AS A SOLDIER, my father was more a pragmatist than a patriot, more a realist than a romantic. His view of the military and war was more Ernest Hemingway, who saw war as a crime, than it was Douglas MacArthur, who said it required the will to win. His sensibilities were more Franklin D. Roosevelt, who called war a contagion, than Winston Churchill, who said success in war came only to those who deserved it. But perhaps the perspective of war my father espoused most was that of comedic writer Larry Gelbart: “A war is like when it rains in New York and everybody crowds into doorways. . . . And they all get chummy together. Perfect strangers. The only difference, of course, is that in a war it’s also raining on the other side of the street and the people who are chummy over there are trying to kill the people who are over here who are chums.”1
In particular, I’m sure my father, a born and raised New Yorker, could quickly draw that picture in his head. More than that, Alex Barris—who spent a lot of his time before, during, and after the war writing newspaper and magazine stories—eventually saw the parallel between his aspirations and those of Larry Gelbart, the scripting genius behind the 1970s hit TV series M*A*S*H. Like my father, Gelbart wrote as much as he could during the Second World War; the difference was that T/Sgt. Barris wrote stories, some serious, others satirical, for his medical battalion, while Pfc. Gelbart wrote variety scripts for show-business stars on radio.
When he turned eighteen in 1944, Gelbart received his draft notice and was shunted from one training camp to another until the army spotted the young Californian’s writing ability and arranged to have him posted to the Armed Forces Radio Service in Hollywood; he wrote a kind of radio request show (often staged in front of a theatre audience) for American service personnel longing to finish the war and get home. Among other things, he and the producers of the popular show Command Performance arranged for the radio broadcast of Ann Miller tap dancing in military boots, Lana Turner frying a steak amid armed guards at centre stage, Errol Flynn taking a shower, and Bing Crosby mixing a bourbon and soda for Bob Hope. Larry Gelbart’s war meant he was stationed in Hollywood, able to live at home and hobnob with a who’s who of show business.
By comparison, at that stage of the war, Pvt. Barris was living in a drafty barracks hut at Camp Phillips, Kansas, a long way from his mom’s home cooking. And yet he applied all his creative juices to the extracurricular task of editing the Weekly Dose, the newsletter of the 319th Medical Battalion. He led a staff of four, including himself, scouring the training facility for printable tips, tales, and gossip. In the March 6, 1943, edition, for example, he composed an editorial extending sympathy to all the battalion ambulance and truck drivers, suggesting they fly their imaginary flags at half-staff because “Henrietta” and her companions were no more. Apparently the powers that be at Camp Phillips had decided that assigning feminine names to their vehicles in honour of their girlfriends back home was inappropriate; instead, the corpsmen-in-training had to choose medical names.
“Slowly but surely they’re taking all the sentiment out of the army,” Editor-in-chief Barris wrote. “Pretty soon they’ll have us using medical names for the litters and, who knows, some day we may hear of Sgt. Sulphadiazine, Cpl. Capillary, and Pvt. Pneumonia!”2
In his own small way, my father was scratching an itch he’d always had: to write as a reporter, a feature writer, and a columnist. Eventually all those forms of professional writing would become Alex’s livelihood when he returned to the United States and ultimately moved to Canada in pursuit of work as a peacetime journalist. I think it’s fair to say that the wit and satire my father regularly stitched into his newspaper columns for the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Telegram in the 1950s and ’60s had a strong connection to some of the tongue-in-cheek writing he’d generated at the helm of Camp Phillips’s Weekly Dose in 1943.
For his daily newspaper column in Canada, “The Barris Beat,” my father chased leads, contacts, and original stories in show business. Not surprisingly, when CBS Television premiered M*A*S*H, a show about wartime medics, my father took notice. Not only was the writing on M*A*S*H razor sharp and funny, its context and message resonated with my father’s memories of army life as well as his views on war and peace. It wasn’t long before my father became a regular viewer of the show and a dedicated fan of its head writer, Larry Gelbart.
M*A*S*H originated as a novel by Richard Hooker, the pen name of Dr. H. Richard Hornberger, a graduate of Cornell University Medical School who served as a doctor with the 8055th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) during the Korean War. Like Hornberger’s novel, the movie released in 1970 reflected the experiences of a MASH unit coping with the rhythm of life and death behind the lines in the Korean War. Eventually producers approached Larry Gelbart to adapt the successful movie for television. The sitcom enjoyed great ratings and lasted eleven seasons (251 episodes). Throughout its run, from 1972 to 1983, Gelbart instinctively sensed that the show had to present characters and situations that were respectful of the Korean War veterans’ experience as well as the experiences of those still serving in Vietnam.
He wrote the initial TV episode in two days, but once CBS decided to produce a full season, Gelbart spent countless hours interviewing military surgeons, nurses, patients, helicopter pilots, and orderlies to maintain the show’s authenticity. From those conversations, word for word, came the poignant image captured in one M*A*S*H script by the chaplain character, Father John Mulcahy: “When the doctors cut into a patient—and it gets very cold here, you know—steam rises from the body, and the doctor will warm himself over the open wound. Could anyone look on that and not be changed?”3
Former army corpsman Barris never missed an episode of former Pfc. Gelbart’s take on military medical personnel at work and play in a war zone.
MARCH 25, 1945—KREFELD, GERMANY
NONE OF THE FORMER Weekly Dose staff members was on editorial duty for most of the Saar-Moselle campaign in the winter of 1945. All of its reporters and editors were otherwise occupied, performing the medical duties they’d been trained to carry out. That doesn’t mean there were no stories to document; on the contrary, by March 1945 most corpsmen of the 319th Medical Battalion had far more experiences fresh in their memories than any four-page newsletter could accommodate.
And in addition to the personal stories, there were the regimental ones. Trier, the crown of the Saar-Moselle Triangle, fell that first week of March. And with that, the race to the River Rhine had begun, with the 94th Infantry Division, to which the 319th was attached, chasing German troops eastward. In the middle of the month, just as the division was about to break through the enemy’s front lines along the rolling, wooded terrain of the Schwarzwälder Hochwald, Gen. Eisenhower visited Gen. Patton’s Third Army headquarters and agreed to allocate the 12th Armored Division in support of the 94th’s advance. On March 14, 15, and 16, the division captured 344, 341, and then 700 German soldiers, respectively; after that, an average of as many as 3,000 troops surrendered per day. With limited space available in the forested areas, the roads grew congested with infantry and tanks racing eastward and POWs going in the opposite direction.
“In the last weeks of the war,” T/Sgt. Barris wrote, “I remember the mad race across Germany in pursuit of a tattered, thoroughly demoralized Nazi force no longer interested in fighting, only surviving.”4
Indeed, the only thing that appeared to matter, according to the grapevine that informed my father and others, was Patton’s single-minded focus on crossing the Rhine before anybody else. In particular, he was anxious to best his nemesis Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and the 21st Army Group, whose Operation Plunder planned to make the crossing on March 23. The 94th was ordered forward at double speed to get Patton there first. Between March 12 and 24, Patton’s so-called Ghost Corps advanced over a hundred miles, taking objectives in more than two hundred villages and towns. In the course of the rush eastward, the 94th captured more than 13,400 German troops. The division was then allowed to backtrack by rail and truck through Luxembourg, over the former battlefields of the Battle of the Bulge, and north to Krefeld, just across the river from Düsseldorf, to await its final orders of the war.
On March 25, as the GIs of the 94th settled into rest areas at Krefeld, they cleaned, overhauled, repaired, or replaced vehicles, weapons, equipment, and clothing. For the first time in two months the daily routine orders slowed to a leisurely pace as command posts attempted to catch up on overdue clerical work. Among the missives came one from Gen. Patton, who finally acknowledged “the splendid work your Division has accomplished during its tour of duty with us.”5
At the time, S/Sgt. Tony Mellaci remembered, many of the medical units that the Saar-Moselle campaign had scattered across the front for weeks were temporarily reunited in the rest area. And as the corpsmen settled in, the regimental bureaucracy posted a number of citations, promotions, and awards to be presented. One caught Mellaci’s eye.
“Hey, Al Barris is getting the Bronze Star,” he announced to his buddies in the 319th motor pool.6 And he recounted the unit assembling for the presentation by Capt. Laurence J. Sykora. Mellaci said it was the first such award given to a member of B Company of the medical battalion, and that my father seemed embarrassed at being in the spotlight for retrieving the four litter-bearers from Campholz Woods back on February 12. Nevertheless, the events of that night were read aloud as the award was presented.
“Tech-4 Barris has repeatedly expressed initiative and foresight in discharge of his duties as liaison Sgt.,” the citation said. “His total disregard for personal safety and his continual service to his organization over and above the call of his particular duties are in keeping with the highest of army traditions.”7
It was S/Sgt. Mellaci’s turn several weeks later, when the appropriate paperwork was processed and he too was awarded the Bronze Star for his meritorious service across the Saar-Moselle Triangle. Such recognition was hardly the stuff of feature films, books, or even news copy. But for those around him, T/Sgt. Barris sensed, this was welcome recognition—despite Gen. Patton’s earlier accusations of their malingering—that the corpsmen, litter-bearers, and ambulance drivers of the 319th Medical Battalion had committed themselves to a greater cause that winter of 1945.
OCTOBER 12, 1915—BRUSSELS, BELGIUM
IT HAD BEEN THREE MONTHS since the armies of Kaiser Wilhelm II marched into Belgium. Ahead of them, in August 1914, the Belgian government went into exile while King Albert I and what was left of the Belgian army joined Allied troops as they fought while withdrawing westward. Behind the lines of German occupation, inside occupied Brussels, the Belgian capital, Germany assigned senior military officers to rule the country. They in turn deported Belgians to become forced labour at German military installations and munitions plants, while making concessions to radical groups in an attempt to placate the Flemish population. Nevertheless, an active Belgian resistance sabotaged German military sites, operated an underground press, and regularly ferried Allied troops trapped inside occupied Belgium to Holland. Amid deteriorating economic conditions and the struggle for power in occupied Brussels, one service continued to operate with relative immunity under the auspices of the Red Cross—L’École Belge d’Infirmières Diplômées, the Berkendael Medical Institute.
One afternoon in November 1914, two wounded British soldiers in disguise arrived at the institute, located on rue de la Culture, seeking assistance. The nursing sister who had run the school of nursing since 1907 welcomed the men as patients. Matron Edith Louisa Cavell operated the facility on the principle that all wounded soldiers—friend or foe—had to be treated alike. Indeed, despite her British origins, Cavell directed emergency services at the institute and at relief stations elsewhere to tend German casualties, an order that almost overwhelmed the nursing staff; that summer and fall the nurses slept fully clothed on their beds, ready to attend to the flood of wounded. But by accepting the two disguised British troops, Matron Cavell knew that the city’s German administrators might consider her humanitarian efforts as “aiding and abetting the enemy.”
Cavell was no innocent. Born in 1865 at Swardeston, in Norfolk, as a vicar’s daughter, Edith attended a school for girls and for a short time served as governess for a family in Brussels in the 1890s. She received her nurse’s training at the London Hospital, where her “self-sufficient manner” was not encouraged or appreciated.8 Rescued from what might have become a lifetime of short-term nursing positions in Britain, in 1907 she was approached by a Belgian doctor to supervise a school for nursing in Brussels. Her hospital grew to become a thriving facility with more than two dozen fully trained nurses. As matron of the hospital, Cavell, at age forty-two, had overnight become a senior figure in Belgian nursing circles.9 Not only did she have full authority over nursing instruction at the school in Brussels, but she had also befriended Antoine Depage, founder and chair of the Belgian Red Cross.
When the Great War began, Cavell was looking after her mother at home in England, but she quickly returned to her duties, preparing the nursing school for the realities of tending the onslaught of war-wounded in occupied Belgium. By 1915 her associate Depage, also the personal physician of King Albert, was in exile, and his wife, Marie Depage, had travelled to America seeking funds for the Belgian Red Cross. Returning to Europe in May 1915 aboard Lusitania, Marie Depage drowned in the German torpedoing of the ship. Meanwhile, Cavell’s work continued in Brussels, attending to both German wounded and what the French called “les enfants perdus”—Allied soldiers who’d become isolated in German-occupied territory.
Matron Cavell did not stop there. For the first two British soldiers in disguise and others who would follow, she sought out safe houses and an underground network to secretly lead the men to neutral Holland. Before long she had concealed about twenty British soldiers in an attic, provided them with false papers manufactured by Prince Reginald de Croy at his chateau near Mons, and arranged for the disguised men to receive money and guided passage to the Dutch frontier. The underground railroad brought together Belgian aristocracy, church leaders, and even the British Secret Service.10 Cavell kept as tight a rein on her “casualties” as possible, warning them not to travel in groups, to abide by nighttime curfews, and to be mindful that German officers were billeted close by.
However, one night a group of Allied troops awaiting transit to Holland got drunk, began fighting, and were overheard singing “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”11 When a postcard later arrived from two British soldiers thanking Cavell for their safe return to England, the German authorities closed in. They arrested Cavell on August 3, 1915, charged her with harbouring Allied soldiers, and held her in St. Gilles prison to await trial for treason, even though she was not a German national.
During ten weeks of imprisonment, Cavell presented three depositions to German authorities. She admitted that she had conveyed as many as sixty British and fifteen French soldiers, in addition to about a hundred Belgian civilians of military age, to the Dutch frontier.* She admitted to housing many of them at her hospital and to receipt of correspondence thanking her for their safe passage. The German penal code made “conducting soldiers of the enemy” a crime, but not necessarily a capital offence. Further, by using her medical immunity under the Geneva Convention as a protection to harbour and transport a belligerent, the German tribunal claimed, she had fallen outside any protection the convention might have afforded her. The tribunal found her guilty and sentenced her to execution.
In her final two weeks in custody, her German jailers kept her in solitary confinement. Announcement of the verdict sparked a diplomatic response from Brand Whitlock, the US minister to Belgium, and the Spanish minister, the Marqués de Villalobar, requested that the death penalty be commuted. The British Foreign Office claimed it was “powerless” to intervene. But Hugh S. Gibson, the secretary of state for the United States, which was not then involved in the war, spoke out. “We remind [the German civil governor] of the burning of Louvain and the sinking of the Lusitania,” Gibson wrote, and “that this murder would rank with those two affairs and would stir all civilized countries with horror and disgust.”12
“[We] would rather see Miss Cavell shot,” German Lt. Col. Count Franz von Harrach responded, “than have harm come to . . . the humblest German soldiers, and [our] only regret was that [we] had not three of four English old women to shoot.”13
Of thirty-five prisoners accused of related crimes, only Cavell and Belgian patriot Philippe Baucq were condemned to death. Matron Edith Cavell’s final hours illustrated her resolve and foretold her stature in history and mythology. Beyond answering the questions put to her in the tribunal—offering no more than 130 words in her own defence—she made no further attempt to refute the German claims. The night before her execution, Reverend Stirling Gahan, an Anglican chaplain, was allowed to pray with her. Apparently without being prompted, the guard at her cell commented to the chaplain that Cavell was a fine woman, illustrating by stiffening his back. Gahan made notes of his final conversation with Cavell. “Patriotism is not enough,” she told him. “I must have no hatred nor bitterness to anyone.”
The chaplain spoke quietly with her for an hour, during which she acknowledged that she had seen so much death during her time as a nurse that the idea didn’t frighten her. Finally, knowing that the execution was scheduled for dawn, Reverend Gahan suggested he had better leave. “You will want to rest,” he said. “Yes,” she said. “I have to be up at five.”14
On October 12, 1915, sixteen riflemen in two firing squads carried out the sentence—eight shooting and killing Cavell, the other eight, Baucq. Immediately following the gunfire, Belgian women took away and quickly buried the remains next to St. Gilles prison. Cavell’s body was exhumed at the end of the war and returned to England, and on May 19, 1919, in a Westminster Abbey filled to capacity, King George V led a memorial service. A special train transported Cavell’s body to Norwich Cathedral; the shaft of the wooden cross erected over her Belgian grave was later delivered for display at Swardeston Church, where her father, Frederick Cavell, had served as rector for forty-five years. It would become a mecca for those paying their respects to the fallen nurse. But long before the church displayed the wooden cross, the Edith Cavell story had transformed her from British patriot to international martyr.
Indeed, even before the Great War was over, the Edith Cavell mythology grew daily. Journalists, poets, cartoonists, painters, musicians, and moviemakers all helped—in either fact or fiction—with the creation and enhancement of the Edith Cavell myth. The American Journal of Nursing printed the hearsay that Cavell had fainted and fallen because she’d refused to wear a blindfold at the execution, and that a German officer then shot her dead with his pistol. This account of a woman, a nurse, a patriot facing a heroic death undoubtedly ramped up American support for war against Germany. By April 6, 1917, both the House and the Senate had passed President Woodrow Wilson’s declaration of war.
While they had seemed oddly resigned to the German death sentence, following Cavell’s execution, British officials turned to Wellington House, the British War Propaganda Bureau, to characterize the nurse matron as an innocent victim of a ruthless enemy. Nurses from the home front to the Western Front looked to the Edith Cavell execution for motivation and inspiration. Agnes Warner was typical. As the matron of Ambulance Mobile No. 1 attending to the wounded of the French army, she regularly warned her nursing-sister staff to be ready for difficulties such as dealing with gas masks and pounding air raids. And she drew the sisters’ attention to posters showing the torpedo sinking of the hospital ship Llandovery Castle, which had drowned fourteen nurses in 1918, and the execution of Edith Cavell as a denunciation of “German barbarism.”15
War bond posters appeared with Cavell in her nursing uniform shown prominently. Postcards circulated widely showing renderings of the firing squad and/or the German officer shooting a defiant nurse, with captions reading “the assassination of Edith Cavell” or “Miss Edith Cavell cowardly murdered.” Overnight, Edith Cavell became the most celebrated British casualty of the war. Recruitment campaigns across Britain adopted the catch phrase “Remember Edith Cavell,” and enlistment doubled from 5,000 to 10,000 for eight consecutive weeks.16
Elsewhere, the Edith Cavell martyrdom story emerged in every conceivable form. The senior doctor representing the Brussels administration, Gottfried Benn, who had witnessed the execution, later published Wie Miss Cavell erschossen wurde or How Miss Cavell Was Shot, to acclaim. Within three months of Cavell’s death, motion picture producers had already capitalized on the drama of her life story; The Martyrdom of Nurse Cavell was released in January 1916 by Australian silent film directors Jack Gavin and Charles Post Mason. And on October 27, 1918, less than two weeks before the Great War ended, American movie producer John G. Adolfi cast Julia Arthur in another silent picture, The Woman the Germans Shot. Not to be outdone, playwrights C.S. Forester and C.E. Bechhofer Roberts wrote a three-act play called Nurse Cavell, produced on stage in 1933. British movie director Herbert Wilcox shot two versions of the story—a black-and-white silent with Sybil Thorndike in 1928, and a black-and-white feature film, Nurse Edith Cavell, in 1939.
In one poignant scene in the movie, actress Anna Neagle as Matron Cavell attends to a British soldier, preparing him to follow a guide and escape to Holland.
“Don’t you ever want to go back home? Not be here among all these foreigners?” he asks her.
“There’s only one human race, my dear,” the matron says.
“What would they do if they found out you’d got me here?” he asks. “I’d be all right if you’d hand me over to them, now that I’m all right again.”
“Do you think I’ve nursed you back to life just to have you shot?”
The movie follows her arrest, trial, and conviction. It ends with her march to execution and Neagle’s voice offering her final thoughts to Reverend Gahan: “I have no fear nor shrinking. I have seen death so often it is no longer strange or fearful to me.”
The sound of the firing-squad rifles flashes ahead to Westminster Abbey and her memorial service over a crescendo of the hymn “Abide with Me” and a final image of Edith Cavell offering her benediction: “Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred nor bitterness to anyone.”17
In a case of art imitating life, the film was released to American movie houses on September 1, 1939, the very day Hitler’s armies invaded Poland.
SEPTEMBER 1951—YELLOW SEA, OFF THE COAST OF NORTH KOREA
WHEN AUDIENCES ATTENDED either the play Nurse Cavell in 1933 or the movie Nurse Edith Cavell in 1939, they readily understood that behind the acting and Hollywood embellishment was the story of an actual nursing sister martyred in the Great War. In 1960, however, when Universal Pictures released The Great Imposter, the line between fact and fiction was blurred at best. The story of a navy doctor in the Korean War being found out seemed awfully far-fetched to be real. But it, too, was based on a true story.
During its second tour in late September 1951, the Canadian naval destroyer HMCS Cayuga supported units of the South Korean marines who were conducting raids along the west coast of North Korea from the Yellow Sea. One such raid left about a dozen South Korean troops wounded, including one with a bullet lodged in his lung.
On the after-canopy deck aboard Cayuga, Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) surgeon Lt. Joseph C. Cyr did a quick triage of the South Korean wounded and requested an operating area be readied for the soldier with the punctured lung. Capt. James Plomer offered his cabin. According to the ship’s supply officer, Bill Davis, Dr. Cyr—with a gunnery officer acting as his assistant and an ordnance officer as his anesthetist—“opened up the [Korean] marine’s chest, took out a bullet, held it up, and said it had been a quarter of an inch away from his heart. He sewed the man up and proceeded to deal with all the other wounded on deck.”18
Later, Lt. Davis joked about his ordinary shipmates Fred Little and Frank Boyle being asked to serve as surgical assistant and anesthetist, respectively, during Cyr’s expertly conducted bullet extraction. “It felt like just another event on board ship,” Davis said. “Anyway, our public relations officer wrote up a piece for publication about Joe Cyr, that he had taken a bullet from next to this guy’s heart, that he had attended all the wounded, and on another occasion had even removed the captain’s abscessed tooth.”19
When the real Dr. Joseph C. Cyr informed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police of the coincidence, the extraordinary tale of Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr. came to light. And his life’s story as a repeat impersonator did indeed read like a Hollywood script.
Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1921, Fred grew up with plenty of exposure to fantasy; his father, Fred Sr., ran a chain of private movie theatres in the region, but he lost everything in the Depression. At sixteen young Fred ran away from home and joined a Trappist monastery in Rhode Island. With only a high-school education, he served as a teacher and guardian at a home for boys, but then, on impulse, in 1941 stole the home’s car and dashed off to join the US Army. Not enamoured of basic training in Biloxi, Mississippi, he took on his first false identity, choosing to go AWOL as Anthony Ingolia.
His family back in Lawrence eventually convinced Demara to stop masquerading and turn himself in. But, at the last minute, he changed his mind and joined the US Navy under his own name. He chose to be trained as a medic, but when his grades fell short, Demara stole the identity of a doctor to support his application for a commission. Despite service on the North Atlantic aboard USS Ellis, his qualifications for advancement in military medicine fell short. That’s when he decided to fake his death, leaving a pile of clothes and a suicide note at the end of a pier and disappearing into the night.20
Becoming Dr. Robert Linton French next, Demara offered bogus services as a former naval officer with credentials as a psychologist, a science teacher, and eventually a doctor of medicine at a Benedictine abbey college near Seattle, Washington. But eventually those false qualifications were challenged in court and led to a charge of desertion from the navy and a jail sentence.
Following eighteen months in prison, Demara resurfaced in Canada, at Grand Falls, New Brunswick, where he met and assisted Dr. Joseph Cyr, a physician with aspirations to work in the United States. Demara borrowed Dr. Cyr’s credentials and attempted to use them to convince another college of his medical and administrative skills. When he was turned down, he stole another vehicle, drove to a Royal Canadian Navy recruiting centre in Saint John, New Brunswick, and—with those borrowed certificates—enlisted for service as Dr. Joseph C. Cyr.
“The only [real] medical background I had was that which I had obtained as a hospital corpsman in the United States Navy,” Demara explained later. And yet he managed to convince medical personnel at the RCN headquarters that he could lecture and lead seminars on internal medicine. He sensed that his delivery was credible enough, since the doctors in the sessions “were avid note-takers.”
In 1951 Canada’s tribal-class destroyers began rotation through tours of duty in the Korean War. On board HMCS Cayuga, the personable and readily convincing Dr. Cyr got on well with the captain and appeared perfectly at ease performing routine procedures in the ship’s sick bay, as well as emergency surgery such as removing the bullet from the Korean soldier’s internal organs.
On October 24, 1951, a month after the famous lung surgery, Cayuga received a message informing the captain he had an impostor aboard. When Capt. Plomer confronted his ship’s now celebrated doctor with the information, Demara produced Joseph Cyr’s notarized birth certificate and his physician’s sheepskin and then retreated to his cabin. Unmasked and accused of impersonating the Canadian physician, Fred Demara took an overdose of barbiturates and slashed his wrists. He was given first aid at sea, transferred ashore, shipped home to Canada, and discharged from the navy.
The real Dr. Cyr did not press charges because Demara hadn’t harmed any of his so-called patients. One of his former Cayuga shipmates, Gil Hutton, claimed that a number of Canadian Navy officers offered Demara funds to pay for a real medical education. Ultimately, Fred Demara was deported to the United States, where he became a hospital chaplain and where, in 1960, Hollywood released its version of his story, with Tony Curtis in the role of The Great Imposter.
FEBRUARY 1952—SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA
IT’S THE MIDDLE OF THE KOREAN WAR. The fictional 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, made famous by the 1970s and ’80s hit television series M*A*S*H, faces an unexpected, unknown enemy. Col. Sherman T. Potter (Harry Morgan) has called a meeting of his senior staff—Frank Burns (Larry Linville), Margaret Houlihan (Loretta Swit), B.J. Hunnicutt (Mike Farrell), and Hawkeye Pierce (Alan Alda)—to compare notes about an inexplicable fever that’s infecting both patients and staff in the camp. Potter acknowledges that everybody has worked tirelessly around the clock attending to those with the rapidly spreading fever, but that the trend will continue until they learn the source of the sickness and its cure.
“Any news from the lab in Seoul?” somebody asks.
“Father Mulcahy’s down there now on R and R,” Potter reports.
“Rest and resurrection?” Hawkeye wisecracks. But the real problem the MASH staff faces is attempting to deal with a disease that for them has no name, doesn’t respond to antibiotics, and is spreading like wildfire. Potter offers what little information he’s gathered, that the fever might be caused by rat-borne mites and fleas. He asks if anybody has noticed more rats around the camp.
“Just the couple that’s been building a family room in my shaving kit,” one of his staff quips.
A few scenes later, in this twelfth episode of season four of the TV sitcom M*A*S*H, Father Francis John Patrick Mulcahy (William Christopher) returns with the lab analysis from Seoul. He reports a history he’s uncovered that both Japanese and Russian soldiers suffered from much the same symptoms during the Sino-Soviet war in northern Manchuria in the 1930s. “[Its] name is hemorrhagic fever,” Mulcahy says. “The doctors then were just as perplexed as you are now.”
“Great,” a MASH staffer says. “We know what to call it, only we don’t know how to cure it.”
“There isn’t a cure,” the padre says. “The only treatment is common-sense medicine.”
The TV MASH, as its creator Larry Gelbart appropriately commented, was better remembered than the costly war that inspired it. In his memoir Laughing Matters, Gelbart wrote that his adaptation of Richard Hornberger’s original book was principally a sitcom, obviously going for the laughs. But it was equally ready to sacrifice laughter for a greater message, or, as he put it, “to give the audience either a laugh or a lump in the throat.” He also referred to the show’s realism as life imitating art. And for at least one of its viewers, truer words could not have been uttered.
Don Flieger, a service corps corporal in the Canadian Army during the real Korean War, recalled the round-the-clock life of what was called “moving control” at Kimpo Airfield, near Seoul. In 1951, as the war moved toward a stalemate at the thirty-eighth parallel to the north, Flieger and his supply and service crew of twenty men scrambled onto the tarmac dozens of times each day to service the flying transports, mostly from the Royal Australian Air Force. The Dakota aircraft would barely have rolled to a stop when Flieger’s crew converged to off-load its food, medical supplies, weapons, ammunition, beer, and cigarettes destined to head north toward the front lines. Then, if required, the moving-control crew would load casualties heading for hospitals in Japan or, occasionally, when loading for US destinations, coffins of war-dead bound for home.
“Seeing all these coffins going back was a pretty graphic way to remind you of the life and death of the war,” Flieger said. “But I was never close to the battle. You could just hear it in the distance.”21
In what some called a bombproof job, Flieger continued the repetitive routine of off-loading and loading, day and night, for the better part of eight months. During rare moments of down time, Flieger and his comrades amused themselves with an odd form of target practice. Armed with flashlights and 9 mm pistols, the men sat at the edge of Kimpo Airfield in the dark tracking down and shooting rats, some as large as house cats, Flieger remembered. Rat hunting was both a distraction and a way to contain an exploding rat population around the supplies, which were sometimes stored on the airfield. But one February morning he awoke in his tent to discover redness on his ankles and wrists, the only skin on his body exposed at night.
“It started out as a rash and then the rash turned into blisters,” Flieger said. “Some were pinhead size, some the size of a fingernail. . . . Then the blisters broke and started to bleed. . . . I didn’t know whether I had leprosy or what. I was just terrified.”
Uninformed and unable to diagnose his ailment, but wise enough to seek help, Kimpo Airfield staff raced Cpl. Flieger to the 8055th MASH in Seoul. By that time he had a body temperature of 104 degrees. The MASH doctors were not familiar with hemorrhagic fever, and tried penicillin. After several days, when Flieger’s condition hadn’t changed, they shipped him to the military hospital in Kure, Japan, where an American doctor recognized the symptoms and reacted with the only antidote he knew. “He told me that all the tests indicated I had hemorrhagic fever,” Flieger said, “and the only possible cure [was] massive blood transfusions.”
What the American doctor didn’t tell his patient was that the mortality rate was as high as 80 percent. Hospital medical staff transfused Flieger right away. He remembered that the procedure required seven or eight bags of blood, all introduced into his system in less than three hours. Four days later they flew him to the island of Midway and from there to Hawaii, where they transfused his system yet again, and again at a military base in San Francisco; he received another transfusion in Tacoma, Washington, and another in Chicago.
“It took me a month to get home to Saint John, New Brunswick,” he said. “I had eight complete transfusions. I was one of the few survivors.”
Had the MASH staff in Korea, the American doctor in Japan, and the military medical staffs in North America not responded with as much “common-sense medicine” as fictional character Father John Mulcahy recommended in that episode of M*A*S*H, real-life patient Don Flieger might never have made it home alive—nor, as it turned out, back to Korea for a second tour of duty when he regained his health.