When I was in England I spent some time with the army’s Medical Corps, and witnessed some of our preparation for tending wounded soldiers.  The sight of surgeons being taught to operate on the front, of huge warehouses filled to the roofs with bandages, of scores of hospitals built for men then healthy who would soon be wounded—seemed shocking and morbid to me.  But I saw all that preparation being put to use.  Soon after arriving in Africa, our doctors and nurses and medical aides had had their first battle experience.  When I first visited them the hospitals were going full blast, and it didn’t seem morbid in actuality, as it had in contemplation.

In the Oran area, where our first heavy casualties occurred, the wounded were in five big hospitals.  Three were French hospitals taken over by the army, one was an abandoned French barracks turned into a hospital, and one was a huge tent hospital out in an oatfield.

On one of my first tours of inspection I happened on a friend I didn’t know I had.  A nurse in an old blue sweater came walking down a muddy street at one of these army hospitals.  An army pal with me yelled at her, and stopped and introduced me.  And the nurse said, “Well, at last!  I’ve been saving sugar for you for two years, but I never expected to meet you here.”

I had never seen the nurse before in my life, so a little inquiring about the sugar business was necessary.  Mary Ann Sullivan was a former surgical supervisor in Boston City Hospital.  She and her sister nurses were reading my reports two years ago, when I was in London and complaining bitterly in the public prints about not getting enough sugar.  So it seems the nurses felt sorry for me and started saving sugar.  Whenever a cube was left over they would save it and say, “This one’s for Ernie.”

Then in the summer of 1941 these nurses joined a Harvard unit and set sail for England.  And they carried with them that sugar especially earmarked for me.  Their motive was high but it came to naught.  For the Germans torpedoed their ship and my sugar went to the bottom of the Atlantic.

The nurses were eventually picked up and taken to Iceland, then to England, and finally to Africa.  And there we all were, and wasn’t it a small world after all even if my sugar was gone?

Mary Ann felt badly about my sugar being sunk, but she did break out a hospital commodity which both censorship and the ethics of war forbid me to mention.  So our meeting was not without a certain rare delicacy to put in our mouths.

Mary Ann Sullivan’s unit came ashore in Africa on the very first morning of the landings.  They operated on wounded men for hours, with snipers’ bullets still pinging the walls.  It was just the kind of life Mary Ann had been waiting for.  She was so steamed up she could hardly wait for the next battle.  When I met her she was with a mobile surgical truck, which she called the super commando truck.  It was equipped to rush into the thick of things, slam on the brakes, and operate on wounded men for thirty-six hours without replenishments.

I arranged officially with General Headquarters to be wounded in Mary Ann’s vicinity.

By then the doctors could be, and were, proud of their work.  The nurses had already covered themselves with glory.  The wounded had nothing but praise for those who pelled them through.

The only deaths in the original occupation were those killed outright and those so badly wounded that nothing could have saved them.  In other words, we lost almost nobody from infection or from medical shortcomings in the hurly-burly of battle.

You probably read of the miracle wrought by sulfanilamide in the first battles of Africa.  Doctors and men takled about it constantly, almost with awe.  Doctors knew it was practically a miracle drug, but they hadn’t realized quite how miraculous.

Every soldier was issued a sulfanilamide packet before he left England, some even before they left America.  It consisted of twelve tablets for swallowing, and a small sack of the same stuff in powdered form for sprinkling on wounds.  The soldiers used it as instructed, and the result was almost complete lack of infection.  Hundreds were alive who would have been dead without it.  Men lay out for twenty-four hours and more before they could be taken in, and the sulfanilamide saved them.

It was amusing to hear soldiers talk about it.  Sulfanilamide was a pretty big word for many of them.  They called it everything from snuffalide to sulphermillanoid.

There was one sidelight on it—some of the wounded didn’t have any sulfanilamide left, because they had surreptitiously taken it all to cure venereal diseases.  They said a veneral case could be knocked out in four of five days with it, and thus a man didn’t have to report in sick.

One doctor told me that most American wounds were in the legs, while most of the French wounds were in the head.  The explanation seemed to be that we were advancing and thus out in the open, while the French were behind barracks with just their heads showing.  Both sides treated the wounded of the other side all during the battle, and our soldiers were full of gratitude for the way they were treated in the French hospitals.  They said the French nurses even stole cigarettes for them.

Morphine was a great lifesaver.  Pure shock is the cause of many deaths; but if morphine can be given to deaden the pain, shock cases often pull through.  Many officers carried morphine and gave injections right on the field.  My friend Lieutenant Colonel Louis Plain of the Marine Corps, who had never given an injection in his life, gave six on the beach at Arzeu.

Many of our wounded men already had returned to duty.  Those permanently disabled would be sent home as soon as they were able.  Those still recovering were anxious to return to their outfits.  I inquired especially among the wounded soldiers about this, and it was a fact that they were busting to get back into the fray again.  Morale was never higher.

[. . . . . .]

There were a lot of things the Charlotte doctors and nurses hadn’t visualized before they set up their big tent hospital there in the field.  The natives, for instance.  Arabs in their long gowns came wandering across the plains hoping the miraculous Americans could cure their ailments.  So the hospital had to set up a separate tent for them.  They had local people in there wounded by shrapnel in the first battle.  There was one old woman of eighty-one whose arm had been blown off.  There were several patients on whom they had done normal operations.

[. . .]

The hospital [the tent one in the field of oat stubble] already had handled more than one thousand patients and hadn’t lost a one.  The doctors ran to the nearest stake and knocked on wood when they said it.  The surgeons had performed more than 125 operations.

There was no red tape about whether a patient was legally entitled to enter the hospital or not.  They took anybody who came along—soldier, civilian, Arab, Frenchman, anybody.  The way they ignored formalities when emergencyy arose was one of the things that made me feel so warmly toward this battle-front hospital.  One day we were looking at the round-bellied iron stoves half buried in the ground in each tent.

“What do you burn in them?” I asked Lieutenant Colonel Bauchspies.

“Wood,” he said.

“Where do you get the wood?” I asked.

“Steal it,” he said.