OPPOSITE: Vern Garrett (left front) and members of the medical unit at Eniwetok late in the war. Dr. Kirsch is at left in back row.
I enlisted in the Navy, but I had a little bit of a push. I knew some guys on the local draft board very well, and they said, “Well, you’re going to go pretty quick.” So, I beat them to the punch. You know, I had the opportunity to join the Navy and I wanted to join. So, I enlisted in Indianapolis and went to Great Lakes for boot camp. So, there I was in boot camp, and we had an officer come up and he says he was going to do a head count. And we were lined up there and he went down counting us off, “Two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve. Okay, now you guys are going to the medical department.” And that’s how I became a Pharmacist Mate! So, I went from there to medical school at the University of Chicago. We went seven days a week, eight to ten hours a day, for about six months. The training was like what we would do if certain things happened. For example, if a guy was shot, then what would we do, and that was what we were trained to do. What to do with shock wounds and things like that. We did everything except an appendectomy. And I came out as a pharmacist mate.
From there I went to Norfolk, Virginia, and then I got on the USS Yorktown in 1943. I was on the original crew. First we did a shakedown cruise. Then we headed out to the Pacific. When we got to Pearl Harbor they hadn’t moved anything. All the ships were still sunken there, and we had a hard time getting that Yorktown in there.
I was on the Yorktown for about six months. It was like a big hotel. We had twenty-six doctors on the Yorktown, and a crew of, I think, it was like 2,500. I was an operating room technician, so I’d help out in the operating room. There were some movies they showed the medical staff on the Yorktown that they made at Guadalcanal showing trauma wounds and how to deal with them. In our previous training we hadn’t seen much blood, but I saw plenty of blood later. I had emergency training and got assigned to a rescue team. When planes came in all shot up and crashed, we’d pull the pilots and crew out.
So, if you’ve seen the movie Fighting Lady, I’m the guy who goes to that wrecked plane and pulls the pilot out. The pilot’s name was Crommelin. He was a commander. That was on the Mili Island raid. It was 650 miles from Tokyo, and this was in 1943. He caught a 20mm shell in the cockpit, and it exploded in there and filled him full of shrapnel. One of the other pilots winged him in, you know, talked him in while flying next to him. His plane was all shot up. So, I think we picked about twenty or thirty pieces of shrapnel out of Crommelin. The plane wasn’t burning that bad, but it was shot full of holes. I remember that. My other job was helping out in the OR. It was mainly gunshot wounds, shrapnel, and burns, injured pilots.
When the Yorktown got back to Pearl Harbor, I got off and they were going to transfer about three or four of us guys to the fleet Marines, and one of them was me. We didn’t know where we were going to go. We talked to an old chief pharmacist mate who did a lot of transferring at Pearl Harbor, and he says, “You don’t want to go where you’re going to go!” That’s when we heard we were heading out into the Pacific with the Marines on some island invasion. We had no idea where we were going, but we found out when we got on the ship that it was Tarawa.
Tarawa was terrible. They really bombed that place. It was great fireworks , I’ll tell you. And they bombed that little island for days. They bombed it so much we thought it would be a cakewalk going in. So, the way it worked for us pharmacist mates was that we showed up and were assigned to a company, so that there was one pharmacist mate for every 100 Marines. I went in on a Higgins boat with my company of Marines I’d been assigned to. I really didn’t know any of them. But as I was trying to climb down the cargo net to get onto the Higgins boat, I was carrying a forty-pound pack of medical supplies, plus my backpack, so I was carrying maybe sixty pounds, and you had to climb down that cargo net and those are big ropes, and your hands are barely big enough to hold on to them, and I just slipped and fell. I don’t know how I landed, but my arms were bruised and I banged my teeth on the steel edge of the Higgins boat. Fortunately there was no blood, just pieces of teeth knocked out. I’ve got that as a memory of Tarawa! It’s lucky I didn’t knock my brains out.
So, I got down in that Higgins boat and, you know, going in, you had fear, but we didn’t panic for some reason or another. They dumped us way out there and we had to wade in. And then I got shot going in, just a minor wound, a flesh wound. So, I had to find someone else to patch me up, but it wasn’t bad, really wasn’t much more than a Band-Aid wound. It is difficult to describe all the things that went on at Tarawa. Sometimes when I think about Tarawa it becomes a big blur. When somebody got shot they’d yell for the corpsman, and that was me. Then I’d have to go patch them up, put bandages on, or compresses. That was what we were trained to do. My job was to keep them alive right after they were hit, stop the bleeding if I could. There was always a lot of blood.
So, the first guy I patched up was a back wound, believe it or not. We were wading in and got next to the pier and this guy somehow got shot in the back. So, I patched him up and had him wait there next to the pier until we got enough wounded to make a load to take them back out to the ship. I don’t remember many specifics, but I do remember another guy I patched up on Tarawa. He was shot in the stomach. I looked him up after the war. So, we were pinned down there next to that pier right on the beach, and we couldn’t go very far; we were all kind of bunched up there right by the pier. And guys were getting shot and I was patching them up right there.
These guys, the Marines, God love ‘em, they’d fight until they couldn’t fight anymore. They’d fight with broken arms, gunshot wounds, shrapnel wounds, and things like that. I’d patch them up and tell them to go back to the ship and they’d say, “I’m all right,” and they would just keep fighting. Those guys would do that! I was nineteen, and we had some seventeen-and eighteen-year-old kids in there. They just wouldn’t give up. That’s the Marine Corps; they instilled something in those kids. But I was Navy and I didn’t have that kind of training. The thing is, the pharmacist mates were in and out of there and I never got to know anyone real well. They shipped me back to Pearl again after Tarawa. I stayed there about two months, and then I headed to Eniwetok, and then Saipan, Tinian, and Guam. I was in a lot of landings. But you can do that when you’re young! On all these islands, we’d bury the dead Japanese face down. The reason for that is, if you bury them face down they go straight to hell, or so they say. We did that on every island we were on. We’d bury them face down. And that tells you what we thought of the Japanese.
Later the Japanese used wooden bullets, and they were bad because they would splinter when they hit the body. If we saw one of those wounds, we wouldn’t even touch them. They were sent right back to Pearl Harbor. We’d try to get them to a MASH unit.
I think I would have liked to have stayed on the Yorktown. Sometimes you wonder why did you live that long, or how did you do that. I was lucky. The only time I was hurt was on Tarawa, and that was minor.
I got out of the Navy in March of 1946. I was discharged after about three and a half years. The duty on the Yorktown was great. All those landings with the Marines, that was rough duty, but it was necessary and I was trained for it. I didn’t go into the medical profession, but I have two kids who are doctors. I had nightmares after the war for maybe four or five months. I’d dream of people getting killed. I remembered faces. I had nightmares about people screaming for mercy. You know, people were screaming for mercy all the time, and it’s like your hands are tied or something. They’d want to be put out of their misery, and there was nothing I could do for them. They were begging for mercy to die because the pain was so excruciating. There were times that there was bleeding I couldn’t stop. We would just shoot them with morphine and let them die. We patched them up as best we could to try and stop the bleeding. But sometimes it’s like trying to stop a hole in a dike. We’d sprinkle some sulfa powder on the wound and try and patch them up.
For years I tried to get ahold of a doctor I worked with, Dr. Kirsch, but I never could find him. I’ve often wondered if my experiences in the war affected the rest of my life. It’s the bad stuff you never forget. You can’t tell anybody, and you don’t feel like telling anybody.