I went into the service on October 7, 1942, and shipped out to the Pacific on the SS Matsonia, an ocean liner they’d converted into a troopship. We were going from Hawaii on to New Guinea. Besides the Navy crew, our entire regiment was on it, probably about 9,000 men, all three battalions.
I was in New Guinea and later the Philippines, but it was pretty much the same routine for us medics. The medical officer stayed there in the Aid Station, and they had phones. We also had twelve litter men, four for each company. But when you got five or six knocked down in, say, thirty minutes, then you’d have to improvise litters and use the natives. We hired a slew of them to help us with the litters!
So the litter men would carry the wounded and dead down when they couldn’t get an ambulance to them, and we were in a lot of terrain where this happened. In one place it was two-and-a-half miles to the closest vehicle! I was actually an assistant ambulance driver for a while. If we ran out of litters, you had to improvise some way or another, and sometimes you’d get two poles and take a couple of jackets and pull those jackets nice and tight over the poles, right in through the sleeves, and you’d have a pretty good litter.
So anyway, we had twelve first aid men, and by that I mean field men, medics, and that is what I ended up doing. But of the twelve of us, they gave three medics to each company, and each company consisted of three platoons for combat. I stayed with Company A all the way through.
We found out right off that the worst of it was that they gave us those big radio packs to carry our stuff in. We took them because we were carrying blood plasma and all the stuff you had to carry, and it all wouldn’t fit into the bags we did have. So these radio packs were like big backpacks, but sometimes we’d get mistaken for radio men! Usually we’d take along several units of blood plasma, all sorts of bandages, all kinds of tape, scissors, compresses, morphine Syrettes, and lots of sulfa powder.
If a man had lost a lot of blood, most of them would be in shock. So we’d take his rifle and stick it into the ground with the bayonet on, or if they didn’t have a bayonet we’d use a tree limb or something. And we’d hang the blood plasma bottle above him, string the tube down from it, and get the needle going into the arm, usually.
So we’d be going along and someone would get shot and then you’d hear, “Medic!” And if it was out in the open you had to work and wish. If there was some cover around, like a tree or even big weeds, that was better, but even then you could expect the Japs to fire at you. You were just hoping it all worked out. But a lot of times we had to go right out into open fields. And we had tags, and when you had someone hit you’d write on the tag the approximate time, where the wounds were, if you gave him morphine, what bandage you used, and so on. You’d write all this down and tie the tag onto them. It didn’t take too long, maybe thirty seconds or so. Shrapnel made the worst wounds—big, jagged, torn up wounds. A bullet would make a clean wound.
I never saw anyone flip out and go out of their head, but a lot of them would just drift off. That’s the way it would usually happen. They wouldn’t scream or yell or anything, they’d just mentally drift away. You could look in their eyes and tell it. I guess we lost about ten or twelve like that. We’d just send them back to the rear to the hospital. There wasn’t anything I could do with them. Only about two or three of them came back to the outfit. The rest of them didn’t ever come back.
We were out on patrol one time in the Philippines, and the lieutenant decided we were going to stop for the night in some high grass. He said, “Boys, I think it’ll be all right. Just lay down here in this grass.” The second platoon was dug in on top of the hill. And about one or two in the morning, the Japs set up two of their little old mortars, and they started pumping them into us! Some would explode but a lot were duds, and we could hear them hit the ground. I was face down with my legs spread, and something hit right near one foot. I yelled out, and one of the guys near me says, “Doc, are you hit?” And I looked back and yelled, “I’ve lost a foot!” I’d looked back and saw my shoe off to one side, and I thought my foot had been blown off. But then I could see my foot and the shoe next to it, and I realized it was a dud shell that had knocked my shoe off. While I was figuring this out the guy had come crawling over to help, and he saw my foot and the shoe and he said, “Oh, hell!” So he’s there with me, and I realized I had been hit in the neck. He said, “Your foot’s bleeding a little bit, but it looks like it’s in one piece. But take a look at me, would you?” He stripped his jacket off, and there were holes all over his back—you could stick your finger in some of them, lots of them! He was as bloody as a hog. So I started talking to him, “Well, you’ve got a few here, and there’s one down there.” And he was carrying on, and I knew he was in bad shape. I got him bandaged up and he said, “Man, I wonder if I’m going to get out of here.” And I said, “We’ll have to wait until daylight. If you start out now, it’d be sudden death! There’s no way to get anyone back.” That shelling was bad.
So this guy laid next to me there all night, and I knew he was hurting. I said, “I’m going to give you a shot.” He said, “Well, I wish you would if it would help me.” I gave him one, and I took one myself. And he got to laughing at me, and we laughed the rest of the night!
When it was daylight I walked him down a bit and I knew he was sore. He had shrapnel in his back and legs, great big slugs in him. I don’t know how many he had in him, so I said, “Now you aren’t walking anywhere.” But he wanted to. It was about a half mile to the medics’ tent, and he wanted to walk. He said, “Get me up so I can walk.” I said, “I got one little slug and you got forty or fifty it looks like. I can walk but you can’t!” I made him get on a stretcher, and they carried him down. I was walking along there by the side of him, and he said, “Hey, Doc, you’re not even limping on that peg leg!” He was making fun of me, you know, for thinking I’d had my foot blown off. And I said, “I’m going to kill you before you get to the hospital!”
They got us into the hospital, and the doctor, a major, said to me, “Well, you don’t have too much to worry about. That piece went in but it will work out through the closest bone.” And that’s just what happened—that little piece of shrapnel worked its way out about ten or eleven years later. He said, “Yeah, that shrapnel will work out, but we have to keep you here for a while.” And I said, “I feel guilty. It’s sore but I feel okay, and I’m guilty. My buddies are up there fighting my fight. My friends are all up there.” And the doctor said, “Well, you’ll get back up there soon enough.” And I said, “I just get the feeling my friends are up there fighting for my family, and I’m supposed to be doing that.” But that’s the only time I was ever in the hospital.
So I’m laid up there in the hospital, and this dentist friend of mine comes up to me and says, “Your wife’s going to get a telegram that you were wounded. Her and your mother are going to go crazy before they hear it from you. The telegram will be sent, and your Purple Heart will be right behind it.” And I said, “I don’t want one!” There were a lot of us who didn’t want one because we thought it was a jinx. But I felt better when I found out it meant five points added to my total, so I’d probably get to go home sooner. Well, the next morning I was running a high temperature and I felt pretty bad. And this dentist came to see me and said, “Well, let me scratch a line or two for you.” They knew I had a little girl at home, you know. I went by the nickname of “Pappy” as soon as they found out she’d been born. I was “Pappy” at age twenty-four! We had one guy who was thirty-two, and he was “Old Folks”!
So this dentist sat down there on the side of my cot and wrote a nice little letter to my wife. It dawned on me that she could tell it wasn’t my handwriting, and that would scare her to death anyway! But we got that letter right out airmail, and it beat the telegram. This old boy who delivered the telegram, he came up to her door, and she knew by the expression on his face that he didn’t know she’d already gotten the letter saying I was okay. All he could tell was that it was a telegram from the War Department. He started in by saying, “I hate to deliver these. It makes my life hard.” So she said, “Oh, he’s already written me a letter saying he’s okay.” And he said, “I wish they’d all do that!”
But the dentist told me, “You get that wife of yours a letter in your own handwriting as soon as you are able. She knows this first one isn’t in your handwriting, and she’s probably worried that you are injured worse than we said you were, so you get her a letter quick.”
At the end of the war I got on a hospital ship coming back. It was an old rusty Liberty ship, but they had converted it into a hospital ship. We got on that ship, and they were bringing the ones on with malaria and stuff like that, and they were awfully sick. But then they brought in about eight or ten ambulance loads of guys who were bad off mentally, and we had to lead them across the gangplank, you know, eight or ten deep, and onto the ship. They took them right down and put them in the hold, and some were violent. They didn’t know where they were, and they weren’t putting it on. I mean, you could tell by their eyes that they weren’t putting it on! And I was always glad I didn’t end up like that.