Battle Field Angels (9 page)

If Rector survived Lipes’s crude surgery, the ground sulfa tablets might give Rector a fighting chance at staving off infection, even considering the primitive surgical tools that would be used in largely unsanitary conditions. Lipes didn’t know how long it would be before Rector reached a proper Navy hospital.

Lipes’s surgical team included communications officer Franz Hoskins, who would act as an untrained anesthesiologist; yeoman H. F. Wieg, who would hand the bent spoons to Lipes; Ward, who would assist Lipes by positioning the retractors inside Rector to separate tissue and muscle; Ferrall, who would keep track of the sponges and spoons inserted in Rector’s abdomen; and the engineering officer, Lieutenant Charles Manning, who would monitor the patient’s circulation. The surgical team gathered around Rector in the
Seadragon
’s sweltering heat and incessant, vibrating hum.

Lipes pulled on alcohol-drenched gloves whose fingers were too long. He looked like Mickey Mouse in his oversized gloves, a blue blouse taped tightly around his neck, and white duck cap. He inverted a tea strainer and covered it with gauze. It became the patient’s mask, through which Hoskins administered ether. A sailor notched the stopper in the ether bottle so Hoskins could dribble the liquid onto the tea strainer. The ether was so caustic that another sailor smeared petroleum grease on the patient’s face to keep it from burning.

At 1046 on September 11, 1942, corpsman Wheeler Lipes began operating. The first incision barely creased the skin. Lipes cut deeper, to the fascia, then through the fascia to separate Rector’s stomach muscles, and another incision through the peritoneum. Lipes kept peeling away Rector’s abdomen until his patient’s organs appeared.

The air in the crowded wardroom grew stale. Then Lipes noticed an odd smell enveloping the surgical team. He looked at Rector’s face and immediately saw that the notch in the ether bottle’s stopper was too large. The ether overdose threatened to anesthetize the surgical team where they stood, while the patient received inconsistent doses. As ether fumes wafted through the compartment, Lipes felt Rector’s stomach muscles tighten, then go limp as Hoskins struggled to drip more ether into the tea strainer. “Give him more!” Lipes ordered as Rector grimaced.

Once Hoskins had the ether administration under control, Lipes made the last incision. He expected the appendix to pop up, probably blackened with inflammation, but nothing happened. It wasn’t there.
Oh, God
, thought Lipes,
does this guy have
situs inversus
? Is his appendix on the opposite side of where it’s supposed to be? Just my luck
, as he frantically searched for Rector’s gangrenous appendix. Finally, there it was, coiled, engorged, black, and attached in three places to the caecum, a pouch that forms the first part of the large intestine. Rector’s appendix had adhered to the inside of his abdomen.

Okay, take it one small cut at a time … don’t rush it … look it over, look again, then make the cut. Slow and careful … don’t hurry it … just like they did it in Philadelphia. …
Lipes knew that if he punctured the appendix, Rector would die. If Rector died on the
Seadragon
, it would be from an appendectomy performed in slow motion, not at the hands of an untrained corpsman frantic to close Rector as quickly as possible.

One step at a time, take double notes to be sure nothing is left behind. Make sure the seventy sponges we’ve used are accounted for. Make sure the sulfa is ground finely enough that it can be sprinkled inside Rector as we close
. Two hours and fifteen minutes after the first incision, Lipes completed the operation. It had taken nearly three times as long as it would have for a practiced surgeon.

Lipes and the others peeled off their sweat-soaked surgical gowns and sat down with mugs of coffee. Word raced through the crew. It was over. Rector had survived, but now Lipes and the rest of the crew had to wait to see if he would recover.

“I’m still in there pitching,” Darrell Rector said forty-five minutes later when he regained consciousness. In the following hours, Lipes regularly checked on Rector. An initial fever spiked and then ebbed as the
Seadragon
resumed its patrol and the surgical team disbanded. Two days later, a pair of sailors helped Rector to his feet. He took his first few tentative steps as the
Seadragon
assumed its assigned position in the South China Sea. Five days after, the sub’s cook complained to Lipes that Rector “was eating like a horse.” A week later the
Seadragon
engaged a Japanese heavy cruiser and two destroyers and survived a depth charge attack.

“One Merchant Ship. One Oil Tanker. One Successful Appendectomy,” read the cryptic report from the
Seadragon
’s skipper. To
Chicago Daily News
reporter George Weller, it smelled like a story. The journalist had escaped after being held by the Gestapo for two months in Greece in 1940, and now was assigned to cover the war in the Pacific. Weller was based in Australia, where he had taken refuge after the Japanese had chased him out of Singapore and Java.

Weller paced the dock as the
Seadragon
pulled into Fremantle on October 20, 1942. He had asked Admiral Charles Lockwood for permission to interview Lipes and his surgical team, eager to decipher the sanitized, curt summary of the
Seadragon
’s fifty-nine days at sea.

“I’m sorry, sir. I thought the captain wanted to see me,” stammered Lipes to the stranger in the wardroom after the
Seadragon
had tied up.

“Are you Lipes?” Admiral Lockwood inquired.

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, you fellows had an exciting time,” the admiral said as he wrapped an arm around the corpsman’s shoulder.
¹²
They talked for five minutes, Lipes adding details to the skipper’s report. When he finished, Admiral Lockwood asked George Weller to come in. Weller looked Lipes up and down as the two sat in the same wardroom that had been an operating room weeks before. As Lipes recounted his experience, Weller furiously took notes, flagging some he would check when he later met with nearly fifteen crewmen who played various roles in the Rector operation. Weller knew when to give an interview subject plenty of rein and let him run with his story.

George Weller’s story gripped the nation, and the reaction stunned Lipes. The corpsman who had been trained as an electrocardiographer hadn’t bothered to mention the appendectomy in letters to his wife. He simply assumed he was doing his job and knew he had been following orders. One day his wife’s sister pointed out a brief article in a Philadelphia newspaper headlined “Sailor Removes Shipmate’s Appendix in Submarine” that didn’t specifically name Lipes. His wife said, “That’s the kind of thing Johnny would do.” Soon the complete story made national headlines and reporters were pounding on her door for comment.

Not everyone marveled at Lipes’s audacity.

“You should have let that man die!” sputtered the Navy physician. He had grabbed Lipes by the shirt after the corpsman had been introduced to him in Australia. Lipes paled as the young doctor swelled with rage and shook him by the shoulders. As the one-time recreational boxer recovered from the unexpected assault and prepared to throw an overhand right, others pulled them apart. The doctor thought it despicable that anyone other than a surgeon dare perform any kind of surgical procedure. Better to protect the integrity of the medical profession than to allow such rash behavior, no matter the circumstance or consequence. What would happen if other corpsmen took it upon themselves to operate at sea?

“Is this operation over yet?”

Submarine corpsman Thomas Moore cringed at the question. George Platter had awakened as Moore searched inside Platter’s belly for a bleeding vein. The Texas native was in the midst of removing Platter’s appendix when his patient roused early from a spinal tap. Moore had wanted to be an electrician in the Navy but decided on the spur of the moment to take the corpsman test to avoid a sudden inspection of his gear by his commanding officer. To his astonishment, he had passed, and on December 21, 1942, he found himself operating on Platter one hundred feet beneath the surface of the ocean.

Four days earlier the USS
Silversides
had sailed out of Brisbane, Australia. The sub’s captain, Creed Burlingame, refused to request a PBY amphibious plane to evacuate Platter when his belly pain had intensified. Sighting several Japanese aircraft through
Silversides
’s periscope made a radio message too dangerous. He dared not risk revealing the submarine’s position.

Moore had no choice. As Platter moaned and squirmed on the USS
Silversides
’s wardroom table, the crew retrieved a can of ether from sick bay. Moore had heard about Lipes’s appendectomy four months earlier and remembered his use of a tea strainer lined with gauze for the ether. Initial doses proved inadequate, when Platter awoke shortly into the operation. As sailors held Platter’s open abdomen stationary, Moore showed a senior officer, Roy Davenport, how to drip the ether steadily into the gauze. When Platter quieted down, Moore resumed his search for the bleeder. Half an hour later, he found it and finished what became the third successful appendectomy aboard a submarine in three months. Only a week earlier, corpsman Harry Roby had performed an emergency appendectomy aboard the USS
Grayback
in the South Pacific.

These operations fueled a debate within the Navy that had been spawned by Lipes’s appendectomy. Lipes’s commanding officers had reeled in shock that a corpsman had successfully conducted surgery behind enemy lines. On October 20, the day the
Seadragon
had returned to port, the commander of Submarine Squadron Two had written, “It is hoped that his [Lipes] success on this occasion will not encourage others to take unnecessary risks … treatment with sulfa products would appear to be the more sound procedure except in unusual cases.”
¹⁴

Yet two days later, Thomas Walsh, the squadron’s medical officer, had cautiously praised Lipes:

A few days later, the Pacific fleet commander, Admiral Charles Lockwood, had noted Wheeler Lipes was being recommended for promotion to “Pharmacist, U.S. Navy,” adding “his skill and willingness to assume responsibility for performing a major operation is outstanding.”
¹⁶
The view from Washington, D.C., however, was entirely different.

Ross R. McIntire, Surgeon General of the Navy, slammed both fists onto his desk. Before him sat the medical officer of the submarine service, Chuck Shilling.

The day before, McIntire had read a report detailing Thomas Moore’s successful appendectomy. Three appendix removals by corpsmen in three months could not to be tolerated. As McIntire saw it, Shilling had to rein in his submarine corpsmen who apparently felt free to remove inflamed appendices without any surgical training. So Shilling developed new protocols for corpsmen, designed to ease their patients’ discomfort and buy time until they could be evacuated off a submarine or until the sub reached a port with a surgeon. As a result, for the remainder of the war, some sailors lived with excruciating pain and risked death for weeks before a “proper” appendectomy could be performed ashore.

Meanwhile, a hushed smear campaign against Lipes slowly swelled within the Navy medical community. Some doctors felt threatened by the corpsman’s pioneering heroism. In wardrooms and naval hospital cafeterias, they whispered that Lipes really hadn’t removed the appendix. That he saw a man in pain as an opportunity to open him up, close, and claim the removal in order to catapult his career. Others speculated that he somehow removed the appendix, but that the removal had not been necessary. The appendix really wasn’t “hot.” The latter was particularly specious because Lipes had saved the appendix, and laboratory analysis in Australia confirmed the blackened organ had swollen to nearly twice its normal size. Darrell Rector almost certainly would have died from its rupture.

For weeks after Weller’s story first appeared in the newspaper, bags of mail from across the country arrived daily for Lipes. “I didn’t want my son to go into the Navy, but when I read this story of how you care for the patient, it makes me feel better,”
¹⁸
wrote one mother. But nothing was forthcoming from the Navy’s medical service. Wheeler Lipes did not receive a decoration for his ingenuity and daring. Instead, he received two quick promotions to warrant officer, which took him off submarines and the duty that he loved. In January 1943, he transferred to a naval hospital in Philadelphia. Lipes remained a celebrity some Navy doctors wished would go away.