Family Card - Person Sheet
Family Card - Person Sheet
NameCol. John Cadman WATTS OBE MC, 3C2R
Birth13 Apr 1913, Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, England
Death17 Dec 2009, Woodbridge, Suffolk, England
FatherJohn Nixon WATTS (1859-1940)
MotherAmy Bettina CADMAN (1875-1932)
Spouses
Birth25 Jun 1912, Worcestershire, England
Death25 Oct 2009, Woodbridge, Suffolk, England
Marriage1938
Children(Private)
 John Inwood Michael (1941-2004)
Notes for Col. John Cadman WATTS OBE MC
Name, birth year, marriage year and death year from The Danbys by Shelby Whittingham.

Full name, birth date and location and death date and location from the Jeremy Watts Family Tree at ancestry.co.uk.

In the April to June 1913 birth index John C. Watts, mother’s maiden name Cadman, Rochford district, Essex, volume 4a, page 1465.

Also From the Jeremy Watts Family Tree
Daily Telegraph - no date given
Colonel John Watts
Army surgeon who operated under fire in makeshift theatre beneath a house that took 15 direct hits
Colonel John Watts who has died age 96, commanded an airborne field surgical unit in Normandy and was awarded a Military Cross.
In March 1944 Watts, then a major, was posted to 195 Airlanding Field Ambulance attached to the Airlanding Brigade. On D-Day he and his surgical team were towed in a Horsa glider across the Channel and landed near Pegasus Bridge. They hitched their trailer to an anti-tank gun and made their way to the advance dressing station of 255 Parachute Field Ambulance in a chateau at Ranville.
One glider party had not arrived, so Watts borrowed an ancient bicycle and set of in search. It was dark, and the pollen laden air set off a violent attack of hat fever. Challenged by a sentry, he could not stop sneezing or remember the password procedure or come to a halt because the brakes did not work. In desperation, he gasped out “Friend!” He said afterwards he was fortunate not to have been shot.
At first light on June 7 he set up a dressing station in a private house at a village near Ranville and converted the cellar into an operating theatre. He and his team worked flay-out coping with casualties. Over the next two weeks the building received 15 direct hits and the operating theatre was hit twice. Watts continued to operate until all the cases were treated.
They were close enough to the front line to see enemy infantry doubling across the fields. One German soldier, with a foot injury suppurating from a wound received on the Russian front two years earlier, spotted the Red Cross and broke off the battle to come in for treatment.
The resuscitation officer covered the wall of his department with saucy pinups and claimed he used the level of response of his patients to gauge the degree of resuscitation required. The Roman Catholic padre visited the dressing station every day. He arrived on a motorcycle, the staccato popping of the two-stroke engine always attracted a burst of mortar fire from the Germans, who probably took him for a dispatch rider bearing important messages.
The padre would enter the dressing station stammering and twitching and giving a lively impersonation of a victim of “battle exhaustion”. On one occasion a highly-decorated senior officer, a man with firm views on this “condition”, was at the dressing station and was horrified until the casual acceptance of the performance by those around him showed it to be a charade.
John Cadman Watts, the son of a solicitor, was born April 13 1913 at Leigh-on-Sea. He was educated at Merchant Taylors before studying medicine at St. Thomas’ Hospital. He joined the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1938 and served in the surgical unit of a hospital at Haifa and then a casualty clearing station (CCS) near Jerusalem.
The following year he moved to a CCs at El Daba, west of Alexandria. Italy had invaded Egypt, and he received a steady stream of casualties. Over the next four years he operated in hospitals at Alexandria, Cairo, Haifa, Damascus and Jerusalem.
In March 1943 Watts was one of a surgical team in a CCS at Medenine, Tunisia. After the Battle of the Wadi Akarit the station handled 1,300 cases. A spell at No 42 general hospital, Suez Canal, was followed by command of the surgical division at No 59 general hospital Tripoli.
In September, shortly after the Allied landings at Salerno, the hospital landed and acting as a CCS received more than 500 casualties as German resistance intensified. January 1944 found Watts at No 31 Surgical Unit. The weather often made the roads impassable, and he got used to skiing through blizzards at night to give emergency blood transfusions and to setting up operating theatres in the kitchens of isolated farmhouses.
In July 1944, during the breakout from Normandy, the dressing station was moved to Amfreville; but as German resistance south of the river Seine ceased Watts returned to England, where he underwent parachute training. He served in Holland during the Battle of the Ardennes and, in March 1945, landed by glider at Hamminkeln, near Wesel, during the battle of the Rhine Crossing.
Watts un loaded his Jeep under sustained and accurate machine-gun fire, and collected the injured from gliders that had crashed. Many of the survivors were in need of urgent treatment. He drove several hundred miles each day, making sure that casualties were being successfully cleared from field ambulance stations. The citation for the award of the Military Cross covered his actions in Normandy and on the Rhine. His courage, coolness, endurance and skill it stated had been instrumental in saving many lives.
After the war Watts commanded 225 Parachute Field Ambulance in Malaya and Java before taking command of 195 Airlanding Field Ambulance in Palestine. He was twice mentioned in despatches.
In the Korean War he was senior surgeon at the British Commonwealth military general hospital, Kure, Japan, where he developed a successful technique for treating frostbite.
He served in Austria and then Cyprus where for four years he ran the surgical divisions of the British military hospitals at Nicosia and, subsequently, Dhekelia during the Eoka insurgency. In 1958 he operated on Auberon Waugh, who had been badly wounded in a firearms accident. Watts was appointed OBE at the end of his tour.
After a spell in BAOR he was appointed Professor of Surgery at the Royal Army Medical College and was awarded a Hunterian Professorship. Following two years at the Royal Herbert Hospital, in 1966 he retired from the Army in the rank of colonel.
Watts retired from NHS [National Health Service] in 1976 and moved to Suffolk, where he enjoyed his boyhood passion of sailing the tidal waters of East Anglia. In 1955 he published Surgeon at War.
John Watts died on December 17. He married in 1938, Joan Inwood. She predeceased him, and he is survived by their two sons and a daughter.
Another son predeceased him.
end of article.
Notes for Joan Lilian (Spouse 1)
Name and marriage year from The Danbys by Shelby Whittingham.
had issue

Birth date and location and death date and location from the Jeremy Watts Family Tree at ancestry.co.uk.
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