Doctors from the Sea

Land warfare was brutal for a small band of 331 Americans who hurled themselves into each successive battle of World War I as it churned Moody way across Western Europe. Suffering 18 killed and 165 wounded—an astounding 55% casual rate—the unit earned every accolade heaped upon it by admiring soldiers and officers. One hundred ninety-eight members received medals for bravery, including six Medals of Honor, yet rarely did any fire a weapon at the enemy. In fact, the entire concept of serving on land seemed foreign, for this unit belonged to the Navy's Medical Detachment and Medical Corps attached to the Marine 4th Brigade—commissioned doctors and enlisted corpsmen from the sea who labored on land to mend wounds and repair shattered bodies.¹

Navy medical personnel arrived at the front near St. Mihiel in early 1918 with the initial Marine units that landed in France. Since Americans were new to battle, they were placed in a quiet sector so they could ease gradually into combat. With relatively few casualties to treat, the medical staff focused on establishing procedures and learning from French medical personnel already in the field.²

From battlefield to field hospital, the Navy’s medical system emphasized evacuating the wounded as rapidly as possible, for their own good and so that they would not hinder their units. Ideally, the system worked like this: when a man was wounded, a corpsman would dress the wound, administer morphine, and tag a diagnosis to the patient’s clothing for hospital surgeons. If a battle’s fury kept the corpsman at a distance, another Marine would stick the injured man’s rifle, bayonet first, into the ground to mark his location. Removal from the battlefield took the injured to the battalion aid station, generally one-quarter mile behind the front, then to either the regimental aid station or field hospital.³

Before each attack, members of the medical staff received briefings on the coming assault so they could begin preparations. Then they chose sites for aid stations that would be close to units and to roads to facilitate evacuation. The medical staff preferred safe areas such as cellars, houses, or dugouts on the side of the hill facing away from the enemy. As a last resort, aid stations appeared on open ground. Ravines also had to be used with caution since poisonous gas could settle in their confines. Once a surgeon selected an aid station’s location, he sent its coordinates to the unit commander so that every man knew where to seek help.⁴

Each corpsman sought to learn as much as he could about the men he might treat in combat. The more he knew about the men—who was bold, brash, strong, able to stand pain—the better he could serve them. In addition, corpsmen had to be proficient in combat techniques such as how to read maps, how to flatten bodies against the terrain, how to detect angles of fire, and how to protect themselves, because they too would be exposed on the battlefield.⁵

The medical staff had little to look after during the initial break-in weeks other than a few cases of respiratory disease, diarrhea, and control of lice and rats. Then the casualties began; on 13 April, a four-hour bombardment of gas shells stunned rear echelon positions, killing 33 men. Two medical corpsmen caught in the bombardment, Fred C. Schaffner and Carl O. Kingsbury, ignored symptoms that the deadly poison was affecting them and remained to treat others until a medical officer forced them to leave. Schaffner later died, becoming the first fatality of the Navy’s medical unit in France, and Kingsbury was so incapacitated that he never rejoined the outfit. Each received the Distinguished Service Cross—the Army’s equivalent of the Navy Cross—for his heroism.⁶

The Battle of Belleau Wood ended the relative calm the medical unit had enjoyed to date. From 1 June onward, aid stations operated under heavy fire as Americans tried to wrest land from the Germans, and casualties escalated. By 6 June, the Marines had lost 1,000 men, more than they had lost in the Corps’ entire history. After operating for four days on all types of wounded, a stunned surgeon related, “Our men had seen little of active fighting until this time and had not realized the horrors of war. They have played with death during these first days of June.”⁷

By 18 June, one battalion had plummeted from 1,000 men to merely six officers and 350 men, and the 4th Brigade was so shredded that it had to be withdrawn from the front. Corpsmen, lugging pouches that contained bandages, dressings, tourniquets, morphine, iodine swabs, and scissors, darted from wounded to wounded while stretcher-bearers attempted to evacuate the injured quickly to advance aid stations located a mere 100 yards from the battlefield. Since any movement invariably drew fire, they operated under lethal conditions, but they succeeded in getting most of the injured from the battlefield through aid stations to field hospitals within two hours. Stretcher- bearers, normally drawn from the ranks of regimental band members, suffered so many casualties that combat soldiers were impressed to take their places. One group of soldiers sent out to look for water ended up hauling wounded most of the day instead.⁸

Though removed from the battlefield, Navy surgeons laboring in aid stations faced grim proof that a ghastly ordeal was unfolding not far away. Continuously drenched in blood from performing operations, harried doctors tended to “tearing, lacerating, crushing, and amputating types [of wounds], accompanied by all degrees of fractures, hemorrhage, and destruction of soft tissue.”⁹ In less hectic times the physicians treated shell-shocked men- some of whom could not even speak. Usually, after a de- cent night’s sleep, the men returned to their units. Intestinal infections, vermin, and skin infections also became a rising source of concern for the naval doctors since the men fought and lived in filth without ample time to bathe.¹⁰

Combat officers praised the performance of the medical staff at Belleau Wood. One commander stated that, although under continuous bombardment, the staff “remained bravely at their posts without thought of their personal safety. . . . Shorthanded and overworked, the naval doctors, hospital corpsmen and bandsmen (temporary stretcher-bearers) were always on hand, day or night, to give cheerful and efficient service in treating the wounded and dying and in getting them off to hospitals.”¹¹ He commended corpsmen for going over the top with his men and ended, “There were many heroes who wore the insignia of the Navy Hospital Corps at the Bois de Belleau.’’

With each successive action the medical staff learned more efficient ways of handling patients. For instance, ” an advance shifted the front lines, rather than moving the entire station forward, a doctor or pharmacist’s mate scouted the new area for a proper site, then sent a runner back for the rest of the contingent. In the meantime, the doctor in the forward area would begin treating patients- thereby avoiding any lengthy lapses in operation.¹³

One tragic situation on 19-20 July angered and frustrated Navy doctors. A French order prohibited the use of roads by anything other than military vehicles, meaning that ambulances could not evacuate the wounded to hospitals. While the staff frantically searched for alternate ways to transport them, the patients were packed inside a cave to provide them minimal protection. Doctors were able to commandeer a few ammunition trucks, but without an orderly evacuation route—also to have been provided by the French—truck drivers became lost and deposited their injured in open fields. Numerous wounded were killed as the trucks sped through areas of gunfire, or they died in a field, enduring pain, shock, and buzzing insects. In his Annual Report for 1919, the U.S. Navy’s Surgeon General described the incident as a “nightmare.” A battalion surgeon lamented, “Few spots in history, in degree of suffering, wasted life, and helplessness of medical personnel to give aid equal that which occurred in connection with this cave during the night and morning of 19-20 July 1918.”¹⁴ He bitterly concluded, “. . . medical aid had been sacrificed to military need. The wounded had to suffer and die.”¹⁵

During the September St. Mihiel offensive, physicians noted increased signs of battle fatigue and strain among the Marines. For three months they had been repeatedly bombarded and had seen their friends die or suffer frightening injuries thereby. As the Navy Department’s official medical historian, George Strott, described it, “They were tired. They were tired of the sword.”¹⁶

Yet more had to be endured. The Marines faced bloody Blanc Mont, a steep ridge that controlled the terrain around Champagne near the Hindenburg Line. In four years of fighting—which left the land so churned from constant shelling that a Marine proclaimed the sector “a place just built for calamities”¹⁷—French troops had failed to wrench the ridge from the Germans. In early October, the Marines successfully stormed their way to the top to dislodge the enemy. Casualties mounted horrendously: one battalion lost 70% of its 1,000 men in 24 hours; on 4 October the brigade suffered over 1,100 casualties; and First Lieutenant Lemuel Shepherd of the Marines 5th Brigade stated that “October 3 at Blanc Mont was the toughest day of the war.”¹⁸

Naval personnel suffered with their compatriots. One corpsman was shot through the head as he tended a wounded Marine; many others were shot at. Marines cut down a German soldier as he attempted to bayonet a helpless corpsman. Germans captured another corpsman as he helped both American and German wounded alike. The battalion aid station had to be placed on a slope facing the enemy—a spot offering little protection—which resulted in wounded Marines being further injured or even killed from shelling. One shell that exploded in the station killed two patients and two corpsmen, and three other medical Personnel were wounded.¹⁹

Members of the Naval Medical Detachment distinguished themselves from their earliest moments in France, during their weeks in the quiet sector, an unnamed corps- roan frequently dashed into no-man’s-land at night to gather rhubarb and dandelions for the men, earning him- self praise as “one of the most fearless and resourceful” men in the sector. A surgeon added, “His physique is slight, his constitution below normal, but he has guts.”²⁰

Another unknown corpsman watched Marines try to take a German machine gun at Belleau Wood that riddled their battalion with bullets. The corpsman urged on the few remaining Marines by shouting an expletive-filled phrase, “Get that gun, you _______ I’m here to take care of you,”²¹ Marines knocked out the gun.

Pharmacist’s Mate Second Class Frank C. Welte’s exploits at Belleau Wood amazed everyone. As he advanced with his troops across a wheat field toward some hills, German machine gun bullets splintered the earth. One hundred yards of open field remained between the Americans and cover, but Welte ignored the zings of bullets to treat the wounded. Suddenly, a high-explosive shell hurled metal fragments into his back and right heel, yet he continued helping his fallen men until mortally shot in the head. Before dying, Welte handed his diagnosis tags to the man he was working on and told him to hand them to the physician at the battalion aid station.²²

During the Meuse-Argonne offensive, Pharmacist’s Mate Third Class Charles H. Patterson braved enemy fire several times to carry wounded Marines across an unstable bridge before he was riddled with bullets. At St. Mihiel a chief pharmacist’s mate and four corpsmen walked into the town of Xammes, set up an aid station, then waited for the casualties to be brought in. After several hours American soldiers cautiously moved in, intent on seizing Xammes from the Germans, but they were stunned to find only the Americans present. Unknown to the five medical personnel, they had quietly “taken” the town from the enemy.²³

Dr. Frederick R. Hook and Dr. Joel T. Boone became the most decorated Navy medical personnel of the war. Dr. Hook, who later advanced to rear admiral, received the Navy Cross for treating wounded under intense fire at Belleau Wood and for establishing advanced aid stations immediately behind the front lines at Blanc Mont. The Army awarded him a Distinguished Service Cross for disdaining danger and braving heavy enemy artillery and machine gun fire to set up a station close to the action near St. Etienne. He also received two Silver Stars.²⁴

Dr. Boone, who eventually became a vice admiral, was one of the most highly decorated physicians in U.S. Navy history. For his action on 9-10 June at Belleau Wood, when he continued to care for wounded Marines after enemy shells tore into his regimental aid station, Boone received the Medal of Honor. A citation praised his “extraordinary heroism in the action in the Bois de Belleau, France, on the 9th and 10th of June 1918. . . . Ten men were killed and a number of wounded were badly hurt by falling timbers and stone. Under these conditions this officer continued without cessation his treatment of the wounded. . . . ”²⁵ Dr. Boone, who was wounded by a shell explosion on 21 June and suffered from gas poisoning on 30 June and 6 October, also received a Bronze Star, Distinguished Service Cross, Silver Star, and the Croix de Guerre.²⁶

In between offensives and during leaves, the Navy medical staff performed inspections and caught up on paperwork. Physicians checked the conditions of the camps and the food supply. They were especially concerned that the men take proper care of their feet: washing and drying them, trimming their toenails, and changing often into dry socks. Each officer was held accountable for the men under his command. Foot problems became especially acute in the first week and a half of September, when continuous night marches in new shoes, often of the wrong size, resulted in an amazing 7,200 cases of bruised, blistered, or swollen feet.²⁷

Of course, wherever you find a large congregation of young men, you will be confronted with preventing or treating problems that result from “fraternization” with local females. World War I soldiers were no exception. Thus, the medical staff dished out prophylactics to combat venereal disease. Wherever units settled down for a stay, easily identified prophylactic stations quickly appeared, dry lectures were delivered to bored men, and twice- monthly VD inspections were performed. After the war, the Navy Surgeon General concluded that, although venereal disease had posed a problem, it was not as serious as expected. “The chief reason for this,” he bluntly stated, “has no doubt been the lack of opportunities for exposure.”²⁸

After the war’s end the medical staff concentrated on preparing the men for their return home. Programs of cleaning, delousing, feeding, and resting various units worked wonders for men too used to battle. As Strott stated, “The transition from haggard weary fighters to laughing, healthy young Americans was rapid.”²⁹

New concerns arose, however, for the men left behind in occupied Germany. “Liberated” liquor had to be inspected for methyl alcohol, and a ruling from a division surgeon, undoubtedly a favorite among the men stationed there, explained that “Copulation is not fraternization [with the enemy], and men will not be tried therefor.”³⁰ During eight months of fighting in Europe, 2,459 Marines were either killed or missing in action, and another 8,907 were wounded. The bold actions of Navy doctors and other medical personnel finally brought recognition to a unit that usually received little notice. One half of all Medals of Honor awarded to the Navy in the war went to this branch. As the unit’s official historian concluded. Navy doctors and corpsmen “splint broken bones; ligate bleeding arteries; support eviscerated entrails; perform merciful amputations with scissors or bayonets; neutralize agonizing burns; satisfy a searing thirst; stimulate and cheer a crushed body; rouse men from the brink of fatal shock; transfuse ensanguinated [sic] tissues; protect injuries against destructive infections; take a farewell word or note from those about to die. . . .”³¹ Little more about their contributions, then, need be written.