Nurses in Battledress. 2nd ed.

Ian W. Toal is a registered nurse in Barrie, Ontario.

This book is about the experiences of a nurse in the Queen Alexandra’s
Imperial Military Nursing Service during the Second World War. The
author, who was just finishing her nursing training at the start of the
war, volunteered for active duty in 1941. Her war experiences took her
from England to North Africa, into Italy, and then back to England in
1945.

Aikens states in her introductory note that she adopted a somewhat
“detached” view of her experiences, not wanting to “describe the
horrible wounds” and have the reader “experience them
vicariously.” The practical effect of this approach is that Nurses in
Battledress reads a bit like a wartime travel book rather than a
documentation of what the nurses actually did during the war. While the
many descriptions of off-duty expeditions and friendships make for
pleasant reading, this reviewer would have liked to have seen detailed
descriptions of how the wartime emergency medical system operated and
how the wounded men were treated in a timely manner. The emphasis on the
personal tends to lessen the book’s value as a historical document.