David J Powis survived the full Siege of Malta, was amongst the initial infantry assaults to invade Italy, Sicily and D-Day (adjacent to where the film “Saving Private Ryan” is depicted). Each invasion was followed by fierce inland battles. The following is an extract about the notorious medical boards from Chapter Eighteen (post-war) of David J Powis’ Book
“My World War Two”:

My annual attendance to a Medical Board did not only put my jobs at risk but was an ordeal which Elsie (my wife) and I dreaded. There was always, what seemed to us, an unwarranted long wait in the waiting room beforehand. After a check of my weight and height, I was to be seated at a table to face three or four very young highly educated men. Their task appeared to be to trick me into saying something to jeopardise the continuity of my war disability pension.

Usually the first question was put to me very pleasantly by one of them requesting me to explain how my health was being affected by recent events in my place of employment, but before I could get halfway through the answer another would interrupt me with a question about my childhood, and before my response to that was near to completion, a question on an up-to-date subject was thrown at me to be followed when I had only uttered a few words by another query about my childhood, then back to up-to-date events. The tempo of the questioning rapidly increased with all of them raising their voices and me never being permitted to give a complete answer. The verbally action-packed cross-examination lasted for what seemed to me to be several hours.

Before and during the war I was a very fast thinker, especially when in battle, but my war disability had now considerably slowed down my response to their questioning, in addition to which the tension produced in me by the Board's aggressive verbal crescendos, had me giving little or no detailed thought to my unfinished answers for me to be certain that they were as accurate as I had intended them to be, and an incomplete answer could have had them accepting something of what I said completely out of context.
Each one of the Medical Board's investigations into my life, humiliated me and made me feel as if I was a criminal on trial; they only needed to shine a bright light into my eyes to convince me that I was under cross-examination by the German Gestapo. Those three or four very young academic men of the Board obviously knew nothing about battlefields and the after affects they would have on the infantrymen who had been engaged in face to face conflicts with a ferocious enemy beyond what they might have read about, heard on radio news bulletins, or seen on cinema newsreels, plus films of which were probably more fiction than fact.
One of the friendly staff on duty in the building where the Medical Board was held, informed Elsie and me that the Board's inquisitors were employed specifically to seek reasons for terminating war disability pensions.
Had I committed a crime by obeying the Conscription Act and serving my country to the best of my ability during World War Two? Was it a crime for me to conscientiously carry out orders and return alive from the many battle zones which I was unfortunate enough to have been required to be present in for the purpose of destroying the enemy? Was it a crime to expect fair compensation for the disabilities continuously affecting me due to my war service which had been forced upon me by the predecessors and those currently being paid by everyone to run our country in a way which the majority of us believed was intended to benefit all of its inhabitants?
The pain and misery the Medical Boards regularly put me through at a time when I was exceptionally weak and greatly suffering the after effects of war, made me vow never to request the services of any kind of Doctor again except in an emergency, and to only see such people when officially directed to as with Maudsley Hospital, because their waiting rooms, their surgeries, and their questioning, would cause considerable deterioration of my health by my inability to prevent myself reliving what I went through on those annual Medical Board appointments.
Elsie was very alarmed by the shattered condition I was in on my return to the waiting room each time the Medical Board ordeal ended. I was on the verge of collapse after every attendance, and had to remain seated for some time in the waiting room whilst endeavouring to recuperate. After