Everybody has a story to tell, I’ve noticed, and one of the best parts of my job is that I get to hear those stories. Recently, for example, I got to sit down with George Stagg.

I first met George last June, not long after he moved to Creston. At that time he told me about his love of ballroom dancing and the many years he’d spent square dancing. But a few weeks ago I learned that there is much more than that to George. He’d heard we were looking for war stories to supplement one of the museum’s exhibits, so he called me to share his.

In January 1951, George was living in Moose Jaw, where he was born in 1927. He was between jobs, due in part to a scandal at the Scott National Fruit trucking company where he had been working for four years. Seven of the men there had been fired for stealing. “I wasn’t one of them,” George says, “but after that if you had worked for Scott you couldn’t get a job anywhere.”
North Korea had invaded South Korea six months earlier. The UN immediately called on its member nations to support South Korea. China got involved on the North Korean side in December and Canada was actively recruiting people to rotate the troops who were already overseas.

One Friday morning, George’s mother told him that if he went in and signed the papers to join up she would give him $5. So he did. “That’s the bet I made,” says George, “and I guess I won it.”

George was sent to the Royal Canadian Army medical corps at Camp Borden, Ontario, where he went through a six-month training course to be a nurse’s aide. “I learned all about the human body, from head to toe,” he recalls. “I graduated with honours, and they thought that was marvellous because I’d only gone up to Grade 10 in school.” (George’s father’s butcher shop was small and not doing well, so George had to give up his education and get a job to help out the family).

In the early spring of 1952, George shipped out for Korea along with the 37th Field Ambulance. They were being sent to rotate out the 25th Field Ambulance, which had been in Korea since May or June of the previous year. George recalls that they were seven days at sea, then got the night off when they first arrived in Tokyo. The next day it was back on board for the final leg of their journey to Korea. They arrived on April 10, 1952.

The field hospital was located about 25 miles north of Seoul, within a few miles of the front line, and the 37th’s duties were to provide initial first-aid treatment and evacuation of casualties. They’d been in Korea for two or three months before their commanding officer contacted an American medical corps, who provided everything needed to set up a hospital.

George remembers the hospital as a one-storey building with two wings, holding 25 beds per wing. The unit comprised between 500 and 1,000 people, ranging from the commanding officers to nurses and doctors, ambulance drivers and support staff.

George’s role as a nurse’s aide was to go with the driver to pick up the casualties where they’d fallen.

“We’d bandage them up,” he says, “then put them on the stretcher and bring them back on the Jeep. The Jeep could take two men, and sometimes we’d have the ‘decker’ – it had room for two more casualties up above. Sometimes we’d be out all day bringing them back.”

By this time, the Korean War had settled into a period of static warfare. The front lines changed little but there were constant raids and counter-raids, bombardments, mines and booby traps to keep the field hospital busy with wounded. George remembers that “they’d be in action for five or six days, then take a break.”

An article I found on the RCAMC in Korea states that “Canadian medical units . . . in spite of many difficulties and privations, provided a very high
level of medical and surgical attention for the Canadian soldiers fighting in Korea. In addition to the thousands of Canadian casualties who passed through the Canadian medical units, there were additional thousands of Commonwealth and U.S. Army casualties who received care and attention at the hands of the RCAMC personnel.”

George was a part of that effort, a part of the medical care that helped reduce the mortality rate to only 34 per 1,000 Canadians wounded – the lowest of any of the wars of the past century.

After his return from Korea in April 1953, George spent three years in Germany with the Peace Corps, then six years working in a military hospital in Ottawa for Second World War veterans. He returned to Korea for a visit in 1996, and today lives in Creston.

For more information contact the Creston and District Museum and Archives:
phone (250) 428-9262; e-mail mail@creston.museum.bc.ca; Web site www.creston.museum.bc.ca.