during the war, did you?

-Yes.

-Did you?

-Lovely house to live in, too.

-It was.

-Bit basic, I should think?

Very. No gas, no electricity, no water.

For two years, I just stayed here, living in the cottage

and working within a 12-mile radius of this village.

When you first came to live here, Iris, how old were you?

-18.

-18?

-Yes, yes!

As Iris was approaching conscription age,

a news report calling for women to join the Land Army

had a dramatic effect on her.

I was sat in the cinema.

It came on the Gaumont British news.

Speaking of what's going to be happening.

We're going to have food rationing,

there's not enough stocks to last too long,

so you'll have to be a little bit more self-sufficient,

so my country needs me, I'm going to feed the nation.

It was in my head to do that.

So, I came here quite proud. "I've come to feed you all!"

"Where do I start?"

Women conscripted into the services to support the war effort

were often confined to military bases.

But the Land Girls like Iris,

their place of work was the open fields

and farmyards of rural Britain.

It was very deep in dung and...

Yes, it would have been. Very useful stuff, too.

-Marvellous stuff.

-Yes.

-Yeah, and quite pungent.

Yes, very!

And then, we used to put it on carts sometimes and take it down

into the fields and spread it out.

-Called muck spreading.

-Exactly.

Iris is returning with Edward to one of the farms

where she was placed over 70 years ago

to help him understand what life would have been like

for his aunt Mary during the war.

But adapting to the demands of farming life

wasn't always easy for city girls like Iris.

When you first arrived, you were in very foreign land to you, really.

-Very much so.

-And everything that was going on

would have been strange?

Yes, I can remember feeling bewildered and gosh, you know...

I don't know, I know I was up to the job

but whether I could do it well enough for them.

Because I'd had a weekend at an instruction farm

and that was all the training I ever got.

But in time, women like Iris

and Edward's aunt Mary proved their worth.

Toiling tirelessly to relieve labour shortages in farming,

no matter how demanding the work.

Many, many jobs and activities were undertaken here.

All requiring this output of food product for the nation.

Yes, from morning to night, there was work and more difficult

because there was no mechanisation as we know it.

It was horse and carts.

How was the hay cut then?

-By scythe? By hand?

-Yes.

Say there's four of us, each with a scythe,

and you would go mowing along.

I was left-handed and you're going with a scythe but left-handed

-would go the opposite way.

-Yep.

And so, they used to say, "Change hands, change hands!"

And then, of course, I'm not in complete control.

They're jumping out of the way.

"Send her to the back. We're going to lose a foot here!"

-So, I had to go to the back.

-Yes.

And then, buttering away about women and with the men gone.

We were not very popular.

I think because they were quite sarcastic with the townies,

"What do they know?" I used to say, "I'll show them.

"We're as good as they are!"

And so, I learnt and I got the respect

and they knew and we were all friendly in the end.

Women like Iris and Mary

were energised by the call to do their bit for the country

and work the land with pride.

They were told that this was work to produce food for the nation

which needed it, and that to get up every day and get stuck in and do it

was what the nation needed.

And the need was immense.

Food shortfalls meant that almost 1.5 million acres of underused land

had to be rapidly cultivated.

For farming historian Dr Mike Tyler,

this huge task would have been impossible

without the efforts of the Land Girls.

British agriculture at the start of the war in that period

was looking at a shortage of around 30,000 pairs of hands.

-Put it in those terms, 30,000 pairs of hands.

-Right.

And of course, that labour has to come from somewhere.

The Land Army was very, very effective in mobilising volunteers.

Bringing people, young girls out and then saying,

"Right, where do these people need to go?

"Where do these girls need to go?

"Where can they make the biggest impact?"

Helping with land drainage was one of the things.

The process of ploughing is very time-consuming.

My aunt Mary was farming from that time, absolutely.

But I remember one of the things she said was,

"We used to plough right up to the edge of the cliff."

Yes.

-To use every foot of land that they could.

-Yes.

Putting the hypothetical question to you,

supposing that Land Girl Army had not been available,

not been willing, for instance,

or just not been there to use for whatever reason,

how would that have affected the dire situation of food production?

Well, it would have been a catastrophe.

-A catastrophe.

-If that million and a half acres of land

hadn't come back into production,

if those 30,000 pairs of hands that the Land Girls provided

hadn't been in, the food would not have been on the plates

and you would have quite seriously been looking at...

-Starvation.

-Starvation.

The war effort drew on a huge reserve of female labour.

Conscripting millions of women to work in the fields and factories

as well as supporting the forces.

And their war experiences often had a long-lasting effect on them.

Edward's aunt Mary remained in Cornwall after the war,

working as a farmer for the rest of her life.

As for Iris, she still treasures her photos

from a time she'll never forget.

This one tells me that you were a very happy girl.

Yes, I was.

They were days that changed my life.

It changed my view of the world.

And it made me a better person.

Really? A better person?

Absolutely, because there was no mum and dad there to help in any way.

You were on your own two feet.

You just did the best you could and while we were growing the food,

and I saw it had been planted and taken care off and harvested,

that was our job, it was a useful time.

I thought, "This is wonderful.

"We are feeding the nation, it's there before my eyes!"

And knowing that life had a very significant purpose.

-Absolutely.

-You had to stand up and be counted.

-It's a good expression.

-Yes!

Sometimes when life goes that way, there's nothing else you can do.

Absolutely.

Anyway, I forgot, I've got a surprise for you.

-Yeah.

-Excuse me. I'll have a look.

92-year-old Iris has made a big impression on Edward.

He is delighted that the plucky spirit of the Land Girls

is still alive and well.

-Ta-dah!

-I say!

Iris, you darling girl.

-You are wonderful.

-Come and get me!

-Really great.

-That's my little dream now.

-On the boards.

-It's brilliant!

-I thought you might like it.

-Oh, I think it's wonderful.

Yeah! Lovely.

Iris's story, though she's younger than my aunt Mary,

but they were doing exactly the same work together in the war

and although they will have made light of it then,

actually without the work of the Women's Land Army

and the women's war effort, there would have been a serious depletion

in food production for the nation.

That's a remembrance worth having.

Just as the Land Girls defied expectations in both World Wars,

so too did those women who took on support roles in the military.

Every one of them paving the way for women of today

and inspiring many to serve in the Armed Forces and on the front line.

I think it's amazing what they did and to see where we've come now

and to look back at that.

I'm really proud to be able to do the job that I do

because of what they did for us.

I think they were very courageous at a time where society maybe

wasn't fully supportive of them in that kind of role.

I can't imagine trying to forge my way

as one of the first pioneering females into the military

because I imagine it must have been really difficult

and because of them, we're here now and we've got mixed forces

and everything is just great, to be honest.

They've paved the way to where we are now

and I'm very proud to be serving in their sort of footsteps, really.

100 years after the first women joined the military,

female personnel regularly work

in extremely dangerous front line roles.

Edward is meeting Sgt Sinead Dodds, who in 2013, aged 20,

was deployed as a combat medic in Afghanistan.

Five weeks after her arrival,

she was out on patrol when her armoured vehicle was attacked.

A civilian vehicle drove past the patrols on the ground.

And then drove into the side of our vehicle and detonated.

Do you remember what happened then?

I remember at the time, I remember being forced back into my seat.

A big warm blast pushing me back into my seat,

and then I was thrown forward and then I'd lost consciousness.

When Sinead came to, her vehicle was on fire and full of smoke.

After checking on the driver who was wounded but conscious,

she went to help her badly injured commanding officer.

So, I managed to pull him up and keep him sat up.

And he was in between consciousness

and I knew he had a problem with his airway.

He couldn't clear his airway very well

and there was blood around his mouth,

so I managed to help him clear his airway a little bit

and keep him sat up.

Despite suffering from concussion, Sinead was able to

keep her casualties stable until help arrived.

You were rightly awarded a decoration.

Can you tell me about that?

So, a couple of months after I got back from Afghanistan,

I was called into the colonel's office and he had told me

that I was awarded the Queen's Commendation for Bravery.

-Yes.

-So, it was a bit of a surprise.

-Nice surprise.

-Nice surprise, yes.

-Nice to be recognised.

-Yes, absolutely.

You were with a unit, all men.

And throughout our modern army, this is very much a fact of life.

To be honest, it's just like a normal thing to us.

-Normal thing for you.

-Normal day-to-day thing.

-Just come about.

When you're out with the soldiers, it's just...

Professionals just doing a job and they...

-It's just a normal thing out there.

-..treat you as another soldier.

We're different creatures, aren't we, in many ways?

I think the engineers, they look after the girls as well.

-Oh, sure.

-Not in a bad way.

No, but I'm sure in a very concerned, proper way.

-Of course.

-But you don't get treated any differently.

-You just get on with it, it's a normal thing.

-Exactly.

I could think, what is it that inspires her to commit herself

at a very young age that requires such courage from her

and bravery, and determination?

And I can't honestly answer that,

but there is something in her which does

and I can only think that it is something...

..certainly in humanity, but I like to think also in the British spirit.

Although during World War I and World War II,

women weren't mobilised to fight on the front line,

over 1.5 million were conscripted into another vital industry.

Armaments.

Keeping up a supply of weapons

which were urgently needed by the troops in the field.

Aircraft production in particular soon became vitally important,

and the supply of one ground-breaking plane,

the Lancaster, would play a critical role

in the entire direction of the war.

Quite wonderful to see the sight of it. Wonderful.

Edward's come to the Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre

to find out what part women played in building the Lancaster.

Just the concept of the brain that dreamed that up for the first time,

utterly amazing and brilliant.

It's also,

in its own curious way, tremendously beautiful.

Just the whole skilfulness of it is beautiful.

But to think what it was meant for.

The arrival of the Lancaster in 1941 came just in the nick of time.

After a disastrous start to the war,

the RAF urgently needed a new breed of heavy bomber.

The Lancaster, often called the Queen of the Skies, was fast,

it could carry a high bomb load and it was very versatile.

It could carry a bouncing bomb, for example,

and the air crews were certainly appreciative

of its abilities to evade combat.

As the aerial war intensified,

demand for Lancasters increased exponentially,

putting greater pressure on the women workers who made them.

In February 1942, a new commander, Sir Arthur Harris,

takes up command of Bomber Command and there is a real shift

in the emphasis and the escalation

of the strategic bomber offensive against Germany.

Of course they needed more aircraft

and that placed demands on the industry.

So, everybody in the nation who was involved in the production

of these aircraft took on that responsibility.

The people who were making the aircraft,

the women in the factories,

on the production lines that were doing the riveting,

putting the engines together,

they were giving these airmen the opportunity

to shift the air battle over Germany.

The role that the women played

in the production of the Avro Lancaster was vital.

They ensured that 7,377 of these aircraft were manufactured

and could reach the operational squadrons.

92-year-old Joan Rae was one of those women.

During the war, she worked in a factory in Doncaster,

riveting side panels for the Lancasters.

It's an extraordinary sight, isn't it?

-It is. It's so big.

-It's so big!

-Yes.

-And yet...

-And it's not so big inside for people to sit in,

because all down the middle was where the bombs were, wasn't it?

Yes.

And very uncomfortable once you got in there and very cold too.

That's a very good photograph of girls work,

because that could have been you, couldn't it, really?

When you were doing the riveting,

what did it entail and how did you do it?

Well, we had to go and pick these panels up

and put them on a stand,

Then you had to drill the holes in the panels

and then there was two of you.

One put the rivets in and at the other side of the panel,

the other lady would be knocking them down.

-Over 12 hours in a day, too!

-Some days, yes.

Did you feel that the work you were doing for the war effort

was vitally important?

Yeah, because we had friends that we went to school with

and everything that were in the war and they didn't come back.

-Exactly.

-And ladies working with me, their husbands and that didn't come.

Yeah, it was very sad and we knew how serious it was,

what job we were doing, yes.

And that everything that you and all the girls did was contributing

in its own way to winning the war.

-Yes, yes.

-That was the feeling, wasn't it?

Of course, yes.

Alongside riveting,

women operated heavy machinery and pressed and hammered parts.

Freeing many thousands of men for front line duties.

To show Joan just how vital her contribution was,

Edward has brought her to meet Rusty Warman,

a pilot who flew one of the planes Joan helped to build.

The intelligence officer would point out these areas,

which are defensive areas which we had to avoid.

This is the first time Rusty's had the opportunity

to meet one of the women who built the Lancasters.

I believe you were involved with aeroplanes,

building the aeroplanes during the war.

-It was a big factory?

-Yes.

-So, what bits were you playing with?

-The side panels. I was a riveter.

-Were you riveting, were you?

That's amazing.

A lot of us were only young girls. 17 and all.

-Oh, I was an old man, I was 20.

-Oh, was you?

The general public these days have no idea what went on

in getting these aircraft built and getting these aircraft ready.

If it wasn't for people like you doing the jobs that you did

and so reliably, we as aircrew couldn't have flown.

-I know.

-So, your job was really just as vital as anybody else's.

Realising just what you did for us flying, people flying,

not me personally, there's a little something.

You may have dozens of these, but I hope you'll perhaps like it.

It's lovely, thank you.

The Lancaster bombers that women like Joan carefully assembled

on the factory floor took on a life of their own once in the skies.

And Rusty's keen to show Edward what being on board one was like.

Those little windows there,

you could look into the bomb doors and see if your bombs had fallen.

Yeah.

One thing you don't get is that sort of atmosphere.

It's very difficult to put over what it was like.

As a crew on operations, it was about 60% normal flying,

about 40% panic and some raids when it was a lot like

when you were in high adrenaline rate all the time.

You can get the impression of the noise and the speed

and you get the impression of the appearance,

but one thing you don't get is the smell.

Cos when you were flying through a box barrage of anti-aircraft flying,

you could smell all the cordite.

Of the 125,000 crew who flew in operations for Bomber Command

during the war, 55,000 were killed.

Many of them in Lancasters.

When you first started on operations,

you realise people were killed.

Oh, you said, "Poor souls," and all this sort of thing.

But later on, it happened so often,

you just accepted the fact that people were going to be killed.

-Yeah.

-And you didn't expect to live yourself.

-No.

-I was giving a talk to a school one day

and one of the little girls said, "How many dead bodies did you see?"

-We didn't see dead bodies.

-No.

-All we saw were empty beds.

It's been a completely fascinating day being here but meeting Joan,

17 and a half years of age, she was on an assembly line.

And Rusty, talking to Rusty is just wonderful.

But as he also was saying...

..the aircrews would never have had aeroplanes to fly

unless they had been made,

and they were put together panel by panel, rivet by rivet.

Mostly by women.

A large majority of women,

it was very important and very crucial to the war effort

and to winning the war.

So, I've had a wonderful day.

Wonderful day. I mean, two wonderful people.

Britain's armament factories and Land Army employed millions of women

during both world wars but there was another profession,

which over the past 100 years and before then,

has provided significant numbers of women.

Nursing.

During World War I and World War II,

most nurses remained on the home front.

But in both conflicts,

many thousands of nurses were also needed to treat wounded combatants

within a hair's breadth of military operations.

One soldier to benefit from the expert care and treatment

of front line nurses was Edward's own father, Robin Fox.

He was a very, very good-looking man, my father.

And had enormous charm.

But that's before the war, I'm sure.

Like many other fathers,

most other fathers did not talk to his children about the war.

I remember him being not angry but he could be very angry

at certain moments and looking back on that,

you realise that they were pent-up needs to release an anger,

which in normal ways, would be kept in a civilised way.

Major Robin Fox fought on the Italian front,

where he was gravely injured during a reconnaissance mission.

They were recking forward in a jeep and were ambushed.

My father's colonel was driving

and he had the wit just to drive on through the ambush.

But my father was hit in the shoulder and the back.

He had a scar that long.

So, I don't know how many bullets there were in him,

or how many were in his lung. I just don't know.

But he would have been lucky

that it didn't affect any other organ, major organ.

One often saw the scar on his back and I don't think my brother and I

would have had the almost impoliteness

to mention what was that?

It used, I know, to pain him.

It couldn't not. He'd had a lung shot away.

Despite his injuries, Edward's father wasn't returned home.

He was treated in Italy and eventually rejoined his regiment.

Edward wants to find out about the role nurses played

in his father's remarkable wartime rehabilitation.

And to see how female Army medics operate on the front line today.

He's come to a field hospital training camp in Hampshire

to meet medical historian, Emily Mayhew.

I know that my papa was operated on, of course,

and his life saved there by, but I don't know what happened after that

in terms of his being nursed back to...

Of an ability to get back into an active service.

The nurses would have been every bit as important as the surgeons.

-Yep.

-A nurse who paid extraordinary attention with all of her senses

to somebody with the kind of complex wound your father had,

so she'd need to listen for breath sounds,

she'd need to be watching his colour and she'd be doing this all the time.

And we forget that this is really the pre-antibiotic era.

-No penicillin, nothing.

-Very little, no penicillin.

-No.

So, you'd be running the risk that you'd get a lung infection.

The only way to deal with that is to have someone watch the patient

second by second, minute by minute.

The nurses would have had to make the same difficult decision

that your surgeon made, which is, "Who do I treat?

"Where does my nurse go? Who do they sit by?

"Who do they give their time and attention to

"because they're likely to survive?"

They would have listened to their last moments of living thought,

-held their hands?

-Absolutely.

Extraordinarily demanding and extraordinary courage and dedication

to summon the energy...

-Yes.

-The mental energy as well as physical.

Spiritual energy, actually, to cope.

Absolutely, and it was dangerous.

The field hospitals in Italy was a dangerous place to be,

as your family knows. The field hospitals moved.

Guns came in, attacks were made, ambushes were made.

So, you were in physical danger.

And I think for many of them, they recognised how demanding it was

but what they had in common, I think, was the memory and history

of nurses in the First World War and the extraordinary contribution

that they had been able to make.

They also knew it was going to be

the most professionally-rewarding work that they ever did.

The readiness of women to serve on front lines over the past 100 years

has resulted in them being fully integrated into the military,

in combat as well as support roles.

Working alongside the men, they're more valued than ever before.

Women have always proved in hard times, we are equally as tough as

the men, if not tougher.

We are seen as equals now.

I don't think there is that differentiation any more.

As long as you can do your job,

I don't think the gender thing comes into it any more.

I take my hat off to all the girls in all the forces now because Iraq,

Afghanistan, what they do, especially the medics

with these CASEVAC's by helicopter and things.

Things are very different now and it's great to see the women in the

Army now much more integrated and making terrific

careers for themselves.

I couldn't be more pleased.

Medicine has changed significantly since World War II,

but the role of the modern female medic is essentially the same.

To provide the best care to injured soldiers as quickly as possible.

To get a sense of what the job entails,

Edward is about to follow a group of reservists in action as they train

for a front line emergency.

And to make the whole exercise more relevant, the casualty is being made

up as if he has the same injury Edward's father sustained in Italy.

These are all senior Staff Sergeant Warrant Officers and they are just

preparing for the arrival of the casualty.

Talking him through the exercise is Lieutenant Colonel Amy Jones,

a medical reservist who has seen action in Afghanistan.

OK, so we've got gunshot wound coming in, so, obviously,

it's going to be our priority one. We need to get him in straightaway.

-TANNOY:

-Trauma team to ED. Trauma team to ED. That is all.

We want to find out which one is the worst priority.

Just one. OK?

Check his pockets. Check him all over.

He doesn't look in good shape at all.

We've got an in plate.

-A weapon.

-Yeah.

Soldiers injured on the front line are transported to mobile field

hospitals like this one which can be completely assembled and up and

running in less than 24 hours.

We have an adult male.

A Royal Artillery officer.

He's got a gunshot wound to left shoulder.

You can see the wound, there.

Quite big.

So there's quite a lot of blood coming out of there.

He does sound quite poorly.

His heart rate is a little bit fast and the most significant thing,

it's taken them three hours to get him here.

What they're going to do is what we call a primary survey,

a top to toe look through their airway, airway, breathing,

circulation, to see if there's anything immediately that's

going to kill him.

X-rays in bay three. X-rays in bay three.

Gunshot wounds can be difficult because it may have gone straight

through, not hit anything important.

-Yeah.

-Or it could have hit, you know...

In your chest is a number of vital organs, so it could've hit

vessels, it could've hit nerves, it could've put your lung down,

it could've hit your heart.

Now, you were serving in Afghanistan,

so you saw and dealt with injuries of all kinds.

So, most of what we dealt with was ballistic trauma,

so IED blasts or gunshot wounds.

Although I was not on the front line when it actually happened,

we would fly a helicopter out to the front line,

we'd land where the patient had been hit.

Often when we landed, we could still smell the smoke from the IED.

We pick the casualty up from where they'd been hit.

Often in the middle of a firefight, so a couple of times we landed in

firefight and had a couple of minutes to throw the casualties on

the helicopter and take off again.

Then do all the treatment we needed to do.

A little bit like what these guys are doing in terms of packing,

giving blood and putting them off to sleep.

We would do that in the helicopter as we were flying out of there.

So the rate of saving life has been extraordinary.

-Massive.

-Quite extraordinary.

We had something we coined unexpected survivors,

so people that on paper should've died.

-Yes.

-And they didn't.

-Exactly.

On previous wars, almost certain death.

Certainly my first tour, lots of IED blasts.

We're going out every single day. Double amputations.

We'd get up in the morning and say,

"We're going to have to pick up a double amputee today."

-Yes.

-Because that's how frequent they were. Yes.

And it was partly because we're pushing forward the advanced care we

could give here right to where they'd been wounded,

so they were getting that care much more quickly.

And just the level of care we can provide at a hospital

like this was, you know, second to none.

So he's still awake at the moment,

looks quite pale and sweaty because he's lost a lot of blood.

He looks a little better.

There are over 1,700 female medics currently serving in the Army

working in every category from health care assistants through

to consultant surgeons.

They're utilised in both military and humanitarian situations,

from the British Virgin Islands to the deserts of Iraq.

We've ordered another group specific which will be with us in about 20 minutes.

Any World War II situation would not have had anything like what

we are seeing here.

But nevertheless,

what would be the same is exactly the same as the spirit of concern

to save life would've been exactly the same as we are seeing here.

The dedication and the skill involved in improving injury.

If you and I were in Afghanistan today, say,

in a situation like this...

..the complement of women would be large, too.

Certainly the predominance of the nurses are female still, but I'd say

nearing half of them are probably nearing half of the doctors are female.

Very, very interesting that, I think.

I think they're going to wake him up now.

If they've done a good enough job and they're happy with his

physiology and his blood tests, they're going to be able to wake

him up and send him to the ward.

From the hi-tech medical units of today, to the improvised field

hospitals of World War II, wounded British soldiers like

Edward's father have had expert nursing.

The quality of the nursing that my father will have received will have

been life-saving for him.

Quite sure of it because the ease with which infection could get into

a wound like that and cause death was very easy to happen.

So my father fell in kind hands.

Whether it was feeding the nation in the First World War,

building Lancaster's in the Second or nursing soldiers on the

battlefields of Afghanistan,

the past 100 years have seen British women play vital roles in civilian

and military life during wartime.

And while the stories from his own family mean Edward has always been

aware of the crucial contribution made by tens of thousands of women

outside the forces, he's now come to appreciate them even more.

Joan, Iris, my aunt Mary, are typical of millions of other

young women who, quite naturally,

felt more than perfectly prepared

to be involved in the work that was required of them and to commit

themselves to doing that work for the war effort.

They will have had that zeal within them to do whatever they could

in civilian life, but for a war purpose.

I don't think the desire to serve, the sense of commitment to duty has

changed today.

So, of course, I admire the women service personnel here,

who none of them will speak about what they've done particularly,

but who will have done very remarkable things

in very difficult and dangerous circumstances and I feel nothing

but huge admiration for them.