Explanations are not defenses, necessarily speaking. I can explain the Biscari massacre. That doesn’t mean I get to defend it, because it’s still a horrible event.
He’s not explaining it, he’s defending it, when he brought up ‘agendas’ I knew he was selling bullshit in defense of the evil british empire.
Agree. I have not painted the entire picture. There was racism by the Brits, floggings,segregation etc etc. But to say they were intentionally starving their own people is bollocks. You want short version? Here is how it goes. There is a rail shortage, hoarding, black market, rapid inflation, no rice from Burma, a cyclone that destroys the crops, workers who are poor can’t afford food. So does the government react immediately? Well… no. Remember that the provincial government of Bengal hasn’t resigned. So they do nothing. And censor the thing. To say just bengal starved is bollocks, the entirety of India (aka pakistan, bangladesh, India) would starve. Bengal was the worst affected. Tranvancore too starved and that was a princely state. So… do the British still play a part?
Oh… also. The agriculture state was fragile. What do I mean by that? Well… It mostly depended on the monsoon. (Still does). If it arrives late, you’re screwed. If it arrives early. You are screwed. If it arrives on time but rains a lot, guess what? You are screwed (unless you are growing rice), and rains less you are screwed.
You also didn’t have a lot of fertilisers then. So… see the problem here?
Plus… famines did happen. Even in 1939 in punjab. So did the British starve them then too?
Is it bad? Yes. Are the british bad? Yes. You don’t get to be largest empire in the world without doing bad stuff. Are they evil? Yes. But in this war, there is a bigger evil.
Oh… in case you ask. Yes, Bengal famine is hotly debated till date. But most agree… that it was not deliberate unless you read some book that says the Churchil hated the Indians and did it a part of some secret war. It is a shame 3 Million died. 3 Million that weren’t on the frontlines and just went about doing their work. There could have been far far fewer deaths but the government didn’t do anything ASAP. It did do somewhere in 1943 by setting up Free Kitchens but the damage was done.
Speaking of agendas. I was referring to Sparty’s comment on WAH (I have forgotten the number) where he says 3 of the big powers are starving their own people (USSR, GB, USA).
Ok let us entertain the idea the Churchill is starving India. Wouldn’t you think Roosevelt would have written a letter to Churchil condeming the action? Stalin? The rest of the Commonwealth? After all India is the crown jewel of the British empire. If they can do it there, What is stopping them from doing it elsewhere? And can we find such letters? No, as far as I am aware.
You are allowed to have whatever opinion you have of me. But my advice is to not get caught up in emotions. Think, analyse and then come to a conclusion. Don’t jump to it as 9/10 times it is wrong. I am speaking from personal experience.
Oh yeah. I forgot. I wasn’t colonised just by the Brits. You also had the french (the city of pondicherry) and portugese(goa and the daman and diu inslands) too. But 99.99% of India is under British colonial rule.
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Source: Der Sturmer.
Launching area for rockets hit
U.S. heavies strikes at Pas-de-Calais bases
SHAEF, London, England (AP) –
U.S. heavy bombers 500 to 700 strong hammered Hitler’s rocket-bomb launching area at Pas-de-Calais today as more of the pilotless explosives hurtled over into England, and other big Allied planes struck heavily at German air bases in southwestern France.
Fighter-bombers, attacking at the rate of one a minute, drove home a three-ply assault in direct support of the invasion forces. One wave pounded trapped German forces on northern Cherbourg Peninsula.
Another battered communications routes to the southeast over which the Nazis were trying to reinforce their armored divisions in the Tilly-Caen sector. The third stream bombed the area north of Paris, disrupting enemy reinforcement lines.
U.S. heavy bombers slashed at rocket installations after a night assault by the RAF, in which one plane was lost, and a raid in the same area Sunday by big U.S. bombers.
Other formations hit airfield targets including Bordeaux-Mérignac, Cazaux, and Corme-Écluse near the coast west of Cognac.
A rare stretch of bad June weather was still hampering air operations.
Deception fails
Fighter-bombers blasted to pieces one concentration of several hundred Germans. Col. Donald Blakeslee’s U.S. Mustang group saw what looked like a big procession of citizens out for a ride in horse shays, but when the pilots “buzzed” the cavalcade for a closer look, German soldiers dived for cover. The ammunition-loaded “shays” were sent up in a string of firecracker explosives while horses scampered across the fields.
The Germans are apparently making increased use of horse-drawn vehicles, indicating perhaps a shortage of motor vehicles or necessity of using horses to go over or around battered roads.
More than 1,300 U.S. heavy bombers hammered oil refineries and storage points in the Hamburg area and three enemy airdromes in Northwest Germany yesterday, while 250 other heavy bombers pounded the Pas-de-Calais area.
The Germans hurled more winged bombs at southern England today, carrying their attack with these new weapons into its fifth day.
Although the German threw up a flak barrage described as one of the heaviest yet encountered, not a single enemy fighter arose to challenge the mighty U.S. aerial fleet which struck into Germany yesterday. About 500 U.S. fighters accompanied the heavy bombers.
Only two German aircraft were sighted all day yesterday by U.S. 9th Air Force Thunderbolt, Lightning and Mustang pilots, who made more than 1,000 individual flights.
Japs repulsed in assault on Saipan
Powerful blows being struck over wide area of South Pacific
USPACFLT HQ, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii (AP) –
U.S. soldiers and Marines, fighting their way through hot cane fields halfway across Saipan Island in the Marianas after repelling Japanese assaults by tanks and by landing craft, drove down toward the island’s principal harbor and naval base at Magicienne Bay today.
Slightly more than 100 miles southward, U.S. warships bombarded Guam heavily for the first time in the war. Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, in announcing that this former American base had been shelled last Thursday, gave no indication as to whether an invasion was in prospect.
Fifteen hundred miles to the south, just below the equator, Mitchell medium bombers and escorting P-38 fighters temporarily neutralized Japan’s last remaining effective air base in New Guinea. They destroyed 50 enemy planes at Sorong and sank five enemy merchantmen and half a dozen smaller vessels.
Nimitz also announced that Army Liberators and Navy Venturas bombed Matsuwa, Paramushiru, Shimushiru and Shumushu Islands in the Kuril chain Wednesday and Thursday and shot down one of 34 intercepting planes.
Hit other islands
Radio Tokyo reported that hundreds of bombers and fighters attacked two islands in the Kazan group, 750 miles northwest of Saipan, Friday. U.S. planes raided the Kazan and Bonin Islands for the first time on Wednesday, destroying 47 Japanese planes and sinking or damaging more than a dozen ships or small watercraft.
The Saipan beachhead established by Marines, with the support of Army infantry units, at last reports extended from Agingan Point on the southwestern tip, where the Americans landed last Wednesday, five and a half miles up the west coast almost to Garapan, the island’s largest town.
Japanese units strongly counterattacked with tanks before dawn Friday, after the Yanks had pushed north and east for two miles and captured the coastal village and airstrip of Charan Kanoa and the inland town of Hinashisu, more than halfway across the island.
Holding staunchly, the Americans forced the enemy back, inflicting heavy casualties and knocking out 25 Nipponese tanks.
Early Saturday, the Japanese attempted new tactics, a landing assault south of Garapan.
Troop barges sunk
Headquarters said the attempt was smashed and 13 troop-laden enemy barges destroyed. There was no indication whether the barges came from Saipan (where an estimated 30,000 Japanese are entrenched) or from Tinian Island three miles to the south.
U.S. warships shelled the island in support of the invasion. The fighting line at last reports skirted the western edge of the 3,600-foot Aslito Airstrip and was less than three miles from Magicienne Bay on the east coast.
Among the warships protecting the U.S. force on Saipan was a World War I destroyer converted into a destroyer transport. Nimitz said this warship, unaided, sank five enemy coastal freighters. Twenty-nine survivors were captured.
Churchill: Victory is closer
Predicts full success will come this summer
London, England (AP) –
Prime Minister Churchill, in a speech delivered at the Mexican Embassy four days ago and permitted to be published only today, said the months of this summer may “bring full success to the cause of freedom.”
He said the invasion of Normandy was a great tactical surprise to the Germans who did not know it was coming until they saw the ships and:
It may be that events will occur in the next few months which will show us whether we are soon to be released of the curse which has been laid upon us by the Germans.
The invasion was launched “in full accord” with the Russians and the decisions reached at Tehran, he added, “and although the execution of the plans adopted there is far from being complete, it is being steadily unrolled, the months of this summer may be the victories of this Allied campaign bring full success to the cause of freedom.”
Touching on political aspects of the war, the Prime Minister said efforts were being made “to achieve permanent cooperation and to build up an organization after which this war will strengthen the bonds between all our nations and will succeed in preserving peace.”
He said:
We look forward to the future in which the rights of small nations will be upheld and protected and in which the strong will use their power under the law for the protection of the weak.
Two earthquakes hit Los Angeles
Shocks yesterday were strongest since those of 1933
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150 injured as trains sideswipe each other
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German Red Cross cars suspicious
An Allied airstrip, France (AP) –
U.S. fighter pilots grew suspicious today of the relatively large number of vehicles behind German lines bearing Red Cross markings.
Pilots said the Germans either have an abundance of wounded or are traveling under false colors.
Lt. David Fuller of Warehouse Point, Connecticut, said:
About eight out of every ten vehicles we sighted had a big Red Cross on them. That seems an unusually high percentage to me.
Pilots meticulously avoid firing on automobiles with Red Cross insignia. The only way they can make sure they are genuine is to drop low while flying 300 miles an hour or more. This is dangerous with flak batteries around.
Yank-held beach becomes France’s busiest seaport
On a U.S.-held beach in Normandy, France (AP) –
This has suddenly become France’s busiest port.
More shipping was landed here Sunday and sent into U.S. lines then passed through Cherbourg during an entire month of normal operations.
And still it is pouring in. Liberty ships, LSTs (Landing Ships, Tanks) and converted ocean liners lie offshore by the scores with their umbrella of barrage balloons.
Their cargo bears a simple stenciled codeword for their destination. To thousands of sailors and soldiers who toil here day and night this beach is their temporary hometown. All it needs is a Chamber of Commerce.
There are no houses – just tents and foxholes.
The foxholes with boards and dirt thrown over the top are more desirable residences. The canvas G.I. tents aren’t flak-proof. Jerry comes over as soon as it gets dark and trigger-happy gun crews on the ships offshore join with the anti-aircraft lads on the beach in an ack-ack show rivaling London’s.
“There have been more killed and hurt from falling flak than from bombs,” said Lt. Col. William Hunnel of Buffalo, New York, director of operations for the Army transportation outfit at headquarters here.
One raider came in too low last night.
“He must be bucking for a sergeant or something,” said Pvt. A. M. Pollock of Brooklyn, New York, as the German plane flew threw a field of tracer fire.
A minute later, the flaming plane started a long drive into the sea.
German fortifications attract the most interest. Elaborate oil paintings on the walls of a tunnel alongside a gun show the beach and landmarks with the exact range noted alongside. The gunners didn’t have to be able to read to operate an 88mm gun.
Inside the tunnel under about 40 feet of earth are thousands of rounds of 88mm ammunition. The big shells were stored like bottles of wine. They are 1943 vintage. Four Germans still lie sprawled in front where the U.S. Rangers killed them on D-Day.
The signs of fierce battles on the beach are rapidly disappearing.
Twenty bulldozers are busy clearing roads. A detail of prisoners is collecting stray pieces of clothing, helmets, and canteens, and sorting them into huge piles. Trucks haul them away for salvage.
Road signs have gone up. Yank MPs keep the traffic moving on the right side of the road, instead of the left.
Essary: Recalls agony of peacetime Channel crossing
Getting past French columns ordeal for veteran travelers
By Helen Essary, Central Press columnist
Washington –
The weather and the Channel tides timed the invasion of France, Allied chiefs explain. Crossing the English Channel is regarded by many people as the most disagreeable experience any traveler can have, said President Roosevelt the other day. The sea moves fast there. The waves roll high and the winds blow strong. There were tens of thousands of men to be got across the water and landed on enemy territory on the shores near Cherbourg, Le Havre and Calais, Mr. Roosevelt added.
I used to think I was landing on enemy territory even in those jolly old pre-war touring days when I tottered off the Channel boat at Cherbourg, Calais or Le Havre. Those fierce able-bodied French females who pushed me around the customs office – especially at Calais – made me feel unwanted on French territory (this is definitely an understatement).
There was no Parisian chic about these ladies. They wore no stays to bind their physical proportions. Their smacked back “cheveux” were not done according to the “dernier cri” of the Rue de Rivoli. Their broad denim aprons had not been created by Paguin nor any other couturière.
But how those women could wave their arms and yell and shove. I suspected them of being descendants of Madama La Farge, whom Charles Dickens pictured knitting in a Paris square as Le Guillotine lopped off the heads of the aristocrats.
When the news of the Nazi invasion of France startled the world four years ago, I wondered how Hitler’s warriors could have got past those custom house grenadier-esses. Bucking the French customs with their assistance was a trial to break the stiffest backbone. You always knew you were going to lose your luggage.
You knew the train on which you had a compartment (suspicious word) would leave without you because you were certain to be the last to escape from this landing madhouse.
You went stumbling up and down steps, across cobblestones – there always seemed to be so many cobblestones – across railroad tracks at the heels of strange, foreign characters. These characters fought over your bags and suspected you of concealed American cigarettes and typewriters, whose shouts you could not understand regardless of the opened Phrase Book for Travelers you held in one hand. With the other hand, you clutched an umbrella, a “lightweight” coat, a paper parcel of silver spoons you had “picked up, my dear, at one of those adorable, open-air markets in London,” a mile of colored tickets, your passport, your landing card, your pound note for which you were sure you were not going to be paid your francs’ worth at the ”exchange” wicket, and your Paris-Herald without which, if you were a true American, you never traveled for fear you would not know the “rate of exchange.”
The heavy fear of the things you had to have in order to land in France was sometimes more than an uncultured American could cope with. Especially if the wind over the Channel was blowing extra strong, I once saw a harried nervous lady tourist drop her purse and her passport over the side of the boat into the sea. The French authorities would not let her off the boat without identification. She may be there yet for all I know.
Those Channel tides were exciting and fun if you were not rocking about on their uncanny crests, so to speak. I spent a season at a small and elegant Channel resort – “Bexhill-on-Sea.”
Near Boulogne, where many of our soldiers landed on the French side, many of the beaches were sandy.
I spent one night at a spot where the swimmers, Gertrude Ederle and others, were in training. After a dinner of langouste (lobsters without the big claw), I had taken myself to bed in a many-windowed room facing the Channel.
All night long, a towering lighthouse twirled its beams across my poor face. When I had finally got to sleep, I was awakened by the noise of the tide rushing in. At low tide the beach had stretched out as wide as two blocks, it seemed to me, but now I could hear the sea charging about under the foundations of the inn. And I thought how sad it would be if I were washed out to sea in this unknown land without a friend to identify “body of drowned woman washed up on shore” like the captain’s little daughter in “The Wreck of the Hesperus.”
Bill to increase veteran benefits
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Editorial: The prize
Cherbourg Peninsula assumes historic importance in this greatest of military enterprises. Allied generals saw that its possession would send the war far forward because it would mean the difference between landing men and armor on the beaches, often in rough seas, and disembarking in the security of a safe harbor.
German estimates, which may or may not be accurate, are that a half million Allied troops have been out ashore in Normandy. The landing of an army of this size, with all necessary supplies and equipment, is a miracle of human endeavor. It must not be forgotten that this task was accomplished with severe losses – losses in men, in shipping, equipment, as the littered beaches and the debris in the wash of the waves prove.
Cherbourg today is a wrecked city and a ruined port. Installations were greatly damaged by Allied attacks from the air, and the Germans completed the work of demolition. Restoration of the port to usability will not be a lengthy job, however, and possession of the city will make possible an uninterrupted flow of supplies from Britain to France as the invasion expands to ever greater proportions.
Cherbourg becomes the first great objective of Allied armies because it was assigned the role of serving as the keystone of the invasion, the source of power for steady, devastating blows which will carry the forces of liberation toward their final objective.
B-29 production effort gigantic
Program started while bomber was only a drawing
By James J. Strebig, Associated Press aviation editor
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The Pittsburgh Press (June 19, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Normandy beachhead, France –
When I went ashore on the soil of France, the first thing I wanted to do was hunt up the other correspondents I had said goodbye to a few days previously in England, and see how they fared. Before the day of invasion, we had accepted it as a fact that not everybody would come through alive.
Correspondents sort of gang together. They know the ins and outs of war, and they all work at it in much the same manner. So, I knew about where to look, and I didn’t have much trouble finding them.
It was early in the morning, before the boys had started out on their day’s round of covering the war. I found them in foxholes dug into the rear slope of a grassy hill about a half-mile from the beach.
I picked them out from a distance, because I could spot Jack Thompson’s beard. He was sitting on the edge of a foxhole lacing his paratrooper boots. About a dozen correspondents were there, among them three especially good friends of mine – Thompson, Don Whitehead and Tex O’Reilly.
First of all, we checked with each other on what we had heard about other correspondents. Most of them were OK. One had been killed, and one was supposed to have been lost on a sunken ship, but we didn’t know who. One or two had been wounded. Three of our best friends had not been heard from at all, and it looked bad, but they have since turned up safe.
The boys were unshaven, and they eyes were red. Their muscles were stiff and their bodies ached. They had carried ashore only their typewriters and some K rations. They had gone two days without sleep, and then had slept on the ground without blankets, in wet clothes.
But none of that mattered too much after what they had been through. They were in a sort of daze from the exhaustion and mental turmoil of battle. When you asked a question, it would take them a few seconds to focus their thoughts and give you an answer.
Two of them in particular had been through all the frightful nightmare that the assault troops had experienced – because they had come ashore with them.
Don Whitehead hit the beach with one regiment just an hour after H-Hour, Thompson at the same time with another regiment. They were on the beaches for more than four hours under the hideous cloudburst of shells and bullets.
Jack Thompson said:
You’ve never seen a beach like it before. Dead and wounded men were lying so thick you could hardly take a step. One officer was killed only two feet away from me.
Whitehead was still asleep when I went to his foxhole. I said, “Get up, you lazy so-and-so.” He started grinning without even opening his eyes, for he knew who it was.
It was hard for him to wake up. He had been unable to sleep, from sheer exhaustion, and had taken a sleeping tablet.
Don has managed to steal one blanket on the beach and had that wrapped around him. He had taken off his shoes for the first time in two days. His feet were so sore from walking in wet shoes and socks that he had to give them some air.
Finally, he began to get himself up. He said:
I don’t know why I’m alive at all. It was really awful. For hours there on the beach, the shells were so close they were throwing mud and rocks all over you. It was so bad that after a while you didn’t care whether you got hit or not.
Don fished in a cardboard ration box for some cigarettes. He pulled out an envelope and threw it into the bushes. “They ain’t worth a damn,” he said. The envelope contained his anti-seasickness tablets.
He said:
I was sicker than hell while we were circling around in our landing craft to come ashore. Everybody was sick. Soldiers were lying on the floor of the LCVP sick as dogs.
Tex O’Reilly rode around in a boat for six hours waiting to get ashore. Everybody was wet and cold and seasick and scared. War is so romantic – if you’re far away from it.
Whitehead has probably been in more amphibious landings than any other correspondents over here. I know of six he has made, four of them murderously tough. And he said:
I think I have gone on one too many of these things. Not because of what might happen to me personally, but I’ve lost my perspective. It’s like dreaming the same nightmare over and over again, and when you try to write you feel that you have written it all before. You can’t think of any new or different words to say it with.
I know only too well what he means.
It is an ironic thing about corresp0ndents who go in on the first few days of an invasion story. They are the only correspondents capable of telling the full and intimate drama and horror of the thing. And yet they are the ones who can’t get their copy out to the world. By the time they do get it out, events have swirled on and the world doesn’t care anymore.
There that morning in their foxholes on the slope of the hill those correspondents were mainly worried about the communications situation. Forty-eight hours after H-Hour, correspondents who had landed with the first wave felt sure that none of their copy had ever reached America. And even I, a day behind then, feel no assurance that these feeble essays of mine will ever see the light of day. But in philosophical moments, I can think of greater catastrophes than that.
LIFE (June 19, 1944)
Invasion surgeon
Gen. Hawley provides quick care for wounded
By Mary Welsh
London, England –
There are thousands of American fighting men slogging through the invasion who, next year or some year soon after, will be home again, living their lives peacefully without any dog tags. In any previous war, these same men would never go home. Their post-war identification would be a fixed cross with their name, rank and serial number.
These returning thousands will be composed of the men hospitalized for battle wounds who this time will not die. The Army Medical Corps has reduced the death rate of hospitalized wounded from 8% in World War I to 3% in World War II. There are many more casualties who, if injured in 1918, would have been long invalided. In 1944, these wounded will recover quickly and completely.
The man who, more than any other, is responsible for pushing back these margins of pain, disability and death on the second front is a solid, freckle-faced surgeon named Paul Ramsey Hawley, who is a major general in the U.S. Army. Gen. Hawley comes from College Corner, Ohio, a town he likes. He also likes precision in speech, medicine and manners, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, his job. He came to England from Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Barracks in September 1941 to study English medical methods under the Blitz. After Pearl Harbor, Hawley stayed on to become chief U.S. Army surgeon in the European Theater. As head ETO surgeon, Gen. Hawley has assembled in one vast organization some of the top U.S. talent in surgery. He has also assembled medicine and huge stores of blood plasma, sulfa drugs, penicillin and new anesthetics like sodium pentathol which can go to forward-zone hospitals because its use does not require elaborate equipment. But Gen. Hawley and his chief surgical consultant, inexhaustible Col. Elliott Cutler of Harvard’s Medical School, put only a portion of their faith in medicine alone. They know how necessary good surgery is in treating battle casualties.
Gen. Hawley has keyed his entire organization to the principle that the earlier the surgery on many types of wounds, the better the soldier’s chance of full recovery. His watchword is: “Get the surgeon to the patient, not the patient to the surgeon.” The invasion wounded will not have to undergo unnecessary feats of endurance, for Gen. Hawley has worked out a “chain of evacuation” system to insure them speedy medical treatment and surgery. His gentle-handed legions of first-aid men, litter bearers, ambulance drivers, hospital train and aircraft crews are skilled in moving casualties quickly and with expert precision. His doctors’ system of sorting wounds quickly routes soldiers in need of immediate surgery to completely equipped hospitals only a few miles behind the front.
In Gen. Hawley’s “chain of evacuation,” there are 10 halting places. In every one of them, and en route between, men may be treated according to their needs. Most wounded will bypass several of them.
The Hawley chain is composed of: 1) first-aid men, 2) litter bearers, 3) battalion aid stations, 1,000 yards or less from the front, 4) division clearing stations, about eight miles back, 5) evacuation hospitals, 15 to 30 miles behind the lines, 6) field hospitals, paralleling the evacuation hospitals, 7) hospital trains and ships, 8) station and general hospitals in secure areas where patients may remain six months if necessary, 9) convalescent hospitals, 10) the United States of America.
First-aid men, one for each platoon of infantry, move onto the battlefield just behind the fighters. In paratroop outfits they jump with the soldiers. Under shells, bombs and mortar fire, they give instant aid to the wounded. If a casualty can walk, he goes with temporary dressing to the battalion aid station by himself. If he can’t walk, the first-aid man makes him comfortable, with morphine if necessary, then directs litter bearers to him.
At battalion aid stations, doctors, working in tents or available buildings, give treatment for shock, control hemorrhage, relieve pain, administer transfusions, immobilize fractures. These numerous small units do not attempt major surgery. They simply prepare the wounded for traveling in the greatest possible comfort.
The first real wound-sorting nation in the evacuation chain is the division clearing station, whose functions are similar to those of an emergency room in big city hospitals. Here experts in wound-diagnosis decide which men need priority in travel and treatment, which can more safely wait. Meanwhile, they change dressings, check tourniquets, prevent infection, relieve pain. Most soldiers hit by ordinary bullets feel little pain for the first couple of hours.
From division clearing stations, all but the most lightly wounded move back in ambulances to evacuation hospitals, two or three hours behind the front. Here doctors are equipped to do major surgery, but since evacuation hospitals must be ready to move with the troops, they take in only men they expect to recover quickly. Annexed to each evacuation hospital is a field hospital which stays stationary longer. To these field hospitals go urgent chest and abdominal cases who will not be moved until they are out of danger.
From either evacuation or field hospitals the way back from the front is comparatively smooth. Shining, clean hospital trains and ships heavily staffed by nurses and doctors take casualties to big station and general hospitals in England where there are experts in every type of medicine and surgery, either on staff or on call. Many of these large U.S. hospitals, now quartered in Nissen huts in England, complete with their own kitchens, laundries and electric power plants, are scheduled to follow the invasion across the channel.
To save travel, the rule of the chain of evacuation is that the patient must be evacuated no farther to the rear than his condition warrants. But sulfa drugs, penicillin and other new methods of treatment now make it safe and virtually painless for many men to travel far distances before they get definitive treatment. For instance, brain wounds may cause no pain at all, since no sensory nerves are in the brain. Thus, if they are not otherwise hurt and if sulfa has been administered early, men with shrapnel in their heads may now travel straight back to the big hospital.
Gen. Hawley’s statistical staff has figured out from its African and Italian experiences, just how many of what kind of patients invasion doctors may expect and what the hazards of their injuries are. They have learned that high explosives – bombs, shells, mines and mortar – cause 82% of all wounds, small arms only 18%, and that the soldier is most apt to be hit in the arms or legs. They know, too, that 15% of all combat casualties receive abdominal, pelvic and chest wounds and that these are the cases which must be most quickly attended. In the last war, the AEF mortality rate from abdominal and pelvic wounds was 43%. During three months of hard fighting in Africa last year, the U.S. Army Medical Corps managed to hold the rate to 21%. With his mobile, forward-zone field hospitals, Gen. Hawley hopes to reduce this percentage even further. On the second front, soldiers with serious abdominal and chest wounds will reach the operating tables of these field hospitals a scant two or three hours after they are hit.
Without the strictest adherence to military precisions and what the Army calls SOP (Standard Operational Procedure), Gen. Hawley’s complex organization could never work. Except in big hospitals, a patient may never be attended by the same doctor twice. The nurse who puts on a bandage may be 50 miles away when it is taken off. To ensure that the treatment of any type of injury or illness “be continuous and conform to one plan rather than altered with each change of medical officers.” Hawley and his staff compiled a Manual of Therapy which standardizes every medical treatment and surgical operation down to the kinds of anesthetics to be given, the exact amount of drugs, types of bandages, kinds of stitches, sixes of shrapnel to be removed.
The manual recommends surgical techniques which a few years ago were considered revolutionary. Proof that these practices are correct is provided by corps of experts in toxicology, pathology, bacteriology, serology, parasitology and entomology. They deal with problems too complicated for average hospital laboratories, hunting down every evidence of unusual diseases, rare germs, worms, bugs. They are the Army’s insurance against outbreaks of food-poisoning or amebic dysentery, typhoid, dozens of other epidemics.
Some of Gen. Hawley’s specialists are searching for the cause of otitis, an inflammation of the ear which grounds a high percentage of fliers and sometimes makes them deaf. Another expert is studying the behavior of typhus virus, imported from Naples. Typhus has been reported in eastern Germany and Gen. Hawley wants all possible answers on how to treat it and the other diseases which may develop in starved, overcrowded Europe.
Just before D-Day, Gen. Hawley said of this great medical machine which he has spent two years in perfecting:
It’s like a beautiful ship, ready on the ways for launching. Let’s hope it doesn’t go aground or capsize.
As D-Day came and went and the wounded eddied quickly back from the first invasion wave to beachhead battalion aid stations and to floating hospitals completely equipped with clamped-down operating tables, it was apparent that Gen. Hawley’s “beautiful ship” was doing a beautiful job indeed on its crucial first run.