Captain Sydney I Green

Sydney Isaac Green was born in Glasgow in June 1915. He was youngest of five children, son of Hymen Harry and Sarah Sayetta Green. The family moved to London in 1925, and Sydney decided to take up a career in medicine, training as Doctor at Guy’s Hospital Medical School.

After being called up in June 1944, he was a Medical Officer with the Royal Army Medical Corps upon the TS Dinard, otherwise known as Hospital Ship 28. She sailed to Normandy to support the D-Day invasion but hit a mine off Juno Beach. She was towed back to Southampton arriving in port on 9 June.

Perhaps chastened by this experience Sydney volunteered for the Airborne Forces. After selection, he was posted to 195th Airlanding Field Ambulance RAMC. By the time of Op Varsity, Sydney Green was as Section Officer, for the assault crossing of the Rhine near Hamminkeln on 24 March 1945. He and his men were in Chalk Number 177, which unfortunately landed near Deurne in Holland and did not join up with 195 until the day after the landings. He remained with 195 AFA, undertaking the March to the Baltic until the end of the war in Europe in early May 1945, and was discharged in late 1945.

After being demobbed he resumed his civilian medical career, specialising in neurosurgery. He emigrated to the United States in the late 1950s to work in practice in Washington and then Bethesda, working mainly at the Sibley Memorial Hospital. He married Phyllis Leon Brown in 1962, and had three stepsons and a daughter.

Sydney Green died in September 2005 following a prolonged battle with chest disease.

Further information

Biography at the Fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons website: Click here

Photo supplied by Myles Brown