Battle Field Angels (6 page)

World War I

A
t sunrise, Weedon Osborne stared out at a sickly wheat field. Blackened bomb craters pockmarked the undulating meadow beside the French forest. An overnight rain shower had filled most of the craters, bent wheat stalks, and muddied the topsoil. Five divisions of German troops in the forest had huddled in their trenches through the surprisingly cold early-summer night. Fires had been prohibited. They would have revealed their position to the 2nd and 3rd American army divisions and the 4th Marine brigade on the far side of the field.

Steam drifted up into the misty dawn on June 6, 1918. A massive, weeklong German offensive toward Paris had been countered by Allied victories at Cantigny and Château-Thierry in recent days. Now the American and French forces intended to push the Germans out of Belleau Wood. But that would require a suicidal advance across acres of open fields toward the forest under German artillery shelling and machine gunfire.

Dawn’s shadows were still long when the Americans began their advance. Almost immediately, German artillery shells rained down with deafening ferocity. The earth trembled under a barrage that staggered the assault. Lead knots of soldiers fell as German machine guns raked across the open countryside. A few screamed for medics and corpsmen. June 6 was the single bloodiest day in the first 143 years of the Marine Corps.

Twenty-five-year-old Osborne had served aboard the USS
Alabama
after graduating in 1915 from Northwestern University’s dental school. The Chicago native had arrived in France three months earlier as a replacement dental officer and was sent to the front line at Belleau Wood after volunteering to join a first aid party.

Osborne heard the screams of wounded men. Enemy fire split the air around him as he sprinted out into the field and slid to a stop beside a white-faced soldier gripping his belly, the first of many men Osborne would treat. Later that day, as sweat glued his heavy uniform to his back and his muscles burned, Osborne carried Captain Donald Duncan back to a dressing station. A German artillery shell exploded only a few yards away.

The injuries mounted as the fight for Belleau Wood stretched into the middle of June. After three years of war, the German offensive that had been launched in March 1918—before the American military had fully deployed to Europe—was beginning to look like a major defeat. Slowly, the Allies were pushing the Germans out of Belleau Wood.

Surgeon Orlando Petty had been on the teaching staff at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia before the war. On June 11, his unit fought for control of Lucy-le-Bocage, a small village in the Picardy region of France. As he bent over a patient, the enemy’s artillery found his dressing station. The blast knocked Petty to the ground, tearing his gas mask. Dazed, he looked around. His station had been destroyed. Body parts littered the ground. Petty carried Captain Lloyd Williams out of the rubble. (Williams, who later died, became famous for saying, when ordered to withdraw, “Retreat? Hell! We just got here!”)

With dust still hanging in the air, the surgeon organized those who had survived into an ad hoc first aid station. Petty leaned over a soldier who had been wounded on the battlefield and again by the blast. He decided this man took priority over the others who also had been wounded, but he had little to work with. His wooden box of medical supplies held fourteen dark metal tubes. As he reached for clean bandages, he scanned the tubes’ labels: Caffeina citrata for heart stimulation; Sodii bicarbonas, an antacid; Bismuthi subnitras, an internal sedative. There it was: Morphinae sulphas to kill pain. Petty reached for the canvas first aid pouch carried on the soldier’s own belt. It contained only two rolled bandages and two safety pins. They were woefully insufficient for the soldier’s massive wounds, but they would have to suffice. Petty and Osborne were typical of frontline medical personnel who had minimal supplies to treat the wounded under enemy fire.

The brief Spanish-American War in 1898 had provided America’s military medical corps with almost no useful battlefield experience when it mobilized for World War I in 1917. The Spanish-American War was notable primarily for the overcrowded, undisciplined, and unsanitary conditions that plagued the military bases where troops trained. The worst soldiers were still assigned to ward duty; as usual, latrines overflowed, hygiene remained an afterthought among many officers, and medical supplies were still a relatively low priority. Fewer than five hundred soldiers were killed in combat in the Philippines and Cuba, but more than five thousand died from disease, most before they deployed for battle.

America’s military medical corps faced a new kind of war when it entered World War I. More than five decades had passed since its medical officers had faced catastrophic death and injury on a massive scale. The Spanish-American War had posed few of the medical challenges that the Civil War had presented. Surgeons had last practiced combat medicine in wagons pulled by horses. Major Civil War battles that lasted three days, such as Gettysburg, were dwarfed by World War I sieges that dragged on for months in Europe. Sweeping advances led by Union and Confederate generals on horseback appeared quaint and outdated in World War I, when massive armies were bogged down in trenches along stationary battle lines that stretched 475 miles from the English Channel to the Swiss Alps.

The shoulder-to-shoulder fighting that characterized the Civil War was replaced by a war waged with artillery, gigantic cannons on railroad cars, machine guns, and tanks. The Germans called it
Materialschlacht
, a war of equipment. The Civil War’s Minié ball was rendered obsolete by a jacketed, high-speed bullet that not only greatly increased a marksman’s range but also produced shock waves that shattered bones and pulverized organs on its path through a target. Timed fuses ignited overhead artillery bursts, showering troops with shrapnel that resulted in casualties with three or more simultaneous critical injuries.

It was a war that once again had caught America’s military medical corps unprepared. The rest of the world had witnessed six major wars, mostly in Europe, in the period between America’s Civil War and World War I. During that time, the industrial revolution had created a mechanized battlefield. Huge cannon had expanded the arena from pockets of combat to entire regions of warfare. The enemy no longer had to draw a bead on a single soldier. He could lob shells across miles of territory that exploded into clouds of death among groups of men. Newly stabilized artillery had become far more accurate. Closer to the front line, one machine gunner, firing six hundred rounds a minute, became the equivalent of one hundred riflemen in previous wars.

The lack of recent relevant battlefield experience and preparedness was compounded by a critical shortage of medical personnel when America entered World War I. In 1917 the U.S. Army anticipated a 300,000-man expeditionary force in Europe, but it had only 491 medical officers. Ultimately the Army grew to 2 million men, requiring 20,000 medical officers and a medical department of more than 336,000. Those figures were unprecedented in the medical corps’ history and were complicated by the fact that World War I was the first major war fought abroad by Americans. Worse, the medical corps occupied a relatively low position in the military organizational hierarchy and was not considered a high priority when shipping men and resources across the Atlantic. Throughout World War I, the medical corps played catch-up as one Allied offensive followed another, exacting a staggering toll in men.

Fewer lives would have been lost had greater attention been paid to the developments in medical science that had taken place since the Civil War. In the late 1860s, an English surgery professor, Joseph Lister, discovered how to use carbolic acid to clean wounds, kill bacteria, and significantly reduce the rate of infection. His antibacterial practices, which included washing hands, wearing gloves, and even avoiding medical instruments with porous handles, contributed to an emerging era of antiseptic medicine, bacteriology, and immunology.

In the latter half of the 1800s, the German military medical corps pioneered the use of hospital trains to keep pace with armies and to facilitate rapid battlefield evacuation. In addition, German soldiers were the first to be issued sterile first aid kits in an army in which the medical corps was highly valued, something of an anomaly in that period.

By the time America’s military medical corps arrived in Europe in late 1918, three years of war had taught French and British doctors brutally painful lessons in wound infection control. The British relied on their medical experience in the Boer War in South Africa, fourteen years earlier. Fought in an arid region of poor soil, that war produced relatively few wound infections. The lessons in proper and meticulous wound cleaning were forgotten. But much of World War I was waged in Flanders, famous for its rich, thickly manured farm fields and naturally damp soil—the perfect ingredients for infection. Thousands of soldiers died from infected wounds that had not been cleaned properly when they were first treated.

Near the end of June 1918, American, British, and French troops finally prevailed at Belleau Wood, the U.S. Army’s bloodiest battle since Appomattox during the Civil War. More than 1,800 Americans were killed and nearly 8,000 were wounded at Belleau Wood.

A month after Belleau Wood, the summer heat sucked the energy out of eighty-five thousand American soldiers along the Aisne and Marne rivers northeast of Paris. On July 15, 1918, twenty-three German divisions launched a major attack against the American, British, and French armies. The Germans were intent on splitting the Allied forces in two, but by 1100 hours that day, the last large-scale German offensive of World War I had stalled.

On July 19, the Allies launched a counterattack against German positions in the town of Soissons. Among them were twenty-two-yearold John Balch, a corpsman from a Santa Fe Railroad town on the eastern edge of Kansas, and twenty-eight-year-old Joel Boone, a Navy surgeon from Pennsylvania’s coal country. Like many battles in recent days, the advances were minimal as soldiers fell under machine gunfire. Corpsman Balch barely paused at those beyond help, packed the penetrating wounds of some, wrapped the shredded arms or legs of others, and called for stretcher bearers. For nearly sixteen hours, Balch repeatedly left his dressing station and exposed himself to enemy fire, giving the wounded a sliver of hope.

Surgeon Joel Boone was not far from Balch. German gunners pinned down soldiers in open fields. A scream rose above the bone-rattling clatter of a machine gun. Boone left the relative safety of a ravine, sprinted out to the fallen man, and dragged him to cover. Later, Boone jumped on a motorcycle and raced to a field hospital for supplies, making two roundtrips through heavy artillery fire.

The wounded kept coming, one after another. Boone could only buy time for each man he treated. It would be up to surgeons in the rear to utilize a recent development in battlefield wound care.

Three years earlier, Dr. Theodore-Marin Tuffier had developed a surgical technique to thoroughly clean the debris from a wound and remove the destroyed and dying tissue surrounding it, a process called “debridement.” Because gaping wounds healed slowly and were easily infected, he used a skin graft to seal the wound so it could heal from the inside out with a lower risk of infection. For the first time, surgeons could treat a badly wounded soldier without resorting to amputation to preempt infection.

Doctors, corpsmen, and medics also faced gas warfare for the first time during World War I. Mustard gas was a stealthy, invisible enemy. Symptoms sometimes took hours to appear. It attacked a man’s lungs and interacted with any exposed, moist skin. The concoction released by exploding artillery shells contained an oil agent that sealed the gas against skin. Soldiers learned to dread the onset of a burning throat, coughing, sneezing, and watery eyes. Severe exposure spawned vomiting and blisters on the face or, where the caustic gas burned through damp uniforms, in armpits and on genitals. Although death was relatively uncommon, thousands of weakened soldiers faced infection as well as lifelong disfigurement and blindness.

The horrors of battle only temporarily replaced the terrors of a medic’s life in the trenches of World War I. Soldiers lived and fought in miles of seven-foot-deep trenches only three feet wide. Their daily routine began with sentry duty against a dawn attack, followed by weapon cleaning and trench maintenance—which involved draining the trenches of rancid water and mud—then sentry duty at dusk.

At night medics stood ready for casualties from patrols into “no man’s land,” which often was riddled with barbed wire and land mines. Sometimes, they were ordered to the rear to collect medical supplies or return to the gut-tightening stink of the trenches, which were surrounded by thousands of rotting animal carcasses, decaying soldiers’ bodies, and overflowing latrines. Inside the trenches, body odor, cigarette smoke, cooking food, hints of poisonous gas, and gunpowder filled nostrils and coated skin.