A new book by Mark Derby tells the remarkable story of Cromwell-raised surgeon Doug Jolly. The following extract describes his work during in the Spanish Civil War.
Brilliant surgeon and medical pioneer Doug Jolly was born in Cromwell, in 1904, the second son of the local storekeeper. He and several brothers were educated at Otago Boys’ High School and, in 1924, he entered Otago University’s medical school. Jolly chose to specialise in surgery and left for London to qualify for a fellowship at the Royal College of Surgeons. He had not quite completed these studies when, in mid-1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out — a brutal rehearsal for World War 2. Volunteers from more than 50 countries, including New Zealand, travelled to Spain to support its democratically elected government. They included medical volunteers who were flung, with minimal training, into the first war in history to be dominated by aerial bombing.
Jolly, after just four months’ service in Spain, now held the post of chief surgeon in the XIth International Brigade and had been promoted to captain, the same rank his father held in World War One. His hospital, in a large villa on the Madrid-Valencia highway, was shared with two other surgical teams and included veterans of the British medical unit based at Granen the year before. One of them, Archie Cochrane, believed that Bethune’s blood delivery service from Madrid represented "perhaps the most significant advance" to frontline medical services since those early days. Just as Jolly and other surgeons were siting their operating theatres as close as possible to the front line, so Bethune had found a system for providing them with vital supplies of tested and classified blood. Recently renamed the Canadian-Spanish Blood Transfusion Institute, it could now deliver blood to 100 hospitals and smaller casualty clearing stations along a battlefront extending 1000km east of Madrid. The Guadalajara field hospital had a refrigerator specifically for storing donated blood, and another of its doctors, Reg Saxton, had developed expertise in administering transfusions and was recruiting local donors. Up to 100 transfusions would be given daily during the forthcoming battle.
The Guadalajara region was still subject to Madrid’s dire "nine months of winter", and the Nationalist advance was made through snow and sleet, conditions which proved greatly to the advantage of the Republican defenders. Frozen roads and poor visibility caused the fleets of Fiat armoured vehicles to stall in an immovable bloc, making them easy targets for fighter planes and bombers. For once the Republican forces enjoyed superiority in the air since by good fortune their aircraft could take off from an all-weather concrete runway while the Nationalists’ air support sat on the ground on drenched grass airfields. In addition, almost 300 light and manoeuvrable T-26 tanks arrived from the Soviet Union in time to be used, with great success, by the Republican forces. Mussolini’s troops were soon forced into a chaotic and humiliating retreat, and for the first time in the civil war the Republican government and its supporters could realistically envisage ultimate victory.
Read the full extract at the ODT here.
