Obituaries Australia

Perditta McCarthy, n.d.

Australian War Memorial, HOBJ0204

Ditta McCarthy, an army nurse in the Korean War in 1953, might well have been likened to Florence Nightingale, especially when, with no electricity, she and her colleagues went round the wards at night with lamps and candles.

The medical staff at the hospital in suburban Seoul, in a bombed-out former school, had to take in the most dreadful battle casualties without sophisticated medical or general anaesthesia equipment and no instrument sterilisation unit. They could not do major surgery except in emergencies, when they used local anaesthetics. But the wounded kept coming, some strapped to the bonnets of jeeps and in the backs of trucks, to be washed and deloused, many of them filthy with their combat clothing riddled with vermin.

Ditta McCarthy joined the services in 1941 and went on to serve in World War II, Korea, Malaya and Vietnam, reaching the rank of brigadier, making her the first woman ever to reach a general rank in the army. She became matron-in-chief of army headquarters in Melbourne, a position that also made her an honorary nursing sister to the Queen, and was matron-in-chief of the Royal Australian Army Nursing Corps.

Perditta Marjorie McCarthy was born in Wagga Wagga on May 21, 1916, daughter of a businessman, Charles McCarthy, and his wife, Kathleen (nee Molloy). She attended St Clare's College, Waverley, and Rosebank College in Five Dock.

She finished her nursing training at Sydney Hospital in March 1939, and went on to train in obstetrics at the Crown Street Women's Hospital. But with war raging, she wanted to get into the action. ''We couldn't join until we were 25,'' she said. ''We'd signed false declarations about our age.''

On June 13, 1941, she joined the Australian Army Nursing Service and was posted to Darwin, then Adelaide and Cairns. Then she was sent to Aitape in New Guinea. ''My God we worked hard!'' she said. A man shot through the thigh had called for a bedpan, and when she retrieved it it was full of blood. ''The man had been bleeding but could not feel it,'' she said. ''We had all the infectious diseases. The scrub typhus was the first ward I landed. You'd go off for lunch, the boy was sick — there'd be a row of them — and you think it wasn't too bad. You come back and the bed would be empty and carbolised to put someone else in. Then you'd have a little cry.'' The murderous conditions continued.

''For about three days after the end was declared, they were still bringing in boys, and some were brought in dead,'' she said.

McCarthy then worked on the troopship MV Duntroon, transporting Australian military personnel, stores and equipment between Australia and Japan. When the Korean War broke out, she was with a detachment of nurses seconded to King George V Hospital in Camperdown. In 1951, she was posted to Japan and took up duties at the British Commonwealth Occupation Force General Hospital at Kure, southern Japan. 

McCarthy returned to Australia briefly before returning to Japan in early 1953 for a posting to the British Commonwealth Communications Zone Medical Unit in the outskirts of Seoul. It was an all-male bastion, and there was some resentment, but the nurses pointed out that all they wanted to do was to care for the wounded.

Despite the primitive conditions, McCarthy and her fellow nurses were determined that their hospital was going to be the most hygienic establishment in Korea.

Promoted to colonel and director of the Royal Australian Army Nursing Corps, as it then was, McCarthy visited several hospitals in Vietnam in 1971.

Retiring in 1972 after 31 years of continuous service, McCarthy was awarded the Royal Red Cross for her dedication. In 1975 she was appointed honorary colonel of the Army Nursing Corps. She worked for years as a volunteer at the Army Museum in Victoria Barracks, Sydney and wrote several biographies of nursing colleagues and predecessors.

In 1988, she was appointed the Australian delegate to the World Veterans Federation, attending assemblies in the Philippines, Thailand, Finland, Taiwan Malaysia, Korea and France.

Ditta McCarthy is survived by nephews Bob and Kevin and a niece, Jane. A brother, Darcy, predeceased her.