Friends' Ambulance Unit
An acquaintance of Baker's, Sir Arthur Stanley, was chairman of the British Red Cross Society's Joint War Commission.
While making their initial voyage from Dover to Dunkirk, the FAU encountered the HMS Hermes, sinking after being struck by a German torpedo, and rendered emergency aid to her crew.
Upon their arrival, they were again immediately called to provide medical care, this time for a group of around 3,000 badly wounded soldiers sheltering in nearby railway sheds.
Besides medical aid, the Unit’s relief activities eventually expanded to include supply distribution, organizing gainful employment for refugees, screening for typhoid, and inoculation.
The outbreak of the Second Battle of Ypres, which involved the first significant use of gas weaponry on the Western Front, forced a rapid end to the FAU's civilian relief in the region.
[5] This was partly due to the British Military Service Act, which mandated conscription and defined the terms of exemption for conscientious objectors.
Under these terms, the FAU was recognised as a legitimate form of alternative service for conscientious objectors, which led to the rapid expansion of the Unit and closer alignment with the British military in particular.
By the end of the war, the Friends' Ambulance Unit’s volunteer staff had grown to over 1000 individuals, serving in France, Belgium, Italy, and in the Home Service Section.
[7] It was refounded by a committee of former members at the start of World War II in September 1939 with the establishment of a training camp at Manor Farm, Bristol Road, Northfield, Birmingham.
More than 1,300 members were trained and went on to serve as ambulance drivers and medical orderlies in London during the Blitz, as well as overseas in Finland, Norway and Sweden (1940), the Middle East (1940–1943), Greece (1941, 1944–1946), China and Syria (1941–1946), India and Ethiopia (1942–1945), Italy (1943–1946), France, Belgium, Netherlands, Yugoslavia and Germany (1944–1946) and Austria (1945–1946).
No 2 FAU was then posted to a newly liberated refugee camp at Leopoldsburg, Belgium, managing reception, registration, disinfection, catering, dormitories and departures.
After a period in Nijmegen, assisting local civilian medical organisations during Operation Market Garden, No 2 FAU cared for a colony of the mentally ill near Cleves in Germany which grew to a population of 25,000.
No 2 FAU was heavily involved with the care and support of inmates at the newly liberated Stalag X-B prisoner-of-war camp near Sandbostel, between Bremen and Hamburg in northern Germany in May 1945.
The original trainees in the 1939 training camp issued a statement expressing their purpose: We purpose to train ourselves as an efficient Unit to undertake ambulance and relief work in areas under both civilian and military control, and so, by working as a pacifist and civilian body where the need is greatest, to demonstrate the efficacy of co-operating to build up a new world rather than fighting to destroy the old.
