Description
Object description
Very graphic ms letter (10pp with envelope and 4pp wordprocessed transcript) written from Warwick to a friend in Kent on 1 June 1940 giving an account of his service as a Corporal in the RAMC during the campaign in Northern France and Belgium in May 1940, beginning with a description of his five days on duty on an ambulance train whose movements were severely affected by German bombing and which, because the patients could not be offloaded, 'smelt far worse than any sewer' and then recording how, after they had to abandon the train, he spent four days on the shore at Bray Dunes waiting with thousands of other troops to be evacuated before being ordered to Dunkirk where, again under heavy air attack, he assisted in the evacuation of stretcher cases from the mole before crossing to Dover and proceeding by train to Warwick from where he expected to rejoin his unit, No 4 Company RAMC. The letter, which is accompanied by a photograph of Osborne in later life, is essentially optimistic in tone despite the writer's harrowing experiences up to his evacuation.
Content description
Very graphic ms letter (10pp with envelope and 4pp wordprocessed transcript) written from Warwick to a friend in Kent on 1 June 1940 giving an account of his service as a Corporal in the RAMC during the campaign in Northern France and Belgium in May 1940, beginning with a description of his five days on duty on an ambulance train whose movements were severely affected by German bombing and which, because the patients could not be offloaded, 'smelt far worse than any sewer' and then recording how, after they had to abandon the train, he spent four days on the shore at Bray Dunes waiting with thousands of other troops to be evacuated before being ordered to Dunkirk where, again under heavy air attack, he assisted in the evacuation of stretcher cases from the mole before crossing to Dover and proceeding by train to Warwick from where he expected to rejoin his unit, No 4 Company RAMC. The letter, which is accompanied by a photograph of Osborne in later life, is essentially optimistic in tone despite the writer's harrowing experiences up to his evacuation.
History note
Cataloguer RWAS