Battle Field Angels (19 page)

Dozens of landing craft that had been circling offshore in the last hours of the final bombardment turned toward Iwo Jima at 0900 hours. It was eerily quiet as the assault force reached the beach. Ramps were lowered, and thousands of Marines gathered ashore, ready to move inland. But the jet-black volcanic sand mixed with volcanic ash had the consistency of wet coffee grounds. Soldiers sank to their ankles. Jeeps, ambulances, trucks, and artillery equipment disappeared up to their axles. Men and machines were stuck in the muck when, suddenly, thousands of rounds of artillery, rockets, and mortars began blasting the surf and pulverizing the beach. Screams rent the air.

Two terraces, one hundred and two hundred yards inland, from five to ten feet high, made progress almost impossible after the Marines had pulled themselves out of the muck. Casualties mounted as enemy artillery found clumps of soldiers huddled in craters for protection. Just as had happened on Tarawa and Peleliu, the pre-invasion bombardment had failed. Instead, it had alerted a well-entrenched enemy to their approach.

The Marines kept coming ashore. Corpsmen crab-ran from one casualty to the next in the surf and across the narrow beach. Four battalions landed in the first hour of the assault. Although that would provide substantial firepower if the force could somehow get inland, it also exposed to the enemy a large mass of soldiers crouching nearly shoulder to shoulder on the beach. Some were out in the open for more than an hour as Japanese gunfire raked across the shoreline. Shredded corpses floated among discarded packs, crates, body parts, and wrecked equipment.

Many Marines had covered their faces with a white cream to guard against burns as they waded ashore. They had expected the Japanese to detonate submerged drums filled with gasoline. Several were defenseless when a Japanese mortar found a pile of artillery shells on the beach. The flash burns seared skin instantly.

A generation earlier, explosive weaponry in World War I had produced burn wounds the likes of which had not been seen in earlier wars. Military doctors used bicarbonate of soda dressings on the burns, a treatment that had changed little from the previous century. There was scarce understanding of how the body reacted to a severe burn.

Frank Pell Underhill was a chemical warfare specialist in World War I. He discovered that the sticky liquid that leaks into a severe burn site is similar to the plasma in blood. Burns that weep copiously rob the body of critical fluid. If left unchecked, blood cells become concentrated and out of balance. Cells cease functioning properly, which leads to shock. Underhill realized that promptly restoring fluid to the burned soldier to ward off shock before multiple organ failure was as important as treating the burn wound.

Following World War I, researchers sought treatments for burns that were more effective than soda-based dressings, salt solutions, and honey. A hospital intern in Detroit, Edward Davidson, developed a tannic acid treatment that covered raw nerves and eased searing pain. It also enhanced the healing process. When Britain went to war in 1939, the medical corps scrubbed burns with sodium bicarbonate, rubbed them with bleaching powder, and then applied tannic acid compresses for two to three weeks. Tannic acid, however, often permanently puckered the wound site. For example, badly burned hands that had healed were left permanently half-clenched.

By mid-1941, Dr. Robert Aldrich had created a new antiseptic coagulant called triple dye that reduced infection, a frequent complication of burns. Aldrich believed that a wounded soldier should be treated for shock for the first seventy-two hours and then receive three sprays of aniline dyes that reduced pain, killed bacteria, and allowed new skin growth with less puckering than that caused by tannic acid.

The American military medical corps had both tannic acid and triple dyes to treat victims of the attack on Pearl Harbor, half of whom had been burned, but they were not satisfied with either treatment. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, physicians began spraying on burns a wax film composed of paraffin, sulfanilamide, and cod-liver oil. The wax covered raw nerves to ease patient pain, allowed wound inspection, and could be applied quickly in mass casualty situations. It could be washed off daily, reapplied, and did not require a dressing. The treatment eliminated the need to clean a burn site.

If the corpsmen on Iwo Jima could stabilize the badly burned so that they could be evacuated to the hospital ships offshore and to Navy hospitals in Guam and Saipan, they stood a far better chance of survival than their counterparts in World War I.

Caspar Wistar and most physician’s assistants in the Revolutionary War were volunteers with little or no medical training. Some became doctors after the war in an era when there were no physician licensing standards.
(University of Pennsylvania Archives)

Men wounded at Fredericksburg lie under a tree, waiting for medical treatment in a country estate that had been commandeered by Union troops and converted into a makeshift hospital on the eve of battle. Unprecedented Civil War casualties often overwhelmed army medical departments.
(National Archives)

A great deal of medical care took place outside during the Civil War. Scores of wounded men lying under trees and huddled along creek beds were a common sight following a battle.
(National Archives)

As medical director of the Army of the Potomac, Dr. Jonathan Letterman’s creation of military medicine’s first dedicated ambulance corps such as this was one of the Civil War’s most profound medical advances.
(National Archives)

An exhausted corpsman on Saipan checks a wounded soldier. A corpsman’s work doesn’t end when the fighting stops. For many corpsmen, surgeons, and nurses, the most intense work comes once the battlefield becomes quiet and hundreds of wounded need attention.
(USMC)

Crews in World War II submarines such as the USS
Seadragon
made extensive deployments into combat without a doctor aboard. They typically relied on a single corpsman for all types of routine and emergency medical care.
(U.S. Navy, Bureau of Medicine & Surgery Archives, Wheeler Lipes Collection)

Darrell Rector (left) showed off his appendectomy scar after Wheeler Lipes (right) performed the first emergency appendectomy by a corpsman aboard a submarine in World War II.
(U.S. Navy, Bureau of Medicine & Surgery Archives, Wheeler Lipes Collection)