Mobile Surgical Units in the Burma Campaign

Join historian Kate Venables as she explores the work carried out by her father, Dr Harry Walker, while serving in the Fifth Indian Mobile Surgical Unit.

Battlefield surgery was utilised in all theatres of the Second World War. Small, mobile surgical units worked close behind the fighting and deployed flexibly according to the nature of the conflict.

With equipment transported by truck, jeep or mule, they operated in tents, bunkers and requisitioned buildings and carried out abdominal, thoracic, head and neck, and limb surgery. Their role was to save lives and to stabilise casualties before evacuation.

Casualty evacuation by air, introduced during the Burma campaign, gradually replaced the use of mobile surgical units in conflicts after 1945. Yet recent re-evaluations suggest that their mobility still gives them a place in the management of battle wounds.

Kate Venables will explore the work of these units in Burma, drawing on the letters of her father, Harry Walker. As a young doctor, Harry served in the Fifth Indian Mobile Surgical Unit attached at different times to various divisions of the Fourteenth Army, from Imphal in 1944 to Surabaya in 1946.

About the speaker

Professor Kate Venables is an Emeritus Reader and Fellow at the University of Oxford, where she specialises in epidemiology and on the occupational causes of disease. She has used the life histories, letters and memoirs of individual doctors and nurses to explore the experience of ordinary people in the forces during the Second World War. She is currently working on a memoir that draws on her father’s early death and their shared profession of medicine.