Anticlimax - or is it? (29)

Members of the 92nd Evac are facing their first battle.  How will Gene react?

April 23, 1944  Sunday
     Woke up at 0300.  I had to sleep on the hard cushions again.  "And the condemned ate a hearty breakfast" says Hiram.

Humbolt Bay from Pancake Hill - note tanks and LCVP's (Landing Craft:
Vehicle Personnel)

     We landed about 8.  On the way in we watched some of our Navy planes dive bombing some air strips.  One started a big fire.  Some fellows were in swimming so we knew things weren't bad.
     At the beach, not 30 yards from our boat, a battery of 75's were shelling someplace, probably Hollandia [Airdrome]. There were more down the coast and we heard their shells screech a little as they went by overhead.  There were large Jap stores of rice, soy beans, artillery shells, food in boxes and small kegs, bombs, plane motors still in crates, parachutes and medical supplies, all along the beach.  The beach at high tide was very narrow, and terribly congested with vehicles.  Some were stuck in the sand and bulldozers pulling them out.  I'm glad we weren't being bombed or shot at.  There were shell and bomb craters and slit trenches everywhere.  I saw the first body of one of our soldiers, on a litter and wrapped in a blanket.  It took my vehicle (we walked) about 1 hour to get on the beach.  After another hour of barely  moving (it was hot!) we tied our packs to the water trailer back of the weapons carrier and walked ahead to our area.  It was up a new road along the side of Pancake Hill, a bare hillside.  The landing on D day was made without much opposition.  In fact, not a dozen Japs were killed.  One of our Companies was straffed [ sic strafed] by our own planes - 6 killed and 8 wounded.  On a campaign they figure 5% casualties from our own guns and planes!

Pancake Hill from behind the surgery

     We went to the 41st CP [command post] and heard the news.  A soldier was killed by a sniper about 200 yards up the trail about an hour before we were there.  We took over some fox holes - mine didn't even need remodeling.  But if it rains tonight - this red mud!  Not even a pup tent or a tarp.  But I have a Jap silk parachute to sleep on.  We ate K rations [according to Wikipedia they consisted of two packages of dried biscuits, cigarettes, gum, sugar (granulated, cubed or compressed), and a key (dubbed a P-38) to open a small canned portion; items specific to the breakfast meal were canned meat and eggs, a fruit bar, and instant coffee; specific dinner (lunch) items were canned cheese and a lemon (early), orange or grape (late) drink packet; specific supper items were toilet paper, a bouillon packet, and a lemon, orange or grape drink packet (later production rations had a disposable wooden spoon, too); if all three meals were eaten, about 3000 calories were provided; they were produced by the Cracker Jack Company with a waxed paper ration box about the same size as the Cracker Jack box] - not too good.  I perspired something terrific and have a headache in spite of 4 salt tablets.  The sun is fiendishly hot.  All of us have our clothes and persons covered with red clay.  Desultory shelling of Jap positions has gone on all day.  On the beach I took pictures, including a bomb explosion when a bulldozer clearing the dumps pushed it on a burning dump.  One fellow was wounded.  A while later there was a terrific explosion at about the same place.  Several small gasoline dumps had been burned.  The 50 gallon drums were pooched out in peculiar shapes.
     This evening about 40 native men, women and children, in all stages of dress and undress, went past under guard.  I wonder what they are - prisoner or refugees.
     In 2 days the Yanks have made more roads than did the Japs in 2 years.  Pim [on Jautefa Bay about 4 miles south of Hollandia] was taken yesterday and Hollandia by noon today.  Certainly we haven't been in much danger today.  I hope this night is quiet.  They said that in this area Jap snipers bothered some last night.  There is a tremendous concentration of troops and guns and machines, etc., and we haven't seen a Jap plane.  They say several thousand tough Jap marines went to Wewak a few days before, for that is where the Japs expected us to strike.  Mostly service troops are left here.
     At night you crawl in your fox hole with loaded carbine and knife handy, and don't get out for anything, for the rest are apt to shoot at anything that moves.

Little did they know what was in store for the U.S. forces in the area.  The undated article below is from the Yank Magazine.  It is mostly about the portable hospitals which are smaller than the Evac hospitals and are usually closer to the front. 

"MEDICS UNDER FIRE: They're non-combatants according to treaty so they don't get extra pay like the infantry but they do draw plenty of enemy lead" by Sgt. Charles Pearson, YANK staff Correspondent [with comments in parenthesis and underlinings presumably by Gene]
     Dutch New Guinea - A portable surgical hospital is a medical unit of four doctors and generally 32 enlisted men.  They're supposed to work directly behind the line of battle and patch up casualties so they can be removed to an evacuation hospital.  Sometimes part of the portable hospital's personnel have to be removed, too.
     During one of the Dutch New Guinea campaigns a portable unit was brought up by buffaloes [a type of landing vehicle] to a position behind the advancing infantry of the 41st Division.  They were moving up a coastal road from the landing beach toward Jap-held airstrips.  The road was on a narrow strip of land with the sea on one side and a strip heavily wooded coral terrace on the other.
     The portable hospital medics arrived in late morning and set up their tents in a coconut grove.  The infantry up ahead was moving along without much resistance.  The hospital personnel were getting the idea they might have an easy show ahead.  The coconut grove was picturesque.  Just off the shore was a reef.  A lot of the men were out on it looking for cat eye shells.  It was all quite peaceful.
     In the distance could be heard the occasional chatter of machine guns and the popping of small arms.  It was a comforting sound.  They were our guns.
     Suddenly they noticed the fire was rapidly intensifying.  The thump of heavy mortars was almost blotting out the sound of the machine guns.  The operator at the field phone called out that they had run into a strong force and were being heavily pounded with 90-mm mortars.  The first casualties were already on their way back.
     Shortly a captured Japanese truck sputtered into the hospital area with six wounded on it.  All of them were badly torn up.  Capts. Edward L. Waisbrot of Canton, Ohio, and Theodore Moss of Kew Gardens, L.I., were quickly working on a man whose arms had been smashed to jelly.  It was an amputation.
     At the other table set up in the pyramidal tent which was serving as an operating theater, Capts. Bernard Sollod of Baltimore, Md., and Sydney Kahn of Chicago were amputating the leg of a soldier.  It had been badly fractured and the main blood vessel hopelessly torn.
     The six casualties had now multiplied to 20 and they were still streaming in.  T-4 Cecil Wells of Hockersville, Okla., a former boxer and carnival pitchman now wardmaster, was going from one soldier to another trying to ease his pain while patients were coming in faster than they could be treated.
     A call was sent back for more doctors.  Three came up later in a jeep.  Lt. Burroughs from Oakland, Calif., (Oscar!) came from the evacuation hospital.  Capt. Krupke of Chicago was from another portable unit and Capt. Ludden came from a clearing company.  Another table was set up in the already crowded tent.  Three teams of doctors continued work steadily.
     Up ahead the infantry was stopped.  Jap artillery and a naval gun were ranging in on them.  Down between the hospital and the beachhead a second Jap force was driving a wedge between the fighting battalion and the rest of the force.  It was now dark.  The doctors were working by the illumination from one hospital light hitched up to a generator, one Japanese headlight powered by a storage battery, several Coleman lamps and all available flashlights in camp.  It was hot in the tent and the surgeons were stripped to their underpants.
     The casualties continued to come in, now from both directions.  The patched up ones were being evacuated by landing craft and buffaloes.  The force ahead was slowly giving ground.  The battle was coming closer.  An occasional mortar shell landed in the area.  The supply tent and extra equipment had already been blasted into ribbons.  One hospital attendant had been hit by a shell fragment.
     Down in the kitchen tent Sgt. John Millner of Washington, D.C., T-5 Arlen Bradstreet of Stockton Springs,.Maine, and T-5 Lucien Nadeau of Matawaska, Maine, were brewing hot coffee and bringing it to the operating theater.  Operating room assistants Pfc. William Abbott of Sommerville, Mass., Sgt. Emerson Hein of Tonawanda, N.Y., T-5 Richard Lucier of North Adams, Mass., and T-5 Sydney Shub of Ithica, N.Y., were giving plasma and morphine and setting the wounded onto litters in slit trenches.  Knee mortar shells were coming down from the ridge and exploding around the ward tent.
     In the pitch black of the night it had not been possible to bring some of the wounded from the lines of fire.  They had to wait until daybreak.
     At 0500 the next morning all the wounded had been cared for.  The doctors knocked off for a bit of sleep.  An hour later in the early light of dawn the stream of casualties began again.
     At 1030 a message came up from the beachhead to be ready to move out at a moment's notice but to continue working as well as possible.  Dr. Moss was working on a man whose head had been split open and whose brain was injured.  He was hemorrhaging badly.  A patient on another table had had his arm blown off at the shoulder.  The fighting was getting closer.  Wounded men were walking back from the lines and collapsing at the hospital.
     The battalion was withdrawing trying to consolidate its position.  The Japs had cut the supply line and were moving up the beach from both directions.  Cpl. Ted Hunter of Macwahoc, Maine, and T-5 Leroy Faulkerson of Columbus, Ohio, climbed up a bamboo ladder against the coral terrace and brought down a soldier with a hip wound.  Infiltrating Japs were working down through the wooded terrace behind the hospital, setting up knee mortars and trying to hit wounded going out in the buffaloes.  Pfc. Leonard Solow of New York City had the job of getting them away from the jetty.
     One Jap reached the ledge directly above the ward tent.  An infantryman shot him.  He fell into a slit trench behind the kitchen tent.
     At noon the last American vehicle came through.  The fighting was now right in the area.
     At 1300 hours the hospital started to evacuate, but at 1400 those men whose lives depended on immediate attention were still being worked over.  An hour later the last of the doctors climbed into the buffaloes and traveled back to the evacuation hospital with the wounded.  Half an hour later the Japs were swarming over the area.
     Back at the (92nd) evac hospital the portable surgical unit doctors continued working. (and how!)  Two days later they were again sent up to the area of their hectic 24 hours.  This time the Japs were in headlong flight, being pursued by the reorganized battalion supported by tanks.  This time the portable surgical unit could patch up the wounded without ducking for cover every few minutes.  As one tired medic put it, "If I was in the Infantry I might be getting that extra 10 bucks fighting pay they talk about.  But then, they say the medics never see combat."