Battle Field Angels (13 page)

On November 23, the battle for Tarawa ended. It had taken 75 hours and 42 minutes before the 5,000 assault Marines had finally secured Betio and its vital airstrip. The cost staggered the survivors: 990 Marines had lost their lives fighting for 291 acres of coral sand. The Navy identified only 565 of them, and 200 of those were buried at sea. The Navy brought home for burial only one in four Marines killed on Betio. Almost 2,300 had been wounded. Except for 129 Korean laborer prisoners and 17 Japanese prisoners of war, the 4,856-man Japanese force had been wiped out.

Duffee smiled when he received orders to head for the north beach on the way out to a troop transport. He barely noticed the equipment necessary for digging graves for the dead. Nearly six thousand Japanese and American soldiers were buried on Betio in long, sandy trenches backfilled with ground coral. In the brutal tropical heat, many corpses already had exploded from decay. Burial details wore gas masks to keep from gagging in the pockmarked, moon-like landscape.

Once Duffee reached the transport, he went straight to the galley, slathered two pieces of bread with butter and ham, and washed it down with a bowl of coffee. Seconds later, he raced topside to throw up. Once the retching eased, he returned to the galley to try again, slower this time.

On Duffee’s way to Hawaii two days later, the galley served Thanksgiving dinner. Men, still pale and shaking, ate in numbed shock. Years later, many couldn’t remember that 1943 Thanksgiving Day dinner aboard a ship crowded with wounded men in the rolling Pacific. Once Ray Duffee reached Hawaii, indications that he might be headed back into battle surprised him as he had anticipated reassignment stateside. But a nagging pain suspected to be appendicitis soon erupted into a full-blown ulcer. It became Duffee’s ticket back to the United States, back to the Navy hospital in San Diego. He never returned to the Pacific.

A soft breeze rolled up Broadway off San Diego Bay on August 15, 1945. Japan had surrendered. Duffee stood on a balcony of the U. S. Grant Hotel, watching a mass of sailors’ white hats floating on a shoulder-to-shoulder sea of dark blue uniforms celebrating VJ Day.

Ray Duffee received the Navy Cross for his heroism on Betio. Embarrassed by the award citation, he didn’t remember many of the specifics before it concluded, “By his courage, determination, and untiring devotion to duty, he saved many lives.” His award entitled him to a discharge earlier than other corpsmen whose service was being extended. Postwar America still needed corpsmen.

Ray Duffee became a reluctant war hero—another honored corpsman who thought he simply had done his job. Before receiving his discharge, he had sheepishly participated in a vaudeville-style war bond tour by giving speeches in small-town theaters and to large employers throughout Arizona and California. But all he really wanted to do was go home, enroll at a junior college with an eye toward becoming a veterinarian, and get used to the idea of looking forward to tomorrow again.

But Raymond Duffee never became a veterinarian. The twists in his life’s path led him to a career as an insurance agent in rural Iowa, where people called each other by their first names on the street and at the country club. Names like Everett, Chuck, and John—solid Midwesterners who looked forward to Pufferbilly Days and were proud of their libraries and city parks. Most didn’t know the self-effacing man down the street was a war hero. After the war, many were content to look ahead with resolute confidence and eternal optimism. As one who valued self-reliance, Ray Duffee fit right in.

World War II brought unprecedented advances in wartime disease treatment and management. This included the military’s recognition that the troops’ health was the responsibility of frontline officers. Training and education became a strategic military priority and no longer the sole province of military doctors as new weapons against disease were developed. Medical supplies and preventive medicine specialists became a priority as well.

The insecticide DDT made its appearance in the latter half of World War II. A Viennese chemistry student had first synthesized the compound in 1874. In 1939, Swiss chemist Paul Müller discovered its remarkably effective insecticidal qualities. By the end of the war, DDT was widely used to rid soldiers and prisoners of war of head and pubic lice as well as to control disease-carrying insects. A vaccine late in the war was an effective new weapon against typhus, a disease that had been the scourge of armies for centuries. A broad spectrum of antibiotics and synthetic alternatives to quinine enabled Duffee and thousands of corpsmen and medics to effectively treat the sick for a wider variety of illnesses than in previous wars.

In World War II, disease deaths amounted to only 40 percent of the 291,000 killed in action. That reflected a remarkable decline from World War I, when disease had killed more men than the enemy. Battlefield survivability increased substantially even as the lethal power of World War II weaponry reached new heights. The race toward survival for many of the wounded soldiers, sailors, and Marines began with an unprecedented fast evacuation off the battlefield, which was only possible through the valor of corpsmen and medics such as Raymond Duffee.

For thousands of soldiers wounded in Europe, survival lay in the hands of equally courageous corpsmen whose families were were incarcerated in American internment camps.

World War II: Europe

K
enzo and Fuyu Okubo’s nine children were in danger. So, too, were many of their friends in Bellingham, Washington. Anger swept across a terrified America in the months following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Many Americans turned that anger inward. Japanese Americans—whether U.S. citizens or foreign-born—became targets of unprecedented racism in the name of national security. Washington Attorney General Smith Troy openly worried about mob violence and wanted all Japanese Americans moved out of the Pacific Northwest. “The government should initiate instant and drastic orders sweeping all aliens, foreign and native born, so far inland that we can forget about them for the duration [of the war],” opined a
West Seattle Herald
editorial on February 26, 1942.

Thousands of Americans of Japanese descent, called
Nisei
, suddenly faced a future filled with uncertainty and even incarceration. They might lose their homes and businesses. Older children might have to abandon college. Younger siblings, who pledged their allegiance to the American flag every day, could be yanked out of the only neighborhood school they had ever known. Families spread across different communities might be permanently splintered. Americans turned on their own.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made their nightmares real. With little opposition, on February 19, 1942, he signed an executive order mandating the relocation of more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans living in the western United States into ten internment camps scattered from California to Wyoming. They were sent to some of the bleakest, least hospitable places in America.

In early April 1942, eviction-notice posters appeared on telephone poles throughout the Seattle area. Nearly ten thousand Japanese Americans were forced to leave their homes, businesses, and farms on only a few days’ notice. When the Okubo family was assigned to Tule Lake, California, Kenzo and Fuyu hoped they would be able to keep their sprawling family together.

One of their sons, James, attended nearby Western Washington University. A lackluster student until he decided to go to college, James was a slight, soft-spoken youngster whose quick smile made him approachable. He had spent summers in high school working with salmon trappers in Alaska to support his family, and he had joined the ski club when he entered college.

Beginning in May 1942, thousands of Japanese-American families passed through the entrance to the Tule Lake internment camp in northern California. Outside the barbed wire, sagebrush stretched forever. Rounded, featureless hills undulated on a hazy horizon that surrounded the dry lakebed chosen as the new home for fifteen thousand Nisei. A small hospital and school separated the camp’s administration building from identical rows of hastily constructed wooden structures twenty feet wide and one hundred feet long that contained one-room living units. When the Okubos reached their unit, they found only a few beds and a wooden stove for the entire family. Camp rules prohibited them from cooking their own food, and a howling wind forced them to keep their door closed.

Shortages dictated life in the compound. Students shared textbooks in the makeshift school; taking books home was out of the question. A lack of medical personnel crippled the camp’s hospital. A patient died while having a seizure because his epileptic condition had not been noted on his chart. A pregnant woman bled to death because there were no available surgeons. The hospital became a place to avoid.

By the first anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Tule Lake had schooled the Okubos and thousands of other Japanese-American citizens from California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington in the life of inmates. Endless days strung together, filled with constant boredom, menial work, and frustrating waits in lines.

A year of war also had taught the military medical corps that several reorganizations in the two decades following World War I had still failed to prepare them adequately for this war. Blitzkrieg and island warfare battle lines crossed continents and oceans. Hospitals had to become mobile to keep pace with advances and attacks. The stagnant fronts of World War I had become as obsolete as the previous century’s shoulderto-shoulder fighting.

Distance to treatment could not be the yardstick by which the chain of medical care was measured. Instead, time to treatment became paramount in a mobile war that required fleets of ambulances, hospital ships, amphibious field hospitals, and medical trains. Combat medicine’s goals were to get critically wounded soldiers to emergency surgery at a clearing station within five hours of being hit and to stage the less serious cases for delayed treatment. This could be as long as eighteen hours later at an evacuation hospital in the rear for those with minor wounds.

The nature of the fighting in World War II, however, posed new challenges to the time-to-treatment standard. Battles on remote islands and deep in jungles made it impossible to establish traditional military hospitals nearby. In early 1942, Army Colonel Percy Carroll developed a new kind of hospital that met the needs of this new kind of war. It contained twenty-five beds with basic equipment, a few surgeons, and a handful of assistants who could relocate quickly and operate in the far reaches of the Philippines, Burma, and New Guinea. They were limited by a lack of equipment for major surgery and bed capacity for postop patients. Many of the young and inexperienced surgeons in the rapidly expanding medical corps could not handle the brutal jungle duty. Regardless, the new hospital represented progress toward the kind of combat care required in the remote settings of World War II. By the end of the war, this hospital model was in use throughout the U.S. Army.

Later in 1942, the Allies launched their first major offensive against Germany in North Africa. America’s traditional military hospital system proved inadequate. Hospitals were too far removed from the battlefield, forcing front-line clearing stations to perform surgery within range of the enemy. The military medical corps needed fresh ideas as much as it needed fresh young men to execute them.

America turned to the Japanese Americans it had incarcerated for more than a year. On February 1, 1943, President Roosevelt announced the formation of the 442nd Infantry Regimental Combat Team, composed entirely of soldiers of Japanese heritage. The segregated units would be commanded by white officers.

“No loyal citizen of the United States should be denied the democratic right to exercise the responsibilities of his citizenship, regardless of his ancestry,” said the President. “Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race or ancestry.”
³⁸
He made no mention of the one hundred thousand Americans who had been confined without due process for nearly a year already solely because of their race.

More than twelve hundred young Japanese-American men volunteered for the U.S. Army from internment camps. Their draft status as “4-C Enemy Agent” no longer mattered. They joined the more than six thousand Hawaiians who had enlisted and been assigned to the segregated combat regiment. James Okubo was among them. He volunteered on May 20, 1943, just ten days short of his twenty-third birthday. He left for Camp Shelby, Mississippi, a world apart from the Pacific Northwest.

Tarpaper, wet forest undergrowth, moldy plywood, stagnant water, and sweat enveloped the new recruits at Camp Shelby. Nearly everything was foreign to the volunteers, most of whom were away from home for the first time. They faced a diet without rice and cringed when they saw such unfamiliar foods as beef brains, tongue, and liver on the menu. Lunch became a favorite meal: a peanut-butter-and-jelly or bologna sandwich and a piece of fruit.