ABBOTT LABO RATORI E S Sroudly dlv n resents to this sfeeiai edition of Men\X/(thout Guns * -r ^ THE ABBOTT COLLECTION OF PAINTINGS OF ARMY MEDICINE POST LIBRARY FORT MONMOUTH. N. J. ENTERED ON ACTIVE DUTY: (date) (flack) rank: ASN: PRINCIPAL ASSIGNMENTS IN ARMY, CHANGES IN RANK AND DECORATIONS STATION LOCATION PRINCIPAL DUTIES, PRO' MOTIONS, 6? DECORATIONS FROM TO RELIEVED PROM ACTIVE DUTY: (datb) (place) .^" MEN WITHOUT GUNS THE MAN WITHOUT A GUN— Lawrence Beall Smith MEN WITHOUT GUNS Text by DeWITT MACKENZIE War Analyst of The Associated Press Descriptive Captions by -. Major CLARENCE WORDEN Medical Department of the United States Army Foreword by Major General NORMAN T. KIRK . Surgeon General of the United States Army ILLUSTRATED WITH 137 PLATES FROM THE ABBOTT COLLECTION OF PAINTINGS OWNED BY THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT Philadelphia THE BLAKISTON COMPANY Toronto 1943 TEXT COPYRIGHT. 1945 BY THE BLAKISTON COMPANY FIRST EDITION PRINTED IN THE UNITEH STATES BY DAVIS, DELANF.Y. INC., NEW YORK Contents List of Tllustratioiis vii Foreword i^ Tlio Snri»eoii General ami His Stnfl' xi 1 Introducing the Corpsman 1 2 Doctor to The Army 7 ^ Southwest Pacific 12 4 Saipan 19 5 Italy 25 (! D-Day in Normandy '^2 7 Burma Road -8 S The Warrior Comes Homo 44 Paintings of "Men Without Guns" follow page 4H Illustrations JOHN STI'XAET CURRY Front-Liiie Surg'ery Plate 6 Collecting Station Plate 7 FRED SHANE Steel Coffin Pt-ate 8 Soup's On Plate 15 Time Out for Chow Plate 16 Hiding Out Plate 17 Quick Treatment Plate 18 manup:l tolegian Laboratory Warfare Plate 28 KRNKST FTFNK Lifo-GiviiiK Phiwma Plate 29 FRAXKLTN BOGGS Jungle Trail Plate 30 Pjvacuatioii Uuder Firo Plate 31 Anopheles Home Front 1*i.ate 32 Battalion Aid Station 1»late .'« Native Casualty Plate 34 Visiting Hour Plate 3;') Pacific Black Diamonds Plate 3 Pill Call Plate 4 End of a Busy Day Plate 5 Jungle — Ally of the Enemy Pla te 1 Night Duty Plate 2 South Sea Island Paradise Plate 12 The American Way Plate 13 Up to Down Under Plate 14 Air Evacuation Plate 9 Return to the Golden Gale Plate 10 Race Against Death Platk 11 ROBERT BENNEY Tank Ambulance at Saipan Plate 8 Flashlight Surgery in Saipan Plate 8 Self -Service in Saipan Plate 7' Island Hospital Plate & Just Off the Line Plate 8 Saipan Casualty Plate 8' F^riend in Need Plate 8; Shock Tent Plate 8l Medical Supply Dump Plate 1 i "Easy, Joe" Plate 2( Sick Bay Pirate 2: Pacific Bay Hospital Plate 2! Saipan, July, 1944 Plate 2', Jap Compound in Saipan Plate 2' Train Pare Plate 3( Short Cut to Life Plate 3: Hospital Train Chef Plate 3! Xight Rendezvous Plate 3! Xight Vigil Plate 41 Coming Home Plate 4: Climatic Casualty Plate 41 Double Deck of Aces Plate 9- Waylaid Plate 9: Men With God Plate 111 JOSEPH HIRSCH After the Fascist Pair Plate Hi Treating a Mule Plate 1 1 So What Plate 11, Personal Magnetism Plate 10. Hospital for Allied Wounded I*late 10' High Visibility Wrap Plate 10 Field ExamJTiation Plate 11 Xight Shift Plate 12 JOSEPH niRSCll — Contimied Front-Liiie Dentist Plate 121 Safe Platr 122 Paradise Xot Lost Platk 123 "War on Ty])hns Plate 124 Italian Rnsh Honr Plate 125 iledieal Tnyeiiuily Plate 126 Medieal Millinery Plate 127 Company in the Parlor Plate 128 All Aboard for Home Plate 129 Non-Combatant Plate 130 Nurse in Newfoundland Platk 93 LAWREX(M^: BKALL SMITH The AVay Back Plate 94 Normandy Vietovy Carfro Plati-: 25 Sunday in Normandy Plate 26 Return Car^o Plate 27 The Quick and the Dead Plate 102 Tension at Dawn Plate 103 "Wounded Crew Member Plate 1 04 AVounded Aboard Plate 43 Death of a B-17 Plate 44 Return from Mission Plate 45 Hospital Bound Plate 4(J Normandy Wash Plate 47 Fireside Comfort Plate 48 Snooker Platk 49 Xfess Call Plate 61 Amateur Kd^ar Bergen Pt^ate 62 HOWARD BAKR Pack Train in China Plate 63 Dyins' Wounded Soldier Plate 64 China Life Line Plate 65 China Supply Rendezvous Plate 66 "Meat WaRon" Pool Plate 50 Burma Mud Plate 51 Ambuhuice, Jungle Style Plate 52 Scant Shelter Plate 53 Junf;le Cheater Plate 54 Field Hospital in Technicolor Plate 55 Moon-Li^ht in Burma Plate 56 Casualty (a) Plate 73 Casualty (b) Plate 74 Casualty (c) Plate 75 HOWARD BAKU — Continved Casualty (d) Plate 76 Jung-le Hospital Plate 57 Artist's Model Platk 58 ( )pen-Air Surgery Plate 59 Jungle Ward Plate 67 Jungle Operating Room Plate 68 Night Operations Plate 70 Pals Plate 71 Aid Station Platk 60 Friends Ambulance X'nil Plate 72 Tank Casualty Plate 69 Convalescents Pi,ate 77 Jungle Patient Plate 78 "Open Wide" Plate 87 J ungle Vet Plate 88 Over the Bumps Plate 89 Burma Air Ambulance Plate 90 Talking It Over Plate 95 FRANCIS CRISS Making Typhoid Vaccine Platk 96 Shoulder Wheel Platk 97 PETKR BLUME Fracture Ward Plate 98 MARION GREF.NWOOD Neuro-Surgery Plate 99 Speeding Recover)- Plate 100 Beer for Two Plate 101 AVounded Boy Plate 108 The Dental Front Plate 109 Occupational Thera])\' Plate 110 Tjcg Work Plate 111 Wounded Man With Crutclies Plate 112 Head Wound Victim Plate 1 1 3 X-Ray of Head Before Operation Plate 114 Kxercise Period for Wounded Plate 131 Shoulder Wheel Plate 132 Standing-Up Exercises Plate 183 A Twist of the Wrist Plate 134 Whirlpool Bath Plate 135 GI Gutenberg Plate 136 Finger Exercise Plate 1 37 Fgreword By Major General NORMAN T. KIRK, M.C., U.S.A. The Surgeon General i\lo ARTIST ever had a more worthy subject for his brush thau did the twelve distinguished painters whose canvases on Army Medicine are reproduced in this volume. Unequivocally and without fear of contradiction, I say with pride and reverence that one of the greatest contributions to victory has been made by the doctors, nurses and enlisted men of the Army Medical Department. AVithout their tireless devotion to duty, their courage and complete disregard for self -safety, the Medical Department would not be able to point today to a record of achievement unmatched in the long history of warfare. Because of the heroism and skill of the men and women portrayed between the covers of tliis book, countless thousands of our fighting men have survived wounds that would have meant certain death in the last war. Their deeds on the battlefields, in front-line medical units and in the great general hospitals have done much to frustrate and discourage a murderous enemy intent upon destroyhig us with every diabolically ingenious instrument of war he could devise. This volume is titled ''Men Without Onus." It is a fitting name for a book that tells the story of men and women who fight with surgical instruments and drugs — penicillin, sulfa, plasma, atabrine and other life-saving medical agents. The twelve distinguished artists who ha\-e produced this Abbott Collection of Paintings of Army Medicine have told the story faithfully. Their paintings constitute an authentic and valuable contemporary history of Army Medicine in the war and a priceless archival treasure. Some day, in all probability, tlie original paintings will hang proudly in our nation's capital for all to see. Meanwhile, it is most gratifying to me and my associates in the Medical Department that these paintings are here reproduced so that so many of us can always have them with us in our homes. This collection is an eloquent testimonial to the enterprise and foresight of Lioulenant Colonel Howard F. Baer, MA.C, who conceived it, to Abbott Laboratories, who sponsored it, to tlie War Department, which encouraged it. to Associated Ameri- can Artists whose director, Mr. Reeves Lewenthal, supervised it and to Charles Do^nls of Abbott Laboratories who has so ably brought it to the attention of the public. To Mr. S. DeWitt Clough, President of Abbott, the Medical Department and the Surgeon General, personally, are very grateful. ihe Surgeon General and fiis Slajj Seated, left to right Brig. Gen. Raymond "W. Bliss, M.C. Ool. James R. Hudiiall, M.O. Brig. Gen. Fred W. Rankin, M.C. Brig-. Gen. Rdward Reynolds, M.A.C. Brig. Gen. Raymond A. Kelser, V.C. Maj. Gen. Norman T. Kirk, M.C. Maj. Gen. George V. Lull, M.C. Standing, Jeff to right Brig. Gen. Charles C. Ilillman, M.C. Brig-. Gen. Hugh J. Morgan, M.C. Col. Robert J. Carpenter, M.C. Maj. Gen. Robert H. Mills, D.C. Brig. Gen. James S. Simmons, M.C. 1 Introducing the Corpsman It takes vast eourag'e for a fiji:htmg-man to go into action. He must have a stout heart who leaps from his fox-hole with the hlood>' dawn of an offensive and pushes forward in a storm of bullets, shells and bombs until he eomes to close grips with the enemy; or who races up from the sea through the minefield of a landing-beach under a hurricane of fire ; or who stands by his post as his slilp, with guns flaming, drives her nose right into the crimsoning waters of a beach-head; or yet who flies into action across a flak-filled sky. All this demands surjjassing heroism. But a very special fortitude is needed by the man who goes into battle as a noTi -combatant. The tension of the man-at-arms is eased by the very fact that his bi-ain is juggling with the life-or- death problems of offense and defense, and because his hands are occupied with the use of his weapons. Fear gives way to the hot spirit of strife. It's a wholly different proposition for the non- combatant, however. He is beset by all the anxiety of the soldier — more, for that matter, because he likely hasn't even a club with which to defend him- self — and lacks the relief which comes from having hia mind engaged with battle. These unarmed forces — trained to defend them- selves with their bare hands in emergency — form a vital part of Uncle Sam's mighty fighting-machine. They are the paradox of war, for their mission is to save human life, and not to take it. This labor of devotion they perform with few headlines, though their deeds are epic. It is largely with these unsung heroes that this story deals, and so without further preliminary I give you the United Slates Army Medical Depart- ment — Men Without Guns. Of course this great non-combatant organization comprises many different elements, just as does the army. There are the men who actually go into battle with the troops and rush to the thick of the fray at the call of help from the wounded. There are the corpsmen who in an emergency may operate on an injured man in a fox-hole under heavy fire. There are the surgeons and doctors who labor to the point of utter exhaustion about the operathig tables of stations which are under bombing and shell-fire in the forward areas. There are nurses who work in constant danger of death. And then there are others who risk their lives no less certainly in fighting the terrible diseases which plague the steaming, stink- ing jungles and other primeval sections of our globe. Those are the sensational aspects of the work — the big thrills— but that's not the whole of it by a long way. Just as the soldier on the firing line is backed by the organization of the home-front, so does the corpsman in action have behind him the vast Army Medical Department over which presides Surgeon General Norman T. Kirk in Washington. The thousand and one ramifications of this wonder- fully synchronized medical machine are what make possible the corpsman 's activities in the theatres of war. So this is neither solely a tale of heroic deeds — though they figure largely in the saving of life — nor is it a history of the Army Medical Department. Rather it is an impressionistic report, done in pic- tures and in words, of the magnificent service ren- dered by the Departmeiit as a whole in the second World War. Its primary object is to give to the folk at home an account of how the health of their boys in the far-away zones of conflict is safeguarded, and of how those soldiers who have been hurt are cared for. Now it isn't the purpose either of the artists or the writer to handle this story with gloves. There will be many harsh things to see and reiid, for that is war. It's no use for us to sit back home here in comfort and security and not know the truth about what our lads encounter. There has been a disposition in some quarters to shield the public from disturbing facts, but this book has nothing to conceal. We take our lead from Major General Kirk himself, for he has said: "The American public should be told the truth about what war does to fighting men. It should know that some of our men are struck down by dis- ease, that they lose arms or legs and that they come home nervous invalids. "The public should also know that in no war have soldiers been given more scientific, painstaking med- ical care and more human understanding. They will coTitinue to get that care and understanding wher- ever they are." So, while the good news will far outweigh the bad in this chronicle, you will be told the truth as we know it. Some of it is mighty toiip;h to contemplate. For example, here's an incident which was given me by Major General George P. Lull, Deputy Surgeon General of the Army Medical Department, while we were chatting in his Washington office. The con- versation had turned towai'd the courage of the corps- man and his ingenuity in meeting unusual emergen- cies, and I asked the General for a story to illustrate these points. He looked at me speculatively for a moment and then said in his direct manner of speech : "All right, I'll tell you a story. And it's one we investigoted and confirmed." He then related the experience of a battalion surgeon in the Southwest Pacific. The Japanese had swarmed down from strong points on a hill and surrounded tlie battalion. One of our soldiers had an ai-m so badly torn that amputation was neces- sary. Here indeed was a case to test the nerve and inventiveness of the surgeon, for not oidy was he without instruments but the whole area in wliicb they were surrounded was being swept by enemy fire. However, the doctor got his men into a fox-hole, and then hunted about for some sort of instrument. The only thing he could find was an ax, but that didn't stop liim, for a life was at stake. He sterilized the ax with hot alcohol, gave the wounded soldier ether — and then removed the arm while bullets and pieces of shell screamed over his fox-hole operating room. Three days later the battalion was relieved, and the soldier's hfe was saved! Then there was a somewhat similar case which was carried by the press out of Bougainville, in the Solomon Islands. This concerned a medical corps major who amputated both legs of a wounded man with a hunting knife under fire. I'm not going to name the major here, for it hardly seems fair to the thousands of other Medical Corps officers who have performed equally heroic tasks. But let the sergeant who had a hand in the ease tell about it in a soldier's blunt way: "He (the Major) removed the left leg below the knee and the right at the knee. It took two hours. I gave plasma to that boy, who was conscious all the time. He was awfully brave. He screamed just a little when the Major cut, because he was in great pain. But he took it very well. He was an ammuni- tion carrier hit by a mortar." However, these are merely by way of passing illustration. We are getting ahead of our story a bit, and we shall be dealing Avith plenty of the crudi- ties of war in subse(iuent chapters. So let's return to our muttons, as the Englishman says. The idea of recording the work of the Army ]\redical Department in art really had its genesis when Lt. Colonel Howard F. Baer, of the Medical Administrative Corps, saw the new moon over his left shoulder and made a mighty wish which came true. The way of it was this: One of Colonel Baer's great friends is another Howaid Baer, the widely known artist. They aren't relatives but the likeness of names is just a peculiar coincidence which brought them together in the first place. Well, back in May of '4'i Colonel Baer dis- covered Artist Baer busy doing some ]')aintlngs for a collection of naval aviation art which was being created for the United States Navy as a gift by the Abbott Laboratories, a large pharmaceutical supply house in Chicago. Eight there was where Colonel Baer made his big wish. It was that the Army Medical Department might be blessed with a similar project. One of his m;iin reasons was that at this time a great deal of publicity was being given to general war work, and people were being urged to get out of non-essential industries and take war jobs. Naturally that didn't help employment in the plants which were making medical supplies. In fact it hurt, because it was difficult to prevent workers who were making hypodermic needles, surgical in- struments, surgical dressings, atabrine, and the hun- dred and one other things urgently needed by the Medical Department, from believing that much greater service could be rendered by leaving these jobs and taking others in plants manufacturing bombs and like instruments of war. Baer, the Colonel, talked the idea over with Baer, the Artist, and the latter brought a third party into the discussions — Reeves Lewenthal, president of tlie Associated American Artists, who had much to do with the Abbott prograni for the Navy. Tlie Colonel raised with Lewenthal the question of whether it would be possible to get someone to sponsor an Army Medical Department project, and the upshot was that Abbott offered to back this further under- taking — a very costly affair, by the way. The ap- proval of Sui'geon General Kirk was secured and there was begun the great work which you see re- corded in part in the pictures reproduced in this book. The plan was the most ambitious of its kind ever carried out, for it covered not only Medical Depart- ment activities of the home-front but reached into Ihe fighting theatres of Europe, the Pacific, India, Burma and China. Among the subjects dealt with were the training of physicians and enlisted men in the scliools at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, and Camp Barkeley, Texas, among others; the produc- tion of those all-important medical and surgical supplies; the movement of men and supplies in combat theatrc^s; tlie general Iiosjjitals, including operative surgery, convalescence, and rehabilitation and occupational therapy; the hospital ship; the army nurse; aviation medicine; and, of coyrse, the ^rippini>- story of how the "Modieal Corps performed its mission of mercy amidst the hell of the actual battle zones. Twelve American artists were selected to carry out this prog-ram, and in lt>44 tliey produ(5ed a large number of striking paintings and sketches out of which was built the collection that Abbott Labora- tories presented to the government. S. DoWitt Clough, president of Abbott's and himself a patron . of the arts, described the gift as '*a tribute to the tremendous accomplishment of tlio Army Medical Department in saving the lives of scores of thou- sands of American soldiers who would be dead to- day but for the vast improvement of medical serv- ice in this over any previous war." It is a remarkable thing that none of the artists who went to tlie fighting fronts was killed or in- jured, for all of them saw action. All were in the midst of gunfire. Robert Benney, for instance, was in the thick of the battle of Saipan. It's even more remarkable that none of them suffered grave ill- ness, although several were exposed to terrible diseases. But let me introduce this gallant little army, whose exploits and impressions comprise so much of this book: Howard Baer: — Assigned as an artist war-corre- spondent to the Burma-India-China theatre, where he produced fifty-five paintings and sketches. Baer was born hi a little mining village near Pittsburgh in 1907. He received his art education at Carnegie Institution. You perhai)s know him as cartoonist and illustrator for such magazines as Esquire, the New Yorker and Colliers, for it wasn't until 1941 that he finally gave way to a great urge to paint. His assignment in the Orient took him into the heart of the Burmese jungle where he was with General Stilwell's forces and with Merrill's Ma- rauders during the fighting to reoj^en the Burma Road. He saw India and spent considerable time in China with the Allied troops. Baer is represented in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the iletropolitan. Rohert 5(^77 jvc?/;— Assigned to the "Western Pa- cific Theatre and did thirty-one paiiitings and sketches. Benney is a native Ncav Yorker and was born in Brooklyn in 1904. Ho studied art at Cooper Union, the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design. His portraits of famous contemporary American actors have been exhil)ited at the New York Public Library and the Museum of the City of New York. He first gave full time to painting in 1936-37 Avhile doing an extensive tour of the West Indies and South America. The work which he pro- duced during these travels, and on the Gaspe Pen- insula, Canada, was shown at national art exhibi- tions throughout the United States. Peter Blume: — Assigned to do a painting at the great Halloran General Hospital, on Staten Island, New York. Blume was boi-n in Russia in 1906 and was brought to the United States when he was five years old. He began art studios at the age of twelve in public school night classes. Latei- he studied at the lOducational Alliance Art School. In 1934 he received the coveted Carnegie International Award, and was one of the youngest American artists ever to get tills honor. He also was given the Guggenheim Fel- lowship, 1932-36. He is represented in the Metro- politan Museum and in numerous others. Franklin Bof/f/s: — Assigned to the Southwest Pa- cific Theatre, l-^ighteen paintings and sketches. Boggs was born in Warsaw, Indiana, thirty-one years ago and alreatly has achieved an important place in contemporary American painting. He was awarded two European traveling scholarships from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, as well as its fii-st foppan award in 1940. In 1940, too, the Tennessee Valley Authority invited him to make drawings and paintings which would depict the vast conservation and power activities of this major project for public information. His paintings have been exhibited in many leading museums. During his Pacific assignment lie witnessed four important actions. Howard Baer Robert Benney Peter Blume i-'i-.uiklin Boggs Francis 6'//.s,s'.-— Assigned to Army Medical Cen- ter, Washington. Seven paintings. Criss was born in London in 1901 but came to this country as a child and his work has been closely identified with Am((rica. He holds the unusual honor of having won three major fellowships for the study of painting — a four-year scholarship in the Penn- sylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Cressou Schol- arship for study in Europe, and the Guggenheim Fellowship for study abroad. He studied at the Grapliie Sketch Club in Philadelphia, and later at the Pennsylvania Academy of the 1^'ine Arts and at the Art Students League in New York. Ho has been given exhibitions both in this country and abroad by important museums, many of which own his work, as do several leading private collectors. John Steuart Curry: — ^Assigned to the Army Medical Department training school at Camp Barke- ley, Texas. Twelve paintings. Curry was born on a Kansas farm in 1897. By the time he was thirty-one he had studied in several art institutes both in America and abroad. He won his first public recognition when his "Baptism in Kansas" was shown at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. This picture later was acquired by the Whitney Museum. He has murals in the Department of Justice and Department of Interior buildings, Washington, in the Kansas State Capitol and in the University of Wisconsin. He is artist-in-resi- dence at that university. Ernest Fiene: — Assigned to plants of medical industry on the home-front. Ten paintings. Fiene was born in the Rhineland in 1894. In the course of his studies he attended the National Acad- emy of Design and the Art Students League. Twice he returned to Furope for study, the first time in France and England, and later on a Guggenheim Fellowship for work in Italy. Fiene 's works have won several prizes at maior exhibitions, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and numerous other museums throughout the country own paintings by him. He has murals in the Department of Interior building, Washington, and in other cities. Marion Greenwood: — Assigned to England Gen- eral Hospital at Atlantic City, N. J., where men wounded overseas are reconditioned. Twenty-four paintings and sketches. Miss Greenwood was horn in New York City in 1909 and comes from a family of artists. Her grand- mother, her father and her sister, Grace, all are painters and her brothers are commercial artists. She studied at the Art Students League in New York, at the Academic CoUarosi, Paris, and in Mexico. When she was only twenty-throe she became the first American woman to paint a mural for the Mexican Government, and received public praise for her work from former President Cardenas. Later she did murals for Mexico City Civic ("enter, as well as for buildings in various parts of the United States. Miss Greenwood has exhibited her paintings widely, and has lectured on painting at Columbia and several other schools. Joseph llirsch: — Assigned to the Mediterranean Theatre, Italy. Twenty-two paintings and sketches. Hirsch comes from Philadelphia, where he was born in 1910. He has had a brilliant career and has been showered with many lionors. He studied in the Pennsylvania Museum School of Art, being gradu- ated with two first prizes. Other awards include the Woolley Fellowship by the Institute of Interna- tional Education for travel in Europe, the Third Hallgarten prize by the National Academy of De- sign, the AValter Lippincott prize for the best figure painthig in oil by an American at the Pennsylvania Academy's Fine Arts Exhibition, and honorable mention in the Prix de Rome competition. For a year and a half Hirsch traveled through Italy, Prance, Spain, Belgium, England, Holland, lOgypt, Ceylon, China and Japan, studying the art of those countries. His assignment in the Mediterranean wasn't the first of its kind in the second World War, for he previously had served as an artist war- correspondent in the Pacific theatre. His work is owned by leading museums. Fred Shane: — Assigned to the Armv Medical De- Francis Criss John Steuart Curry Ernest Fiene Marion Greenwood partment training school at Carlisle Barracks, Pa. Fourteen paintings and sketches. Shane was born in Kansas City in 1906. He stud- ied at the Kansas Citv Art Institute, Cotorado Springs Fine Art Center, and in Paris and New York. He has been the winner of many prizes and awards and his work is represented in museurns and private collections throughout the country. His honors include the winning of the MacMillan Pur- chase Prize from St. Louis Cily Museum, the Byng Memorial Purchase Prize from Springfield, ilo.. Museum, and mam- awards from Kansas City In- stitute. He is a member of Missouri University faculty. Lawrence Beall Smith .-^-Ai^sigjied to the l^hiro- pean Theatre — Ihigland and France. lOighteen paintings and sketches. Smith was born in Washington, D. C, in 1909. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and received his early art training at the Art Inslitute of Chicago. He has exliilnfod widely aiid his work is hung in Harvard University and many other pub- lic and private collections. His assignment in P'u- rope included the coverage oi' D-Day, and lie went into Normandy with oui- troops through a beach- head. That wasn't his first experience with war, however, for he liad done painting previously aboard an aircraft carrier. Manuel Tolegian: — Assigned to the Army Nurse Corps training school at Camp White, Oregon. Ten paintings and sketches. Tolegian was born in 1911 in Fresno, California, of Armenian i)arents who emigrated from Angora, Turkey. His fatlier was a famous poet. Tolegian was educated in the University of California and then went to New York to study at Ihe Art Stu- dents League. Among his teachers was John Steuart Curry, whom the reader already has met as one of the artists who did paintings for this book. Tolegian 's work is owned by leading museums, and Ihe late President Franklin D. Roosevelt personally selected a Tolegian picture for permanent hanging in the White House. The youthful artist's gifts go outside his painting, for he composed music in the Pulitzer Prize-winniiig play. Time of Your Life, by Saroyan. That completes the list of twelve artists who have used their great talent to help us vivsualize some of the marvels which arc performed for our fighting men by the United States Army Medical Depart- ment, and to depict the frequently terrible condi- tions under which this service is rendered. Perhaps the best way to describe the manifold activities of the Department is to say that it is doctor, surgeon, nurse and dentist to Uncle Sam's millions of sob diers and airmen. And like the old-time general practitioner in the country districts, it carries its own equipment about witli it. The Army Medical Departmonl supei'vises hun- dreds of hospitals at home and abroad — erects many of them, for that matter — and gives treatment to thousands ui)on thousands. It's the largest medical organization the United States ever has had. The Department comprises (to give the approxi- mate figures at the end of the European War) 45,- 000 doctors- — and there arc 83 women among them for the first time in history; 15,000 dentists; 2,000 veterinarians; 2,000 sanitarians; 18,700 members of the Medical A(hninistrative Corps; 61 pharmacists; 52,000 army nurses; 1,500 dietitians; 1,000 physical therapists. All these are quite apart from hundreds of thousands of enlisted men who are serving as litter bearers and in iirst-aid work. **jMedical men follow the soldier and guard his health from the time he is inducted into the army until he is discharged," to use the language of the Department, ''and even after he returns to civilian life he is watched and cared for by other govern- ment health agencies. Our armed forces are fighting all over the world, in every kind of climate — from the trojjics to the Arctic. They have lived and are living among primitive peoxjles and have been ex- posed to every known disease under the most diflS- cult field conditions. They have suffered every type of battle wound. Joseph Hirsch Fred Shane Lawrence Beall Smith -Maiic^i l\jIcL'i,ii "Yet, in spite of those handicaps, nearly 97 per cent of the wounded who roaeh hospitals live; and the disease rate in the array is only one-twonlicth as high as it was in the last war — the lowest ever recorded in the army^ — -while the health of soldiers in Ihe field is j^enerally better than that of civil- ians." Jnst think of it — all hut llirce per cent of the wounded who roach hospitals live. This achievement is all Ihe more remarkahle when one stops to con- sider that it wasn't until our American Civil "War that methods wore devised for anything approach- ing adequate evacuation and treatment of the wounded during combat. And the death rate still remained terribly heavy. Up to about the seventeenth century the wounded got little consideration in battle. The best they could hope for — if they were too badly hurt to look after themselves — ^^\'as that a comrade would put them out of their misery with knife or bullet. Indeed, this dis- patcliing of the wounded wasn't confined to that dis- tant time, for in the last war the soldiers of some conntries practiced it to a certain extent in eases whore there was no hope for recovery of the wounded man and ho was dying' in agouy. M('rcy killing was what they called it. These days things are different for, as Surgeon General Kirk has said, "the survival rate am7,4{)0 were ready in Army hospitals in Fngland, and provision was made for nccommodalion of 19(),- 000 patients by full use of previously surveyed locations of hospital units. Tliese could have been statfcd with doctors — including such specialists as internists, surgeons, psycliialrists, radiologists and ortliopedic surgeons^nurses and enlisted personnel williin 24 hours if the emergency required. Only necessary beach installations and port con- struction to insure the flow of supplies into the zone of operations took precedence over care of the wounded. Hospitals had iirsl priority in constnie- tion work. If casualties had exceeded expectations, pUins were made for evacuation from the United King- dom by air and ship to the United States. There were waiting in Fngland— not including staffs of battalion aid stations, collecting stations and evacuation hospitals to be landed in Furope — 8,000 doctors, more than 10,000 nurses, 1,600 den- tists and more than 100,000 trained medical and surgical technicians ready to take care of the wounded. The following supplies were stored and ready for use: 800,000 pints of blood plasma; 600,000 doses of penicillin with 600,000 more ready for shipment in July; 10,000 pounds of sulfa drugs; 650,000 mor- phine syrettes (Vi; grain each); adequate supi)lies of anesthetics; more than 2,000,000 surgical instru- ments; 2,000 doses of tetanus toxoid (for booster shots following a wound), and 8,000,000 first-;ild packets. Fifteen hospital ships, not including LST's and other small craft, w^ere used in surface evacuation from France to England. As soon as air strips were secured, fifty planes, each capable of carrying eight- een patients, began shuttle service for the wounded across the Channel. You'd tliink lliat such a mighly undertaking, the greatest of Its kind ever envisaged, represented the last word in complexity, but the problems of pro- viding the best and swiftest medical care for our men in the Pacific tlieatres of combat were even more difficult. There hospitals had to be transported much greater distances by water, and then over- land by trucks. Operating rooms for such theatres are on wheels. Specially constructed hospitals, dismantled and- packed so they can he carried on men's backs, arc quickly reassembled and set up wherever a site is found. The wounded are evacuated mostly by air because there are no roads and most transportation is done with oxen and mules. Virtually all supplies also are brought in by air to the jungle zones of combat. Evacuation hospitals usually are set up right on the beaches. These are just a few of 1lie high-spots in the amazing story of the Army Medical Department's achievement in providing the multiplicity of sup- plies needed for the care of our fighting men — by far the best care the world ever has known. One could fill a library with the details, but we must hasten to the actual battlefields. Before we embark on this adventure, however, there is one more de- partment which the reader should meet^the great Army Nurse Corps. All nurses in the Army now are Army nurses — members of the Army Nurse Corps — having the status of officers. The Second World War has taken them to service in every part of the globe, and they have made a glorious record of devotion and hero- ism. They have carried their life-saving from Ice- land to the steaming jungles. They have followed our troops onto beach-heads within a matter of hours after the invasion. Some of those brave girls have been killed, some wounded, some captured, and some of them are missing. They have kept their bond, which is the pledge of the Army Nurse : "As an Army nurse I accept the responsibilities of an officer in the Army Nurse Corps. "I shall give faithful care to the men who fight for the freedom of this Country and to the women who stand behind them. "I shall bring to the American soldier, wherever he may bo, the best of my know^ledge and profes- sional skill. "I shall approach him cheerfully at all times, under any conditions I may find. "I shall endeavor to maintain the highest nursing standards possible in the performance of my duties. "I shall appear fearless in the presence of danger and quiet the fears of others to the best of my ability. "My only criticism shall be constructive. The reputation and good name of the Army Nurse Corps and of the nursing profession shall be uppermost In my thoughts, second only to the care of my patients. "I shall endeavor to be a ci'edit to my Country and to the uniform I wear." The Superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps is Colonel Florence Blanchfield, one of the remarkable women of our time — the right woman in the right y)lace. In her tine eyes burns the idealism of the nurse's pledge. Her experience has been great, including eighteen months as a nurse with American troops in Europe durhig the first World War. In the Ilitlorian con- flict she visited England, Belgium, France, flolland, Luxemburg, Germany and Italy in pursuit of her duties as head of the Nurse Corps. And she went where she could see what was going on. She was in Aachen, for instance, soon after that badly shat- tered German city was cajjtured by our forces. I found Colonel Blanchfield intensely interesting as we talked in her office at Army Medical Depart- ment headquarters. Here are some of the highlights of what she told me : "Our nurses are actuated by the ideal of service. "There's no glamour about nursing. Unless you want to help others and make sacrifices, you have no right to be in nursing. "A nurse must adapt herself to conditions on the battle front. The type of work in this war is far different from that of the last, and it calls for much greater fortitude and sacrifice. In the first World War the nurses were in the rear areas, but this con- flict has demanded that medical installations move with the army, so the nurses go up with the army. "Some of the forward imrses are as far up as the clearing stations (normally from four to seven miles behind the front line and a highly dangerous posi- tion). You have to care for your patient where he is. lie can't be brought to the nurse. "It has amazed folk that the nurses could adapt themselves to such conditions. But not one nurse complained to me when I was overseas. So long as 10 tUey are serving their patients, they are happy. None of the girls in advance areas wanted to go back to the rear echelons. "Tills reaction is the outstanding point ol" the Army Xurso Corps in the war. "Every nurse is a volunteer. She is nursing be- cause she wants to. AYoak spots showed up in train- iiitV and were counted onl." We were closing the interview when the Colonel added a thought which shows her broad understand- ing and her solicitude for the women under her. "Don't forget the girls back home," she said. "Nurses* services are equally important wherever they are. They don't like to be idle. Those who are serving at home rather than at the front are good soldiers in every respect, adjusted to all situations. "Work at home is just as important as at the clearing station. There is the same consecration to duty at home." The signilieance of Colonel Blanchfield 's remark that "weak spots showed up in training, and wore counted out" is seen in the tough schooling the girls get. This is well summed np by Artist Manuel Tolegiau in his comment on the training which he studied at Camp White, Medford, Oregon. "The war consciousness superseded every other consideration," he told mc. "This was war and the training emphasized it at every turn." Tolegian depicted these young women sweating- it out under realistic combat conditions which in- cluded all the difficulties and hardships of the front- line. Certainly "weak spots" would show up under this rigorous program if ever, but the artist found seriousness and efficiency the outstanding ehai'acter- istics. This intensive training is, of course, typical of the entire Army medical structure. The grilling of officer-candidates, for examjjle, is a really terrific test of physical stamina and ability to "take it." That's very natural, for if competent medical of- ficers could be created by the simple expedient of putting uniforms on doctors, then there wouldn't be any need of an elaborate Army Medical Depart- ment. The medical officer is a specialist in the un- usual emergencies which arise from war. The Medical Department operates two principal officer-candidate schools. One is the Army Service Force Training Center, at Camp Barkeley, Texas, and the other is the Medical Field Service, Carlisle Barracks, Pa. Tliese schools resjjectively are dealt with pictoriiilly in this book by Artists John Steuart Curry and Fred Shane. The primary quality sought among applicants in these schools is proven leadership capacity, and the training the>' get certainly brings out all their capabilities. Students are put through all phases of actual field operations, staged by bodies of regulars which are stationed at the schools for that purpose. Just as in actual battle, "wounded" men (labeled according to their supposed condition) are picked up, perhaps given "blood plasma" and "morphine," bandaged and rushed to the hospital. "Battles" rage day and night, and often the corpsmen are working in pitch dark. There are "gas" attacks, and Fred Shane told me that at Carlisle Barracks they even had a "Ger- man" prisoner, outfitted in German uniform, who was "wounded." Corpsmen bandaged his hurt and then brought him in for questioning, just as would have happened on the real battle front. Highly important are special tests which call for improvisation. In this manner are the students taught to think beyond their "book learning" in meeting the many emergencies of the battle zone. And they do meet the unusual situations when thrown on their own. Because they are young and energetic, they have developed new ideas by their experiments under pressure of necessity. Apropos of this general thought it can be re- corded that Army surgeons have been able to call attention to new enemy weapons hy the type of wound or burn. Some of the first tips have come from these quick-thinking specialists who have adapted themselves to the environment of war at close quarters. 11 Southwest Pacific 1 HE NATURE of the War ill the Pacific is well characterized by the fact that the Allies in the main were compelled to abandon the use of the Red Cross for protective purposes in savino- life, because a barbaric enemy used this emblem of mercy as a target for bombs and bullets. Not only was it necessary for Uncle Sam's forces to obscure the Red Cross on hospitals, but the first- aid man early learned to smear mud over insignia on his ambulance and to remove his armband as lie went about his rescue mission on the battlefield. Many a hospital had been bombed, and many a corpsman had fallen to a bullet, before the Ameri- cans learned the manner of enemy they were fight- ing. Typical of Japanese tactics was the savage attack on the United States hospital ship Comfort, loaded to capacity with wounded, olf Okinawa on April 28, 1945. A Japanese suicide })ilot dove his plane into the Comfort, killing some 29 people, including five Army Medical officers and six Army nurses. The attack was deliberate. It was delivered in briglil, full moonlight after the pilot had made several runs. The problems of the Pacific fighting were many. Much of the warfare, of course, was in the jungles where the enemies which our men encountered in- cluded fierce heat and horrible diseases, insects which carried death, and horrors like land-crabs and huge rats. In many instances these things were worse than the enemy bullets. It is a marvel that our death lists in the Pacific weren't larger. The answer is that while the toll of wounded was heavy, the Medical Corps saved most of these men. It was into this savage and most far-flung war of history tluit Artist Franklin Boggs was sent early in 1944 to paint scenes which you see in this book. Ho was assigned to the American invasion of the Admiralty Islands. This group had been governed by Australia under mandate from the League of Nations, the islands formerly having belonged to Germany. The Japa- nese occupied the Admiralties early in 1942 and used them as a valuable refueling station on the routes southward from their great naval base of Truk, 750 miles northeast. Rabaul, the Nipponese base in northeastern New Britain, lay 350 miles to the southeast of the Admiralties, and the strong enemy base of AVewak on New Guinea was 275 miles to the southwest. So it can be seen that the Admiral- ties were a real prize. In recognition of this, on February 29, 1944, an American Meet bearing troops thrust daringly across the Bismarck Sea and invaded the Admiralties in a surprise attack directed by General Douglas Mac- Arthur from the bridge of a warship. Our men hijided on Los Negros isle, just off the northeastern tip of Manus which is the principal member of the group. Then on March 15 we drove on to Manns it- self under the protection of broadsides from Yankee destroyers. By the following day the strategic air- port of Lorengau was in our hands and our position in the Admiralties was secure. But I want Boggs to tell you his own story, and this is the way he re- lated it to me: I was assigned to the Southwest Pacific. When I arrived in AustraUa it was suggested that I see the base hospitals first. It was thought that if I saw the front fines first other things would seem tame to me. So in Melbourne and Sydney and Brisbane I visited tb.e big base hospital centers. li^ach one of these hospital units was different. For instance, the one at Melbourne was made up of Cleveland doctors, and near Brisbane there was a Harvard group. There were separate hospitals with specialists in certain things, such as bone surgery and skin grafting. At Gatton there was a rehabilitation center and there they took men who were wounded and recon- ditioned them to be put back into the lines again to fight. Their morale wasn't too hot. These fellows had suffered from malaria and they felt that they had done their turn. War brings out the good and had. Yon are taking a cross-section of American manhood. There were fellows who didn't fit into the army in the first place. Some tried to get out of it. (In thus referring to malingering, Boggs cites a condition which exists in every army, in every war theatre — and has existed for time immemorial. It is one of the problems which all nations have to face, but the reader should not fall into the error of thinking that malingering was widespread among the American forces, for it was not. However, since the Medical Corps encountered it in most theatres, it is well that we take note of it.) 12 Tlie men (maliugorers) complained or having chronic stomach trouble, or what not. The medics had so much difficulty trying to take care of the ^vounded that they couldn 't always look after these special cases, so they sent the complainers hack to the base hospitals. There a diagnosis was made and they were treated. The doctors would discover that there was noth- ing the matter with a guy. He was shipped up to the' front again. He pulled the same thing once more. Some of the men came back two or three times. It was really quite a problem. Generally there was nothing the matter with them — they were pro- fessional "gold bricks." There were malaria cases that were dischai'ged because they were chronic. There was a rule that no one who had malaria could leave the theatre. Many of the men were taking atabrine pills (the famous new malaria medicine) and they would hide them. They would get malaria on purpose in order to stay out of the fighting. The doctors would line these fellows up, as you see in my picture of men taking pills (the title of this picture is *'Pill Call"), and made sure they took them. These pills turn you to about the color of a lemon. About this time the Admiralty Islands campaign began. This was the first move north of New Guinea —an amazing place where there are large moun- tains 13,000 feet high. At that time they were doing some fighting at Saidor but it wasn't heavy and I had to go where it was. I fiew over the Coral Sea from Australia to Port Moresby (southeast New Guinea). Out in the Coral Se;) it was beautiful — coral reefs down below. The colors were like jewels — green and blue and gray and white. Generally the corals are submerged. Sometimes they look like doughnuts underneath the water. From Port Moresby I worked my way to Finschhafen where there was an airstrip which had been carved out of the jungle. Fighter planes were taking off all the time. They were just like bees. The invasion of the Admiralties was in full force and we already had captured Momote (on Los Ne- gros Island just east of Manus) from the Japanese. I went into Los Xegros. You could see the Japanese fighting through the smoke. G U I N E^iA 1 S Al:A RK ARCH klp - w f-\ „,.-■ NADZAB ,.., CORAL SEA SCftlE Of hUllLtl F.&.. 13 There wore a lot of our ships iiiiloadiii|E?, and siip- ])IIes were lined up along the beach. There were many jeeps and trucks hauling these things away. They really had got a good hold of the airstrip. 1 told Colonel John Hall (Army ^Tedical Corps olfioer) that I wanted to get real lighting in the front hnes. lie said : "Let's go!" **Do you have someone to go along with me?" I asked. "I will go with you," he replied. We started out in his jeep and he took me to a place called Papatali Mission. There had been a mission at that place and the Japanese had taken over. Our fellows had made a landing on this par- ticular spot the day before and 300 men who had pushed up through the dense undergrowth had been caught in enemy cross-fire. I did a painting of three battalion aid stations. On D-Day at Los Xegros Colonel Hall set up an emergency operating room in a former Japanese pillbox. (From this Boggs made his picture "Bat- talion Aid Station.") While we were up at Papatali Mission an oflficor told Hall he was afraid one of the outfits had been cut off because communication had been lost. Some- how the Japanese had cut the Signal Corps lines. "We have got to get up there," said Hall. That man deserves a lot of credit. He is a cou- rageous guy. We got into a little old rowboat and some Aus- tralians rowed us down along the coast to a point where we landed. We started up inland with some native ammunition carriers. We didn't know where the Japs were. Suddenly there was an ungodly scream and everybody fell flat. One of the natives told us it was a jungle bird. On we went to what had been a Jap outpost. There was rice and stuff all over the place. It was very smelly. We had a little rest there before going up. It was really quite dramatic. Along this trail we met a fellow sitting with a tommy-gun. lie was an outpost to check and see what went on. We met some Signal Corps fellows stringing wire, followed by a chap with a tommy-gun. We passed a group coming down this trail. One of our men called out: "Hey, what happened to iVfike?" *'He got it," rephed tlie other. "Is he dead?" our man asked. "Not yet," was the laconic answer. Then there was silence. We arrived on the top of the hill whore the bat- talion aid station was. There was a modlcnl cfiptain in charge of this station and ho had throe doctors besides iirst-aid men. They had lost some of tlioso aid men who had crawled out to get the wounded. Natives carried down the wounded. Tlie native labor was called Angau, which stands for Australia Xew Guinea Administrative Unit. There were HO,- 000 employed in the New Guinea campaign and through Lend-Lease some of these fellows worked for us. General MacArthur paid thorn a tribute when he said it would have been impossible for the Xew Guinea campaign to succeed without them. Colonel Hall went about checking what the Medi- cal Corps needed. He wasn't supposed to bo out in the field doing tliis kind of work but ho did i1 to make sure things were going properly. He told the fellows off, too, if everything wasn't all riglit. He risked his neck — a fighting fool — and they admired him. During our triy) wo stopped at every battalion aid station along the coast. They had an arrange- ment whereby the wounded were evacuated from those stations in barges and were taken to a lios- pital which had better facilities. This set-up was amazingly efficient. The battalion aid stations, which accompany the troops, treat for shock and bandage wounds. If a man was dying, they would take a chance and per- form a major operation, but generally a battalion aid officer is a specialist in first-aid treatment and in putting splints on fractures. He must know what to do quickly in order to keep the wounded man in con- dition until ho can be sent back to a hospital. I went over to Manns Island and it was amazing what the war was like on a beach-head. You think of constant fighthig but it's not like that. There was artillery set up on an island two miles off shore to knock out the Japs and it was firing over our heads as we came in. Supplies were being unloaded, and tliere were follows in swimming, having a won- derful time while tlie guns boomed. Wounded men were coming in — -one with his jaw shot and hanging down. We pushed In from the beach a little way to a hill. The Japanese had heavy guns but our men had swarmed up to the crest. One of the wounded bound for the battalion aid station had been shot through the log and was in agony. I had a camera along with me and when he saw this he begged me not to take his picture looking like that. Many of the men were overcome by the heat in the fighting, and four had passed out from exhaustion. The Ad- miralty Islands are only about two degrees short of the equator. On the way back from the beach-head the boys who wore in charge of the landing-barge Avantod to know what I was doing, and I explained that I was on assignment for the Army Medical Corps. They wore in sympathy with the corps and o\-eryono thought that it was doing a swell job. Those men didn't even know what month it was or what day it was. The chief thing running through their minds 14 was ''When do 1 get home?" It was a job to be done. The corpsmen and the GIs wore constantly asking questions about their comrades — "Have you seen so-and-so! "—"How is he!" — "How many fellows are out there wounded?" When a wounded fellow is brought into the battalion aid tent they talk to- g-ether just as thougli they were discussing a foot- ball game. "Mike got it when that mortar shell hit" — "That machine-gun opeiied up right in front of my face." It's astonishing that more lads were not killed. The Japs felt tliat they were going to die anyway and might as \viil\ take down a couple of their enemies with them. Back in Los Negros they had set up an operating room, 30 by 80 feet. Four operating tables were going constantly. There were about five or sis sur- geons, all young fellows, and I went in at night when they were operating. There was no picture of men in white. I think in Europe it might have been a little different but out there these medics had to contend with the rains, and the water came into their operating theatre. It was muddy, and there were bloody bandages about. The surgeons wear only a pair of shorts and a little operating cap. I saw one fellow — a very handsome young lad — having his leg amputated. lie didn't know what had hit him, because he was knocked out when a piece of mortar shell struck him. As he lay there naked on the operating table yon wondered Avhat tlioughts would go through his mind when he came out from under the anesthetic. One of the most dramatic things that I saw was a corpsman Avalking out of a tent, carrying a bucket with an amputated foot in it, and part of a hand and gauze — just a lot of blood and mess. He was going to bury it. That's one of the many duties of the corpsman — that and scrubbing the blood off the stretchers. (This is shown in Boggs' painting "End of a Busy Day," where the stretchers are being cleaned in the surf, for it is said that salt water is good.) The corpsman who washes the stretcher does a lot to make the wheels of the Medical Corps turn. Some of the men work themselves to death. Prob- ably in civilian life they were meek and mild fel- lows, and being so close to wounded men they feel that they can't give enough. For instance, if there's heavy fighting tlie corps- man never lets up. He has to go right back and get another injured mau. He never can say "I'm tired." The enemy snipers pick off a GI. Maybe he's just wounded but is so badly hurt that ho can't even crawl from the spot where he has fallen. He yells for help — for water. Along comes a corpsman, and he's a perfect target for some sniper. If a corpsman has to crawl out to get a wounded soldier, a machine-gunner goes along with him. The cory)sman risks his life to get th*^ injured man Imt knows that his comrade with the machine-gun will avenge any sniper's bullet. I think the corpsmen deserve tremendous credit. Ice is important in the tropics. In many cases it is used to keep down infection. For instance, if they had been able to get ice they might have saved the leg of that boy who was operated on at Los Negros. With ice available they could have packed his leg and llown him back to New Guinea. ' >'-^ I returned to New Guinea on a B-17 which brought in a cargo of medical supplies and carried wounded men back. They put the patients through the gun turrets to get them into the plane. Only cargo planes are equipped with racks for evacuat- ing the wounded, so these fellows had to be put on the catwalk through the center of the B-17. When we took off it seemed as though we must hit the palm trees on the runway because of the great wingspread of this huge bomber. With the gun turrets opened there was a great deal of wind coming in and the blankets would blow from the wounded fellows. It was important to keep them covered. A special corpsman went along with the boy who had his jaw shot off. I had followed this case from the day he was wounded. He was all bandaged up, and the fluid from his salivary glands kept running down and choking him. The corps- man went along to keep this GT's head turned and mojj his face. 15 Of course the wounded man couldn't talk. The eorpsman would lean over him and ask him if he wanted anything. The GI would reach up and hold liie ('ori)snian down lo him. He didn't need any- thing:, but he wanted someone near him. Tiiere were touj^Ii ,e:unners on this ship sittin,ij; on ammunition boxes. They would watoh and say, '*My God, this is awful!" In looking out for the wounded men, we nearly lost the whole plane. We wei'f about If) minutes away from the base when a Jap bomber, out on a reconnaissance flight, flew over us and dropped two bombs in an attempt to hit our B-17. One bomb went forward and the other went aft, and our gunners opened up with their 50 's but he was too far away. When I returned to New Guinea there was no place for me to stay except in the ward of a port- able hospital witl; ^^'ouuded men. I was three beds away from tlie fellow who had his jaw shot off. This portable hospital was right in the jungle. It was screened in and had an iron roof on it. In the Pacific you always slept under mosquito nets, which were a sort of green color. It was a strange experience, being inside a net with a flash-light shining on the scenes about you. A nurse came through to look after a shipwrecked sailor who had swallowed so much oil that he vom- ited constantly and couldn't keep down food or water. You would see an arm in a cast, oi- bandaged limbs, sticking up in the air. Men were restlessly turning over. Outside in the jungle at night there are the danmedest 7ioises. Among other things there is a tropical bird which has a terrible scream. While I was in the Admiralty Islands, everyone had slept with his knife in his hammock. So I figured that I was going to sleep with my knife in the portable hospital. I had my knife right handy and had dozed ofif when there was a terrific racket on the corru- gated iron roof. I grabbed my knife and yelled. Somebody said: "All right, buddy. Take it easy. Don*t get ex- cited. It's just a cocoimt falling on the roof." In New Guinea and all the other islands out there conditions had been primitive before the war. There was nothing but native villages, and bringing in nurses was difficult. Consequently nurses didn't ar- rive until things had been pretty well consoUdated. The minute the base hospitals were set up, the nurses came along. In the matter of the Philippines and Saipan the nurses went in sooner because (hey had buildings as base hospitals and there was less chance of being overrun by the enemy. The Flight Nurses would go on planes to advance bases and come out with the wounded. They did a great job. At Port Moresby, New Guinea, there was the 17Ist Hospital and this had modern equipment. One of the terrible diseases of the New Guinea jungle is "scrub typhus." There is a grass called kunai which grows five or six feet high. In that grass there is a louse which breeds typhus germs and infects humans. This typlms Isn't like the European variety. Gen- erally a man will become paralyzed. The paralysis hits him on the seventh day, starting in his legs and working up to his lungs. He gets so paralyzed you would think that he was never going to breathe again, and if he isn't cured by the twelfth or thir- teenth day, he is gone. This scourge was all through New Guinea. Our troops were ordered to tie their pants legs and keep their borlies covered as much as possible. Skin diseases are severe afflictions out in New Guinea and other steamy hot islands of the Pacific. Some of them consist of itchy scaling patches with open sores partly caused by the scratching. Some- times they spread over the entire body. The soldiers have coined the word "jungle rot" for all types of skill diseases which occur in jungle areas. The doc- tors don't like this terra because it means so many different things. One soldier who writes home and says that he has "jungle rot" might have ordinary athlete's foot, another a skin ulceration, another a dermatitis due to plants, etc. However, soldiers like vivid terms and they won't gi\-e up this one. I saw- plenty of skill diseases in New Guinea and back in the hospitals of Australia. The fighting men have to live like rats in the first few days of an invasion. They live in dirt— in the ground. They can't wash their clothes. Because of constant rain and perspiration in intense humidity, their clothes never are dry. Insects get on them and the men start scratching. The men scratch this dirt into themselves and get their skin infected. The first stage produces i-unning and crusty sores. Then come blisters which break, and the infected water spreads to other places. I saw cases where the doc- tors put piping over the beds to hold up the sheets so tJiat they wouldn't touch the nft'ected men. In some cases the scaling, oozing patches get into the ears and around the eyes and they want to scratch themselves all the time. Skin diseases are bad out in New Guinea, but luckily they are not contagious and the men don 't infect each other and they won 't infect other people when they come home. Sometimes the doctors paint the fellows with gentian violet. I was very much impressed. Out in the jungle they had Medical Corpsmen set up a dispensary. Men with sores on their body would go there and corpsmen would paint them with gentian violet. Some of them with a strong sense of humor made their painting with a design. I called one of my pictures "Easter Egg." One of the most efficient developments in the Army Medical Department operations in the South- 16 west Pacific was the formation of the portable hos- pital uiiit.s, since these units were used in the early stages of invasion. They moved tliem by man-power through the jungles and they actually transpoi'ted 24-bed hospitals right over the Owen-Stanley range of mountains in New Guinea. Medical supplies were packed in oil drums which were slung between two poles with straps. The members of the unit had to carry their own food and water for the trip. They moved fast and there seemed to be no place they couldn't go. Portable units went into the Admiralties on D- Day. The units were so arranged, with prefabri- cated equipment, thai they could be set up and get to work immediately they hit a beach-head. These hospitals had full equipment and were sort of com- bined battalion aid stations and clearing stations. They not only may be on the firing line, but they also operate. You find them in the jungle, on the beach-heads, and even on the decks of transport ships. One evening I was walking along a beach. The sun was going out in the west. I saw a blood plasma bottle — a medical first-aid tin broken open — some bloody gauze and torn clothing. These things are symbolic of the Medical Corps. You know that wounded men have been treated. AVherever war has passed, there you see the Medical Corps syrettes. "When we went in and shelled an island it meant that the natives got shelled. Children, who didn't know what it was all about, got hurt. The Army Medical Corps cared for these wounded. One of the doctors at Finschhafen had a beautiful set of native spears as a result of such aid, and the way he got them was this : There was a very sick little boy in a village. Some natives came to the American hospital and asked this doctor to treat the child. The medic did so, and when the youngster was well his father said to the physician : "I will give you anything you want." The medical officer said he would like to have a few spears and arrows. The next day the father brought over a load of them — magnificent ebony fishing spears. Turning to anothi^r phase of the war, T have this feeling: that we are so far away from these boys who are coming back that 90 per cent of the people don't know what the soldiers stand for. We douH know where the places are that they speak of. Thev talk in GI terms of *' jungle rot," and it has no meaning on the home front. It's going to be very difficult for the average soldier. People won't appreciate what he has gone through and has suffered. Flyers! Folk don't even know what kind of planes the airman has flown. We don't talk the fighting man's language. While I was at the special hospital at Port Mores- by, they had one fellow from Chicago in confine- ment. He was the mildest-looking man. I took his picture. Well, he had killed three of his fellow fighters at the front when he got so excited that he "blew his top." The authorities found that he had become insane. His recovery is doubtful. The worst case of this nature was a chap from Oklahoma. He had been a gunman for a racketeer but when the war broke out this trigger-man and two brothers joined the service. They were sent to the Pacific, and his two brothers were killed. With that the ex-gunmau became mentally un- balanced and went AWOL from his labor battalion with a machine-g-un. He climbed over the towering Owen-Stanley Mountains and joined up with the Australians on the other side. I saw the report made on the case by the captain of the Australian unit to which the Oklahoman be- came attached. This said that he killed 135 Japs. He had no fear whatever but just pursued the enemy with his machine-gun. This" idea of exacting ven- geance for the death of his brothers became a mania with him and he reached the stage where he was ready to kill anyone. They got him back to Port Moresby, where they put him in confinement. But he had one of his spells during which he punched a hole through a wall with his bare fists, got out and knocked a imrse down. He knew when his attacks were coming on and used to warn the doctors so that they could handle him during this period. They were afraid that he might never fit into society again because of the possibility of recurrence. Most of the fellows come out of that sort of thhig. I've seen cases of men completely mad, and in about three weeks you wouldn 't know that there had ever been anything the matter with them. I saw one lot of heavily bearded fighting men, just back from the front, who were so addled they would sit in a daze. The ship I came back on carried 87 psychoneurotic patients. One fellow jumped overboard. One nurse was out of her mind. Many doctors have lost their reason. This is one of the difficult problems of the Medical Corps. Here is another impression : We had just had our supper in the Admiralties when a truck called a "hearse" came in. I looked into the hearse and saw a whole row of dead American soldiers. I saw a hand with a high-school ring on it. I saw their bodies taken over to graves. That sort of thing gets you to thinking. These poor devils out here are fighting this war. They've been taken from their homes. Men will risk their lives. Fighting day after day, life becomes cheap. By the law of averages they feel: "I will get it sooner or later." 17 Men do heroie tliiiiji;s. None of them think at the time: '*I am doing a brave thing!" I've seen the g'reatost affection between two men. I came back on a ship carrying wounded men to the United States. I was interested in a boy who had been hit by a piece of shell and was paralyzed on his right side. He couldn't talk or walk. While ho was in the hospital he met n fellow who had a case similar to his own but had recovered. The fellow who had regained his speech felt that he could help the other b;i' giving him encourage- ment. He would carry the paralyzed boy in his arms. The Good Samaritan would talk to his buddy and the latter would make answer by shaking or nod- ding his head. Their greatest fear was that when they got back to the United States they would get separated by being sent to different hospitals. The men on that ship had been away 26 to 28 months. They had been through the toughest part of the fighting. Coming back home was really some- thing. There were fellows who wore unable to walk on deck — and corpsmen carried them up to see the Oolden Gate. 18 4 Saipan UuR CONQUEST of Saipaii in June and July of 1944 was one of tlio j^rcat battles of the Pacific, for this island not only lay at the crossroads of the Mikado's supply lines but also was a vital stepping stone to Japan proper. Saipan belongs to the Marianas Group (known also as the Ladrones). It is about 700 miles north- west of Truk — one of Japan's most powerful bases — and some 1,000 miles northeast of the Palau Is- lands. These three— Saipan, Truk and the Palaus — were names to conjure with in the war against Nippon, for they were towers of Japanese strength and strategy in the Southwest Pacific. American forces stormed their way onto Saipan June 14 under cover of bombardment by United States warships and the bombing and strafing of carrier planes. The contest for the island was bloody, but by July 9 Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander of all American naval forces in the Pacific, was able to announce : "Our forces have completed tlie conquest of Sai- pan." Then on July 25 Secretary of the Xavy James V. Forrestal reported that American casualties totaled 16,463, including 3,049 killed in action, ] 3,049 wounded and 365 missing. He stated that more tlian 5,000 of the wounded already had returned to duty, and added: "This reduces our net losses at Saipan by about one-third and it speaks volumes for both the morale of the troops and the effectiveness of the Medical Corps." This Battle of Saipan was the red-hot assignment handed to Artist Robert Benney, and here is the story of his experiences as he told it informally to me: I went from San Francisco by battleship to Pearl Harbor where I spent several weeks doing base hospital work. Then I was assigned to a transport ship carrying soldiers and marines. You are tinder strict secrecy when you know where you are go- ing, as all war correspondents do. Once you are aboard ship you can 't go back to your hotel. I spent several weeks on the boat and did lots of work in the sick-bay. Several interesting things happen to the boys 07i a ship. When you pull out from the home port there is not a thing doing in the sick-bay, but after you arc at sea awhile it be- comes a well-populated place. Every fighting unit has its own Medical Corps outfit with it. The men receive reg-ular medical care in the sick-bay. The corpsmen hold constant consul- tations. They always are trying to improve them- selves. The interesting thing is to see the earnest- ness of the boys to add to their knowledge. They cram and cram and spend hours in the hot ship trying to add to their skill. That goes on all the time until the troops are ready to go over the side. I^^ach corpsman has a special job. One group is trained in pest control, an- other for battahon work up front, and still others are litter bearers. They all are specialists. If a boy shows special aptitude in a certain tj^pe of work, he will be selected for that. If he is light and agile, and can leap over crags and rocks, he is likely to become a litter bearer. If he is heavier he will be assigned to another job. My approach was slrictly that of observing the average man — to see what happened to the average medical soldier. The doctors are always on their toes to make sure that the troops are tops all of the time. For instance, the fungus disease in the ears and toes is a com- mon one, and every man who becomes afflicted with this is immediately treated and put back into shape. It is also of the utmost importance to see that all immunization injections are kept up to date. The cooperation is splendid between the Anny aTid Navy personnel aboard ship. They're com- pletely at the service of one another. Tlie Army takes care of its own men on the trip and the Ma- rines take care of theirs, but the doctors of the two services get together for consultation, and diag- noses are made jointly. The Marine doctor may have been an abdominal surgeon in civilian life. The Navy man may have been a brain specialist. The Army physician may have been a pediatrician. They pool their knowledge. Our landing on Saipan got underway during the night. Some of the men had to wade quite a distance from their landing craft because the tide had turned. Others went in on ducks {amphibious trucks) and alhgators (amphibious tanks). When daylight came it was an amazing sight. Our ships were maintain- ing a continuous barrage, and we could plainly see 19 our flame throwers smoking out the pill boxes and our carrier planes and ships bombing the heavier Jap installations. There was a great deal of dust in the air, and large smoke columns were pouring from gasoline dumps which had been fired. Every man had to reach the beach and do his job. You saw pieces of clothing floating on the water. At the outset of the landing you didn't see any dead men. Bodies got caught on the bottoms of amphib- ious vehicles and showed up days later. You saw m&ji hauling supplies on the beaches. Everybody was dirty and sweaty and very much the same color— gray. The intense barrage from Ihe ships stirred up the coral dust which covered every- thing. There were ducks and alligators taking the wounded back to the ship. My first sight of the wounded was when T saw them being loaded into LCVP's. They had been wounded chiefly by Jap rifle fire and mortars. Some of the first men to land didn't get touched until they had got up on the shore about 100 yards. Then the Japs let them have it. During and after the landings, numerous ships continually unloaded annnunition and supplies in order to maintain our positions. AVe pushed the Japs back b\' weight of materiel aiid men and tough and bloody figliting. l']ach group of Marines and Army men has a cer- tain number of corpsmen to take care of it. The corpsmen "go in" with Ihc fighters. The medics always travel with the troops to which they are assigned. Colonel Elliott G. Colby was the chief surgeon of the Army garrison force on Saipan. I hitched a ride on a truck which had brought a load of wounded to the beach. The wounded lay in tiers on trucks, and the corpsmen saw that the dressings were in place and gently wiped the in- jured men's faces and brushed off the numerous flies. The corpsmen do (lie same things for these men as their mother would. It was not quite dark when I finally found my way to the 38th Field Hospital of the 27th Division. The place was littered with wounded. This hospital was located in ('hinook Village at the southern tip of the island. To reach it one traveled along the beach road which had but recently been secured. The dust was so thick that you couldn't move more than four or five miles an hour, and the drivers of all trucks and other veliicles were armed against sudden ambush or sniper tire attacks. Surrounding this village were heights known as "Bloody Kidge" and others from wbich the Japa- nese recently had been cleared out but from which snipers still were operating and even shooting pa- tients in the field hospital. Our men have such con- tempt for the Japanese that they won't use the fox-holes that the Japs have dug, but often dig their own right next to them. T worked at the 38th Field Hospital, the 31st Field Hospital, the 2nd Marine Hospital, the 5th Amphibious Corps Hospital and at the Clearing and Aid stations. I syjcnt five days and nights at the 381h, sleeping on a litter or on the floor. There was no other place to sleep. The doctors rarely slept. They worked until they either dropped from exhaustion or were ordered off duty. There were slit trenches to dive into when the Japs shelled the area, but these doctors and corpsmen kept on op- erating during the air raids, working by flasldiglit at night in the stifling, blacked-out tent. Along with the surgeons and corpsmen were the Red Cross representatives and the chaplains of the various faiths. These men did a magnificent job, soothing and encoui'aging the wounded and admin- istering the last rites to the dying. As in my pic- ture *'A Prayer for Johnny" (Men with God), at the request of this badly wounded man the chaplain gently reads a psalm while the soldier slowly goes to sleep under an anesthetic. The wounded men were brought into the receiv- ing tent where they were given plasma in some cases or were taken to the shock tent where almost every man received plasma. The men who drove the jeeps had a tough job, and they looked as though they had been tired for weeks. Frequently these men would work continuously all day, and at night when they got back from the front they would act as litter bearers. It was eerie the way jeeps loaded with wounded would keep coming down the road at night while Jap planes were approaching. The drivers were supposed to seek cover but they wouldn't desert the wounded. They took the injured men off the jeeps first. For a time there was such a tremendous influx 20 of wounded that there wasn't sufficient tentage for them. As previously pointed out, the doctors kept right on working during the air raids. From a dugout one night I saw two Jap planes shot down. One exploded into a red ball of flame and foil into ]\[agicieune Bay. I saw men wdio had been working continually for 24 hours as litter bearers and jeep di-ivers. They called the jeeps "meat wagons." When the jeep pulled up at night during a raid the drivers would call out "Litter bearer!" and some of these men would crawl from the dugouts and take the wounded into the tent for plasma. I know nothing tougher than leaving a hole during an air raid. Wlien the Jap bombers were a^jproaching one of the boys would lift the flap of the tent and yell, "Air raid!" Then the switch was thrown for the generator which supplied light for the hospital, plunging the entire area into darkness. Still the operating wont on by flashlight. The flap would be lifted again and there would come the yell, "Fnemy planes overhead!" Everybody was supposed to stop work and hit tlic dirt — a regulation which rarely was complied with. The doctors were completely selfless in their woi-k as the wounded kept flowing in. Sometimes the com- manding officer had to order a man off duty because he hadn't slept for such a long time. The Colonel woidd say: "This is an order. You must go off duty. You are too valuable to be walking around until you drop." The doctor then would go into his tent, shave and wash with some of the filtliy water in the cistern, lie down for a few minutes — and then get up and go right back to work. You slept wherever you could find a place but, wherever you were, the infiltrating Japs were apt to discover you. They would crawl up in the dark- ness and put a grenade by your tent or hut and then sneak away. Snipers would lurk nearby waiting for you to disclose your whereabouts by some move- ment. One of our doctors was shot in the leg in broad daylight while taking a shower atop a Jap water cistern. The climate of Saipaa is humid and the tempera- ture high. Everybody was wet all the time, and covered with soot and dust. The island is volcanic and everything has to be regarded as liighly infec- tious because of the dust. Every scratch, every wound, had to be treated immediately. The terrain of Saipan' is hilly and jagged and tiiere is jungle on the island. There are numerous insects and pests — scorpions, land crabs, snakes, mosquitoes. The flies from the dead were terrific. The land crabs would crawl into fox-holes and at- tack wounded men. There also were plenty of rats which were extremely largo. However, the men stood up very well under all this. When I hit the landing beach I was stunned for two days. I couldn't do a bit of work. I wont into the operating tent and the heat was intense. Every- flflfWC^W'^ J-^jifv I til u> ' yf^'-^' -^Ui^. pti»n/v ? -M8 fItLP JAPf' ptffgeo /Mr" AlU&ATOI'_ __ AID sTA- <"■ *>-J3» R§PJi.ilO AT uSf^/ PT thing was blacked out at niglit. There was no ven- tilation. The heat — the smells — the blood — the brain cases! I could take it for 20 minutes or so and then had to go out for air. The lighting was provided by portable generators. The surgeons usually wore shorts, and sometimes gowns in cases of abdominal or other major opera- tions. They also wore masks. Our men didn't get gangrene because they had their wounds treated at once, while the natives got gangrene because they had old wounds. The Japs were sent to a separate hospital but they received the same treatment as our men. (The reader undoubtedly will recognize, without prompting from the writer, that Artist Benney was risking his life every moment of the day and night, just as did the other artists who were assigned to the theatres of war. It was the feeling of these men that it was their duty to collect as much informa- tion as they possibly could, even on the tiring line, in connection with the work of the Army Medical Corps. They had to get out and do their jobs and forget about themselves.) The danger to the medics was the same as it was to the lighting men, and the latter had the highest regard for the corpsmen. Some of the aid stations were no more than slit trenches from which the corpsmen would crawl out, get the wounded and drag them in by a rope tied around them. Once in the trench they could be given plasma. These slit trenches were in constant danger of being surrounded or overrun by Japs in their banzai charges. The trenches were also under mortar fire on occasion, and a large number of the Medical Corps lost their lives or were Avounded. During the battle the corpsman would crawl out and two riflemen would watch him to keep him cov- ered so that he could get the wounded. If a Jap fired they would pepper his position. In the abso- 22 lutely silent night they would try to creep up and drop grenades into your fox-hole. The fighting on Saipan was largely with rifie and mortars. Wherever a line did exist it Avas taken care of with heavy guns which were going all the time — Bloody Eidge, Hill Five Hundred, Nafutan Point, Agingan Point, Magicienne Bay, Garapan, the battle of Tanapag Harbor. Marpi Point was where the Jap suicides occurred. The Japanese killed the civilians rather than allow them to surrender. There were three civilian com- pounds — for Chamorros, Koreans and Japanese — and the civilians poured inlo the compound by thou- sands as the battle progressed. A score or so of Army nurses came in with the Second Echelon after the island was secured. Fight- ing still contiimed, however. These girls were put in with the civilian poxjulation, and they did a wonder- ful job. They worked night and day, principally with the women and children of the natives. In a civilian hospital to which they were attached there was a Japanese girl with a remarkal)le story. She had been a nurse in civilian life and was in a cave with other civilians and some Jap soldiers when American troops entered to clear them out. Our men found this girl lying with her throat cut from ear to ear. They rushed her to the hospital and her life was saved. When she was able to talk she explained she had done this because she had been taught that American soldiers always raped women and then killed them. Amazed and grateful for our humane treatment, she gave her services as a trained nurse in the hospitah A wounded Japanese soldier who was being treated by an American corpsnian tried to kill the latter — and this after being bandaged and fed by the Americans. One of the things that the corps- men in the aid stations and the field hospital had to watch out for was attack by Japanese wounded. If a Jap was sufficiently strong he might seize a knife and attack a doctor. But to get back to the treatment of our oAvn boys, the shock tent gave you the impression of an as- sembly line^ — the men all getting plasma. Some were given five or six units. Some came in there with practically no pulse and appeared quite dead. The doctor would examine the patient and prescribe ])lasma to be given. Then a corpsman would work on the wounded man, giving him unit after unit, and the strangest sight was to see a man, who had received five or six units, come to life, open his eyes, and ask for a cigarette. He would want to know where he was and would ask if his buddy was all right. You never heard the really wounded cry out. There was a certain amoTint of moaning, but no yelling. I heard but one wounded man yell in Saipan, and that was in a hospital area. He was a Jap. He had a superficial wound and thought the Americans were taking him into the tent to torture or kill him. The corpsmen often would give their blood to the wounded. On the hospital ship Solace a call went out one night for 50 donors, and they got over 250 volunteers from the ship's personnel. Colonel Colby rode around the island picking hospital sites. Along with his immediate responsi- bilities his concern was for the future of his men. He really was an artist as well as a great surgeon. He selected his hospital sites after carefully analyz- ing all the terrain and conditions, looking forward to the rehabilitation period of the wounded with the idea of surrounding them with all the beauty possible, and thereby helping their recovery. He had to do this during battle conditions, projecting his imagination and probing the island for its sensitive beauty in the better days to come. At Garapan, the capital city, the Japs had a beau- tiful hospital which we used, of course. Indications were that they had killed all their wounded before they evacuated the place. A captured Japanese medical officer who was questioned as to what the Japanese did with their wounded when they had to retreat, replied that if a wounded man couldn't be evacuated his carotid artery was cut and he was impregnated with an inflammable fluid. Every wounded or sick American was evacuated by ship or by plane. The first stop back from Saipan was the island of Eniwetok, in the Marshall Islands, where some of the wounded were kept until they were able to continue. We had other hospitals scat- tered throughout the Pacific islands — Kwajalein, Johnston Island, etc.^ — where I took notes and made sketches. When the hospital plane landed it was met by a crew wliich brought up huge blowers that pumped cool air into the plane. Corpsmen fed the ■Ai 23 wounded with hot food. All this made it quite com- fortable. On one of the flights with the wounded we carried 15 eye cases. Motor trouble at Johnston Islaiul forced us to wait for another plane, and the wounded men were taken to the hospital. Tliere they were examined immediately and the dressings were changed. The battlefield diagnosis for one of the patients had been total blindness by mortar frag- ments, but when the doctor took off tlie bandage he saw that while one eye was dead there was life in the other. "I think we can give this boy an eye," said the pliysician. With that he swabbed the pus from the eye and though it was puffed up and discolored, the eye was O.K. I'll never forget the expression on the sol- dier's face when he realized he could see again! This is an example of tlie Army Medical Corps' vigilance in safeguarding our boys. 24 5 Italy Italy and other battlefields of the MediterraiieaTi theatre produced Home of the most important medi- cal advancements of the entire second World "War. The American Medical Corps — fif^iiting' such dread enemies as malaria and typhus, wliieli down the ages had ravaged ai'mles — lost only 585 soldiers to disease from the time of the North African in- vasion^ November 8, 1942, through March of 1945 when the l']ui-opean conflict was rushing to its end. This really amazing record was made public in Rome on May 14, 1945, by Major General Morrison C. Stayer, chief theatre surgeon, whose 50 Army hospitals treated 918,298 members of the United States armed forces during the period in question — and this with a death record of less than one per cent. One of the early problems of the Array Medical Corps was a malignant type of malaria. In 1943 this was taking the life of one out of everj 700 sol- diers stricken with it. But by 1944 the ratio had been cut to one in 14,000 ! Then there were outbreaks of typhus — ^that ter- rible pestilence which Is borne by lice — among na- tives of Africa and Italy, but Ihere were only nine eases in the Army and all of these were non-fatal. For the first time a typhus epidemic was knocked out by a louse powder — the sensational new DDT. This was in 1943 when there was an outbreak of the scourge in Naples and almost the entire population was dusted with this powder. Bacillary dysentery was kept under control by sulfa drugs. Our sanitation measures were so effec- tive that only 161 cases of typhoid hit the armed forces. Major General Stayer reported that the doctors of the Mediterranean zone made an outstanding con- tribution io medical science in the early diagnosis and treatment of jaundice, a disease which hospital- ized many American soldiers. He also noted that this theatre pioneered in demonstrating the Tieces- sily of adequate, fresh whole-blood for the treat- ment of shock. Besides caring for Americans, the Army hospitals also treated Allied fighting men. These included more than 100,000 British, French, Italians, Brazil- ians, Yugoslavs, Dutch, Poles, Russians, Finns, and Greeks. Then, of course, as in every other theatre, civilians wore taken care of when the emergency called for it. Improvisation, upon which the Army Medical Corps lays so much stress, reached a very high pitch during the Mediterranean fighting. So the story goes. Artist Joseph Hirsch worked in this zone durhig March and April of 1944 and brought back a fas- cinating report to which the writer listened for hours — an account which the reader will see illus- trated by Hirsch's pictures in this book. Again I am setting the facts down in the language brought out by a wholly informal conversation — and now Hirsch is speaking: The outstanding impression of my whole trip was that despite the preparation — and everything ap- parently is anticipated^ — yet in the actual zone of fighting things arise which can't be anticipated at all. For instance, they have a wonderful streteher which is strong, light, can fold up, will hold a 400-pound load, and yet the natives down in the South Pacific {I was in the South Pacific) will got a couple of poles and weave grasses across to make a stretcher. This is springy and a little soft. There is a space between the grass strands and it is cooler and much more comfortable in the tropical climate. The same idea holds good even in the northern zones in summer. A lot of the things which look medically wonder- ful on paper, so far as supplies can, didn't cover all the exigencies of actual combat. For example, there is no way in which our Medical Department Supply Service can sec to it that a wounded boy on a stretcher is carried down a horribly precipitous rock — not even dirt — at night time, as is shown in one of my pictures. (This painting is called "Night Shift.") The burden of the Medical Department's joh weighs heavily on the men who have to find ways and means — the men at the very front. They have to improvise. All the foresight which is so necessary at Washington still isn't enough. The department makes provision for everything, including front line dental chairs — everything you can imagine! And still the reason it works is because of unique in- genuity. (The reader will note that Hirsch is emphasizing our old friend, the all-important "improvisation.") o^ To illustrate: Normally in a back injury — a dis- located vertebra or a broken neck — a boy's whole body has to be kept in traction and very often bis entire torso must be incased in a plaster cast. But a dentist in Naples contrived a way of transporting- a man with a broken neck in an airplane without a plaster cast. This dentist had a device wliich he called a niax- illo occipital traction appliance (Ilirsch's picture "Medical Ingenuity") by means of which the pa- tient could be transported by litter with the entire body in traction. The pull was maintained by means of an ingenious plate fitting the roof of the mouth. Out of this plate came rods which w^ere connected by rope and pulley to a spring underneath the stretcher. Tliat w^as a device wliich was thought of right in the war theatre. The same dentist got hold of a mine-detector and devised what lie called a foreign body locator for shell fragments. A piece of shell would come in any one of many directions and a small wound would be no indication as to where the metal was. The doctor had this little mine detector which instead of being as big as a "pie-plate," like the regular mine, was a three-inch disc with a tiny needle on the oscillation indicator. It would tell where the metal was just as the big detector would locate mines. Another Army doctor contrived a way of tindiiig a piece of metal in a boy's groin, or ear, or throat, where you can't probe around as you can in a fleshy part. He wired two needles which were inserted into the flesh at approximately right angles. A^Tien both needles touched the piece of metal, the circuit was completed and the doctor knew precisely where the fragment was. To illustrate further, in a field hospital oul in the Solomon Islands I saw several notched pieces of two-by-four lumber standing in the corner of a ward and asked what they were. The explanation was that they were used to make a sort of tent frame over beds in case of air raids, the idea of it being this : When there was a raid all patients who could be moved were immediately taken into a fox-hole. They called even a large air-raid shelter a fox-hole, and very often it was right in the tent. The tents had beds and cots. The latter were light and could be carried very easily but if a badly injured boy was in a heavier bed, the corpsmen made a tent frame over him with the two-by-fours and on this they piled several mattresses. Thus the wounded chap was in his own little air-raid shelter — not very ef- fective with a direct hit but protecting him well in case of a near hit. Just that simple ingenuity is one of the things whore a lack of supplies wouldn't enter into the need for improvisation. In one hospital there was a sudden rush of pa- tients, necessitating so many changes of sheets that the engineers made a sterilizer out of a gasoline drum with a pressure gauge on it. Thus they had their own little laundry — improvised because the number of patients was so great over the period of a few days. AVhen they brought a boy in, covered with sticky, maroon paste^a combination of his blood and the mud he had lain in — they got hold of some tar paper, spread it on a bed and undressed him there in order to save sheets. The traffic of patients varied so greatly that there was no way in which a doctor could be assured that everything w^ould be there at the right time no matter what happened. So improvisation is one of the great points to make in connection with the work of the Army Medical Corps — not so much improvising instru- ments, but improvising ways and means. I tried to get as much latitude — as wide a variety of corps activity as possible — in Italy. For example, take tlie veterinary work In the Ai-niy. (This would seem to be a good place for a word of explanation about a highly important bul little publicized branch of the Army Medical Department — the Veterinary Corps. It is manned by officers who are graduates in veterinary medicine. The vet- erinarians have twofold duties: they are responsible for the health of animals in the Army, including horses, mules and war dogs; and they are con- cerned with the supplies of food of animal origin, which involves an immense job of inspecting and analysis. (In combat, animals get tlie same swift treatment as soldiers. Veterinary aid stations receive and re- cord animal casualties, give emergency treatments to disabled animals, return them to duty or prepare them for evacuation. Animals which cannot be sal- vaged are destroyed.) 26 The pack mules in Italy were vitally important in tlio mountainous combat zone. Mules are very sure-footed and sensible. While a horse will get frightened and lose its balance in the dark, these pack mules won't. Transportation of the wounded was the major problem of the corpsman in the mountain regions. Because the mules wouldn't work on precipitous slopes in the dark, corpsmen very often had to carry the injured back at night. I saw one wounded soldier being transported by eight men. There were four carrying the stretcher, one lugging all their kits, two in front to hold back the little scrub bushes so that the stretcher could pass, and still another one who acted as relief. Near Mount Camino, south of Mount Cassino, I saw my brother-in-law — a doctor — ^who had been wounded after forty-one days without changing his clothes. He was hit by a mortar fragmciit. I haven't been wounded in battle but here is how this boy felt: He was with the battalion aid station up on Mount Camino. This station consisted of little more than a lot of courage, and a canvas flap with a red cross on it. The men in Ihe forward zones used to cover the red cross with mud so that it couldn't be spotted, because the Germans — at least in Italy — sometimes deliberately hit a hospital. If they saw the red cross they might use it as a target because they knew that the command post was nearby and if they could box that area with artillery they could hit com- munications. At any rate, my brolher-in-law was at the front and late in the afternoon he and some comrades started to heat coffee over a little gasoline stove. A mortar shell dropped nearby, and they picked themselves up — and then a second, and a tliird. Fjvery time they reached for the coffee another shell came. My brothor-in-law took refuge behind a rock with four other men, lying elbow to elbow and holding onto their helmets. He was in the middle. The shells kept coming and they counted them. He thinks it was the eighteenth or nineteenth which got them. The boy on his far left was killed outright, the one next to him on that side was fatally injured, my brother-ill-law was wounded in the shoulder- — and the two on his right wore not hurt at all. Another medical offic;'r dressed the shoulder. A shell fragment is red-hot and therefore often sterile, and because of the heat penetrates the flesh very easily. My brother-in-law didn't feel the wound greatly and it didn't bollier him as much as the fact that he was deaf. He had no way of knowing, al- though he was a doctor, that he was only temporar- ily deaf. He was quite deaf when he woke up in the morning after lying there all night in a state of mild shock. All he could think about was not the wound in his shoulder, or the fact that he had to go down the mountainside almost five miles to get a jeep to a collection station, or even the permanence of his deafness- — ^but he was worrying because he couhln't hear the sound of a shell. He never had realized how much he listened to the war, but suddenly being deaf was worse than the wound. To be thus deprived of his ears meant that he had to keep an eye on some soldier perhaps several yards ahead of him. When the soldier heard a shell coming and dropped for cover, the doctor hit the dirt too. The end of the story is that within a few days his hearing was almost 100 per cent. At the front there was very little formality be- tween officers and enlisted men. They ate together and of course there Avas absolutely no saluting. At the battalion aid station there might be one or two doctors, eight medical corpsmen and perhaps a half- dozen litter bearers. This was not behind the front but was part of the fighting line. All the stretcher bearers were volunteers. I can't think of any more hazardous work, because they can't defend themselves. It may be hazardous to unscrew a pin on a bomb or a mine, or hazardous to do something similar for one afternoon, but the.se noble fellows serve day after day. If a soldier is shot and falls they go and get him. Thoy are won- derful boys ! The blackout in the combat section right near the front lines was nearly 100 ])er cent so far as con- cerned cigarettes, flashlights and matches. Conse- quently, the putting of a tag on a wounded man who was being transported back was a problem. The stretcher bearers had to dig a hole, get a blanket under which they could use a light, or write in the dark. Naturally most of the injuries occurred during the day, although the German artillery would open up and work at night if they knew precisely where the target was. This meant that most of the trans- portation was done during the day although the movement and treatment of the wounded was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job. I studied anatomy as an art student, and my father is a doctor. I'm interested in medicine and know pretty well what the human body consists of, but I never realized there were so many bones in the body until I saw these wounded boys. We nor- mally think of a bullet wound as being a hole in the fleshy part of the body, but what the bullets do to a bone is ghastly. I saw one soldier who had his lung ripped, three ribs fractured, his shoulder in- jured badly and the bone in his upper arm damaged with just one bullet. 27 Another ^a:reat problem which the ^lodical Corps had to face was treatment of the blind, l^'ortunately very few boys were totally blinded, that is, lost the sight of both eyes. Many of them — Ihousands^lost one eye. In the case of the blind men the experts in the war zone wanted to teach the boys how to bo blind so that when they came back to America they could walk down the gangplank with all the assur- ance that the sightless person ultimately acquires. However, it didn't work out that way because after a few weeks of cooperation the injured man's nostalgia for America became overpowering. For that reason many of them were brought back for treatment in the hospital at Valley Forge, Pennsyl- vania, then for reconditioning at Old Farms Con- valescent Hospital, Avon, Connecticut, before they were ready to take off their unifoi'ms and proceed as successful blind people. I was told that the rise and fall of the spirit of bUnded boys was almost the same in every case. At first they were almost suicidal from very deep mel- ancholy. One of the earliest things they were taught was how to typewrite — that is, after they had learned how to feed themselves and get to the bath- room. AVlien they found that they were getting every attention and that all their wants were anticipated ■ — that they could indeed find their way to the bath- room, feed themselves, and typewrite — their spirits rose and they became almost exhilarated, especially over the typewriting. From then on until they were to go home there was a slow drop. There were some horrible instances of eye in- juries from frost-bite among members of our air corps based in Fngland, where I also worked. At altitudes of 25,000 and 35,000 feet temperatures of 40 to 50 degrees below zero are "normal," and an eye may be lost by very brief exposure to the cold air. Fingers also become frost-bitten in 10 or 12 seconds if gloves are taken off. The fingers look almost like little blue bananas. It is very much like a badly burned hand and I think that medically frost-bite and burns are akin. We have another tine example of improvisation in the case of the loss of eyes. That was in the de- velopment by two dentists of acrylic resin instead of glass for artificial eyes. The demand for artificial eyes was considerable and couldn't be met quanti- tatively because most of them came from German)'. The dentists made artificial eyes by baking the acrylic resin and painting it, and they could match it even to the flecks in the cornea. {Surgeon General Kirk has said: "These acrylic eyes arc fitted to the eye-socket in the same way that dentures are fitted to the mouth. Besides fitting perfectly, these new eyes are much lighter and less fragile than the old glass eye.") (Artist Hirsch has mentioned one of the great hazards of the air — frost-bite — but there are many others which make aviation a definite field of medi- cal specialization due, to (juote Deputy Air Surgeon Charles E. Glenn, "to the inescapable fact that man in flight is a different animal from that earthbound creature with whom other specialists are accus- tomed to deal." (The airman encounters many unusual death- dealing forces which are capable of injuring or kill- ing him. Bar(mietric pressure and temperature at high altitudes are among these. The flier has to learn, too, that if he is to survive he must maintain rigid oxygen discipline. An attempt to breathe free air between 20,000 and 30,000 feet would result in death in a few moments. (Then, as General Glenn says, "each man has his flying efficiency curve and the best of them will reach a point in that curve where he will break down him- self or crack up his plane. The breakdown common to combat fliers is called operational fatigue." (The list of unusual dangers with which the flier has to contend is a long one. So while the medical problems of aviation ground-crews are much the same as those of the foot-soldier, the airman pre- sents a very special case which the Medical Corps handles through experts in aviation medicine.) The Medical Department can gauge our Arm\- morale in any part of the world, and morale can't be uniform when it involves millions of men. In Italy, where I was, it wasn't too good. The doctors 28 all told me that the lungth of the line in front of the clinie at 8 A.M. was directly in proportion to the morale of tlie troops and to the nearness to the front. In a sector where morale wasn't good, a doc- tor in the rear echelon would report by eight o'clock and he finished hy iiiiio. Farther forward he might report at eight and not be finished nntil one. Just what projjortion in line wore gold-bricking and just what proportion were afflicted with a cold — or whatever the coniiilaint happened to be — is something I don't know. But there was very little gold-bricking in the rear echelon. And the doctors had a pretty accurate gauge of morale in the num- ber of ajiplicants who showed up at the hospital. I am tahcing about non-combat patients. In a few instances^ — a very fcAv — there were self-inHicted in- juries, but a boy who inflicted an injury on himself was usually psychoneurotic to a degree. I remember seeing one who had shot himself in the foot, and the story, always the same, was: "I was cleaning my gun and it went off." But the men who were genuinely hurt werc^ \'ery cooperative with the doctor whereas the others were evasive in their answers. One lad had taken his shoe off and then shot his foot and imi the shoe back on again. In general, gokl-biicking is a very reliable measure of morale. Another thing: The men who pass through the hands of the Army doctors, after having been wounded in battle, are a different kind of animal than the soldiers who haven't suffered physically at the hands of the enemy. They have a more sub- stantial realization of what the wai' is about. I re- member in particular seeing the reaction of about 5,000 soldiers in a personnel replacement depot. That was where wounded boys went after recupera- tion — before being sent back to the United States, into limited service oi' back to combat again. One night the men had assembled in the big grandstand of a horse-racing track where the re- placement depot was located, and they were waiting for the sun to sink sufficiently so that the movies would be visible on the screen. Dui'iiig this wait there were some news flashes over the loudspeaker. One of the flashes from home was that the cost of the war to the United Stales up to that time had far exceeded one hundred billion dollars, but that America was ready to spend another billion dol- lars to speed victory. You could hear a gasp of surprise and a wave of muttered exclamations of disgust and curses. These boys, who didn't think at all In terms of dollars, much less in terms of billions of dollars^wlio had lost completely any habit of thinking in such terms — suddenly heard this statement, which was so ir- relevant to tlmt ^-ertebra that had been pulled out of place, or the bullet in the thigh or arm. To hoar tin' war expressed in t-erms of dollars was a shock. The very infliction of a wound in battle gives a man a different slant. Consequently I think the Medical Corps more than any separate department of the Army has a liarticularly advantageous posi- tion insofar as gauging the change that comes to veterans of combat. I met many boys who had been in four amphibious invasions, and one who had been in five, and up to a certain point they became battle- toughened veterans. After that point their efficiency — hut more their spirit — definitely dropped. The number of venereal patients treated by the Medical Corps was the biggest problem in certain areas — that is, statistically. In the South Pacific, malaria took precedence. So far as medical prt)]ihylaxis for venereal dis- ease was concerned, there certainly was no short- age. The doctors had to deal with the final results, but there was a whole prior chain of events. A kid was subjected to nervous strain and tension during battle, and on his leave he didn't dehberately de- eid(! to find a female and become infected with venereal disease— although on occasion it is a form of gold-bricking — but he simply got drunk and care- less. I should say that about 95 pei' cent of the boys so infected were drunk. They were drunk and ir- responsible, and they forgot. On any reports having to do with a patient, whether dischai'ged or otherwise, always was the clause: "Jn the line of duty — yes; In the line of duty — no." Of course if a boy got careless and was hospitalized with pneumonia, it was in the line of duly. But not so in the case of venereal disease. There are two sides to this problem. On the one hand you have doctors invoking the Ilippocratic oath that a patient is a patient and should be so treated. But on the other hand, a man of about 50 said to me in great heat: "Hirsch, you are an artist. You want to got back and paint pictures. I want to get back to cardiology. Everybody wants to get back. And those who de- liberately or accidentally become infected venereally, in sx^ite of all the provisions that the Medical Corps 29 has to prevent infection, are absenting themselves from tlieir jobs in the Army. They are occujjying hospital beds where bad cases should be. They are prolonging the war." (These two viewpoints of course raise the much debated question of whether fighting men who con- tract venereal disease should be punished. Tlie method of deaUng with this troublesome problem varies in different countries. Some inllict heavy penalties, especially where the disease is contracted through infraction of rules.) In the army there is nothing backward about the preventive measures, although in many areas of America there are backward people. All over the war theatre there were signs: "Beware of V.D.," or "Caution — V.D.," or in some places "Venereal disease bad." The prophylaxis stations bore the sign "Pro Station." Incidentally, a very funny thing happened in con- nection with these "pro station" signs. Shortly after we moved into Naples, the Army public rela- tions office, where all the correspondents checked in — British and American — posted a sign outside. This was "PKO," meaning public relations office, but the initials weren't separated by periods. As a result it was several times confused for a "pro station" by bewildered GIs who ran into it. In Jaimary of 1944, before the Allied Control Commission Avas set up in the Naples area, our Army Medical Corps had the responsibility of com- bating the seriously threatening epidemic of typhus. It was serious insofar as it contaminated the area and the civilians — even though none of our inocu- lated soldiers contracted the disease — for we used Itahans to drive our jeeps and to do our work for us. Contamination of food and water supplies would be very dangerous. The Medical Corps did splendid work. I went around with the hce-squad one night when wo visited nine underground "recoveros" or air- raid shelters. Two or three of them were without doubt the filthiest places 1 ever have seen, including some of the slum areas in Spain and Shanghai. The shelters were damp and there were puddles of urine. My flashlight picked up squashed rats. It was in the air-raid shelters that the typhus epidemic spread, and we sent down men with DDT powder. By using that powder and a lot of elbow grease they held the line and won the battle. But it was serious in Janu- ary of '44. About six or seven miles outside Naples the Fas- cists had a World 's Fair in 1940, and on the site of these fair grounds the United States Army set up a medical center. This consisted of live or six hos- pitals. One of my paintings shows an orthopedic ward — a couple of rows of beds with our banged-up boys, and back of them on the walls by the high ceilings were big Fascist photo murals of an Italian soldier and Mussolini's ideology in quotation. Bom- bardment by us and later by the Germans had cracked the walls, I thought the juxtaposition of the cracking walls and the broken bones in the boys be- ing mended made a striking picture. On top of these murals — as another example of GI impudence and disdain — were pin-up girls. The incongruity was wonderful I The diversity of the Medical Coi'ps undertakings was amazing. I visited an evacuation hospital de- voted entirely to the treatment of our Allies. I saw a seventy-year-old woman being cared for in an Army hospital. A Corpsman carried a woman, who was about to have a baby, out of the path of a stream of lava from Vesuvius. Then, about twenty minutes before the lava came down, a corps doctor delivered her while the volcanic ashes dropped around them. This doctor also attended two sheep belonging to the woman. So far as the psychoneurotic question is con- cerned, it is the biggest problem in relation to the knowledge which we have to combat it. We know a lot about broken bones, and about malaria, but not so much about psychoneurosis. Many boys who were temporarily psychoneurotic would insist upon being sent back to the front and it wasn't very often that the doctors refused such a request. A general hospital was the only one which could send a soldier back to the United States. One soldier arrived in Algiers from Naples on his way home — a psychoneurotic case — who apparently was the victim of a mistake on tlie part of the doc- tors in Naples, since he seemed to be normal. But one day while he was in hospital in Algiers an airplane zoomed low over the building in violation of regulations — and this so-called normal boy was found under his bed completely shaken. When a soldier was sent home, it was for a very good reason. Many were assigned to permanent limited service. Simulated psychoneurosis is really a form of the affliction. A man Avho is willing to bo branded as a neurotic — as having cracked — is, to a degree, neu- rotic. If he is crazy enough to shoot himself in the leg, he has reached what they call his emotional threshold. The problem of how long to keep men in combat is naturally a serious one. 1 questioned some Ger- man prisoners about this, at a compound where sev- eral hundred of Ihem were being treated by their own doctors under American supervision. I asked two German doctors how to explain the absence of psychoneurosis cases in a hospital taking care of 700 prisoners. Their explanation was that the German spartan CTivironment — the early military training — ^was more re-enforcing than American football, basketball and 30 tennis. My own explanation was that tliose Germans who were sufficiently close to us to be captured were healthy. I figured that they must have cases which were not in the front lines. The German doctors did say that letters from home indicated there were a lot of psychoneurotic disturbances among the civilians. Somehow I didn't think that was a shame. -^^■^■^ .#^«^ JJ!»*^ il^JL. VX—i^U f,-« rfrt. ,1^^ l-«»<.*.',. ^ "J- Cv-v(.l-W-^. hi vv'^ -.u-a^. '•■iK-^ L 31 6 D Day in Normandy 1 riE United States Army Medical Corps Avon a Purple Heart on tlie historic D-Day of June 6, 1944 — for the Oorpsnien swarmed u]> onto tlie shell- swept, bloody beaclios of Normandy with the first thi-ee waves of Allied fii;hting men. This greatest of all amphibious invasions was much as the exports had dreamed it would be. An Allied armada of 4,00U shl^js drove across a stormy English Channel towards the five landing beaches which had been selected. There had been a heavy air bombardment Ihe night before, and as the fleet moved in with ihe coming of the dawn every gnn went into action. Cruisers and destroyers rammed their iioses riglit up to the shore, and some even struck bottom. Our greatest losses at the outset were on the heavily mined beaches which were under a vicious enemy cross-fire. Because of these mines we couldn't bury the dead until D-f3, as the engineers were so busy clearing out mines for the forces that the graveyards had to wait. The Corpsmen were among the earliest arrivals on the beach-heads and their losses were heavy. The medical men had their httle stations along the sands and were not only under shell-fire but were sniped continually by the Germans. Surgeons performed major operations on these l)cach-heads. All the members of the corps had been specially traiued in Knglaud for this great emergency, and they did a grand job. Many of them didn't sleep for 48 hours, for the wounds were bad in those first few days. ]\[edical supplies kept coming from Britain in the narrow water lanes wliich Allied vessels had swept through the German mine fields. The landing boats Avhicli took troops to the beach-heads brought wouiulcd back to the ships. Some of these landing craft were specially fitted so that stretchers could be put on them in tiers. Into this unprecedented scene, fortune flung Art- ist Lawrence Beall Smith, who risked his life to gather the story which he now presents: In England when they were getting set for D-Day there was a terrific sense of the impending event — of the probabilities that there would he awful cas- ualties. Preparations never before envisaged were made to meet the anticipated casualties. During the last week the tension was fUmost un- bearable. You couldn't help but know that things were moving. Many war eorrespondcuts and pho- tographers had left London and were on their way. It was very reasonable to assume that things were pretty close. There was a stepping up of air activity. Every morning the noise of the bombers going over seemed to be greater. If you went down into what they called the "restricted area" near the coast it was obvious that things were ready. From the looks of the jjlace they couldn't find much more room for men and supplies. The troops had been waiting without leave for two and a half months. It couldn't last much longer. On the morning of D-Day it was obvious that the great moment had arrived, because the roar of the warplanes overhead was incredible. There were hun- dreds of them in the air at once. You could feel the released tension in London after it was announced that the invasion was under way. But to start at the beginning, I left New York in February and made my headquarters in London. The first material I went after was air corps medi- cine, and my point of departure was the American Eighth Air Force Headquarters. The Eighth was fiying B-17's and this created a big medical prob- lem, since these were ten-man planes. I got to see the constant operation in connection with what, at that time, was an enormous offiuisive. There was a vast diii'erenco between air corps modi- cine and ground medicine. For instance, they were having a lot of trouble with frost-bite. Gunners got their fingers frozen from the cold air coming through the vents by their guns. Sometimes the face or eyes would be badly frozen. The nose of the ship might be sawed off and allow an inrush of destruc- tive frigid air. If men forgot to put on their gloves in bailing out, their hands would freeze. Frost-bite sometimes caused gangrene. Tliis could be checked but the treatment was slow and laborious. The whole set-up for medical treatment in con- nection with the air corps warfare was well stabi- lized. Each one of the air bases would have several station hospitals within a few miles, so that the men who did come back wounded could be transported easily to a well-equipped hospital. 32 Thoy had many rest honu'S which were not con- valescent places but establishniouts to which they could send those men wlio were on the verge of a nervous breakdown or who needed simple release from tension. The strain in the air war is complete unto itself so far as the husiness of bombers is con- cerned. These men fly through fiak over a target. The\' know that sooner or later they are bound to get hit. It's just a case of sweating out their series of missions and trusting to luck. There is very little maneuvering they can do. Unlike \ho infantrymen who live in niiserahle surroundings all the time, day and night in mud and cold, these fliers go oft" 07i their missions at dawn — long missions may take ton Innirs — and when thoy return to base llioy get a shower, fresh clothes, and go to an officers' club. There the>' have a pleas- ant bar wlxere they get plenty to drink and to eat. Then they go away at dawn the next morning. Their day is divided into torrifie danger and al- most complete normalcy. This causes the tension which results in breakdowns, as does the steady diet of the infantry. It is a particular kind of teiision that the infantry doesn't understand. The rest homes were instituted with the idea that they would give just as little suggestion of war as was possible. At these rest homes the mm got ont of uniform. They broke all routine and they slept throughout the day if they wanted to do so. This made a complete change. Some airmen reacted vio- lently the first couple of days. They wanted to finlsli their missions. After that, however, they were ail rigJit. They had every conceivable kind of thing to keep them entertained. D-Day found me in the throes of credential diflR- culties, which T iimdly solved on June 11. After the first night of the V-1 bomb I left the next day for sontliern Kngland to witness the return of early casualties. I watched this constant procession of the wounded as they came from the beach-heads. They were brought back on enormous IjSTs and then were transferred to smaller LCTs which ^vent into tlie English beaches. By the time the TjRTs came back they were the most miserable sights T ever have seen. The weather couldn't have been worse. The problem with the LSTs was the fact that it was a 14-hour trip from the time they started, and then there was aiiollnn- five or six hours waiting for tides, and sometimes aii' i-aids or storms lield them uj). There were occasions when the casualties were packed on the tank decks for two or three days be- cause of such complications. Another difficulty from the medical standpoint was that the wounded had to be handled so often during this transporting. The t'orpsmi'n would put them on one shij), transfer them to another, and then carry them to ambulances. That was three handlings. Manv of them were se- vere litter cases and each move meant a strain. Among the thousands of wounded whom 1 saw returning from Normandy, I seldom heard a groan out of anybody. A huge transport would be full of wounded men, many of them in agony, but rarely would you hear a moan or a complaint. T think it was mostly a matter of mass feeling. If one man had o])ened up, ten others would have told him to shut up. The woumled didn't often ask attention of any man. They just acce])ted their particular fate. At Portland they built special docks for the LfSTs. AVliile they were unloading wounded men from one ship they were loading another nearby with fresh troops and taiiks. It was psychologically bad and the confusion was terrible. The atmosphere was tense. The transportation problem alone was staggering. Just as far as the eye could see there was that end- less, steady stream of vehicles. The unloading of an LST was a slow, laborious job. Xeyro litter bearers would take oft' the casualties one by one until the smaller ships were filled. They had two Navy doctors attached to the L8T and after the heavy ru.sh began they added an Army doctor. AVith them were non-professional {'orpsmcn and anyone else who could help. The wounded ran to over 400 on one of these ships. The walking wounded were on the top deck, weather permitting. One of the enormous problems for the artist was the fact that this whole operation was so vast that it almost staggered you to know where to begin. Yon saw thousands of casualties. You saw liion- sands of ships — -wounded men coining in ajid fr<'sii troops and supplies pouring out. There was ma- terial to use everywhere and always tin? kTiowlcdge tliat you wouldn't have time to do it all. It was just a question of tryiug to pick out cliaraeleristic things which hil you as pietoi'ial. After al)0ut five days there I hopped an LST and took a trip across to Normandy. I went in on what was known as Omaha Beach. I arrived right after 33 the big storm and it looked as though another in- vasion iiad taken place. It was a terrific mess. Small ships wore ci-ashed up on the beach and there were a few sunken craft in front of it. Many of the place- ments and piers, which the seabees and engineers had built, were askew or completely destroyed. Wg carried over a complete set of tanks on the tank-deck, and after we had run our huge ship up on tlie beach I watched the whole procession of tanks roar down to the shore. It wasn't more than half an hour after they departed, and the odor of carbon monoxide was still in the air, when they started to bring in the casualties. Litters were placed on the ship where the treads of the tank tires still showed — these monstrous tanks going out first and then the miserable litter cases coming in. All this was during a blackout with intermittent enemy planes overhead, which emphasized the macabre feature of tlie thing. All the men attached to the Medical Corps were working very hard, right around the clock. Carry- ing litters, for instance, is a tough job. They are heavy. The litter men were under the constant strain of going up inclines without shaking the patients. They really worked like dogs to fill a whole ship with casualties. I hitched a ride with one of the ambulances which had brought wounded men to our ship. It was as black as ink. You couldn't see a thing. I rode on this ambulance to the original D-Day clearing station which was right on the beach-head behind the air strip. The fighting was very, heavy in the direction of St. L6. I went to the field hospital attached to the 29th Division in the St. L6 sector. I spent the rest of my time in Normandy with that division and with the 30th, alternating between the two as the fighting shifted. I made my headquarters at the field hos- pital, going up into the forward areas during the day. The first medical unit was the battalion aid sta- tion which was connected with the infantry and was usually a hundred yards behind the line. Generally a few hundred yards behind the aid station was a collecting company. The transportation of the wounded between these two was done by jeep, which was a big advance over the last war. These jeeps would carry three or four litter cases. At the col- lecting station Iho wounded might be given a little more treatment. Then they were put into ambu- lances and were rushed back to a clearing station. The clearing station was a clearing point for all types of wounded, from the man who had a scratch on one of his fingers to the chap with a severe abdominal wound. The men who were badly hurt were not transported back any farther but were sent across to the field hospital, which was attached to the clearing station. Only grave cases, however, went across to the field hospital from the clearing station — cases in which men were in danger of dying if they were moved any farther back from the front. The other wounded were sent to evacuation hospitals in the rear. The field hospital was the farthest forward that surgery went. They tried to keep the field hospital four to six miles back from the fighting zone. They figured that four miles was the closest point at which they still could have a degree of safety from artillery. Because of the closeness of the field hospitals to the front, almost invariably they were set up near units of our own artillery. That was a deafening place for men who were so sick, especially when our guns started barrages. Then the ground literally shook. Gunfire would do anything but quiet the nerves of men in that condition. All of them liad suffered shock and had to be brought out of it be- fore they could be operated upon. "When one of the big barrages opened up, it started about 5 :30 in the morning and went on for perhaps two solid hours. The gun batteries were on both sides of the field hospitals. It sounded as though they were automatics. At the clearing station there was a place where they had battle exhaustion eases. During one of the barrages some of these men went completely hay- wire and tried to dig fox-holes in the ground with their hands. They had to be rounded up like sheep. This was going on in all of the tents in a less ob- vious way. Most of the wounded felt the same al- though they were too sick to move. Every one of these chaps in the field hospital was a very sick man or he would have been sent farther back out of the noise. Most of the treatment of battle exhaustion was by giving sleeping pills. The men slept their ex- haustion off and were sent right back into the linos. These particular men who "blew their tops" had just moved in that afternoon and had not yet been treated. Most of these exhaustion cases snapped out of it. A few did not. At that time whole-blood was being supplied by Britain. "Whole-blood is much more beneficial than plasma. Shock breaks a man's blood down and this will kill him in a very short time unless his blood is replaced. The blood content of the body is great and a wounded man has to have a lot given him before he comes out from shock. So pint after pint of whole-blood was used and at one point the outfit I was with ran out of it. There were two shock tents, containing thirty men each, and they could only be brought out of shock by pouring blood into them. The doctors got about eight volunteers from the exhaustion tent. These weary men gave their blood. They volunteered al- 34 though they appeared to be out on their feet. It was an impressive sight. The shock tents were terribly quiet places. They had a certain atmosphere about them — a kind of tension — that was depressing. Thcsre was little rav- ing. The men lay very still and breathed hard. There was the feeling in many instances that it was a borderline case. Would the blood do it, 6v would it not? The combat at this time was mainly a battle of hedgerows. The Americans would gain a hedgerow across a field and the Germans would counterat- tack. Most of the figliting seemed to be with artil- lery, mortars and mines, all of which caused terrible wounds. It was seldom during the time I was there that I saw a I'ealiy clean bullet wound. The men had multiple wounds. During pushes the Army Medical Corps surgical teams worked 16-hour shifts. They had auxiliary surgical imits which would move from one platoon to another. All iield hospitals had three platoons and when one platoon would get heavy casualties, an auxiliary would go up and help out. The auxiliary team generally was composed of a commanding officer — usually a major — three sur- geons, an anesthetist and four eidisted handy-men, who worked in many capacities and took the x)lace of nurses. One of these units had been through the Salerno and Anzio landings and this was its third invasion. They had imrses at the field hospitals. It was a rough life for a woman. They didn't go any farther forward at that time than the field hospital. It was a tough spot and a very uncomfortable existence. In the first jjhice they were moving all the lime. As the front would advance they would pack up and follow on. The speed of the movement made it diffi- cult. There was intermittent German air activity at night. The danger was mostly from our own flak, which was sent up and had to come down. Most of the nurses looked weary, but they did a wondci'ful job and the fact that they were there helped a great deal. The psychological effect was very good. At least one nurse worked in the shock tent all the time. Sometimes it was necessary to dig fox-holes for protection against bombing. However, as the battle progressed there wasn't as much enemy air activity as had been expected. The fox-holes were dug with a httle less enthusiasm than at first. The Germans didn't use any flying bombs in Nor- mandy while I was there. These were miserable things. The robots which came over the area seemed to be on their way somewhere else. Seldom did any- thing drop. But our flak was sent up, and it fell down on the tents. The operating rooms were all blacked-out. The tents were fool-proof so far as light was cmicerned, liaving been specially constructed. At the entrance they put double doors and two curtains. Most of the surgical tents that I saw had an inner lining of white. They found that the light reflected olf this white sheeting. The lighting was done with portable dynamos and was just adequate, but it Avas all they e()uld get with the power they had. They had accessory lighting wiiich would show ufj the specific feature of an operation. During the rush period I often helped by holding a little handlight that was made with a coux)le of tins which had held blood plasma. This sx)otlight was devised by an enlisted Corpsman. One of the surgeons was a chest specialist, and I watched him frequently. I became fascinated by the whole business. 1 saw hundreds of operations of all kinds and occasionally found myself doing things which I never had thought that I could do. At one time I held a leg that was being amputated. Thus much of the material in surgery appealed to me clinically greatly, but pictorially was far behind other subjects which I chose. The doctors and enlisted Oorpsmen wore quick to meet emergencies and improvise. They were forced to do this by the conditions under which they lived. The surgical teams I was with hit the beach- head about D + 1. One of these teams hung there on Omaha Beach, just hoping they could live to do something. All that could be done at that time was temporary first aid. They didn't set up surgery for some time after that. The surgeons in the majority of the groups that I observed were from 35 to 46 years old. I saw two men at the field hospital who must have been in their fifties. It Avas a rough life for a man of that age, to say nothing of the 16-liour shift strain. The surgical specialists, of course, had to pitch in. They might have a dozen chest cases alone. They sometimes performed two and three major opera- tions on one man, and they didn't know how these boys lived through it. I saw one case where two surgeons worked on the same man. He had an arm amputated and then had a stomach operation. They turned him over and found the whole fleshy part of one of his legs gone. They were afraid of gan- grene and so they cut away a great deal of tissue. All three of these things were done under the same anesthesia. Four days later this boy was better off than some of the others. Sometimes there were double amputations. One amputation is a terrific shock. They did everything they could to save a limb. In cases of bad wounds they would try to fix the main artery and would go to immense pains to avoid amputation. They al- ways had consultations on all amputations. 35 The woiuuled wore moved from the field hospital at the earliest possible time. Since the field hos- pital was constantly filling up, the men had to be evacuated. They were so sick that their post-opera- tive care was an enormous problem. "When a field liospital moved forward, it very often was neces- sary to leave post-operative eases beiiiiid under the care of one of the doctors. The minute a man could he moved be was sent to the evacuation liospital. There he might be op- erated on for a second time or have a new cast put on a fracture. The evacuatioiL hospital wms a well- equipped and fairly stable unit, and the general hospital was even more so. They were tent hospitals, but huge, and had many nurses and doctors. The surgical tent would have 15 operations going on all at once. The first general hospital arrived in Xor- mandy early in July. Most of the cases were going from the evacuation hospitals by air or by ships to general hospitals in l^higland. The Array Medical Corps had many unusual sit- uations to meet. I remember that once when I was in England one of our bombers crashed and blow uji, and 10 of the men were killed. Tt was the first mission for all of them. The force of the explosion boosted me out of bed at the base, a mile and i\ half away. The Medical Corps had to take care of these casualties, as there was no one else to do it. It was a question of salvaging as much as they could. They got the equivalent of six bodies out of the wreckage. (This is Smith's picture "Death of a B^]7.") I was with a collecting company unit which set up at a village outside of St. L6. This was about 800 yards back of the fighting line and the villnge was ill flames. The unit had one tent and they put it up in the churchyard. They hadn't been there for more than half the day when the Germans began pouring shells all around this area, and the unit suffered two casualties. The Corpsmen moved to a safe spot and then 24 hours later came back to the same place and re-established themselves. (This scene is depicted in Smith 's * * Sunday in Nor- mandy.") When this unit set up in the cemetery the men started to dig their fox-holes right away. The fox- holes looked like graves, and the fellows scattered all over digging these holes appeared rather ghoul- ish. Incidenlally, it was extremely interesting to see how many churches stood up under fire. They must have been pretty well built. (There perhaps was a further reason why these churches sui'vived. During the last war the writer saw mmicrous instances in France where churches were left standing because gunners and bombers deliberately avoided hitting them. (There was, for example, the case of the Golden Virgin which stood atop the church in the town of Albert, on the Somme. This was a heroic size figure of the Virgin, holding the Christ Child, and you could see it for miles aci'oss the valley when the sun glinted off the gilt. Both Allied and German fighting men did their best to avoid damage to this statue, and the tradition grew up that the side Avhich destroyed the Golden Virgin would lose the war. Finally one day a German gunner shot down the statue^ — and sure enough, the Reich was de- feated.) The aid men to me were an extremely heroic lot. I tried in one picture to show a typical aid man. All were haggard, and very tired. They seemed like young old men; they had a kind of haunted look. They were the first medical help that the wounded man got. They were under fire just as much as the infantry. They didn't carry arms and were abso- lutely non-combatant. Their only jjrotectiou was the red cross. The red cross was plastered all over them. Only seldom was the red cross not respected by the Ger- mans. One surgical team, which went in with the gliders on D-Day, set up in an open field. They had a big tarpaulin with a red cross on it, and they were left unmolested. (The reader should note that' Artist Smith is speaking of Normandy. There were instances in other Fjuropean theatres in which the Germans did not resx^ect the red cross.) These battalion aid men were on the firing line with the troojjs. They rushed to the wounded men who had fallen, gave them morphine and any other emergency treatment feasible. The aid men carried a fair amiiia m or- der to make a junction with the Burma Road. There was bloody fighting, for the Japanese Avere in force in that part of northern Burma.) It was the monsoon season with its heavy^ rains, and the field we landed on was just a soupy mass. It was very difficult to get the planes up, and some- times they couldn't land at all because it had rained so much for several days. Clay is the basic sub- stance in that region, and as we went along the road there would be ruts so big that the jeep would be hung up. That was the normal condition of the terrain. Stilwell 's headquarters was on the Ledo Road, around which the jungle formed a solid wall. A man could be 15 paces awfiy and you wouldn't see him. Every morning you were awakened about five o'clock by the weird chattering of monkeys. You never could see them, but they were on all sides. There were many sorts of flowers and strange plants. Trailing vines crept everywhere. On and off the rains were a deluge, and some- times there were terrible winds like hurricanes, so strong that they would rip limbs off trees. The tem- perature was hot and sticky — running from 110° to 120° F. You couldn't toll where the sweat ended and the rain began, and so I often left my raincoat off. We slept in jungle hammocks that had mosquito- net sides. They were shaped like a coffin. The wounded were on cots under nets. The new road was being built while we fought the Japs. They were all around us — always infiltrating — always sniping. They also bombed the medical camps, but the jungle provided a natural camou- flage. The American Medical Corps was divided into platoons, and each platoon was located in a diil'erent section. The corps looked after Stilwell's picked Chinese troops, our American fighting engineers and Merrill's Marauders which comprised the U. S. forces in Burma. I was with the medical platoon which was closest to the front. It was one of the portable surgical outfits which were the first to give a wounded man operative treatment. Before that he got quick band- aging at the first-aid station. vVmbulancos would go from the portable hospital to the first-aid station from which Chinese stretcher-bearers worked out into the firing zone. Our portable outfit, which was about three miles from the fighting front, was in little tents like a circus. 38 The majority of the doctors were young — in their twenties. It was a great experience for them be- cause they were experimenting in many ways. They were terrifically energetic and worked all the time. Even the deiilists were doing operatioDs on other parts of the body. As a result every doctor got vast experience in operatiiig. The Cochins — -aborigines who were head-hunters before the war — helped to carry in the wounded and also fought the Japs. Those natives were brought into our service in a peculiar way. The jun- gle is tilled with huge leeches^ — some several inches long — which drop from the trees and fasten them- selves on human beings. If they are pulled oif Ihey may cause terrible sores. The best way to get them off is with salt or with a lighted match. AVell, the Cochins were filled with sores from these leeches. Our medics curetl 1hem, nnd as a result the Cochins were so grateful that they offered their help. They were of great assistance to our troops in the jungle. Our platoon had tents with open sides. There was also a baslia^ — a little hut of bamboo poles with open sides and planks for tables. The whole outfit could be torn down and put on the road for moving to a new position within two hours. AYe went forward in trucks. Including surgeons and Gls there were about ;>0 men involved. The hospital tent was divided into two. One was the reception part, to which the patients were brought in ambulances. There tlie wounded men were given morphine and a tetaims injection, and after that came plasma. Up to this point the patient had been given sulfa and had been bandaged out at the front. In the other part of the hospital tent was the operating theatre. Each outfit had a generator which gave the power for lighting. During an air- raid the current was turned off and all lights Avent out. Then masked flashlights were used until the surgeons had finished their work. There was no end to the care that the surgeons gave the wounded men. I saw doctors probe for hours after a shell fragment. Finally they would take out a piece no bigger than a fingernail. There were no American women nurses in the immediate vicinity of the front. The nurses who were in the jungle were back near Ledo at a place called Shiiibyaug, where there was an evacuation hospital carvef tlie other conveniences that have made our Amer- ican way of life so desirable. Sinne of these men are pampered by over-indulgent mothers and co-work- ers from early morning to late at night. "When this type of person is put into the Army he has a lot of adjustments to make. He becomes part of a vast machine that is regulated like clock- work. His job becomes an important part of an over- all job. He is not always in a position to know the ultimate objective of his work, so he starts to worry abt)ut it. "He has other adjustments to make. There is mass feeding. Often he is on K rations. Sometimes he has no rations and he has to shift for himself. There is mass sleeping and the man next to him snores. Un- familiar sounds (.llstnrii his slee]). On maneuvers he has to sleep on the ground, and on the battlefront he may not ge\ any sleep for hours at a stretch. Those are all disturbing elements to him. "Under all of these conditions it is difficult for him to adjust. It's ha?-d enough for a rugged, hardy individual to adjust, let alone a man with psycho- neurotic tendencies. Therefore the nervously in- clined individual who was a success in civilian life, fails in the Army and receives a discharge. "We also have the moron, the mental defective and the constitutional psychoitath to deal with. We get the alcoholic, the pathological liar and the pre- criminal in the Army. We have Ihe boy who has been a failure all his life. He is a problem child at home and his school and occupational records have always been poor. Very few of these men ever make good soldiers. "Then we have the nearly normal individual who cracks under combat. Everyone has his limit of mental and physical endurance. A man can stand just so much. Put him in combat and under pi-o- longed shelling and bombing, combined with poor rations, sometimes none at all, antl he becomes a casualty. "It's not the first time strong men have broken down after giving what it takes ! "AVe may have as many of this type of casualty as we do physically wounded, and the cycle of niewg ->.:.-- ;-. > . -■■...t-.jr.:-— ^n'»*.>Jt^T:^y>»--^--..:^:--.-->-.^.T>r^>.- v^rry-.-.- v--'f-^--^-_. - .y>^.-^a3a. I 3. PACIFIC BLACK DIAMONDS— Franklin Boggs. These men of Hew Guinea played an iynportant part in the evacuation of the wounded and the rescue of downed airmen. Their uncanny ability to traverse the dense jungles rapidly and stealthily and their innate kindness meant the difference between life and death for many a veteran of South Pacific fighting. 2. NIGHT DUTY— Franklin Boggs. An Army nurse breal{s the monotonous vigil of night duty by mak- ing a checl[ on a coughing patient. Artist Boggs slept in this ward in the South Pacific — was strucl{ by the eerie effect of a flashlight^s beam on the green mosquito nets which shroud the sleeping u;ounded. He reported: 'The light sounds of the jungle cannot be painted, hut are >iMte unforgettable."' 4. PILL CALL— Franklin Boggs. Soldiers suffering from malaria get their daily quota of atabrine tablets from the Medical Corps captain. Artist Boggs caught this scene in the South Pacific, The temporary coloring of the patients'' s\in, he explains, is ''more vivid than that of the enemy who controls tlie quinine."" ..* J ";. ">. ^..jaiiHii i'Mmi-' 5. END OF A BUSY DAY — Franklin Boggs. Bloodstained litters give mute and shockyng testi- mony of the fierceness of tlie struggle — gruesome evidence of a busy day for the hearers of wounded and dying men. Washing these litters m the salty water of the South Pacific — -salt water does the best cleansing job — is one of the many unpleasant chores assigned to enhsted men of the Medical Corps. But litters must he clean for to- •mnrrnm ami. innrf ■mpn % 6. FRONT-LINE SURGERY— John Steuart Curry. Highly mobile surgical teams attached to field hospitals have made front-lme surgery a reality in this war. Blood plasma, the sulfa drugs and penicilUn are great life-savers, hut Major General ^lormayi T. Kir((, the Surgeon General of the Army, says they are '^essentially adjuncts to the prime requirement — skilled surgeons qualified to apply the latest and most modern techniques." :^"*^,|: m w' ^■■3o;: b^'.A^'^v "^ ^4 ■ ^^,.;.JpAa^:^' -Ci^^--^ -■ i', '..; 6r«- s^i^'^ll^^;; t'^^^^ i V #^ ^;^^ ^ 7- COLLECTING STATION— John Steuart Curry. After hast}/ ex' dmindtion dnci emergency treatment at the Battalion Aid Station, which is right behind the hattlt \\nts, voound^cd, ratn are brought to the Collecting Station j a mile or more to the rear. Here the)? are given additional emer^ gency treatment pending another trip to the rear to the Clearing Station. This picture was found b)' the artist at Camp Bar\€l€y, Texas ^ where hiedical Department tactical units are framed. ^: w ^f% i :.«Ui£^. .... . ^..^^Y^f^y^f^n:-' '^'^';^>^^,.^^r _ ^ r H^ % •^' i^ ^'^. ■f^.*--.. m 8. STEEL COFFIN — Fred Shane. A wounded man in a burning or stalled tan\ is in a desperate plight. It is not easy for able-bodied men to mal^e a hurried exit from a disabled tanl^ under fire — almost impossible for a badly wounded man. At the Medical Department's Field Service School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the "medics" are taught how to lift an injured soldier from a land battleship. The Medical Corps is explaining the rescue techniques to the bleacherites. Xote the special harness used to lift the "casualty' through the conning tower open- ing. Viewer tan\s have escape hatches near the bottom, simplifying the getaway. 9. AIR EVACUATION — Franklin Boggs. High over the Owen Stanley mountains a flight nurse ad- ministers oxygen to a wounded soldier. The plane is hound for Australia, next stop on the long journey to the United States and a general hospital near home. Only hours before^ this same plane had arrived in the battle area with a had of ammunition or medical supplies. 10. RETURN TO THE GOLDEN GATE -Franklin Boggs. Wounded men aboard an Army transport crowd the rail for the first joyous glimpse of the Golden Gate Bridge. The excitement on decl{ quicl{ly pervades the entire ship^ and from a ward below decl^s a paralyzed patient succumbs to the infectious gaiety of his buddies, hitch-hil^es topside on the sturdy bacl{ of a corpsman. These ships are outfitted with operating room, dental clinic — amply provided with medical supplies and adequately stajfed by Army doctors and nurses. 11. RACE AGAINST DEATH — Franklin Boggs. In this Japanese piU-box site on Admiralty Island, which hut a few hours before had been spoutiyig death and injury. Army doctors have set up a front-line emer- gency operating unit. Artist Boggs' brush con- veys the devastating tempo of invasion warfare. Crisis, speed, grimness, reality, mercy are registered here in rapid bewildering succession. /^^.. 12. SOUTH SEA ISLAND PARADISE —Franklin Boggs. Stately ^alms swaying gently m the breeze, eternally green foliage, white sandy beaches \issed by warm chameleon waters, straw's\irted hula girls — the average American pre-war conception of life in the South Pacific. This 1944 version b}i Artist Boggs features uprooted, broi{en palms, a discarded plasma bottle, bloodsoa\ed bandage, empty first-aid tins and spent syrette — signs of mercy once meted out by men of the Medical Corps, 13. THE AMERICAN WAY-^Franklin Boggs. A frantic, bewildered mother dogs the footsteps of a Medc cal Corpsman in the Admiralty Islands as he carries her wourided child away fro^n the combat area. Emer- gency treatment has been given at a Battalion Aid Sta- tion— --more definitive care at the hands of expert Army doctors ivill folloiv. 14. UP TO DOWN UNDER— Franklin Boggs. Wounded Australian soldiers are being loaded aboard a big Army transport plane for the long flight aver J^ew Guinea's Owen Stanley mountains to the land of the }{angaroo. Thousands of wounded Americans and Aussies were evacuated by air. Crude flying fields and in' cessant tropical rains added greatly to the ei'ocuation problem. 15. SOUP'S ON— Fred Shane. Mess halls and dishes are left behind when Medical De- partment soldiers go on maneuvers at the Army's Field Service School in Carlisle, Penn- sylvania. It is just as important that they learn how to get their chow on the fly as it is that they master the art of handling ''' wounded'''' under battle conditions. This lieutenant dis- plays fine technique m the presentation, of his mess \it and cover to the K.P. dishing out the groceries. 16. TIME OUT FOR CHOW— Fred Shane. Medical Department soldiers at the Army's Field Service ScJiooi, Carlisle^ Pennsylvania, grab a bite during war maneuvers. These men carry no guns — are armed only with emergency bandages, sulfa, and pain-relieinng drugs. It is their job to pic\ up wounded men, almost as soon as they are hit, and rush them baci{ to waiting Army doctors at Battalion Aid Stations. 17. HIDING OUT — Fred Shane. Somewhere at the 'Jront" at the Medical Department Field Service School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, medical soldiers in training cover their ambulance with camouflage netting. This is a rendezvous spot, and here the ambulance will wait until litter-bearers bring haci{ the ''''wounded^'' for a fast ride to Army doctors. 18. QUICK TREATMENT— Fred Shane. This is a Battalion Aid Station right behind the "/ront" at the Medical Department s Field Service School, Carlisle, Pennsylvw nia. The ""u^oujided" soldier is getting emergency medical attention prelim- inary to his removal to a Collecting Station farther hac}{ where more ad- vanced treatment will he adminis- tered. The Army's medical soldiers at Carlisle are thoroughly trained— }{now just what to do when they get into action. ■^oes-^ 19. MEDICAl. SUPPLY DUMP— Robert Benney. It was very thoughtful ofHirohito^s Utile men to leave this spacious dugout undamaged when they departed for their Japanese Heaven. The great Pacific outdoors isn't the best place in the world to store perishable medical supplies, so this readyynade emergency storeroom came m very handy. Artist Benney visited this medical hideout while at a Pacific island base. 20. "EASY, JOE"— Robert Benney. 21. SICK BAY — Robert Benney. While aboard an invasion-bound ship in the South Pactjic Artist Benney paid a visit to the sic\ hay. The ship's doctor prescribes for minor ailments — \eeps the men in good shape for the ianding soon to come. I 22. PACIFIC BASE HOSPITAL— Robert Benney. In sharp contrast to the hnsttly constructed and highly maneuverahle medical units of front-hne combat, are the nmnerous rear echelon hospitals scattered throughout the vast Pacific. Here, m the cool and quiet atmosphere far from the battle, a man has time to reflect, while his wounded body is made well and strong again. --^^ ^ C ^^ ,^ifi^/ ^7'^ ^ -y*^ -^ I ..^ 23. SAIPAN, JULY, 1944- Robert Benney. 24. JAP COMPOUND IN SAIPAN— Robert Benney. An Army doctor handagts the head of a Jap civilian in Saipan while other subjects of the Mikado line up for medical attention. 2^ 25. NORMANDY VICTORY CARGO— Lawrence Beall Smith. When the lst's returned to the Enghsh ports of embarkation, they carried wounded from the Hormandy beach-heads. In order to avoid the enormous confusion of two-way traffic at the docks these ships were met by the smaller lot's out in the harbor. The ships were "married, ' and litter hearers transferred the casualties. When an lct was filled, it headed for the beach and waiting ambulances. ifft.. jj) fe^ fr y^ v>:^-. ';^'.'^Ms^), !/i^-:- .'S;Si^iw_t--*. «OfBi!'. . . '-■'■r^y^, i ^ iiiiRSBBM^vp^w^ 26. SUNDAY IN NORMANDY— Lawrence Beall Smith. Eyilisted men of a Collecting Station of the First Army "diggmg in" next to a church in a tiny village near St. Lo, Little was left of the hurned-out village when this outfit arrived. The men were \€pt busy during periods of heavy activity setting up tents, treating the wounded and evacuating them by ambulance 10 clearing stations m the rear. Shortly after Artist Smith reached the spot, the Germans counter- attacJ^ed from their lines 800 yards distant, and all equipment and icounded had to he removed rapidly?. I ' V 4. 9!. 27- RETURN CARGO— Lawrence Beall Smith, The huge tan\ dec\s of the lsts were carpeted with litter cases when they hac\ed off the Jslormandy beaches for the dash hac}{ to the white cliffs of Dover. Weather, mines and German ''£'' boats impeded the progress of the ships^ and sotnetimes wounded men spent many long, miserable hours aboard before reaching the comparative safety of England's shores. I I op 28. LABORATORY WARFARE— Manuel Toiegian. The ArmyMedicalDepartments war on disease is constant mid unrelenting. The Army's laboratories are the battlefields, with Army doctors and nurses pitted against germs, microbes, and other pathogenic bacteria. Artist Toiegian s brush found this picture at Camp White, Oregon, former training center for members of the Army J^Jurse Corps. 29. LIFE-GIVING PLASMA — Ernest Fiene. Blood (ylasmahas been one of the foremost Ufesavers of World War 11. Artist Fiene''s brush brings this picture from one of the great laboratories where plasma is processed for the Army Medical Department. The technician is drawing off the plasma from the blood cells. It is a delicate operation, performed under tfie strictest aseptic conditions. Dried plasma inust be free from all blood cells and any contam inariTig bacteria. The small bottles in the foreground show the plasma at the top, the blood cells {darlO at the bottotn. 30. JUNGLE TRAIL — Franklin Boggs. Through the unfriendly, tightlyi^mt H^w Guinea jungle an Army Medical Corps unit threads its tortuous way inland, loaded down with the bac\-hrea}{ing coynponents of a port' able hospital. The hlac!{, tousled heads of the ;ungle-u;ise natives bob evenly along in strtk}ng contrast to the bended hac}{s and bowed helmets of the corpsmen. Units lil^e this crawled for endless, miserable days over the Owen Stanley mountains. ^ii f^ ?*•*&.- *^ -i ^tT\-^r-: 1 try: , ,•'[■ *i;i:^fc^t»v- -.v^-t- c-y *-i'f----Ji Si. EVACUATION UNDER FIRE— Franklin Boggs. Immediately after driving the }{if)S from entrenched positions on this Admiralty Island hilU side, a Medical Corps unit set up this Battalion Aid Station in the sheltering scarp of the sharp-rising \nolL Men on the ridge dig in for protection against the stub' horn Japs who give ground grudgingly. Wounded in the hac}{ and pelvis, the tnan on the incoming litter sec}{s relief from his painful injuries by l^eeling. 32. ANOPHELES HOME FRONT— Franklin Boggs. Breeding grounds of the Anopheles mosquito in J^ew Guinea are invaded hy a Sanitary Corps Officer and squad of energetic grass-cutting na- lives. The Anopheles is the carrier of malaria, formid- able enemy of American troops in the tropics. The Army Medical Department wages ceaseless, untiring war against malaria — not the least important phase being control of mosquito breeding areas. 34. NATIVE CASUALTY— Franklin Boggs. A }iew Guinea native gets some American emergency treatment after he ing injured by a falling upright during the con- struction of a hospital ward. They were twining worl^ers and of immeasurable help to the Sea- bees and Army Engineers. r^^^'?^-^^h^.^ ■ ^ fi^ ^ -; ."^^ 33. BATTALION AID STATION — Franklm Boggs. The men pictured here by Artist Boggs are receiving emergency treatment at a front-line Battalion Aid Station {Papa Toll Mission, Admiralty Islands) a few minutes after being hit. One man is getting plasma while another has his arm bandaged and treated with sulfa. In the lower left a wounded man tries to lift himself up m his Utter as the effects of morphine begm to wear off. 35. VISITING HOUR— Franklin Boggs. In the early phases of the X[ew Guinea jighting, native houses were used as hospitals for wounded and sic\ men. Civilization has no monopoly on l^ndness to the sic\. This native brought jiowers every day to his new-found American friends. 36. TRAIN FARE— Robert Benney. Believe it or not. It's icecream! Just one of the delicacies served to our wounded men while they travel across the country on one of the Army Medical Department s Hospital Trains. This careful study by Artist Benney betrays the indelible imprint of war on the boy''s face. A year ago, perhaps, a dish of ice creayn would have brought a smile to youth- ful eyes -not now. I 37. SHORT CUT TO LIFE— Robert Benney. The lives of many wounded men in Saipan were saved by the fast diagnoses of this front-line X--ray unit, word- ing in an abandoned Jap shac\. In the cases of severely wounded, the difference between life and death was measured in seconds. This fast-moving unit turned out an X-ray plate every two minutes. The Army doctor studies an X-ray of a man who is on his way to the operating tent, as two other ivounded men await their turn on tlie X-ray table. 38. HOSPITAL TRAIN CHEF— Robert Benney. The boys do not have to he introduced to the trams jovial coo}{. They just \now that his name is "S/(mn>i" — and that's what they call him. ''Skjnny^ typifies the j^ind of chow he serves — nothing but the best for the best. r^.^"-i rt*'*'' 4. 39. NIGHT RENDEZVOUS — Robert Benney. Somewhere on the cold, wind-swept plains of Kansas, the Hospital Tram \eeps a tryst with waiting ambulances. Swiftly, quietly, carefully, wounded men are transferred from the tram to the ambulances for the trip to one of the Army's great General Hospitals. Light for the worl{ at hand is provided by the automobile headlights which l^ife their way through the biacl^ness. Through unsympa- thetic clouds, a frustrated, faltering moon tries to lend a hand — triei to send a message of cheer and hope to un' happy ■men. 40. NIGHT VIGIL— Robert Benney. While the Hospital Train rolls through the lonely night, the Army nurse checl{S the patients^ charts. Some of the wounded men sleep soundly — others fitfully. To some the rhythmic clicl{ety'dac}{ of the speeding wheels is a sweet lullaby to their hardened, shell-blasted ears — to others a relentless reminder of bar}{ing machine guns. At the far end of the car, the medical aidman \eeps an alert eye on hu precious cargo. *:C^ "^ 41. COMING HOME— Robert Benney. Every turn of the Hospital Train s wheels brings this convalescing soldier nearer to home and friends. For him, there have been many days at the front, many more in the hospital A gentleman and a soldier, he carries a cane mvolun- tarily, but it will steady the faltering steps of a new leg. 42. CLIMATIC CASUALTY— Robert Benney. Through the narrow doorway of an isolated compart- ment aboard the Hospital T^ain, Artist Benney saw this GI victim of a respiratory disease, one of many ivho are unable to withstand drastic changes in climate and living conditions. He is a casualty not of the enemy^s making m the strictest sense. 43. WOUNDED ABOARD — Lawrence Beall Smith. Doctors, Medical Corpsmen and ambulances are present for the ''"sweating in" of the returning mission. Coming in late in the day and often in the heavy weather which hangs over Britain, any ship in the group which has wounded men aboard will drop red flares so that medical aid will he on hand the minute the ship taxis to a stop. 44. DEATH OF A B-l7^ Lawrence Beall Smith. At dawn on a cold March morning, a B-l? too}{ off on a long mission to Germany. It crashed on the yellow field of an English farm just a mile and a half away. Ten men were blown to bits — all ten were on their first -mission. For hours, the doctors and Medical Corps-men carried out the miserable and sic\ening job of huynan salvage. Artist Smith adds the followiyig to his canvas: "Though the explosion of three one-thousand' pound bombs jolted us heavily bac}{ at the base, the hay stacks, wmdmill, and trees were left undamaged adding a macabre touch to the scene. The jire was started by one of the engines hurled through the woods.''' ^Klf^ 45. RETURN FROM MISSION— Lawrence Beall Smith. Wounded member oj a Fortress crew jxnally removed from the ship after the tortuous return frorn mission. The only spot of color is the heated suit, called a "biue hunny.'^ The electric cord attached to the suit is rather symbolic of the mans complete breal{ with the lung machine of which he was an integral part for ten hours. 46. HOSPITAL BOUND— Lawrence Beall Smith. The removal of wounded from the air base by ambulance to the nearest station hospital was carried out in a very short space of time. Here casualties are leaving from the medical stations at the air base. A farmer plows his field nearby. The cloud of syno}{e is from burning oil on one of the Fortress "'hardstands.'''' 47. NORMANDY WASH— Lawrence Beall Smith. The field hospitals, usually four to eight miles behind the Imes, were often the scenes of contrast such as this caught by Artist Smith's brush. Families moved bac\ into their shattered towns after the battle passed to live amid Army installations of all \tnds. French chiidren loitered around field hospitals asking for chewing gum for themselves or cigarettes ^^pour papa." They carried flowers — either as a friendly gesture or as a medium of exchange. - 48. FIRESIDE COMFORT — Lawrence Beall Smith. Housed m Hissen huts, the station hos(yitals at the mayiy English air bases were well equipped to care for wounded airmen fortunate enough to get home on a wing and a prayer. The little English stoves J^e^t the huts comfortable, and groups such as this one depicted by Artist Smith hovered over inany firesides. 49. SNOOKER— Lawrence Beall Smith. Playing a game called Snooker at the Red Cross Club of a sta' tion hospital. This subject had an amusing pool room atmosphere. 50. "MEAT WAGON" POOL — Howard Baer. Jungle Garage —Motor pool of ambulances m Burma jungle, Portable Surgical outfit "Meat Wagons" are what the boys call them. ,/ 51. BURMA MUD— Howard Baer. Army Medical Department ambulance bogged down on a Burma jungle trail during the monsoon. During the rainy season many trails became impassable for ambulances and medical supply vehicles — supplies had to be ■moi.'ed forward by pac\ trains and on the hacl^s of native carriers. 52. AMBULANCE, JUNGLE STYLE— Howard Baer. Chinese stretcher hearers in elephant grass, Burma jungle. Sometimes these men carry the wounded as long as eight days before they can be hospitalized. Tou can't over-estimate their endurance and courage. 53. SCANT SHELTER — Howard Baer. Chinese Medical Aid Station at the front lines in Burma jungle within rifie and mortar fire range. Chinese stretcher hearen: carrying wounded m hac}{ground. 54. JUNGLE CHEATER— Howard Baer. Bahy Piper Cub plane tal{cs aboard a wounded man at a small clearing in the Burma jungle. These small planes can get into and out of jungle holes with the agility of a bird. They fly wounded men to surgical installations in an hour, spanning mountain and jungle trails that it would ta}{e native litter bearers two wee\s to traverse. IP / / i ^' ^ ^ t i^if^-. -^x. 1 i ^^ 55, FIELD HOSPITAL IN TECHNICOLOR — Howard Baer. A few hours before Artist Baer came u^on this scene at M^fitl^yind Airfield these colored para^ chutes, pitched as tents, floated from the s}{ies with ammunition^ food and medical supplies. Each type of supply has its own distinctively colored chute. Troops have td\en the airfield^ hut the Japs still infest the jungle brush around the edges. So Burma Surgeon Seagrave found it practical to pitch his para- chute tents on the airstrip. As he operated (foreground), assisted by Burmese nurses whom he had trained, American fighter planes overhead \ept the Japs in the surrounding brush reasonably quiet. 56. MOON-LIGHT IN BURMA — Howard Baer. Army doctors operate on wounded American soldiers through, the hot Burma night m a ceaseless, tireless struggle to save lives. The lush Burma foliage provides a perfect asylum for this forward-area Portable Surgical Unit, but a moon-lit sl^y is no help. Army surgeons attached to these portable units often operate continuously for 18 hours. " r »-t " - A - . .^"^' -i ** *\ fc. m 57. JUNGLE HOSPITAL— Howard Baer. Evacuation hospital in Honh Burma jungle. This is the only hospital which has American nurses m the Burma jungle. Thev do an excellent job. 58. ARTIST'S MODEL— Howard Baer. Wounded American tan\ man. "I found that all the Avierican wounded at the front showed no surprise at finding an artist, and were compktdy cooperative when asi{ed to pose, doing so with no seif'Consciousness,^' says Baer. 59. OPEN-AIR SURGERY— Howard Baer. Reception tent. Portable Surgical out/it, Burma jungk. 60. AID STATION— Howard Baer. Parachute tent. Medi- cal Aid Station, Tan\ Unit, Burma jungle 61. MESS CALL— Lawrence Beall Smith. Station hospitals in England were housed in many T^issen huts. Ambulatory patients walked from their ward to the Mess Hall carrying their own coffee cups. This hospital was set in a wooded section, and the noise of the coof(s oven competed with the constant roar of planes leaving and returning from nearby bases. 62. AMATEUR EDGAR BERGEN— Lawrence Beall Smith. This youthful patient in the Orthopedic Ward of a station hospital in England was an air casualty and as such had lots of company. He was somewhat unusual, however, in that he was an amateur ventriloquist who }{ept the whole ward amused by putting words into the mouth of the tiny doll suspended ot'er his bed. Here he is playing "bingo" with the other men in the Ward in a game directed by a Red Cross girl. ^^■P^CK TRAIN IN CHINA — Howard Baer. Medical Department pac\ train bridges the mountain wilderness which lies between American forces on the Salween River front and supply depot at a nearby air base. Harrow ledges along the cliffs of the river canyon ma\e hazardous, stubborn trails which exact a heavy penalty for a single misstep. Even the sure-footed, little Chinese horses must be coaxed and cajoled to carry on. Encum- bered by heavy loads of plasma, sulfa drugs, penicillin and other medical supplies, the animals must be guided carefully by the corpsmen. 64 DYING WOUNDED SOLDIER, SALWEEN FRONT, CHINA— Howard Baer. 65. CHINA LIFE LINE— Howard Baer. Chinese stretcher hearers, familiar with ■mountain trails and masters of tlie ruggeti terrain bordering upon the Burma Road, carry American wounded from the Salween front. The Utters are a native prodw:t, crude but comfortable. The crosspicce spanning the Miter handles shifts some of the load from the arms of the hearer to his broad, stout hac\. ^, CHINA SUPPLY RENDEZVOUS— Howard Baer. Tsfe^tled m the deei> gorge 0/ the S^ilt^een Riuer, guarded an^ sheltered b)^ mou^itamous overhanging c/i]f5, this tree-rimmed maiddn is an ideal supply relay site. Tiny Piper Cubs bring food, medicme and other supplies to the Medical Department pac}{ trains which continue to Salween front over precarious ledges s\irting the river canyon. The Cubs do not require large areas for landings and ta}{e^offs — get away from this Salween oasis by flying upriver through the chasm in the background. J 67. JUNGLE WARD — Howard Baer. After operation hy a Portable Surgical outfit in the Burmese jungle, the wounded rest in a ward tent awaiting evacuation to field hospitals. 68. JUNGLE OPERATING ROOM— Howard Baer. Medical Department surgeons of an advanced field hospital m Burma lose no time in operating on wounded men to save an arm or a leg—or life, itself. The Surgeon Generdi has ordered that there shall be no delay in giving men surgical attention because he \nows that early surgery means a low niortaiity rate. Artist Baer found this jungle field hospital in a native "basha" com- pletely enclosed by netting to protect patients from mosquitoes and other disedse-laden tropical insects. 69. TANK CASUALTY— Howard Baer. Amer- ican tan}{ corps officer burned m engagement, Burma jungle. /0\ \/^ - ^V^ _j> . l-*^ V ^^fe //' f^k ^^K 2«»^> »^<> ...^' r«^ t 5 HU 70. NIGHT OPERATIONS- Howard Baer. Operating at nighc, Burma jungle, Vmtohk SmgicoX outjit. 71. PALS — Howard Baer. Americiin t&y\\ man u^ounded m an engagement m tht ^uima ;ung/e, coming out of anesthesia; budd>i also wounded m same engagement watches anxiously. 72. FRIENDS AMBULANCE UNIT— Howard Baer. This unit, affilmted with the Chinese Red Cross near Pashan, is down on Burma Road around 650 \m. mar\. 73. CASUALTY (a)— Howard Baer. Chinese wounded hyjap officer's saber, receiving drop anesthesia- 74. CASUALTY (b)— Howard Baer. Debridement of wound; clearing away scar tissue. 75. CASUALTY (c)— Howard Baer. Anesthetized patient bandaged and carried by stretcher with center hole to fracture table. Stretcher is suspended by straps until series of straps are attached to patient. Then stretcher is lowered to ground. This fracture table was designed b>i Col. Seagrave in Ha}{awng Valley, Burma. 76. CASUALTY (d)— Howard Baer. Patient is being band- aged with plaster rolls in order to iminobilize the tissues for evacuation to base hospital. This is done to pre- vent hemorrhage during transit. 77- CONVALESCENTS — Howard Baer. Chinese wounded after operation, under overhanging mosquito nets. 78. JUNGLE PATIENT — Howard Baer. Waiting for the surgeons, Burma jungle. Portable Surgical outfit. I u '■y P 79. SELF-SERVICE IN SAIPAN^Robert Benney. Ambulatory patients wait upon themselves at this Saipan patients' mess visited by Artist Benney. They have to wash their own m,ess J^its, too. In the foreground two wounded soldiers enjoy an after^lunch siesta. 80. ISLAND HOSPITAL— Robert Benney. Somewhere in the South Pacific Artist Benney found this cheerful^ neatfyturned ^iwnset hut. It was a stop'Over spot for wounded men headed for base hos" pital in the rear. i^B^MA//^y ^%^ CWlA ■ttbaiAd .^«cs V*?«r!**!^'"" .*! 81. JUST OFF THE LINE — Robert Benney. This man has just been brought from the front line to a Col- lecting Station. Although wounded less than an hour before, he has received medical attention three times. He was given emergency treatment on the battlefield, had a splint put on his arm at a Battalion Aid Station, and received a special dressing on his thigh at the Collecting Station. J^ext stop to the rear is the Clearing Station, and more treatment. 82. TANK AMBULANCE AT SAIP AN— Robert Benney. An amphibious tan\ hrmgs a had of wounded from an '^alligator'' aid station, near the remains of the city of Garapan, to waiting lst. What our own guns did not destroy at the Battle of Garapan and Hill SOO was tal^en care of by the Japs^ who applied the torch lavishly before giving up their capital. The utter exhaustion of the wounded men ma\es them seem indifferent to the violent scenes of destruction so recently left behind. i^ ^ ^ •4, ■^^tV" 83. FLASHLIGHT SURGERY IN SAIPAN— Robert Benncy. Army doctors performing a delicate brain operation continue doggedly by flashlight during a Jap plane raid on the hospital area. All power was shut off when the raiders appeared, plunging the hospital buildings and tents into Stygian dar}{ness. In spots lii^e this the poci{et flashlight is as important as the scalpel. 84. SAIPAN CASUALTY— Robert Benney. 85. FRIEND IN NEED— Robert Benney. An American Red Cross representative in Saipan listens to a tale of woe from an American soldier far from home — ma}{es notes while the Gl tells his story. In ail proha- hility the soldier is too busy fighting japs to write home, has as\ed the Red Cross man to get a letter off for him. Red Cross field workers in combat areas do much to comfort our Jigfiting ?iien. mf ■•^ss^- \,- i.v mjm^ "im^pWl i^iii iMMIIII»«Hi - y^- — ■•siwflW'!^' "Jl^icr*"' 87. "OPEN WIDE"— Howard Baer. Dental set-up. Portable Surgical out/it, Burma jungle. 86. SHOCK TENT— Robert Benney. The seriously Wunded as well as those suffering battle fatigue are im- mediately ta\en into the shoci{tent where plasma is con- '■dy being admmistered during the tide of battle. At ^ as many as 40 or 50 men will receive plasma at ^iL' same time. The great thrill of seeing these men •"Ought bac\ to Ii/e as the blood from fellow Americans woustinds of miles away slowly drips into their veins is * ''ight never to be forgotten, says Artist Benney. 88. JUNGLE VET — Howard Baer. Debridement of shrapnel iwund, U. S. Army Medical outjit with Stilwell's forces in Burma. 89. OVER THE BUMPS — Howard Baer. Wounded men in ambulance being carried from aid station at the front in Burma, to Portable Surgical outfit for operations. 90. BURMA AIR AMBULANCE— Howard Baer. Sic^ and wounded men being evacuated by plane froin the Burma fighting to a base hospital in Assam. Their wizened scrawny bodies and forlorn faces reflect the wretched existence from which the); flee. Many of the flight nurses on these unarmed planes were former airline stewardesses— pretty, brave, devoted to duty. Japanese Zeros and obscure mountain pea^s combined to mal{e this run a hazardous business. 91. DOUBLE DECK OF ACES— Robert Benney. The Ace on the floor is an eloquent hillof-ladmg for this car of the Hospital Tram and its load of wounded soldiers. Artist Benney s brush has run the gamut of emo- tions in this daytime scene. The card game has its }{ihitzers in choice upper tier seats. Down the aisle, men swap combat stories, and at the window, a colored hero loo\s thani^fully at the good old V. S. A. landscape — home. In front of him, a badly wounded man just loo\s — -and wonders. ::?^ :^' i $ • ♦?- lAii^ 92. WAYLAID — Robert Benney. This hand of patriotic home-front Americans waited long hours for the Hospital Train to arrive at the rail- road operational stop where coal and water are ta}{en by the locomotive. Even though the tram larder is spilling over with fine food, the wounded men eagerly accept the homemade ca}{es and sandwiches from the family \\tchens of the kindly, simple townfol^s. After all. Mother's cookies were always best. 93. NURSE IN NEWFOUNDLAND — Joseph Hirsch. Army nurses on duty wherever there are American troops are writing a glorious chapter in the history of World War U. Of this rustic winter scene. Artist Hirsch has this to say: "There is nothing glamorous about the wor}{ tlie nurses do in J^ewfoundland; this nurse is going to her post at 6 A.M." •'»'^iA»»i 94. THE WAY BACK— Lawrence Beall Smith. The scene portrayed here by Artist Synith was enacted many tiynes after D-Day. Evacuation of casualties by LST was accomplished successfully despite vicious at' tac}{s by eneyny planes. This lst at Oynaha Beach dis^ gorged tan}{s^ truc\s^ men and supplies from her fiery mouth J and before the dust^ synol^e arid gases from the departed machines had cleared^ the long procession of litter cases and wal\ing wounded filed into the ship for the trip bac\ to England. tiT-s.^ ;<» ii-^-^m ■•4 f* * r^ ^'^y *f -^<3* **^^ ?>2-nii«^ CLl T^ ^' 95. TALKING IT OVER— Howard Baer. Buddhist temple convened into Chinese hospital 424 miles from Kummmg. Adjacent to the American field hospital, where patients undergo operations. 96. MAKING TYPHOID VACCINE — Francis Criss. The Army produces its own typ]w\d vaccine in its laboratories. It began developing typhoid vaccine in 1909, has pushed forward relentlessly smce in hmlAing its defense against typhoid baciHus. Army lahoratories are capable of producing 1,500,000 doses in a single week} During the Spanish-American War^ 14,000 out of ei'ery 100,000 soldiers contracted typhoid fever; in World War I, only 37 men in every 100,000 got typhoid — in this war, typhoid is practically nonexistent. 97- SHOULDER WHEEL — Francis Criss. Physical therapy used in reconditioning of the wounded soldier tildes many forms. The apparatus shown is a Shoulder Wheel. It is used for strengthening and developing the long muscles of the shoulder and arm. These muscles may have become atrophied from disuse during convales- cence. At the beginning of the treatment, the wheel runs freely — but as the muscles gain strength the teyision is increased. 98. FRACTURE WARD— Peter Blume. A more complicated suh ject could scarcely have heen selected by the artist. It is a study in almoii pure mathematics with triangles predominating. Beginning with a set of triangles as represented b)/ the ceiling, floor and walls, the artist has supa' imposed other geometrical figures as represented by the fracture or "Bal^dit Frames r ^'^d then not satisfied, has superimposed the traction cords. In the hands of a lesser artist, such a tas}{ would result in confusiony hut Mr. Blume has achieved clarity, dejinition, and has presented a fine record. The handling of the drapery is especially interesting, and the bright colors help to bring the composition into harmony rather than to further confuse it. -;;^*>'-:" -• '^'•^•- 99. NEURO-SURGERY — Marion Greenwood. Artny surgeons at the Medical Department's England General Hospital, Atlantic Cit>i, perform a delicate nerve operation on a soldier who was severely wounded by shrapnel in the European jightmg. The severed ulnar nerve is being spliced to overcome paraylsis of the arm. 100. SPEEDING RECOVERY — Marion Greenwood. Physical therapy plays an important and early part in the restoration of American wounded, particularly those suffering from injuries to muscles, joints, hones and nerves. It follows closely upon the heels of surgery —l{eeps muscles and tendons pliable while crushed or severed nerves are being revived to feed thein with energy and control. 101. BEER FOR TWO — Marion Greenwood. Wounded soldiers undergoing treatment at England General Hospital swap combat yarns over a quart bottle of beer at the PX {Post Exchange). The hospital PX is well- stocked also with candy, ice cream, cd^e and assorted tidbits At the counter an Army nurse gets an impromptu report from a Medical Corpsman. ^y r^;-^ 102. THE QUICK AND THE DEAD—Uwrence Beall Smith. The onct pamfui and slow Utter haul by foot from Battalion Aid Stations is still painful, but thanl^s to the versatile jeep, is now mercifully short. Through shell-torn roads still under fire, these vehicles mal{e the trip haci{ to the comparative safety of the Collecting Station in a few minutes. The carcasses of dead cattle in the field and hedgerow ditches near St. Lo contributed a mute, grim, and grotesque comment on mans ingenuity. 103. TENSION AT DAWN — Lawrence Beall Smith. The Flight Surgeon is ^^on the line" for the always dramatic ta\e'OJf for mission over the Continent. One of the great dangers is explosion on take-off. Flame from an engine^ even though usually temporary, is an unwelcome spot of color against an English dawn. 104. WOUNDED CREW MEMBER- Lawrence Beall Smith. First aid treatment of wounded crew member of Flying Fort immediately upon return to base. This man was given emergency treatment by crew members in the air. 105. PERSONAL MAGNETISM— Joseph Hirsch. The galvanic principle of a mine detector is here applied in the form of a foreign body locator which expedites finding hits of shell fragments in the flesh. 'O ^.-v '4V-«A 106. HOSPITAL FOR ALLIED WOUNDED Joseph Hirsch. An entire evacuation hospital m Africa was given over to the care of wounded soldiers from artnies of our allies. In this picture French Moroccans while away the time playing checi{ers. They proved themselves extraordinarily brave in the J^orth African fighting — - worried more about losing their precious queues than their lives, for the hand of Allah lifts a dead Choum to heaven by his queue. 107. HIGH VISIBILITY WRAP — Joseph Hirsch. The Army doctor left two very important openings in this head bandage. The nedt triangular window gives the soldier good vision, and there is plenty of room for the all-important cigaret. 108. WOUNDED BOY — Marion Greenwood. \ r-^ -^"■1^^ m 109. THE DENTAL FRONT — Marion Greenwood. There can he no doubt in the minds of these wounded men at England General Hospital but that Sherman was right. With battlefields and enemy guns behind them, they line up again for assault from an unexpected quarter. Miss Greenwood has caught the utter dejection written upon their faces. But healthy teeth are reflected m a man's general physical condition. When a man is \ept in good shape during convalescence, recovery is faster. 110. OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY — Marion Greenwood. With the aid of a special apparatus designed to exercise his injured arm, this wounded man weaves a belt. Occupational therapy plays important part in the rehabilitation of physically incapacitated I'eterans. By peeping the disabled mans mind occupied and off hts in' firmity while teaching him a craft in a s\illful manner, occupational therapy serves a twofold purpose. -^awiw<*^,_^ ill. LEG WORK — Marion Greenwood. Advanced Reconditioning. Pulley exercises for injured and para- lyzed limbs. r:-^,( 1 12. WOUNDED MAN WITH CRUTCHES Marion Greenwood. 113. HEAD WOUND VICTIM - Marion Greenwood. Study of soldier after hrain opera- tion in which shrapnel was removed and metal plate inserted. 114. X-RAY Of HEAD BEFORE OPERA- TION — Marion Greenwood. -:.5r i^ef<*MEY .m 115. MEN WITH GOD^Robert Benney. A jew rnvnutes before thishadly wounded Pacific campaigner suc- cumbed to t}ie sting of a merciful needle he aslfed for the chaplain to come and pray with him. Froin American battle fronts all over the world comes the ringmg message that there are no atheists in foxholes. To that ynessage this canvas writes a. resounding "Amen." Two men of God —and a ^oo\. 116. AFTER THE FASCIST FAIR— Joseph Hirsch. Once upon a time II Dvice held a Fascist festival in a great, white building in H(^plcs. People from miles around came to the city to view the ambitious murals and read the windy phrases of the bombastic Mussolini. But that was before {"^rt ec-iv^f\ Jinn A An^rf-in .ht^+r%vj^ A -wn^viV-zTvi nntirfhrtnvc /^ii'inhi^n tih th^ It/lli/tvi boot and chased the flatulent dictator toward Berlin. J^ow Mussolini s propaganda palace is an evacuation hospital and the herocic figures on the crumbling walls compete in vain with American pin-up girls for adoration from Gi Joe. 117. TREATING A MULE — Joseph Hirsch. In this war of mechanized divisions and"dismounted" cavalry, the chief function of the Veterinary Corps is the inspection of meat for our troops. But Artist Hirsch found this traditional/ Army mule m Italy getting a dose of miyxeral oil. Pac\ mules frequently need a laxative when they return from combat areas. A rubber tube is inserted in the animals nose, pushed down his gullet and the oil pumped through. The mule doesn't lil{e it. 118. SO WHAT—Joseph Hirsch. Kipling said: 'It was crawUn and it stun^" — this thirsty medic says. '^So what!" x^^. ^ 1 IQ. FIELD EXAMINATION — ^Joseph Hirsch. Medical Corpsmen 'ma}{e a hasty examination of a soldier's leg wound before carrying him to a Battalion Aid Station. The wound is a painful one as tfie tense expression of the man indicates. A little "dope" will calm him down for the trip haci{ to the doctors. 120. NIGHT SHIFT — Joseph Hirsch. Hidden from snipers' bullets fj^i the dar\ness of an Italian night, the medics bring in wounded infantryman. Although they are carrying their burden down a rocl^y^ slippery slope, the corpsmen \eep the litter level at all times to ma\e the journey easier for the ifounded man. The rifle mal{es an excellent emergency splint for a shot-up leg — an old battlefield tricl{ of the litter hearers. Carrying a loaded litter over terrain too rugged even for pac}{ mules, taxes to the utmost the s}{ill and endurance of the corpsmen. 121. FRONT-LINE DENTIST— Joseph Hirsch. The only \ind of drilling they do at the front — sometimes within range of the enemy s howitzers. 122. SAFE — Joseph Hirsch. These little orphans }(rioiu well that the Medical Corpsmen are the real liberators from pain and hunger. 123. PARADISE NOT LOST— Joseph Hirsch. Although he lost an arm in battle, this French Ghoum from J^orth Africa is probably pleased that he did not suffer a head injury which would have resulted in the clipping of his queue to facilitate treatment. At death, the hand of Allah will grasp the precious queue and lift him to heaven. 124. WAR ON TYPHUS— Joseph Hirsch. Lice squads^ organized by the Army Medical Department in the J^aples area, led the Jight on typhus among tlie Italian population. The dirty insanitary air raid shelters were ideal breeding places. Constant count of louse eggs plus plenty of DDT spraying powder saved thousands of lives. The Italian civilians were willing helpers — had a good time at the spraying sprees. A[ot one case of typhus developed among American troops, thanks to the Medi- cal Department s foresight in inoculating every soldier against the disease. 125. ITALIAN RUSH HOUR— Joseph Hirsch. In this gay waia- coXoftA cartoon Artist Hirsch skow^ how an Army ¥idd^ Hospital loo}{s as It passes through the mam street of an Italian village en route to the Cassino front. Careful mspectton of the picture will unearth many interesting side lights^ such as the little hoy waving a greeting with the American flag and the colored soldier with a hot platter under his arm. 127. MEDICAL MILLINERY— Joseph Hirsch. This is a maxtllo-occipital traction appliance with a modification for a fractured upper jaw. It is an ingenious device obviating the necessity of more comphcated and burdensome apphances. Pressure is maintained between a plate on tlie roof of the mouth and a leather s}{uU cap. The lower jaw is allowed complete freedom of moi'ement and the patient can smo^e, drinl{, eat and tal}{ in reld' live comfort. *>>*«Jk. 128. COMPANY IN THE PARLOR— Joseph Hirsch. The gaunt stone walls of an Italian farmhouse provide scant shelter for a front-line Battalion Aid Station, but they do screen the activities of the missing farmer^ s uniiitiiteti guests from the sharp eyes of enemy artillery spotters. Slill under fire, the medics perform their duties with compleu disregard for their own safety. Their only precaution seems to be to have the man at the left \eep his binoculars trained on enemy guns and their targets of the moment. The parlor wall shrme maizes an excellent medicine cabinet for drugs and antiseptics. ,**rt*^ 129. ALL ABOARD FOR HOME— Joseph Hirsch. One of the Army Medical Departments big hospital ships ta\es on wounded men during typical rainy day in England. When the ship arrives in Hew Torl{, the men will be ta\en in ambulances to an East Coast Debarkation Hospital, from where many of them will be sent by hospital tram to interior general hospitals for specialized treatmait. Umbrellas are taboo in the Army, but Artist Hirsch insists his paintmg is authentic to the minutest detail. 130. NON-COMBATANT —Joseph Hirsch. Artist Mirsch found this Medical Corps enlisted man and his Utter on an Italian front. 131. EXERCISE PERIOD FOR WOUNDED— Marion Greenwood. These wounded men are deter- mined, and their indomitable spirit is captured completely by Miss Greenwood's understanding brush. Despite the handicap of painful wounds encased in heavy, clumsy casts they struggle courageously to carry out the exercise routine prescribed for them. The Army Medical Department does not beliei'e in inactivity during hospitalization — \nows that men who exercise regularly recover quicker. 132. SHOULDER WHEEL— Marion Greenwood. Advanced Reconditioning following arm and shoulder injuries. 133. STANDING^UP EXERCISES— Marion Greenwood. Advanced Reconditioning, Home made, simple devices made hy veterans have proven best. Rollers are used for correcting an\ie injuries. ^■• 134. A TWIST OF THE WRIST— Marion Greenwood. Advanced Reconditioning. Ap- paratus for wrist exercises. 135. WHIRLPOOL BATH— Marion Greenwood. Treatment for radial paralysis of left forearm. 136. GI GUTENBERG —Marion Greenwood. Oc- cupational therapy — Printing Press exercise for limbs and arms. 137. FINGLR EXERCISE— Marion Greenwood. Modification of a Knaval Table. The End