IT WASN’T ANY DIFFERENT getting killed in World War II than in the Civil War, but if the shrapnel, bullet, or tree limb wounded a GI without killing him, his experience as a casualty was infinitely better than Johnny Reb’s or Billy Yank’s, beginning with his survival chances. Military medicine had vastly improved in the twentieth century. The medical team, from medics in the field to the nurses and doctors in the tent-city hospitals, compiled a remarkable record. Over 85 percent of the soldiers who underwent emergency operations in a mobile field or evacuation hospital survived. Fewer than 4 percent of all patients admitted to a field hospital died. In the Civil War it had been more like 50 percent.
Wonder drugs and advanced surgical techniques made the improvements possible, but it was people who had to get the wounded into a hospital before it was too late for the nurses and the drugs and the surgeons to do their work. Those people were the medics.
In an infantry battalion of twelve platoons, there were thirty to forty medics. After time on the line, whether a week or a month, most units were down to one medic per platoon. The medics varied as much in motivation as in size and shape, but a common theme was a refusal to kill along with a desire to serve.
One of the heroes at Pointe-du-Hoc on D-Day, Pvt. Ralph “Preacher” Davis of the Rangers, asked in September to be transferred to the Medical Corps, for religious reasons. He was accepted immediately, as volunteers for the Medics were hard to find. On a night patrol, Preacher got hit in the back by a sniper. He was paralyzed below the waist. (After the war he achieved his ambition of becoming an ordained minister, before he died of the wound.) Sgt. Frank South said Preacher was “deeply respected for his courage—proven in battle—and his devotion—also proven.”1
The combat experience brought forth from Preacher a strong moral reaction. Others had strong responses, too, but sometimes in the opposite direction. Preacher couldn’t bring himself to kill anymore; some men who started out as medics because of religious conviction changed on encountering the reality of war—they requested transfer to the line company, meaning they wanted to pick up a rifle and shoot back.
The medics had done all the training an infantryman did, except for weapons. In training camp, the medics had been segregated into their own barracks, kept away from the men they were learning to save, apparently for fear of contamination of the real soldiers. The rifle-carrying enlisted men and the medics developed little camaraderie. One lieutenant confessed that he and his platoon “mildly despised” the men of the Medical Corps because they were conscientious objectors.2 Their mere presence cast a moral shadow over what the infantrymen were training to do. They were often ridiculed, called names such as “pill pusher,”I and the tourniquets and bandages they put on imagined wounds in field exercises were a joke. So was their only real work, treating blisters and the like.
But in combat, they were loved and admired without stint. “Overseas,” Medic Buddy Gianelloni recalled, “it became different. They called you Medic and before you know it, it was Doc. I was nineteen at the time.”3
On countless occasions, when I’ve asked a veteran during an interview if he remembered any medics, the old man would say something like, “Bravest man I ever saw. Let me tell you about him . . .” Here is a typical account: Pvt. Mike DeBello got hit by a machine-gun bullet that ripped right through the upper muscle of his right arm. “Doc Mellon was the bravest kid I ever saw. He came running right through the machine-gun fire and put a tourniquet on my arm.” Mellon got smashed by the concussion from an 88. His shoulder was out of the socket. He should have gone back to the aid station, but as he later explained, he felt “there were just too many wounded guys to work on, so I took some codeine and morphine. I couldn’t raise my arm beyond my waist, so here I was trying to work on these wounded guys with one hand.”4
To preserve their noncombatant status under the Geneva Convention, the War Department did not give medics combat pay (ten dollars extra a month) or the right to wear the combat Infantryman Badge. This was bitterly resented. In some divisions riflemen collected money from their own pay to give their medics the combat bonus. As to their right to wear the badge, five enlisted medics in ETO were awarded the Medal of Honor; hundreds won Silver or Bronze Stars.5
Medic Ed Grazcyck of the 4th Division had earned a Bronze Star. Later, when his company underwent a shelling in the Hurtgen Forest, one of the sergeants was killed by shrapnel in the neck and Grazcyck took a large fragment in the back of his head. He was unconscious and looked gone. Beside him, a third man was screaming for a medic. Lt. George Wilson ran to the wounded man and found him “frantically gripping what was left of one arm with his remaining hand. The arm was gone, almost to the shoulder.”
As Wilson stared helplessly, Medic Grazcyck came to. He told Wilson to get a tourniquet on the man, handed him some morphine, explained how to use it, then gave verbal instructions as Wilson sprinkled sulfa powder on the gory stump and bandaged the wound. As Wilson completed the job, both the wounded man and Grazcyck passed out. Wilson got a jeep to carry them back to the aid station. They survived.6
Medics served in the line companies. They were in the foxholes in static situations. But if the Americans were on the offensive they sometimes had to stay behind with the wounded, feeling lonely and abandoned. On other occasions, when an attack failed and the men fell back, medics had to go between the lines to deliver aid and start the wounded man on his way to the field hospital.
Pvt. Byron Whitmarsh of the 99th Division described what it was like for the medics during a shelling: “There are worse things than being a rifleman in the infantry, not many, but being a medic is one of them. When the shelling and shooting gets heavy it is never long until there is a call for ‘MEDIC!’ That’s when your regular GIs can press themselves to the bottom of their hole and don’t need to go out on a mission of mercy.”7
Once the medic reached the wounded man, he did the briefest examination, put a tourniquet on if necessary, injected a vial of morphine, cleaned up the wound as best he could, sprinkled sulfa powder on it, slapped on a bandage, and dragged or carried the patient toward the rear. Pvt. Robert Phillips, a medic with the 28th Division, came to dread the sound of incoming shells and the invariable “Medic!” cry that forced him to leave his hole. As he worked, shell fragments whittled down the trees and casualties increased. He remembered for the rest of his life the job of examining a wounded man at night, cutting away clothes in the darkness, feeling for the wound: “It was like putting your hand in a bucket of wet liver.”8
Pvt. Benedict Battista was a medic with the 90th Division who went the whole way from Utah Beach to Central Europe, “trying to save lives.” After the war, he reflected, “I don’t regret what I did but if I had to do it all over again I wouldn’t want to be a medic. I have seen too much blood. I would want to be in a maintenance outfit in the army.”9
On his initial mission in the field, Sergeant Gianelloni came near to total failure. “The first person that I treated who was wounded happened to be an old rough-and-tough sergeant. He had a piece of shrapnel go through his boot and up there by his toes and it wasn’t a serious wound, but to him it was. . . . I sat down alongside of him and he was moaning and groaning, and I said well I have got to cut your shoe off and he said well come on don’t talk get me taken care of, so I cut his shoe off and I am getting ready to put the bandage on and I looked down and there is blood all over my hand, so I lean over the side and I have the dry heaves.
“And he is getting more aggravated by the minute this sergeant. He says come on don’t do that, he said take care of me. I said I am doing the best I can.”
The patient was getting nervous, and he was armed and angry. Gianelloni decided to give him a shot of morphine, not because he needed it but because “I didn’t want that son of a gun to get all worked up. So I got a morphine packet out of my pouch and I rolled up his sleeve and I pushed it in his arm there and I am squeezing that thing and squeezing it and he is yelling and I’m squeezing and finally the damn thing broke. I said, oh, I forgot to puncture the needle. I said oh.”
Gianelloni threw the packet away. His patient picked up his rifle “and he said, ‘you bastard you better take care of me or I am going to shoot you.’ I said, ‘Just one more time,’ so I got another packet and I punctured the needle that time and I gave him a half of a grain of morphine. That got him reeling.” It should have—according to Gianelloni one sixteenth of a grain is sufficient to knock a man out for an operation.10
If the medic didn’t do the job right and fast, he lost the patient. And sometimes he had to deliver his first aid while under aimed enemy fire because occasionally Germans would fire at a medic at work between the lines. Private Phillips was wounded while tending to a wounded man. On Christmas Day, Pvt. Louis Potts of the 26th Division was fired on while attending a wounded soldier. He stayed in the snow-covered field and went to work on another casualty. This time the German sniper got him in the forehead. His sergeant commented, “Potts was small in stature. . . . He did his very best to help the wounded, regardless of personal danger.”11
I’ve heard dozens of such stories, from German and American veterans, usually, however, from a man who heard about such a thing as opposed to seeing it himself. Albert Cowdrey of the U.S. Army’s Center of Military History insists that they were uncommon. He points out that careful studies demonstrated that “the Germans by and large were following the Geneva Convention.” Although men wearing their Red Cross armband were shot, sometimes it was because the red cross had not been seen. The response of the medics is conclusive: it was to make themselves more visible, not less. They began to wear two armbands and paint a red cross in a white square on their helmets. They were confident that most Germans or GIs would respect the symbol if only it could be seen. (Cowdrey contrasts this with the Pacific War, where medics were special targets of the Japanese and responded by taking off the armbands and even dyeing their bandages jungle green.)12
Lt. Wenzel Andreas Borgert commanded an antitank unit in the German army in Normandy. He described an American attack in which ten of his fifteen men were wounded. He radioed for an ambulance. “And this much I acknowledge,” Borgert said in an interview, “that at the very second that the big Red Cross flag came over the hill behind me, the Americans stopped firing immediately. I can honestly say that made a big impression on me, because there was no such thing as Red Cross on the Russian front.”
Both sides tended to their wounded. Borgert noticed an American officer and crossed no-man’s-land to talk. The American opened the conversation in German.
“Where did you learn such good German?” Borgert asked.
“My family is German,” he said. Then he asked Borgert if he didn’t want to surrender, as “Germany has lost the war in any case.” No, Borgert replied. He would continue to fight. But he let the American know that as soon as dark came, he intended to pull back from his present position.
“Then I won’t attack you till dark,” the American replied, and it was done.13
Americans sometimes shot medics. Maj. John Cochran of the 90th Division recalled a forward observer who would call for a barrage when he knew the Germans were eating—he had a sixth sense about it, according to Cochran. After calling for a cease fire, he would say, “Get ready to do it again.” He explained to Cochran that in five or ten minutes “their medics will come out to treat the casualties and we’ll get them, too.”14
Sgt. Robert Bowen of the 101st recalled that on December 23, in the Bulge, two men from his platoon were wounded. “They lay in the snow, one babbling incoherently and the other screaming.” Bowen tried to get to them, but German fire drove him off. Medic Evert Padget said he would try, explaining that the Germans would honor his Red Cross patch. “He went out there. It was one of the bravest acts I had ever witnessed. Enemy bullets were plowing up the snow around him until he reached the wounded men. Then the German fire slackened and he tended the two men—although both were beyond rescue, at least Padget gave them some morphine. Then he returned to the American line and the firing resumed.” Bowen confessed, “I thought of the wounded Germans who had lain in the road the day before and our guys had tried to kill whomever went out to help them.”15
In Normandy, on D-Day Plus Two, Pvt. Ken Webster of the 101st saw a German jeep pop out of some smoke and drive boldly through the village of Vierville. It was flying a large Red Cross flag and carried two wounded Germans on stretchers in back, with a big husky German paratrooper at the wheel. It was so surprising a sight, no one made a move to stop it, until finally when it was almost out of the village an American officer stopped it. Webster described the result: “The jeep was commandeered. The driver, a medic, was shot for carrying a pistol, and the two wounded men were left by the side of the road to die.”16
Lt. Charles Stockell saw medics fight each other. His diary for July 25 reads, “An American medic and a German medic in No Man’s Land treating the wounded get into a fist fight. The war stops for 10 minutes until the American clobbers the Kraut.”17
On one occasion, a medic inspired a company to seize an objective. Captain Colby’s company was on the Our River during the Bulge. Colby told his men to attack across the frozen river. They did but were driven back by a machine gun.
All but one man made it back to the American-held bank of the river. He was a casualty. As Colby related the story, “He lay still in the middle of the frozen river. A medic (I am pretty sure it was Vosburg) left the pitiful concealment on our bank of the river and made his way to the fallen man’s side. The machine-gun opened up again. Spurts of snow flew up from the burst, which were falling around the two.
“The medic got to his feet and stepped across the wounded man, thus placing himself between the machine-gun fire and the casualty. Lying in the snow, he began tending his patient.
“With that, the rest of Company E headed across the river to the far side, each man banging off a few shots as he went.” The wounded man survived and the attack was a success.18
Too often, when the medic arrived the man was dead. In that case it was the medic’s responsibility to oversee the retrieving and hauling of the body back to a Graves Registration crew. Bill Mauldin described one such crew. Its personnel, he said, “could have played the gravediggers in Hamlet.”19 They were usually drunk, a necessary condition for their job.
They became callous. Pvt. Kurt Gabel of the 17th Airborne described the day he had participated in the gruesome job of finding and stacking up the dead from his outfit following a failed attack in a snow-covered field. The bodies were frozen. After a morning’s work, Gabel and his buddies had a large stack. A Graves Registration crew drove up in a deuce-and-a-half truck. Two guys got in the back of the truck, two others went to the pile.
The two on the ground grabbed a body by shoulders and legs and swung him three times to gain momentum, chanting, “one—two—three—heave!” The body flew through the air and landed on the truck with a thump. The men on the truck dragged the corpse to the far end and got ready for the next. They did it again.
Gabel stepped forward. He looked like the combat infantryman he was. He had his rifle dangling from his shoulder. Touching it lightly, he said in a matter-of-fact voice, “You do that once more and I’ll blow your goddamn heads off.”
For a moment, no one moved. Then the men on the truck slowly climbed down, and the four-man crew gently lifted the next body and placed it on the truck.20
The men killed in action were buried as soon as possible in small temporary cemeteries, later dug up and taken to a division or army cemetery in the rear. This too was temporary. After the war ended, the family had the right to have the body brought home. Many parents or widows decided, however, to leave their loved ones where they fell. Those bodies went into one of the beautifully landscaped military cemeteries maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission. The largest are in Normandy and Luxembourg.
Robert Bradley was an aid man with the 30th Infantry Division. He had been a medical student before the war. A religious man, he preferred to save rather than to kill. He went into Omaha Beach on June 10. He slept along a hedgerow. Starting at dawn, through to the end of the war, he set about saving lives.21
His instruments were crude. He tied scissors to one of his wrists with a shoestring in order to have them handy to cut away bloody clothing. He carried extra compresses in his gas mask container. His raincoat had many patches cut out of the tail, because he had learned to slap a piece of raincoat on a sucking chest wound, then cover it with a compress.
In Normandy, Bradley learned how to get to his patients in a hurry. In basic training he had detested learning to turn somersaults, but he found that the best way to go over a hedgerow was in a dive, headfirst. Then he would dash to the wounded man in the open field, a man who had been abandoned and who was utterly dependent on the medic. Bradley remembered “the unspeakable light of hope in the eyes of the wounded as we popped over a hedgerow.”22
Sgt. Frank South, a medic in the Rangers, noticed something that also struck other medics: “During training it was not uncommon to hear one say, ‘If I lose a leg (arm or whatever) please shoot me. I don’t want to go home a cripple.’ Never, in combat, did I, or anyone I know, hear this, no matter how bad the wound.”23
An officer in the 90th Division remarked, “We had so much faith in our medics’ ability that we firmly believed we would not die if they got to us in time.”24 Lt. Jack Foley of the 101st Airborne had typical praise for his medic, Pvt. Eugene Roe. “He was there when he was needed, and how he got ‘there’ you often wondered. . . . He struggled in the snow and the cold, in the many attacks through the open and through the woods.”25
When the temperature went below the zero mark Fahrenheit, even the medic couldn’t help. “What worked against the soldier was shock,” Pvt. Richard Roush, a medic in the 84th Division, said. “It didn’t really make much difference whether a soldier was barely or severely wounded in that extremely cold weather, he would immediately go into shock. We couldn’t do anything for him because we didn’t have any means to warm a wounded soldier. We could not save him.”26
“The medic could do more with less to do with than anyone,” Ken Russell of the 82nd Airborne remarked.27 The medic seldom had much, and often not enough. Morphine was a most important drug, because it would relax the wounded man and help keep him from going into shock. In the Bulge, to keep it from freezing, the medics carried it next to their bodies. One man carried his in his underwear top. Others carried their morphine under their arms.
During the Bulge, Medic Roush kept the life-saving plasma in a metal pan he placed on top of the engine. Since his jeep had no antifreeze, he had to run the engine every half hour anyway, which kept the plasma from freezing. But “after about five days of this I could go no further so I just fell out and went to sleep. When I awoke my jeep was frozen and so was the blood plasma.”28
Carrying so much morphine around a battlefield proved to be a temptation at least one medic could not resist. Medic Gianelloni related the story. There was a shelling. He heard the cry “Medic!” “I said, ‘oh shit,’ got up and went in the direction of the call for help.” It took him into the next platoon’s area. He asked who was hurt. “Doc, look over there,” one of the GIs responded. There was the platoon medic, walking like a zombie, even as shells continued to come in. Gianelloni tackled him and discovered he had given himself morphine when the shelling began. It turned out he had become an addict.29
Once the wounded man was behind the main line of foxholes, four litter bearers from the forward aid station, located a few hundred yards to the rear, summoned by radio or telephone, would come forward to evacuate him. That usually took about fifteen minutes. They would haul the soldier to wherever they had parked their jeep—25 meters to 100 meters back—load him into one of the four litter bearers mounted on the jeep, and drive as rapidly as possible to the battalion aid station, a kilometer or so to the rear.30
In early August, Lieutenant Stockell of the 2nd Infantry Division was hit badly in the leg—twenty deep shrapnel wounds. A medic got to him, did some patch work, and helped him to the rear. There a jeep awaited. “I am laid across the hood,” Stockell wrote in his diary, “like a slaughtered deer.”
At the aid station, “it is a blur. I did wake up in a field hospital to find two doctors taking my combat boots off and stealing my Luger pistol. I protest but then the fog closes in again.”
In the field hospital, doctors gave Stockell more morphine and plasma and an antitetanus shot. They removed his bandages and cleaned up the wounds, put on fresh bandages, made a tentative diagnosis of his case, and labeled him for evacuation. An ambulance took him to Omaha Beach—he remained unconscious—where he was transferred by landing craft to an LST, then taken to Portsmouth, then by rail to the hospital.
“I next woke up in England.” From the time he was wounded until he was in a modern hospital across the Channel took twenty hours. There he recovered, as did more than 99 percent of the men evacuated from Normandy to England.31
Corp. Walter Gordon of the 101st was one of them. Outside Bastogne on Christmas Eve, he was hit in the left shoulder by a sniper’s bullet. It passed out from the right shoulder. It had brushed his spinal column; he was paralyzed from the neck down. Two buddies hauled him out of his foxhole and dragged him back into the woods—“as a gladiator was dragged from the arena,” according to Gordon—where the medic gave him morphine and plasma. Sgt. Carwood Lipton held the plasma bottle under his arm to keep it flowing. Within minutes, a jeep was taking Gordon to the forward aid station.
An hour after he was wounded, Gordon was in an ambulance headed toward an evacuation hospital in Sedan. There—still the same day—he was marked for air evacuation to England. Once there, the doctors put Crutchfield tongs on him to keep him immobile. For six weeks he lay on his back with no movement. His recovery was not rapid but it was complete. Gordon went on to live a full and successful life.32
Air evacuation was more comfortable as well as much faster than going to England by LST. And it was safer. Worldwide, only forty-six of the 1,176,048 patients air-evacuated throughout the war died en route.33
The remarkable rate of recovery for wounded GIs was based on mass-production, assembly-line practices. How well it worked, from the medic to the aid station to the field hospital to England, can be judged by the reaction of the men of the front line, who were almost certain to get caught up in the process, with their lives depending on it. As one lieutenant put it, “We were convinced the Army had a regulation against dying in an aid station.”34
The recovery rate also benefited from the general physical condition of the wounded. First of all the GIs were selective even within their age group. One out of three potential inductees was rejected by the Army doctors for physical reasons—a telling reminder of the effects of the Depression on the American people. Second, they were, generally, in excellent physical condition. Third, they were free from body lice, thanks to DDT, and adequately fed. As against this, they were generally exhausted even before the shock of injury hit them. But if the medic could get to the wounded man in time to stop the bleeding and prevent shock, his chances for recovery were excellent.
Most patients came back to consciousness in the field or evacuation hospital. They were groggy from the morphine. The first sight many of them saw was a nurse from the Army Nurse Corps (ANC). She was harassed, wearing fatigues, exhausted, and busy. But she was an American girl, she had a marvelous smile, a reassuring attitude, and gentle hands. To the wounded soldier, she looked heaven-sent.
The first nurses to enter the Continent came in on June 10 at Omaha. They were members of the 42nd and 45th Field Hospitals and the 91st and 128th Evacuation Hospitals. They were the vanguard of the 17,345 ANC who served in ETO in 1944–45. That was seventeen times as many ANC personnel as existed in the entire Army in 1942. By 1945, total ANC strength was nearly 60,000.
These pioneers had to overcome many obstacles. The first was the act of volunteering. There was a nationwide slander campaign about women in uniform, as vicious as it was false. The jokes were gross. They were told by rear-echelon soldiers and civilians. No one who had ever seen an Army nurse in action in a field hospital, nor any wounded soldier, ever told such jokes. But because they were so widely told by people who didn’t know what they were talking about, recruitment slowed down to a trickle. A questionnaire showed that of those nurses who did volunteer, 41 percent had to overcome the opposition of close relatives. Only half said their closest male friends were supportive, whereas 80 percent of their closest female friends had supported their decisions.35
Under the circumstances, recruitment was insufficient. To speed it up, the Army made the ANC more attractive. From June 1944 onward, nurses were given officers’ commissions, full retirement privileges, dependents’ allowances, and equal pay. And the government provided free education to nursing students.
In his January 1945 State of the Union Address, President Roosevelt referred to the critical shortage of nurses in Western Europe and proposed that nurses be drafted. A bill to do so passed the House and came within one vote in the Senate.36
One untapped source was African-American nurses. When the war ended there were only 479 black nurses in a corps of 60,000. This was because the Army assigned a quota, not because the black nurses didn’t want to serve. But in the America of that day, it was unthinkable that black nurses could care for white American soldiers. (In June 1944 one unit of sixty-three African-American nurses went to a hospital in England, to care for German POWs.)37
The continuing shortage of nurses meant that those who served at field or evacuation hospitals were badly overworked. The experiences of the 77th Evacuation Hospital were typical. By mid-1944, the 77th was a veteran outfit. It had been in England in the summer of 1942, then went to Oran in November, on to Constantine in January 1943, Tébessa in February, La Meskiana in March, Tébessa again, Bone in April, Palermo in September, on to Licta in October, and in November back to England to get ready for D-Day. Clearly the battalion-sized team knew how to pick up and move in a hurry.
On July 7, 1944, the 77th entered Normandy at Utah Beach. It set up at Ste.-Mère-Eglise. It was open within a day. During the first twelve hours it treated 1,450 patients, or two per minute. In the first six days the 77th handled 6,304 patients in triage. For the first week, patients came in at a round-the-clock rate of one per minute.
The ambulances coming from the battalion aid stations had to line up, three abreast, in lines reaching up to 200 yards. The six doctors worked as rapidly as possible but were only just able to keep up with the litter bearers carrying patients in from the ambulance and out the back of the receiving tent. Not only were litters coming and going; there was space for 100 litters in the tent and it was nearly always filled. There were litters bearing wounded men in open spaces on the ground outside the tent. Along the sides of the tent sat the walking wounded, clutching their souvenirs. A tag showed whether and how much morphine the casualty had received from the medic. The doctors went from patient to patient, asking questions, scanning each record, lifting the dressing to check each wound.38
The nurses changed dressings, administered medications, checked each record, monitored the vital signs, and while they were doing those jobs they rearranged the blankets and gave the soldier a smile. They were too busy to do much more. As Lt. Aileen Hogan described her experiences in Normandy, “I have never worked so hard in my life. I can’t call it nursing. The boys get in, get emergency treatment, penicillin and sulfa, and are out again. It is beyond words.”39
Red Cross volunteers helped meet the need for comfort. The first two Red Cross women to arrive in Normandy were hospital workers, Jean Dockhorn and Jascah Hart. They waded ashore with the first Army nurses on June 10 and went to work. On July 31, Red Cross hospital worker Beatrice Cockram described her activities and emotions: “To walk down a ward virtually made my heart bleed to see how much was to be done just washing faces and giving drinks of water. The nurses are too busy with the vital blood plasma, penicillin and sulfa treatments.”40
Lt. Aileen Hogan was forty-two years old when she volunteered for the ANC a few days after Pearl Harbor. She was with the 2nd General Hospital Unit in Normandy. She described her duties on the penicillin team. “At seven [1900 hours] all the penicillin needed for the first round is mixed and two technicians and one nurse make the rounds of the hospital giving penicillin to the patients. One loads the syringes and changes needles, the other two give the hypos. At the rate of 60 to a tent, one gets groggy. It is an art to find your way around at night, not a glimmer of light anywhere, no flashlights of course, the tents just a vague silhouette against the darkness, ropes and tent pins a constant menace, syringes and precious medications balanced precariously on one arm.”41
When the nurses had waded ashore at Omaha or Utah, they had rolled their pants legs up to keep them from getting wet. Such niceties didn’t last long. Lt. Mary Eaton told her friends back home that the nurse in France “shows only trousers and shirts, leggings, and boots in her summer wardrobe this year. Headgear is a tin helmet, worn at all times.”42
After its month at Ste.-Mère-Eglise, the 77th Evacuation Hospital moved forward to St.-Lô, then Le Mans, next Chartres, where it arrived on August 24, close behind the advancing line. One member wrote a vivid description of the countryside in the wake of battle: “Along the sides of the roads, the fields were filled with grain and the farmers were beginning to harvest. An occasional field was dotted with foxholes where the infantry had dug in. All along the road, on each side about forty yards apart, were foxholes, covered and marked by a wisp of straw tied to the top of a pole. These had been dug with military preciseness by a retreating enemy for protection of the drivers, who could leap into them when Allied planes began a strafing attack.
“Just outside Chartres, enemy hangars and barracks had been blasted into heaps of debris. Neighboring fields were pock-marked with bomb craters. Stacks of enemy aerial bombs still piled around the field. Near the barracks a large garden had been planted by enemy airmen and the vegetables were still in the neat, orderly beds.”
The hospital set up outside Chartres, in a field that soon became mud up to the hubs of the trucks. The mud clung to shoes in huge clumps. Nevertheless, by evening the pyramidal tents for quarters and many of the hospital tents had been erected, and by early afternoon the next day the hospital was completely set up and ready to receive patients.
Later, outside Verviers during the Bulge, the 77th underwent a heavy artillery bombardment and deliberate strafing from German fighters. Two dozen nurses were wounded. Even as the strafing planes returned, most of the injured nurses were being tended to—they had become patients.
The mission of the 77th at Verviers—which was about twenty kilometers east of Liège—was that of a holding unit, which meant a combination of triage, holding, and evacuation. It was at this point that the patients were sorted out. The doctors made the decision. They sent a few men directly back to duty. Others were tagged for a general hospital in Liège, where they would spend a few days before being returned to duty. Those who would take longer to heal went to Paris. Most of them traveled by rail. A few were tagged for immediate air evacuation to England.
During the Bulge, the hospital was all but overwhelmed. The capacity was supposed to be 750 patients, but more than double that number were in the hospital by late December. Despite the overload, the Red Cross workers and nurses managed to put up some Christmas decorations and provide wrapped Christmas presents to the patients—candy, books, various toilet articles. And the cooks provided a Christmas dinner for all that featured turkey and the works, plus grapes and apples.
Funny stories helped them keep going. One concerned a Red Cross worker, Miss Eisenstadt, who picked up a chart expecting to see where and how the patient was wounded. What she saw astonished her.
“How on earth did you ever get shot with two arrows?” she blurted out.
The full-blooded American Indian on the cot replied with righteous indignation, “That’s my name, not my injury!”43
In a letter home, nurse Ruth Hess described setting up and opening a field hospital that had moved forward in the wake of the American sweep through France: “We arrived late in the evening and spent all nite getting ready to receive patients. We worked until 3:00 p.m. Then started nite duty, 12 hours at 7:30 p.m. For nine days we never stopped. 880 patients operated; small debridement of gun shot and shrapnel wounds, numerous amputations, fractures galore, perforated guts, livers, spleens, kidneys, lungs, etc. everything imaginable. We cared for almost 1500 patients in those nine days.” Then the hospital packed up and moved forward.44
Like many of the nurses, Hess found herself weak with admiration for the wounded men. Lt. Frances Slanger of the 45th Field Hospital expressed the feeling in an October letter addressed to Stars and Stripes but written to the troops: “You G.I.’s say we nurses rough it. We wade ankle deep in mud. You have to lie in it. We have a stove and coal. . . . In comparison to the way you men are taking it, we can’t complain, nor do we feel that bouquets are due us. . . . It is to you we doff our helmets.
“We have learned about our American soldier and the stuff he is made of. The wounded don’t cry. Their buddies come first. The patience and determination they show, the courage and fortitude they have is sometimes awesome to behold. It is a privilege to receive you and a great distinction to see you open your eyes and with that swell American grin, say, ‘Hi-ya, babe.’ ”
Slanger was killed the following day by an artillery shell. She was one of seventeen Army nurses killed in combat.45
In January 1945, Lt. Marjorie LaPalme was with the 41st Evacuation Hospital in Belgium, caring for the wounded from the Bulge. Her patients, she wrote home, “always have a smile . . . always wanting to talk to us about home and families. Great kids. I love them all! Like my own brothers!
“When I came over here I was just 21—among the youngest—Now these kids are coming in at eighteen.”46
Whatever their age, the nurses bore their burdens and met their responsibilities and stayed cheerful. “The life of an army nurse,” Lt. Hess wrote home. “I love it!”47
“Doctors in all military hospitals did a great job,” Ken Russell of the 82nd Airborne remarked. He knew; he had been their patient. “The doctor in the forward field hospital was one of the most dedicated people you could meet. He would work long hours without adequate supplies—and the wonderful nurses did the same thing. They did not even have decent lighting. I have heard of them picking shrapnel or a bullet out of a wounded man by flashlight.”48
Their patients were often mangled beyond imagination. Dr. William McConahey was a battalion surgeon in the 90th Division in Normandy. “I’ve never seen such horrible wounds, before or since,” he wrote. “Legs off, arms off, faces shot away, eviscerations, chests ripped open and so on. We worked at top speed, hour after hour, until we were too tired to stand up—and then we still kept going.”49
Dr. Joseph Gosman was an orthopedic surgeon with the 109th Evacuation Hospital. He got to Normandy in time for the St.-Lô battle. “I was floored by the turmoil,” he recalled. One patient had been in a jeep when it set off a mine. X-rays showed “undamaged bolts, washers, bushing in the muscle as on a work-bench.” Another man had been shot in the side. The bullet entered a large vein and “floated” in the current of the vein into the right ventricle of the heart and then into the left auricle. The X-ray showed it bobbing in the heart chamber. A third soldier was carrying a Swiss Army knife in his pants pocket. Shrapnel had hit it, and bits of knife and shell entered his thigh together. “X-ray picture looked like a table setting with knife, fork and spoon and other stuff.” A fourth was crouched beside a manure pile when a shell landed on it, “filling his thigh from knee to buttocks with manure, all tightly packed as into a sausage.” These were a few of the almost 200,000 battle-wounded men who were treated in the hospitals in 1944.50
Gosman noticed a look among survivors of such wounds. It was “an appearance of naked bankruptcy, the stunned emptiness . . . of men whom death had breathed on and passed by.” He was especially struck by a GI lying on his bunk, silent, who looked “like somebody rescued from the ledge of a skyscraper.” He read the chart and was astonished to learn that the soldier had been shot in the neck. The bullet had entered on the left, missed the nerves, carotid artery, and jugular vein, drilled a neat hole in the spinal column without touching the spinal cord, and exited. The man needed no surgery; his chief symptom was a sore neck.51
In Bastogne, the medical team of the 101st was sorely tried. The aid station became a field hospital, accumulating wounded. There were doctors present, sometimes working twenty-four-hour shifts. When they ran out of plasma they took fresh blood from the lightly wounded and combat exhaustion cases. The surgeons attempted no major operations, concentrating instead on keeping their patients alive until definitive surgery could be done at a general hospital.
Two days before Christmas, a successful airdrop provided penicillin, morphine, litters, and blankets. Still the patients suffered. Infection was spreading in the “wards” (which were generally in cellars) and they stank of gas gangrene. The 101st put out a call for help that was answered by volunteer surgeons who flew into Bastogne by glider and set up their operating theater in a tool room next to a garage.
For all medical teams the Bulge was a huge crisis. Trench foot cases outnumbered gunshot, shrapnel, and wood wounds. Army medical historian Albert Cowdrey comments, “The marvel is that the medical system continued to operate under the burdens imposed simultaneously by weather and war.”52
Both sides treated the enemy wounded in their hands, as well as they could. Captured medical teams were put to work. Lt. Briand Beudin, a surgeon with the 101st who parachuted into Normandy shortly after midnight, June 6, was taken prisoner at 0300 in the aid station he had set up. The Germans helped carry the American wounded to one of their aid stations, “where we medics were treated as friends by the German medical personnel.” The doctors worked together through the night and the following days. Although a prisoner for some weeks, Beudin found his stay at the 91st Feldlazarett to be “most interesting.” He learned German techniques and taught them American methods.53
The German doctors, with a land line of communications, had a supply crisis in France, while the American doctors, with the Atlantic Ocean between them and their supplies, were well supplied. This was due to the Allied air forces, dominating the skies over France. It put the German medical teams in a desperate situation. They made do with what they had. Nurse Ruth Hess wrote home on August 8 to report, “We sent our surgical teams and our men to a German hospital that had been captured to operate and evacuate the patients to us. All the work the Germans did was dirty surgery—every one was covered with pus, gangrene, bed sores, and filth—absolutely skin and bones. . . .”54
Her scorn was real but not typical. Usually when the young warriors started comparing living conditions—what’s it like on the other side?—the answer often came out, “better.” Ex-GIs tell me, vehemently, how much better the German boots were than the American, but I’ve heard just the opposite from ex-Wehrmacht. So too for equipment and weapons.
Most of all for food. The Germans envied the Americans their rations—especially the cigarettes and chocolate bars—not only in their quantity, but quality. But whenever GIs overran a storage area for the German field kitchens, they marveled at the wonders they beheld.
A nurse in the 77th Evacuation Hospital remembered the glories of a ration dump outside Chartres (including vegetables ready for harvest outside the barracks). “Delicious sardines and cheese,” she wrote. “The cheese was put up in a collapsible tube like toothpaste, and was of the variety which smells so bad but tastes so good. There were eggs and oranges.”55
The doctors had to be shrinks as well as surgeons. Some of the patients—as many as 25 percent when the fighting was heavy—were uninjured physically but were babbling, crying, shaking, or stunned, unable to hear or to talk. These were the combat exhaustion casualties. It was the doctors’ job to get as many as possible back to normalcy—and back to the lines—as soon as possible.
In the field hospitals, the American doctors treated the men as temporarily disabled soldiers rather than mental patients, normally categorizing them with the diagnosis “exhaustion.” For the sake of both prevention and cure, the doctors tried to treat such patients as close as possible to the line. Typically the doctors at battalion level kept the exhaustion cases at their aid stations for twenty-four hours of rest, often under sedation. The men got hot food and a change of clothing. In as many as three quarters of the cases, that was sufficient, and the soldier went back to his foxhole.56
Good company commanders already knew that to be the case. Captain Winters of the 101st commented that he learned during the Bulge “the miracle that would occur with a man about to crack if you could just get him out of his foxhole and back to the CP for a few hours. Hot food, hot drink, a chance to warm up—that’s what he needed to keep going.”57
Men who needed more than a quick visit to the CP or battalion aid station were sent back to division medical facilities, where the division psychiatrist operated an “exhaustion center” that could hold patients for three days of treatment. The bulk of these men were also returned to the line. Those who had not recovered went on to the neuropsychiatric wards of general hospitals for seven days of therapy and reconditioning. The extreme cases were air-evacuated to the States.58
The system worked. Ninety of every hundred men diagnosed as exhaustion cases in ETO were restored to some form of duty—usually on the line. As they had done with the men wounded by bullets and shrapnel, so did the medics, nurses, and doctors do for the exhausted casualties—give them the best possible medical care ever achieved in an army in combat to that date.
I. Or “shank mechanics” because of the salt tablets they handed out.