Battle Field Angels (10 page)

“Darrell Rector is dead.” Wheeler Lipes swallowed deeply at the news. On October 24, 1944, Rector had been aboard the USS
Tang
, a submarine preying on Japanese supply ships near the China coast. In a night attack, the
Tang
had sunk several Japanese ships. As soon as the crew fired the
Tang
’s last torpedo, they knew the sub was in trouble. The torpedo arced left, broached the surface, and “porpoised” as it turned back toward the submarine. The torpedo buried itself in the
Tang
’s stern, the explosion deafening the crew. Men flew across compartments, breaking legs and arms. The Pacific poured in through the hull, pulling the
Tang
toward the seabed, one hundred eighty feet below the surface. Only nine members of the crew had managed to escape and remain afloat until they were picked up the following morning by a Japanese warship. Darrell Rector had gone to the bottom in the crippled
Tang
.

By that time, the sulfa drugs that had helped save Rector’s life had been replaced by a new antibiotic whose efficacy was being proven on the battlefield: penicillin.

Penicillin’s roots extended back to World War I, when bacteriologist Alexander Fleming witnessed the horrors of rampant wound infection in combat hospitals. Lipes was nine years old when Fleming accidentally discovered mold that appeared to be killing bacteria in a Petri dish. He published a paper about his observation, but it garnered little attention when Fleming failed to adequately replicate the bacteria-killing mold.

While Lipes honed his corpsman skills in 1939, a team of Oxford University researchers headed by Australian pathology professor Howard Florey and German refugee biochemist Ernst Chain turned their attention to Fleming’s decade-old observation. Remarkably, only two years later, in mid-1941, they had found a way to reproduce enough of the antibacterial mold for experimentation, completed the first round of human testing, and laid the groundwork for its mass production. Penicillin was used in combat for the first time in North Africa in 1943. Doctors called it the “magic bullet.”

Penicillin became a national medical priority. In 1943, U.S. drug companies produced 21 billion units of the antibiotic. In excess of 1.5 trillion were produced in 1944, more than enough to protect the Allies during the Normandy invasion.

Millions of wounded and sick soldiers owed their health and even their lives to antibiotics. During World War I, 8 percent of the wounded had died of their wounds, a mortality rate that declined to less than 5 percent in World War II. In World War I, a battlefield surgeon reported that 70 percent of amputations were due to infection rather than anatomical destruction. During World War II, the military medical corps effectively replaced amputation with antibiotics as the first line of defense against infection. Although a higher percentage of amputations took place in World War II, that was due to improved battlefield evacuation procedures that delivered more gravely wounded patients to field hospitals. Antibiotics had an even more profound impact on disease in war. Only 0.1 percent of the 14.3 million soldiers who fell ill died during World War II.

Wheeler Lipes stayed in the Navy after the war, although it seemed that an invisible black mark had blemished his name. He resumed his education: he finished high school and began attending university classes. A lifelong student of the world around him, Lipes was a highly principled man who didn’t fit in a bureaucracy as political as the Navy. He fearlessly identified policies, rules, and protocols he thought were ill advised. He had a very strong sense of right and wrong, and he always spoke his mind—for which he paid a price.

Lipes’s peers quickly overtook him. They were promoted repeatedly, while characterizations of arrogance and stubbornness dogged Lipes. In 1957, he was asked to be the technical advisor for an episode of
The Silent Service
, a popular television series about Navy submarines. Admiral Thomas Dykers produced the episode called “Operation Seadragon,” which was based on Lipes’s successful appendectomy. Lipes refused to endorse the program. He felt the producers had taken too much dramatic license with the facts and believed the result presented an inaccurate portrayal of what had happened fifteen years earlier. No matter what Dykers said, Lipes refused to endorse the final cut. Even a summons to the Pentagon didn’t sway Lipes. “Operation Seadragon” went on the air without his blessing, another black mark on his name. When it aired one Sunday night, a boy sat mesmerized by the story. More than forty-five years later, Jan Herman would play a pivotal role in Lipes’s life.

In 1962, Lipes retired as a lieutenant commander after twenty-six years in the Navy. His Navy retirement letter became a poignant capstone to his career. It made no mention of Lipes’s willingness to follow orders to perform the first appendectomy aboard a submarine. No mention of his passion for learning that made it even remotely possible for a man who had never spent a day in medical school to cut into another man’s belly, remove an inflamed organ, and give that man a second chance at life.

In 2003, Herman, historian at the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery (BUMED), attended an officer’s retirement ceremony that left him unsettled. The man had received the Legion of Merit when some believed he was wholly undeserving of the honor. They felt that bestowing it simply as a lovely parting gift belittled those who had legitimately earned the recognition in years past.

History was irreplaceably precious to Herman. Its preservation came in many forms, from oral histories to books to documentaries. Awards and medals served as history’s mile markers in measuring a person’s contribution. The standards by which medals were bestowed were sacrosanct and born from years of considered application in a spirit of fairness.

Herman remembered watching
The Silent Service
on television and marveling at a corpsman performing an appendectomy with little more than a spoonful of faith. As the BUMED historian, he had met and interviewed Wheeler Lipes to record his life story for posterity. The two had grown so close, their relationship was beyond friendship; it approximated that of a father and son. Herman believed that Lipes had gone unrecognized for too long. Something had to be done.

“Admiral, there has been a stain on the Medical Department since 1942,”
¹⁹
Herman said at a meeting with then Surgeon General of the Navy, Admiral Michael Cowan. As Herman launched into a recitation of Lipes’s heroics, Cowan cut him short. Everyone at BUMED knew the story. But Herman was just building up a head of steam. “You, sir, need to make it right. If I can document what Lipes did and nominate him for a medal, will you sign it?”

“You bet I will,” promised Cowan.
²⁰

Herman embarked on a complicated scavenger hunt. He researched BUMED’s archives and the U.S. Navy’s records. Second-hand reports, however, were not enough. He had to find witnesses to the appendectomy, more than sixty years after it occurred, who remembered the details and who were willing to sign an affidavit. Most of the officers in the wardroom that day in 1942 were no longer alive. But Herman found the executive officer, Norvell Ward, living in Florida. Ward remembered the incident and signed the necessary paperwork.

His research complete, Herman submitted a medal nomination to the awards board of the Chief of Naval Operations and anxiously awaited the panel’s decision. He knew some medical officers in the Navy still clung to the belief that Lipes’s actions had merited a court-martial rather than an award. Others remained convinced that it was a hoax of sixty years’ standing which had originated at a time when America desperately sought good news about the war in the Pacific—a sham best forgotten.

Not so, ruled the awards board. Admiral Cowan called Lipes as soon as he received word that the Navy stood ready to correct one of its longest-running omissions of recognition. Wheeler Lipes had earned the Navy Commendation Medal.

Then pancreatic cancer struck Lipes. At the age of eighty-three, he somehow survived an eight-hour surgery and faced a long recovery. Nearly eighteen months later, in February 2005, the Navy brought the awards ceremony to Lipes, holding it at Camp Lejeune, not far from his home. Family and friends filled the auditorium as corpsmen stood at attention. More than one hundred fifty people attended the brief presentation. None was surprised to hear Lipes brush aside any talk of heroism.

Although Lipes began a new series of cancer treatments two days later, the ceremony marked the closing chapter of his life. He faded fast. On April 17, 2005, Wheeler Lipes passed away.

Lipes had spent a lifetime caring for others, becoming the chief executive officer and president of large hospitals in Tennessee and Texas after retiring from the Navy. One day, while flying to a medical convention, he noticed a man next to him reading an edition of
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
. The book sat open to a passage and cartoon about Lipes’s appendectomy. The man noticed Lipes gazing at the page, his face blank.

“Look at that,” the man said. “Can you believe somebody could do something like that?”

Lipes didn’t miss a beat, shook his head, and said, “Don’t believe a word of it.”
²¹

Wheeler Lipes, along with thousands of doctors, corpsmen, and medics, had helped save more than 670,000 wounded sailors and soldiers during World War II by using sulfa drugs and pencillin to ward off infection. The wounded survived enemy fire, wounds, and the threat of infection. Millions more also had survived another ageless nemesis on the battlefield: disease.

World War II: Tarawa

T
he American convoy cut into the endless green South Pacific swells in November 1943. As Japanese submarines silently patrolled below, more than eighteen thousand American soldiers on battleships, cruisers, and transports waited and wondered. Some faces blanched with fear, while others affected a false bravado to guard against the uncertainty ahead. Many were at sea for the first time and discovered seasickness was made worse by taut nerves. Their destination was an island called Betio in the Tarawa Atoll, so small it would fit within Central Park in New York City.

The Japanese garrison on Betio knew the American battle group was heading directly for it. Their admiral claimed that a million Americans could not drive his men from the island in a thousand years. Every Japanese soldier had been trained to drive the enemy into the sea or die when the invasion force reached Tarawa. Both invaders and defenders had nowhere to retreat on isolated islands in the Pacific. Either the Japanese or the Americans would be decimated in the coming showdown.

Ray Duffee had just enrolled at the University of California, Davis, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He decided that school would have to wait.

Although school officials had told him it was his patriotic duty to stay in college, restlessness pulled at Duffee. He had seen how news of the Pearl Harbor attack had devastated his Japanese college classmates. Not knowing exactly why, Duffee felt it imperative that he serve his country. On March 25, 1942, Duffee and his aunt drove to San Francisco to talk to Navy recruiters.

As he stood in a long line at the recruiting office, a recruiter walked past and asked Duffee about his background. He described his part-time work in a veterinarian’s office and mentioned that he had a Red Cross certificate. The recruiter pulled him out of the line and sent Duffee to corpsman school at the U.S. Naval Hospital in San Diego’s Balboa Park, an expansive complex on a ridge overlooking San Diego Bay.

Corpsman training in the summer of 1942 was basic, and much of it was based on common sense, it seemed to Duffee. He was taught how to assess patients and monitor their condition, and he knew just enough to discern when to call for a doctor. He also learned that disease had always been the most lethal enemy on the battlefield.

For thousands of years, disease had determined the victors of numerous wars. Epidemics ravaged the Roman Empire’s armies and contributed to its demise. Typhus crippled Napoleon’s attack on Russia. Raging disease epidemics led to a three-year stalemate in World War I: there simply weren’t enough soldiers to wage war. From 1916 to 1918, one British army unit of 124,000 men suffered 162,500 cases of recurring malaria compared to 24,000 men killed in action. A French army of 120,000 men suffered a malaria rate of 80 percent.

In 1935, Army maneuvers in Panama had been cancelled due to an outbreak of malaria. As long as the U.S. Army stayed out of regions ravaged by disease-carrying mosquitoes, its soldiers remained relatively healthy. In 1939, the malaria rate among soldiers was five per thousand men, the lowest since the Revolutionary War. That changed in 1941 when America went to war. Malaria decimated American troops in the Pacific throughout the first year of World War II. On New Guinea in late 1942, the malaria recurrence rate was four thousand per one thousand men. This was shocking, considering that the medical corps had an effective weapon against the disease: Atabrine.