Apprentice becomes doctor at scene of big tragedy
Still in training, boy, 17, treats many victims with the skill of a veteran
By Donald Moloney, as told to Mary Harrington, United Press staff writer
NEW YORK (UP, July 28) – I’m just a U.S. Coast Guard hospital apprentice, second class, and I’m still in training. I suppose I could get prosecuted for what I did.
I was on 34th Street and saw the B-25 crash into the Empire State Building. There was a drugstore across the street. They gave me apllta, gave syringes, two dozen needles, eight grains of morphine, bandages, 10 tubes of burn ointment and sterile water alcohol.
I ran first to the sub-basement. Somebody shouted that help was needed there. I’m little, so the firemen let me climb down into the elevator, where the elevator girl was trapped. I had heard the elevator shoot down about 70 floors.
She was still alive and screaming. She hung on to me so I could hardly help her. I gave her morphine to ease the pain, and marked the dosage on her arm, where it wasn’t burned, with her lipstick. I put oil on her burned face.
That was the only part of her I dared treat. The rest of her body was burned and charred. I put on sterile bandages, though. We carried her out. A priest and a rabbi heled me. The morphine didn’t help much. Her legs were crushed and I think her back was broken.
There was another elevator operator in the basement, in the same shape. I helped him, too.
Then I went up to the 79th floor. I picked up two heads and parts of four bodies and helped stack them on a table.
They called me down to the 70th floor, and I carried three women from there to the 67th floor. They had fixed the elevators. I guess I must have carried and treated about 20 people. All of them were burned, and suffering terribly from shock. I gave morphine to 14 people.
We’ve been told in school for eight months, at Manhattan Beach and Groton, Connecticut, how to treat people suffering from burns and shock.
On the 69th floor I treated five injured. A man had been pouring whisky down their throats. I put one woman’s arm in a triangular bandage, and sterile bandages on another’s burns. I was carrying one woman to the elevator when another crawled over and put her arms around my legs.
“God in Heaven, help me.” She screamed, and then fainted. I’ll have nightmares for a long time. Those dead people up there. Thank God they never knew what happened to them. They couldn’t. The blast blew them apart in an instant.
I always wanted to be a surgeon. I want to practice at home, in Detroit. A couple of shore patrolmen took me out to a bar at one o’clock when the head doctor said everything was under control. I started shaking as soon as he said that. I don’t know why. I was real calm before.
Maybe that’s what my commanding officer meant when he said I couldn’t ever be the only medical corpsman on one of those small ships, like I want. He said I was too young, that I couldn’t take the responsibility. I guess I am. I’m only 17.