A doctor with the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) during World War II, Ken Stewart saw distinguished service during the allied invasions of Sicily and southern Italy; at the Normandy landings; and with the forces entering Berlin following the Nazi surrender.
Stewart was a House Surgeon in Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the old Samaritan Hospital, Belfast, when he volunteered for war service in 1940. He was posted at first to the Trossachs, north of Glasgow, as the Medical Officer to 1,000 infantrymen defending a huge ammunition dump, before volunteering in 1942 for the Mediterranean theatre. There the British 8th Army, under Montgomery’s command, invaded Sicily from the south in Operation Husky—the largest amphibious operation of the war thus far. Stewart was a Captain as second-in-command of a beach-landing medical unit, consisting of two officers and some 50 RAMC personnel.
They landed before dawn on 10th July, at the village of Cassibile near Syracuse. “Our job was to deal with the casualties on the beaches,” Stewart wrote in his memoirs. “I found my first casualty. An engineer who had been clearing the mines had been severely wounded in the thigh by an exploding mine and needed the immediate application of a tourniquet to control the bleeding; then we carried him the few yards to the shelter of the trees and set up an intravenous drip to treat him for shock, hanging the bottle of serum from the branch of an olive tree.”
The capital, Catania, fell quickly to the US and British assault, and in a huge hanger Monty briefed them about the next day’s landings on Italy, across the Strait of Messina. They landed in Reggio Calabria, wading ashore from landing craft. Stewart’s medical section occupied a large villa near the beach to receive casualties.
The 8th Army made rapid progress north and Stewart’s medical company boarded “a ramshackle Italian train”, heading for the port of Taranto, drawn by an engine with “repaired bullet holes in the boiler”. Stewart was appointed Port Medical Officer serving the sick and wounded on board the ships in the harbour. Days later he took over an ambulance train operating between the 8th Army railhead at Termoli, half way up the Adriatic coast, and the hospital ships in Bari and Brindisi.
The following February, 1944, he was ordered back to Britain to help pass on landing experiences to the British 2nd Army preparing for the D-Day landings. He joined 194 Field Ambulance Company which landed in Normandy on D-day plus six, 12th June. The allied forces had pushed the German army 10 miles inland, and in the apple orchards the RAF bulldozed 13 airstrips to allow Dakotas to fly in with ammunition and to evacuate casualties. They had a one-hour turn-around time, each aircraft taking 24 stretcher cases with six sitting. Stewart coordinated the hectic logistics between the hospitals and airstrips. He rode 2-stroke motorcycles, dropped with the paratroopers, and as the carburettors choked up with dust and sand, “I got through about a dozen in a couple of weeks.”
At one point a huge storm blew up, halting air traffic, just as he had evacuated some 50 casualties in a dozen ambulances. Not knowing what to do with them he prayed for inspiration and felt urged to go to the beach. There to his astonishment he found an old friend from university, now a Navy Medical Officer, who took the casualties aboard his tank landing craft.
Promoted to Major and given command of a Field Ambulance Company, Stewart followed the allied advance to Belgium, where RAF Dakotas flew up to 500 casualties a day from Brussels to British hospitals.
His Field Ambulance Company joined the allied advance across The Netherlands, spending two months dug in on the west bank of the River Maas. His HQ was in a house two miles back from the river bank exposed to German mortars. “The evacuation of the wounded was very dicey and much of it was done under cover of darkness.”
On 22nd March 1945, he took part in the dawn assault across the steep banks of the Rhine, a dangerous operation in the fast flowing currents and under enemy fire. He was soon ordered to join a Headquarters Unit in Eindhoven, preparing to enter Berlin. His medical unit was in Utrecht when Armistice was declared on 8th May. “As we drove into Berlin we were struck by the colossal devastation wrought by the Allied bombing… it was pathetic to see half-starved and exhausted German women and children picking over the bricks.”
In Berlin, he arranged for the medical care of Allied troops and civilian staff at the allied Four Power Summit Conference. Stewart was awarded the MBE in 1945, and mentioned in dispatches, and was discharged on 31st December 1945.
After the war he was deeply concerned about the need for post-war reconstruction in Europe and, instead of returning to Britain as a GP, he based in Italy for 10 years as a volunteer with Moral Re-Armament (MRA, now named Initiatives of Change), which had opened its centre for reconciliation in Caux, Switzerland, in 1946.
He joined a small band of eight to ten MRA volunteers based in Milan. They visited factory workers and employers at a time when communists and Christian democrats struggled for shop floor control of Italy’s industrial heartland. Stewart and his colleagues brought groups of workers and employers to MRA’s annual conferences in Caux. Much of their focus was on the giant Falck steelworks in the Milan suburb of Sesto San Giovanni and other industries.
Among the Caux participants was Angelo Pasetto, a militant communist cell leader in the chemical industry, who even performed alongside his personnel director in an industrial relations drama staged by MRA in Milan. This and his decision to accept a Christian faith made a huge impacted on his colleagues, some of whom followed in his footsteps.
At first, the Roman Catholic Church was suspicious of MRA’s activities—prior to the Second Vatican Council of 1962 to 1965—not least because MRA’s initiator, Frank Buchman, an American Lutheran, wanted to embrace people of all faith traditions and this was seen by the Church as 'indifferentism'. However, as former diehard communists began to find a faith and join the Catholic Church, the Vatican revised its stance, and the late Cardinal Franz Koenig, the Archbishop of Vienna, became a frequent visitor to Caux.
In 1960 Stewart married Dorothy Page—they had first met in Belfast in 1940—and she joined him in Italy for the next five years.
Stewart’s decision to volunteer with MRA, rather than pursue his medical career, was perhaps not so surprising given his pre-war experiences. Born in Dublin to Scottish Presbyterian parents, he was a brilliant languages student at Trinity College, Dublin, winning an entrance scholarship in Irish. He took an honours degree in French and Irish in 1933. That summer an event took place “which changed the course of my life”. He attended an evangelical conference in Keswick, where he decided to “give my will to God and ask him to guide my life”. He promptly felt he should study medicine “and use my training to serve people”. To his surprise, he found Trinity offered a scholarship to a graduate in Arts who wished to study medicine.
In his third year of medical studies he attended a student conference in Oxford organised by The Oxford Group, the forerunner of MRA. This had already impacted his brother Finlay, prompting him to apologise to Stewart for past antagonisms. Stewart found the Group’s emphasis on absolute moral standards “brought more discipline into my life”, including a decision to quit smoking. “We were beginning to realise the dangers to health of cigarette smoking and I saw I couldn’t help patients to give them up if I was hooked on them myself.”
Returning to Britain from Italy, Stewart ran a medical practice in Kingussie in the Grampians for 10 years, before moving to a practice in Tarporley, Cheshire. There he could act as the doctor to MRA’s nearby residential conference centre, Tirley Garth. He and Dorothy remained in Cheshire for 25 years before retiring to Bangor in Northern Ireland, and nursing five members of his family through terminal cancer.
Dr Kenneth Donald Stewart, doctor and surgeon, army officer Royal Army Medical Corps, 1940-1945, MBE 1945, born Dublin
9 October 1911, married Dorothy Page, 1960, died Galway 11 June 2006.
English