WW1, a kitchen on a hospital train, nurses, cooks, pots and pans. I'm looking forward to reading the other blogs for this week's theme on Sepia Saturday, but I'm going to write about WW2 hospitals (and not a train in sight).
Have you heard of a place called Tarakan? Or Morotai?
Both are islands in the Indonesian archipelago and in WW2 and both were held by the Japanese until battles late in the war secured them as bases for the Australian and American forces. I had heard of Morotai because my father was on Morotai with the Australian Army until he was hopitalised there with a tropical skin condition and then sent home. I had never heard of Tarakan.
But then an album of photos came my way, small photos taken by an Australian soldier while he was serving in Morotai and Tarakan in WW2. We aren't sure who the soldier was but I have now scanned all the photos and added them to my online Flickr album and the associated National Library of Australia's group called Trove. Maybe we'll find out for sure who the photographer was one day.
I was interested to see that there was a photo of a hospital at Tarakan and also Morotai. I showed my dad but he said he couldn't remember what the hospital looked like but he did remember almost falling out of the ambulance because he had a high fever!
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| Hospital, Tarakan, WW2 |
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| Army Hospital and ambulance on Morotai, WW2 |
