Battle Field Angels (16 page)

Called the “Three Musketeers” by friends at school, they gathered in a shed behind Sammy Petrovich’s house to drink wine, smoke cigarettes, and celebrate their graduation. Sammy typified Tonopah. His Yugoslavian family hailed from a long line of miners, back in the old country and then at a copper mine in Ely and finally in Tonopah. Five-foot-seven Sammy matured early. He affected the hallmarks of miner manhood, smoking cigars and playing poker in the backroom of the Skunk Dive.

Bob Warren loved music. He learned the piano at an early age and soon added the saxophone. Before school each morning, he practiced on his home’s screened porch. His notes rode the breeze up the canyon and across town as men headed for the mines. He played in a high school Dixieland band, with Sammy on the trombone.

Joe Marquez lived at the edge of Tonopah. The son of divorced parents, he was raised by his grandparents. His grandfather and uncles worked in the nearby mines. They lived on credit from one silver strike to the next, paying off the old debt with a big paycheck only to begin a new one. Joe worked a succession of jobs starting in the third grade, selling newspapers, working in a laundry, and tending the gas station. Mining was a family heritage. As an eighth grader, he started hitchhiking to Los Angeles to see his father, who became a paraplegic after a mining accident. Before returning to Tonopah, sometimes he gazed out at the Navy ships moored at San Pedro and Long Beach. About six feet tall and whisper thin, Joe overcame his modest early schooling with a natural charisma and innate athletic ability. He was the captain and most valuable player of the school basketball team as well as student body president. Everyone liked and respected the Hispanic kid from the other side of town.

On graduation night, Joe Marquez, Bob Warren, and Sammy Petrovich knew they soon would be drafted, so all three planned to enlist, after spending one last night in Sammy’s shed.

“I heard that one out of three guys shipped out overseas gets killed,” said Sammy.

“I dunno, that seems a little high,” said Joe.

“You sure about that?” Bob asked.

“Well, that’s what I heard. So I guess one of us won’t be coming back,” Sammy replied.
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Silence followed as the three teenagers contemplated their futures. They decided to draw straws. Whoever drew the short straw would be the one to get killed in the war, so the other two would know they would survive and return to Tonopah. Each drew a straw. Each took its measure and glanced at the others. All three wondered whether fate would abide by a teenager’s game of predicting the future.

Sammy Petrovich decided to enlist in the Marines. Bob Warren opted for the Army. Joe Marquez joined the Navy. When asked for his preferred duty, Marquez first listed yeoman because of business classes he had taken in school. Having worked nights at a gas station earning $40 a week, he made “mechanic” his second choice. His third option was “anything else.”

One day as Marquez got into formation on the boot camp’s parade ground, an officer walked up. Without explanation, he ended Marquez’s boot camp a week early and sent him to corpsman school, fulfilling that third option of “anything else.” He didn’t know what a corpsman did when he headed up to Balboa Park, a fourteen-hundred-acre oasis at the northeastern edge of downtown San Diego. Some of the park’s buildings a few blocks from the nearby Navy hospital had been converted into barracks for corpsmen. Training there would be the first step down a path that might lead to hospital duty, assignment to a ship, or possibly transfer to the Marine Corps.

As Marquez finished his hospital training, a clerk tacked the official list of Marine Corps corpsman assignments on a hallway bulletin board. Marquez found his name halfway down. Visions of combat patrols on beaches and islands with Marine platoons immediately appeared. The first stop would be Camp Elliott, just north of San Diego, where sweaty marches replaced mundane hospital ward duty.

Navy corpsmen became Marines at Camp Elliott, a vast expanse of scrub-covered ridges separated by arroyos filled with Mexican sage, sumac, prickly pear cacti, and rattlesnakes. They learned to crawl through ditches covered with barbed wire as machine-gun fire blasted the air just inches overhead. They were taught how to jump into the water carrying full medical gear and how to survive an oil slick on fire. Corpsmen toughened for battle.

By Thanksgiving 1944, Marquez eagerly anticipated transfer to the war zone. The tide had turned, and the United States had forced Japan into retreat. One morning, an officer announced that Marquez’s unit would ship out to the South Pacific. They cheered at the prospect, young men who had left home eighteen months earlier, anxious to make their mark.

The Marines choked on the stench of rotting coconuts on Pavuvu Island. Marquez had been assigned to the 1st Marine Division, a unit famous for the vicious island battles it fought in the march toward Japan. Pavuvu was supposed to be a place to rest, replenish, and train for the next assault on a little-known island called Peleliu.

Peleliu is part of the Palau Islands, a group of 100 islands and atolls 600 miles east of the Philippines and nearly 2,500 miles south of Tokyo. The island is shaped like a lobster’s claw, its pincers pointing toward the northeast. About six miles long and only two miles wide, its dense jungles, rock-hard coral ridges, invisible caves, and mangrove swamps made it nearly impenetrable. The Japanese had built a triangular airfield in the southwest corner of the island, not far from a handful of ridges, called the Umurbrogol Mountains, which rose five hundred feet above sea level. Vegetation covered them so completely that they were nearly invisible from the air.

In early 1944, Peleliu became the focal point of a heated debate among America’s most senior war planners. General Douglas MacArthur pleaded for the opportunity to fulfill a very public promise to retake the Philippines, which he had evacuated two years earlier. He viewed securing Peleliu’s airfield as crucial to protecting his eastern flank. However, Admiral Chester Nimitz pointed out that American forces already had bypassed Peleliu as they advanced from the Gilbert Islands to the Marshalls and on to Guam and Saipan. He argued for a continued advance toward Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and ultimately the Japanese homeland. Should the thrust into Japan come from the southeast, a single island at a time—with no need for taking Peleliu? Or should MacArthur be authorized to lead America’s charge up from the south through New Guinea, the Philippines, and then mainland China?

General MacArthur took his case to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in July 1944. MacArthur prevailed. The 1st Marines received orders to secure Peleliu and its airfield in September to protect the general’s flank. For Joe Marquez and thousands of Marines, the road to Peleliu went through Pavuvu.

Everyone hated Pavuvu. Many officers considered it too small for maneuvers and training exercises. Its massive coconut groves had been unharvested since the start of the war. Legions of rats swarmed over the rotting coconut carpet as battled-scarred veterans tried to rest and heal. The stench of rotting coconuts and putrid coconut milk soaked into everything: clothes, food, and the water. Men choked on the stink. Even more despised were the thousands of coconut land crabs that roamed the island at night. The spiny creatures, as large as a man’s hand, often climbed into boots, under cots, and among personal belongings. Hordes amassed by the thousands during mating season. Men cringed at the sound of steady crunching under boots and vehicle wheels.

Marquez’s first assignment on Pavuvu was the “soak tent,” where Marines covered with fungus arrived for treatment. America’s warriors had never faced tropical diseases and parasites on such a massive scale as they confronted in World War II. Marquez slathered gallons of calamine lotion on backs, arms, legs, and faces. Sometimes the medical staff applied a potassium permanganate solution to Marines who were so blanketed with fungus that eating and sleeping had become impossible. Fungal infections the Marines called “jungle rot” in armpits and on ankles tormented malnourished soldiers.

The food dampened the Marines’ spirits even further. They were fed dehydrated eggs, oatmeal, and Spam, washed down with a fake lemonade concoction they called “battery acid.”

Worst of all was Pavuvu’s lack of fresh water. Limited water supplies had to be shipped to the island and rationed. The mess hall commanded top priority for the water, followed by sick bay. Personal hygiene depended on stripping and running out into a rain shower, soaping up, and waiting for the next thunderstorm to rinse off.

Preventive medicine was a priority for corpsmen and medics. Marines frequently stood in line for a shot, especially boosters, as they recovered from a jungle bug or built up immunity before their next invasion. In an era before disposable needles, a corpsman sometimes spent hours filing needle points after they dulled with repeated use. On more than one occasion, a corpsman gave a shot, pulled the syringe away, and discovered the well-used needle remained lodged in the Marine’s arm.

Once training was completed, crowded transports carried Marquez, other corpsmen, and the massive assault force toward Peleliu. Marquez grew certain that he would be wounded in battle. He didn’t know if it would be on Peleliu, but he knew he’d be hurt. “God, don’t let me be disfigured,” he prayed one night:

Men whispered similar prayers as the American armada approached Peleliu.

Three days before their arrival, underwater demolition teams cleared a path across the island’s reef. On the surface, five battleships and five heavy cruisers pounded Peleliu. Attack aircraft from three carriers, five light carriers, and eleven escort carriers screamed over the island, blasting it from one end to the other. After two days of uncontested assault, Admiral Jesse Oldendorf claimed he had run out of targets. He called off the bombardment, believing Peleliu had been bombed into easy submission.

He wasn’t alone in his belief. General William Rupertus told his Marines to expect a two- or three-day operation, similar to the landing on Tarawa, which had been an intense and bloody but short assault the previous November. Hit the beach fast, move inland on the double, and destroy what was left of the enemy after the pre-invasion bombardment.

On the eve of the invasion, Marquez and other corpsmen reviewed everything they had learned from a handful of weeks in corpsman school.

“What do you do for a sucking chest wound?”

“What’s the first thing you do for a gunshot wound?”

“What’s the minimal equipment you need to give the wounded plasma? How can you improvise a transfusion to keep a man from going into shock?”
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Shock had plagued the medical corps in every war. Civil War doctors had thought that shock and severe hemorrhaging were different conditions. Little had changed by World War I, although by that time military doctors suspected blood loss was a complicating factor for what they called battle shock.

Low blood pressure, cold legs and arms, a fast pulse, and nausea were common early indicators of shock from blood loss and dehydration. Shock was common in men badly wounded, but sometimes it also surfaced after minor wounds. It made a soldier a poor candidate for surgery. The prevailing thinking in World War I had been to first treat shock with rest, warmth, and medication and then to treat the soldier’s wounds after he “came out of it.”

That posed a conundrum for military doctors. If they waited for a severely wounded soldier to stabilize from shock, he was less likely to survive his wounds. In World War I, the mortality rate for a soldier with nontransportable wounds was 10 percent if he was treated within an hour of being wounded. If doctors waited eight hours to treat him, the mortality rate increased to 75 percent. Shock, simply by delaying definitive treatment, could be as deadly as the most severe battle wounds.

Military doctors knew to treat shock with blood transfusions. They also understood that matching recipient and donor blood types was critical. Austrian physician Karl Landsteiner had developed the classification system of blood types in 1901, but the World War I medical corps was poorly equipped for blood transfusions. The military had a limited ability to reliably preserve, store, and transport perishable blood. In the absence of blood-typing capability near the battlefield, some British doctors in 1916 attempted direct transfusion from healthy soldiers lying next to wounded men. Fifteen out of sixteen wounded soldiers died from receiving incompatible blood. Later in World War I, doctors collected blood between battles and stored it in iceboxes. They gave a wounded soldier a small amount of donated blood, and if he didn’t show an adverse reaction after two minutes, they administered the remainder. The inability to administer intravenous fluids and blood on a widespread basis contributed to thousands of wounded men dying from shock and hemorrhaging during World War I.

In the decade preceding World War II, remarkable progress had been achieved in understanding the role and use of blood in war. In 1928, a Russian doctor, Serge Yudin, successfully used cadaver blood for the first time to resuscitate patients. By 1932, he reported more than one hundred successful transfusions of blood that had been stored at least three weeks. By 1936, that figure had ballooned to nearly one thousand.

Then in 1940, an American, Dr. Charles Drew, made blood a viable battlefield weapon against shock. Drew developed a method that separated plasma from whole blood. Plasma is whole blood’s liquid component. It contains blood cells, glucose, dissolved proteins, clotting agents, and hormones. Plasma could be dried into a powder for easy transport, storage, reconstitution, and use on the battlefield.

Drew also pioneered methods of reliably preserving, storing, and shipping whole blood. His motivation at the time had been to provide needed blood for Britain in its war against Germany. Drew’s Blood Transfusion Betterment Association of New York, with support from the American Red Cross, began soliciting blood donations in August 1940. Within five months, more than fourteen thousand units of blood were donated and more than ten thousand units of plasma were shipped to Britain. The concept of the blood bank had been established.