An Cosantóir

28 | BORN SURVIVOR A BY SGT COLIN STONE (62 RES ARTY REGT) PHOTOS COURTESY OF ADRIENNE MACCARTHY to have found his story in the fiction section of the bookshop. This man lived a life that would match all the exploits of Chris Ryan, Andy McNab and Bear Grylls but writes about it as if he had just been walking in the local park. Yet he is one of the great Irish heroes, like Tom Crean and Ernest Shackleton, who we as a nation do not seem to acknowledge or cel- ebrate their momentous achievements. Born in 1913 in Castletownbere, Co. fter reading the autobiography of Irishman Dr Aidan MacCarthy, A Doctor's War, you would expect Cork, Aidan trained as a doctor but find- ing his options limited he emigrated to Britain. In 1938 he signed up to serve as a doctor with the RAF. Within a year he found himself in France with the BEF fac- ing the Germans during the Phoney War. After the fighting broke out the RAF evacuated all its aircraft back to Britain and Aidan was ordered to retreat to Dunkirk where he joined over 300,000 British troops on the beaches awaiting evacuation. Eventually picked up by a ferry he immediately began emergency operations on casualties onboard. Op- erating is tricky enough at the best of times but operating on a dining table while the ship pitched and rolled, and survived a hit by a mine or a torpedo, made for interesting work conditions. Many of the bullets he extracted from the wounded soldiers were British .303 rounds, fired by panicked troops from the beaches where near mutiny had broken out. was diverted midway to Java, a Dutch colony in the Far East. Not long after he arrived, the Japanese launched an airborne assault and outflanked the Allied troops, who offered only a token resistance. They were treated relatively well by the front line Japanese troops, in stark contrast to the rear echelon troops who followed and who were among the most sadistic troops every to have been unleashed by any nation. POWs who didn't bow before their captors were severely beaten, and when the captured troops refused to fill in a questionnaire about Allied flying proce- dures the senior officer was taken out, beaten and shot in front of his men. The others then filled in the questionnaire to an airfield in Britain. Again drama was not far away when a Wellington bomber came into land with a young, inexperienced pilot at the controls. As he made his landing approach under full power, ready to take off again should the undercarriage not be locked, he was informed that there was a German fighter on his tail. The pilot panicked and came over the boundary fence too fast. The bomber's starboard wing struck the bomb dump and burst into flames, land- ing on the stacked explosives. Aidan ran into the flames along with the emergen- cy crews and got the dead and wounded clear. Luckily the bombs failed to go off. For his bravery Aidan was awarded the George Medal in Buckingham Palace. He was next sent to North Africa but After Dunkirk Aidan was posted but with mischievous answers that left the Japanese scratching their heads. One local who fell foul of the guards had his head shaved and was buried up to his neck in the tropical heat. He was burnt by the sun and stung by insects over the next two-and-a-half days that it took him to die. Dr MacCarthy asked for permission to tend to the dying man but his requests were denied and the man died an agonising death, barely recognisable as a human being by the time he died. Food was a preoccupation of the prisoners and everything was eaten, from rats to animals that wandered into the camp. Luckily Java had fertile soil that allowed the POWs to cultivate crops. Dysentery and starvation were the big- gest dangers that the POWs suffered and its credit to MacCarthy and the other medics that so many survived. The prisoners had little outside contact: Aidan's own family had been told that he was "missing, presumed dead" and Red Cross packages were only delivered once or twice in his years of captivity. One day Aidan made the mistake of bowing to the guardroom when the guards were at lunch and had left their pet monkey behind. He was spotted by the returning guards who took great offence at the loss of face and proceeded An Cosantóir November 2012 www.dfmagazine.ie

• Cover