Battle Field Angels (8 page)

Two groups of twenty-seven enemy bombers converged on the largely undefended Navy base and leisurely formed up for bombing runs at defenseless ships and buildings. The first stick of enemy bombs missed the two submarines by one hundred fifty yards. The enemy bombers circled, seemed to pause, and then made another run. The
Sealion
shuddered when the bombs hit. One destroyed a machine gun mount that had been vacated only seconds earlier, exploding just outside the sub’s control room where most of the crew had gathered. Another bomb hit at almost the same instant, exploding deep inside the sub, killing four men. Shrapnel skittered through the
Sealion
, slicing skin and scalp.

Within seconds, the
Sealion
listed hard to starboard as seawater filled the ruptured aft engine compartment. As the sub settled into the mud, a short, skinny corpsman from New Castle, Virginia, escaped through the forward torpedo hatch into the bay as explosions rocked the burning Navy yard. Wheeler Lipes treaded water in a circle, shocked at the near total destruction of the Navy base. When a rescue party finally pulled him out of the water and took him to one of the few remaining piers, Lipes treated soaked, bleeding, and burned men.

That night, after a hot dog and sauerkraut dinner, Lipes collapsed on a cot aboard a tender that had survived the attack, oblivious to the smell of burning rubber and rubbish that wafted through the ship. As he closed his eyes, “Wheeler Lipes, report to sick bay” blared from the ship’s loudspeakers. The sound of men arguing pierced Lipes’s exhaustion as he approached the compartment. The USS
Seadragon
’s corpsman had been wounded during the attack, and the Navy needed a replacement before the submarine put to sea. Several men shouted over each other, trying to convince a confused officer that they deserved the transfer.

“Look, I’ve been here longer than you! An’ you know I got more medical training than you,” said one.

“Yea, and how many times you been late from liberty? Just last Saturday the MPs had to drag your sorry ass aboard,” said another.

“Enough!”

The senior medical officer looked Lipes up and down as he entered. “How would you feel about another submarine?” he asked Lipes, whose scalp laceration still ached.

“I’m ready now, sir,” said Lipes.
⁸

Over howls of protest from men senior to Lipes, the matter was settled. Wheeler Lipes, a young man who always had his nose to the grindstone, was the only candidate present who had completed all the qualifications for transfer to submarine duty as a corpsman. Soon he would head out to sea.

America’s military medical corps was poorly prepared and undermanned when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the Philippines in 1941, even though President Franklin D. Roosevelt had begun mobilizing for war two years earlier. The Army’s medical department totaled 11,000 doctors, 7,000 nurses, and 107,000 enlisted personnel. The entire U.S. Navy medical department numbered only 13,500. Rapid medical corps expansion became paramount as America sent 16 million men and women to war over four years. That required the military medical corps to more than quintuple in size, ultimately numbering more than 800,000 by 1945. That expansion created a variety of options for bright and ambitious young men.

Wheeler Bryson John Charles Lipes had always been a serious young man. Standing five feet, six inches tall and weighing about one hundred twenty pounds, Lipes had small feet and small hands. He had wanted to be a doctor for as long as he could remember, especially after working in a Norfolk, Virginia, naval air station dispensary, where he served patients their evening meals, punched capsules in the pharmacy, and typed patient records.

The family bragged that his aunt had been Virginia’s first woman pharmacist, but it was his mother, Ida Mae, who set the example he would follow. As a child, Lipes had watched excitedly as some taffy syrup boiled on the stove. When he accidentally stuck his hand in the syrup, he suffered horrific burns. Ida Mae refused to let doctors amputate the badly burned hand, and she slowly restored it to health and dexterity. Another time, while sitting on his mother’s lap, Lipes unexpectedly flinched, startling her. She was holding a toothpick and accidentally poked him in the eye. Weeks of daily care slowly but fully rehabilitated his eye. Wheeler Lipes might have grown up with one eye and one hand. Instead, his family’s patient ministering instilled a deep sense of responsibility, self-reliance, and ingenuity that would define his life.

Lipes dropped out of high school and enlisted in the Navy in 1936. Within weeks, the former Eagle Scout found himself on the USS
Nitro
, bound for hospital corps school in San Diego. Corpsman training came easily to Lipes. Anatomy classes that confounded others were a snap. The body was a road map and all a man had to do was study it, he often said.

Several months later, Lipes headed for corpsman duty at a Navy hospital in Philadelphia. Over the next three years, he constantly sought physicians who didn’t mind teaching young corpsmen. “I want to learn everything I can,”
⁹
the single-minded young man told them. Lessons often extended well beyond the boundaries of corpsman duty.

Rain pounded the
Seadragon
’s periscope, blurring Captain William Ferrall’s view of the South China Sea whitecaps. The sub had departed Fremantle, Australia, sixteen days earlier on August 26, 1942, on its fourth patrol of the war. The next day it reached its assigned station. Secret Operation Order 49-42 directed the
Seadragon
to pursue and destroy enemy shipping.

The
Seadragon
had spotted an enemy sub and a destroyer, evading both as it headed for a shipping lane often filled with Japanese troop transports and supply ships. After completing a watch assignment, Lipes headed for the crew compartment in the battery section of the sub.

“Hey, Doc, I don’t feel very good,” Seaman first class Darrell Dean Rector said to Lipes. On the youngster’s nineteenth birthday, a dull ache in his belly made it impossible to stand up straight. For three days the stomach pain had persisted, and now his temperature was 102.4 degrees. “I think I need a laxative.”

Lipes wasn’t so sure. “You lie down, and I’ll go stand your watch for you.” Two hours later Lipes returned.

“Jeez, Doc, my belly’s really hurting. Bad. Gimme me a coupla pills or some mineral oil or somethin’. Maybe I just need to take a dump.”
¹⁰

Lipes paused as a frown creased his face. “Why don’t you just get in this bunk and we’ll see how you do.” The corpsman was thinking several moves ahead:

When Lipes touched Rector’s abdomen, the crewman nearly jumped out of his bunk. Sailors heard his scream several compartments away.

Lipes left to see the captain. “What do you think is wrong with him?” Ferrall asked.

The corpsman had assisted with appendectomies before transferring to the submarine service. “I think he has appendicitis. He needs an appendectomy.”

Ferrall and Executive Officer Norvell Ward blanched. They were weeks away from a friendly port, and appendectomies even in hospitals were far from routine. Deadly infections were common in the prepenicillin era of 1942. Ferrall, Ward, and Lipes headed for the bunk where the sailor squirmed in pain. No position brought relief as Rector looked up at concerned faces. Ferrall turned to Lipes. “What are you going to do?”

“Sir, I can’t do anything,” Lipes replied.

“Son, we’re out here in enemy waters. We do the best we can every day. When I fire torpedoes, I know sometimes they’ll miss. But we all have a job to do. You tell me this sailor’s got appendicitis. Now, can you do an appendectomy or not?”

Only the engines’ rumble through the metal deck and a distant clang broke the lengthening silence.

“Yes, sir, I can do it, but everything is against us. Our chances are slim. But if that’s what I’m ordered to do, that’s what I’ll do,” said Lipes as he, Ferrall, and Ward looked down at Rector, his face red with fever.

“Son, what do you think?” Ferrall asked Rector.

“Whatever the doc feels has to be done, it’s okay with me,” said the sweating Kansas native.

Only twenty-three years old, Lipes’s heart pounded as he considered his orders. No one had performed an appendectomy on a submarine before, largely because no surgeons served on them. A corpsman with modest basic training stood between Rector and a ruptured appendix that would kill him. Worse, Lipes realized he lacked the tools he had seen surgeons use when he had assisted in the Philadelphia Naval hospital.

Color drained from his face as he looked around the
Seadragon
’s cramped officers’ wardroom. It was so small, even the diminutive Lipes could not stand up straight. Lipes lacked the necessary equipment to take Rector’s blood pressure. There was no way to do a blood count to assess the patient’s condition. No intravenous fluid. No equipment to administer anesthesia. Wheeler Lipes’s patient faced death unless he operated, yet the corpsman lacked the most basic equipment found in many physicians’ offices.

Lipes, though, possessed an intuitive gift, intelligence, and a passion for learning. Years earlier, he had bought
The Merck Manual
, a massive technical guide to the human body. He considered it one of the greatest books ever published, second only to the Bible.

Captain Ferrall ordered the
Seadragon
down to one hundred twenty feet, to get below the stormy South China Sea swells. The
Seadragon
’s helmsmen would have to keep the submarine perfectly level for as long as the surgery required. Lipes began to improvise. A desk drawer pulled out extended the wardroom table to accommodate the six-foot-tall Rector. Sailors rigged floodlights, normally used for night loading, for added illumination in the dim wardroom. Others piled battle lanterns and flashlights on a nearby bench. Lipes pricked Rector’s ear and used a torpedo stopwatch to time how long it took the blood to clot to make sure Rector wasn’t a hemophiliac.

Pajamas sterilized in torpedo alcohol served as surgical gowns. Five tablespoons with handles bent backward became retractors. Lipes would have to monitor Rector’s pulse rate by watching blood vessels pulsing in his opened belly. Sailors ground sulfa tablets into powder for sprinkling into the patient’s stomach to fight infection.

Infection had always been a major killer in war. During World War I, 1.8 million Allied soldiers died from battlefield wounds—after reaching a military hospital.
¹¹
Infection accounted for an estimated 10 percent of all German deaths in World War I. Military doctors understood the necessity of cleaning wounds and used a weak bleach solution to sterilize them, but they had no broad-spectrum, systemic antibacterial drugs to fight infection from within the body. As a result, wound infection was so common it often was called a “military disease” and barely rated a mention in leading surgery books written between the Civil War and World War I.

For many soldiers who survived the battlefield, hospital gangrene led to a gruesome death. A fever developed a few days after being wounded. Vomiting and diarrhea followed. After the wound became swollen, it typically turned black and fetid. Then tissue began to fall off, exposing muscles. As gangrene progressed, the muscles separated while vomiting and diarrhea increased. If that didn’t kill the wounded man, eventually veins and arteries disintegrated until he bled to death and his pitiful screams ceased. Hospital gangrene was a weeklong hell.

Gerhard Domagk, a German researcher, saw the horrors of wound infection as a medical assistant in the Ukraine during World War I. Under brutal operating conditions, he watched surgeons insert dirty magnets into entry wounds in search of shrapnel. He was powerless as half the men in his postop ward died of gangrene. Domagk survived the war, intent on making medicine his career.

At Bayer, a German pharmaceutical company, Domagk began testing chemical dyes used to stain invisible bacteria so doctors could monitor infections. If a poison could be attached to the dye, perhaps it could become lethal to the many bacteria species that caused a wide range of infections and diseases. Both had killed more soldiers in war than the enemy.

Wheeler Lipes was twelve years old on Christmas Eve, 1932, when Domagk made a startling discovery. Four days earlier, Domagk had given a red dye called Prontosil to a group of mice infected with streptococcal bacteria. By Christmas Eve, every mouse treated with Prontosil was free of infection. All the mice in the untreated control group had died. Domagk was stunned. He replicated the test time and again, with similar results.

At one point he gave Prontosil to his daughter who was very ill. She recovered completely. Domagk had discovered sulfonamide, the world’s first antibacterial drug. His discovery sparked worldwide research into different types of sulfonamide, which proved to be effective against pneumonia, streptococcal infections, common types of meningitis, and other diseases. On the eve of World War II, newly developed mass production capability made sulfa drugs a potent new weapon against wound infection in the hands of surgeons, corpsmen, and medics.

In 1939, Domagk received the Nobel Prize in physiology, but it was awarded in absentia. The Gestapo had arrested the researcher to prevent him from accepting it in person because Domagk had refused to support the Nazis.

By 1941, every corpsman and medic carried a supply of sulfa. Soldiers’ first aid pouches included sulfa powder and tablets. Five grams of crystalline sulfanilamide powder were to be sprinkled over open wounds. Sulfadiazine tablets were taken orally, except in cases of stomach or throat wounds. Sulfa was known to cause nausea and abdominal cramps, but its advantages more than outweighed these nuisances. For the first time, corpsmen and medics had a battlefield weapon against infection.