Battle Field Angels (22 page)

It had been called “shell shock” in World War I, when soldiers endured relentless enemy attacks and the constant threat of death, disease, wretched living conditions, borderline malnutrition, and loneliness. Military psychiatrists developed the concept of “forward psychiatry” and a treatment regimen called PIES (proximity, immediacy, expectancy, and simplicity). Psychiatric casualties received treatment close to the front as quickly and directly as possible and were told that they would return to combat duty.

But many of the lessons of World War I had been forgotten by the outset of World War II. American military psychiatrists believed that young men with a propensity for becoming psychiatric casualties could be identified by their childhood experiences. Approximately 1.6 million inductees were deemed unfit for military duty based on an experimental screening program. The disqualification rate for World War II inductees was more than seven times that for World War I.

The military relied on the screening program to such an extent that no psychiatrists were assigned to combat battalions at the start of the war and no provisions were made for psychiatric facilities in the rear. Yet psychiatric casualties began appearing in some of World War II’s early battles.

On March 15, at sunrise, 5th Division Marines again engaged the enemy. When a corpsman and two of the four stretcher bearers carrying two wounded Marines were injured, Francis Pierce, Jr., ran to their aid. As he neared Japanese snipers, he pulled the wounded corpsman and stretcher bearers into a sheltered position so he could treat them. The two hurt Marines whose medical evacuation to the rear had been cut short would have to wait.

Pierce stood up in the enemy’s line of fire. He discharged his weapon from left to right, directing a second rescue party toward his position. Once the wounded corpsman and two stretcher bearers had been carried to the rear, Pierce dropped to his knees to treat the two Marines still waiting to be evacuated. A Japanese sniper came out of his cave only twenty yards away and shot one of the Marines a second time. With the last of his ammunition, Pierce killed the sniper as he approached.

Pierce shouldered the first Marine, pushed hard into the island sand to stand up, and carried him two hundred yards to safety. He returned for the second Marine, retrieving him as enemy bullets pinged off rocks a few feet away. Pierce successfully dragged the semiconscious soldier behind friendly lines before falling to his knees in exhaustion. He had saved the lives of five Marines.

By the following day, the infantry’s ranks had been depleted so seriously that corpsmen became riflemen. On March 16, Pierce led a combat patrol toward a sniper nest. When he stopped to treat an injured Marine, he was seriously wounded, but he refused first aid. Instead he acted as a spotter, directing fire at the enemy while others evacuated the hurt Marine. Only then did Pierce allow another corpsman to take care of his wounds.

Word spread from foxhole to foxhole.

The corpsman who had first impressed his buddies in boot camp with his marksmanship became a legend on March 16 on Iwo Jima, the same day senior military officials publicly proclaimed that the island had been secured. It had taken twenty-six days and nine hours of some of the most brutal fighting Marines and their corpsmen had ever faced.

The Marines discharged Francis Pierce on December 9, 1945. After a year in the Michigan National Guard, he settled in Grand Rapids and joined the police force as a patrolman. Three years passed before he learned he would receive the Medal of Honor. In June 1948, he reported to the Truman Presidential Library for a brief ceremony. Pierce returned to Grand Rapids and a career in law enforcement.

One of George Wahlen’s orders before his discharge from the Navy on December 19, 1945, was to report to Naval Barracks in Washington, D.C., at 0830 on October 3. He and thirteen other Marines and sailors were to receive the Medal of Honor.

Terror gripped Wahlen when he arrived at the White House for the ceremony. He immediately spotted Generals George Patton and George Marshall. Not far away stood Admiral Chester Nimitz. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal sat nearby.

When George Wahlen heard his name called, he stood and walked forward, stiff with nervousness. He stopped two paces short of the president, and stood at attention while staring at the ground. After a moment’s pause, President Harry Truman took a half step forward and reached out for Wahlen’s hand to draw him closer. Wahlen smiled sheepishly when the president told him it was “good to see a pill pusher here in the middle of all these Marines.”
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Daughty Williams had no interest in going to Washington for a Medal of Honor ceremony. So the Navy came to Harrison, Arkansas, a year and four days after her only son had been killed and buried on Iwo Jima. The delegation was far less impressive than the officials who attended the ceremony at the White House. A Navy captain, public information officer, photographer’s mate, and recruiter stood on the stoop of the Williams house on the morning of March 8, 1946.

Only five members of Jack Williams’s family attended the ceremony in the modest, five-room house: his parents, both grandmothers, and a sister. Captain Arthur Agerton read the award citation before he placed the medal around Daughty’s neck.

“Heroism was commonplace on Iwo Jima,” he told her. “The heroism of your son stood out in such company.”
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Young Johnny Willis wasn’t impressed with Secretary of Defense James Forrestal’s office on a crisp, cold morning in early December 1945. Oblivious to the strangers in the room, he looked up and smiled at his mother, Winfrey. Johnny and Winfrey Willis had come to Washington to formally receive the Medal of Honor that John Harlan Willis had earned on Iwo Jima. Winfrey and John had been married for less than a year when he sacrificed his life for wounded Marines. Secretary Forrestal carefully pinned the Medal of Honor on Johnny’s shirt. He had been born two months after his father collapsed on the sand of Iwo Jima.

John Willis was among the more than one hundred ninety other corpsmen who died on Iwo Jima. He was buried in one of hundreds of broad trenches in a cemetery surrounded by a white picket fence at the foot of Mt. Suribachi. A simple white wooden cross with his name and the corpsman’s crest marked his location.

More than two dozen Medals of Honor were awarded for extraordinary acts of bravery and heroism on Iwo Jima, more than for any single battle. Four were awarded to young corpsmen. Nearly 530 other corpsmen were wounded on Iwo Jima. On average, during the 36-day campaign, a corpsman fell wounded every 90 minutes. Almost 6,000 Marines died, and 16,000 others suffered battle wounds. Roughly a third of all Marine casualties in World War II occurred on Iwo Jima.

Many survived due to a number of advances in military medicine during World War II. Corpsmen and medics were confronted by wounded Marines suffering from multiple injuries. Enemy artillery simultaneously could produce flash burns, contact burns, and injuries from hot penetrating shrapnel. Increased weapon use of chemicals such as phosphorus added to the burn incidence rate. Although improvements in burn care were made, soldiers who suffered widespread burns faced a bleak outlook. About half of those who were burned on more than 40 percent of their body survived their wounds.

Aerial medical evacuation became a critical link in the chain of battlefield care. Navy flight nurses helped evacuate 17,700 Iwo Jima casualties by sea and air. Army flight nurses assisted in the evacuation of more than 1.1 million soldiers by air over the duration of World War II. Only forty-six died in transport.

The military medical corps’ most significant failure was its pre-induction psychiatric screening program. In 1943 on Guadalcanal, as many as 40 percent of the casualties in some units were psychiatric. It became evident that in some units in which leadership was poor, psychiatric casualties were widespread. In other cases, such as the Japanese-American 442nd battalion in Europe, soldiers endured a series of brutal missions with no reported cases of combat fatigue.

However, once the psychiatric lessons of World War I were reapplied, World War II marked some progress in military psychiatric care. The military medical corps learned that every soldier had a “breaking point;” that tests could not screen out those most susceptible; soldiers tended to fight for their buddies, units, and country rather than against an enemy; and that prompt treatment near the battlefield and a swift return to combat duty was more effective than shipping psychiatric cases home.

Yet for corpsmen like George Wahlen, the greatest medical tools may have been their courage, compassion, perseverance, and ingenuity. More than nine out of ten American soldiers and sailors survived World War II as a direct result.

Yet for some members of the medical corps, World War II did not produce personal or professional advancement in battlefield medicine. They were prisoners of war, trapped in a stench of despair while treating hundreds of desperately ill men.

World War II: Philippines

S
hock waves from the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, rolled across the Pacific to the Navy in the Philippines, an American colony since the United States emerged victorious from the Spanish-American War in 1898. The military medical corps braced for a Japanese attack on the Philippines. Officials at the U.S. Navy Hospital, Cañacao, knew their patients were at risk. The hospital was not far from the Cavite Navy Yard and the massive Navy complex on Manila Bay. If the Japanese attacked Cavite, bedridden patients could be killed by wayward bombing runs. The patients had to be evacuated. Ambulatory patients who could manage for themselves were discharged shortly after news of the Pearl Harbor attack, but dozens more still needed hospital care. As night fell on the first day of war, some Cañacao doctors prayed for a few days’ peace so they could find a home for men too sick and weak to defend themselves.

On December 10, war reached Manila. Unopposed Japanese bombers destroyed Cavite Navy Yard. Truckloads of wounded sailors began arriving at Cañacao hospital. The medical staff treated their injuries through the night. The next day, they evacuated all remaining patients to Philippine Union College in Balintawak, not far from Manila. Abandoned dorms became patient wards, where doctors and corpsmen hoped to hide their patients from the advancing Japanese.

By Christmas Day, 1941, Balintawak stood in the path of the enemy’s march on Manila. Once again the medical staff evacuated their patients, this time to Santa Scholastica College in Manila, hoping to avoid the primary assault. It bought only a week. On January 2, 1942, two dozen doctors, 5 pharmacists, 12 nurses, and 53 hospital corpsmen watched Japanese soldiers arrive at the gate of Santa Scholastica. The soldiers erected a machine-gun nest shielded by stacks of sand-filled gunny sacks. The machine gun pointed directly at the front door of the hospital to keep medical personnel and patients from escaping. Navy doctors and corpsmen stayed at their posts, knowing they risked capture by the enemy.

—diary excerpt,
William Silliphant, U.S. Navy doctor
Bilibid Prison, Manila, 1942

Silliphant and dozens of Navy doctors and corpsmen spent the first few months of captivity in jungle work camps after the Japanese had taken them prisoner in early January. Brutal working conditions coupled with sweltering tropical heat and beatings by Japanese guards killed men daily. A few doctors and a handful of corpsmen, armed with little more than first aid kits, were powerless against jungle rot and the spread of gangrene. One surgeon wrote that: