The British sapper was the victim of a German booby trap.

 

June 19th 1943 - Tunisia

The British sapper was the victim of a German booby trap. He was bleeding badly. The explosion had almost severed his leg. A razor-sharp piece of shrapnel had penetrated his skull. When medical orderlies reached him, his life was in the balance. Only a miracle or skilled surgery could save him.

The miracle - and the surgery - came in the form of a Dakota aircraft, complete with a surgeon, nursing orderlies and an operating theatre. Within an hour of the explosion, the fight to save Sapper X was taking place in mid-air. The shattered leg was amputated, the head wound prepared for more complex surgery in a hospital ship in Algiers. In any previous war, the victim would have stood little chance. But now, the RAF's "flying ambulance" service is playing a vital life-saving role on the battlefield.

Nearly 3,000 lives are known to have been saved by the service in the desert campaigns. Only one-tenth of head-wound cases have failed to survive. Major-General Freyberg, the New Zealand VC, owes his life to a flying ambulance after being picked up from a desert airstrip with severe neck wounds. 

It is a risky business for the personnel, flying in unarmed planes, often over Axis territory. One orderly received two bullets in the legs, but continued working until  the patient was safely down - then collapsed from lack of blood.