Benjamin Ellis

Birthplace: Llanelli, Wales, UK

Branch of Service: Other

Unit: Royal Army Medical Corps (UK)

Theater of Operation: China / Burma / India

Enlisted / Commissioned: May 1, 1940

Discharged: Jan 15, 1946

Highest Rank: Major

Military Honors: OBE ( Order of the British Empire )

Honored By: His children

He graduated from St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College, of the University of London, MBBS ( equivalent to MD in USA ) in 1937 and was a registrar ( resident ) in OBGYN at the outbreak of WW II. He was recruited to the Royal Army Medical Corps of the British Army as a general physician/general surgeon in 1940. He was posted overseas initially to India where he attended to Lord Mountbatten who was the British Commander in South East Asia. He was involved in the Burma campaign and eventually was transferred to the China theater where he was stationed in Chungking. He achieved the rank of Major. At the end of WW II he was decommissioned from the military and returned to his further medical training in Queen Charlottes’ Hospital, London as an OBGYN. He took up an initial Consultant post in Teesside, England in 1949 in the newly formed National Health Service (“NHS” ) where he remained in practice for the next 27 years. He retired early due to ill health and passed away at home in 1978, aged 63 years. He was granted the OBE after the war and later was made MBE for services to medicine at the end of his career. He rarely, if ever, talked of his time in the Far East but “would never wish it on anyone”. He was a student of history and an admirer of both Eisenhower and Churchill and was always keen to read or watch military history TV shows of WW II to learn what had happened in other parts of the world during the war. As the son of one of “the greatest generation” and a US citizen of Kansas, I am proud to ask for his inclusion in the list of military members from WW II in the President Eisenhower Foundation.