Infantry Combat Medics in Europe, 1944-45

T. Shilcutt

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781137347688
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137347695
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Medics learned quickly to ignore standing operating procedures in order to save lives but tensions within infantry units created a paradoxical culture of isolation and acceptance. This groundbreaking work examines training and combat experiences of soldiers working in Battalion Aid Stations and those who went as aid men to the line companies.

1

Chalkboard Training

Abstract: This chapter highlights the stateside training experiences for those who would become front line medics, 1944–45. Lessons learned from World War I should have alerted World War II planners to possible medical and evacuation problems, but medical soldier training regimens from 1920 to 39 reveal that the Army continued to marginalize Medical Department combat preparedness. Instead, the Army designed training programs to forge a standardized medical soldier who could be plugged in anywhere along the chain of evacuation. The unimaginative training short-changed the battlefield medics.

Shilcutt, Tracy. Infantry Combat Medics in Europe, 1944–45, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137347695.

On Sunday 7 December 1941 18-year-old Paul Winson sat stunned in New York’s Empress Theater as its employees interrupted the film with news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The youngest of five children, Winson went the next day to enlist in the Navy, but diminished vision in his right eye disqualified him for service. By 1943, however, “the military wasn’t so particular,” and the Army drafted him, judging his sight sufficient for medical duties. Marked for “limited service,” Winson trekked cross-country to the Medical Replacement Training Center (MRTC) at Camp Grant, Illinois. Together with a core group of 120 fellow New Yorkers he plunged into “intensive” basic infantry training, without weapons. More importantly, as prospective medical soldiers they received no “adequate” first aid instruction.¹

Despite the global conflict then raging, “tranquility” rather than a “climate of death” permeated the camp, leaving Winson with a “light-hearted attitude” about training and his looming tasks. Army instructors carried out much of the schooling in classroom settings, while periodic first aid sessions held in the wooded terrain emphasized locating and moving simulated casualties to an aid station. These poorly constructed training exercises, intended to introduce the real dangers of combat, inevitably deteriorated as teenagers found humor in even the most serious lessons. The medical trainees role-played litter bearers and casualties, and these scenarios often turned “comical” as the men tried to hoist and then haul the litter patients. So in an effort to accomplish their tasks more easily, his fellow trainees assigned Winson, one of the “lightest and smallest” of the group, the recurring role of wounded soldier.² This light-hearted approach defined Winson’s experiences at Grant.

During a hands-on seminar on poison gas, MRTC instructors stressed the probability of chemical warfare, drilling the New York recruits on the identification of various gases. A “Missouri farm boy” sergeant, leading the discussion on phosgene, assured the group that they would have no trouble recognizing this chemical because it smelled like “new mown hay.” The fledgling soldiers looked doubtfully at one another, each “with raised eyebrows,” because not one of the city boys had any idea what any sort of hay smelled like. When they tried to explain to the sergeant the peculiar odors of the New York City subway, each recognized that the other had no frame of reference. The seriousness of chemical warfare vanished in laughter, all too typical of a training regime remote from the shock of combat.³

Following basic training, Winson’s indifferent combat training continued at Lawson General Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, a “topnotch facility,” but one focusing on sterile procedures rather than the emergency treatment that the unsanitary front lines demanded. While at Lawson, Winson assisted in the operating room, managed surgical equipment, and completed course work in anatomy and pharmaceutical procedures, training ill-suited for a nascent front line medic. Following his Lawson stint Winson moved on to Camp Reynolds, Pennsylvania, where in the days just prior to his departure for the European Theater of Operations (ETO) he cleaned pot-bellied stoves and picked up cigarette butts on the post.⁴

Winson’s training suggests the Army envisioned him serving in a rear echelon medical environment, but wars rarely conform to expectations. When Winson arrived in the ETO, the Army quickly plugged him into the 30th Infantry Division as a replacement company aid man, and he found that his training had ill-prepared him for the realities of a combat medic’s duties. There were no autoclaves or boiling water on the battlefield, no sterile procedures in the battlefield muck.⁵

Winson’s introduction to war is certainly not a new story. The battlefield has always been a hard teacher and by World War II, general Army doctrine recognized that on-the-job training was to be expected. But with the Army’s training directives and materiel focused on teaching soldiers to kill, combat medics participated in training programs that relied on chalkboard explanations for initial aid and the evacuation system. The horrific realities of war soon made it plain that the line of battle that had been chalked on training boards was far more fluid than trainees had been led to believe. Successful medics swiftly adapted to combat conditions, insuring their own survival as well as that of their wounded comrades. Learning on the fly and under deadly fire, they discarded or radically modified prescribed medical techniques, discovered ways to utilize the changing terrains for their own protection and that of the wounded, and coped with unanticipated long-term problems. Yet lessons taught by World War I should have convinced the Army of the crucial role of front line medic and the centrality of realistic training.

American medical soldiers had been among the first to see combat during World War I in support of British and French troops. These first-wave soldiers worked within an established evacuation model, which included staged treatment that began in the trenches and continued as the wounded moved rearward by motorized transport.⁶ Stateside, the United States mobilized for the Great War, with medical soldiers participating in four-week training programs emphasizing personal hygiene, sanitary service, and some field training. American planners read reports from France concerning combat medical demands, and they requested increased strength for the Medical Department, stressing that the “needs of the front had precedence.” But Tables of Organization allowances shorted medical personnel, allocating 2 percent less than had been authorized.⁷ While military medicine is not generally a compassionate endeavor, this culture of inattention to the wounded soldier at the front would persist through World War II.

Events in France only compounded this organizational shortage. For one, medics intended to provide emergency first aid for the wounded at the front were diverted to care for diseased soldiers in the rear. Not only was care for the combat wounded on the line sacrificed for care of sickly troops, the AEF reassigned at least 1,000 medical soldiers to the front line as combat troops.⁸ The resultant “acute shortage” of front line medical personnel pressed other soldiers, including band members and German prisoners, into service hauling litters. The Army’s chief surgeon judged the situation as near disastrous, suggesting that only devotion to duty and outside assistance saved the AEF.⁹ Analysis revealed that larger numbers of better-trained medical soldiers must be stationed at the front.

Along with a shortage of medical soldiers, Americans in World War I lacked a systematized evacuation structure. While elements of the American troops had worked with and learned from the British and French, the AEF failed to institutionalize a consistent organizational model. Some units did successfully adapt to meet the challenge of front line medical care. In general, effective units established a company aid post forward of the BAS, staffing it with one battalion surgeon and two enlisted men. These medical soldiers treated the wounded where they fell and readied them for litter transport to the trench station.¹⁰ Additionally, in these static positions an assortment of trench diseases such as trench-foot, trench-mouth, trench-nephritis, and trench fever complicated the job of the front line medical soldiers even though Americans saw limited trench action.¹¹

Combat medical soldiers caring for units that moved from trench to open warfare had to adapt quickly as BAS moved out of the trenches and onto or near the battle lines. The “Manual for the Medical Department” proved less than prescriptive, and each fighting unit developed its own priorities for treatment and evacuation with no single method universally employed, but in each case, the mobility of the BAS allowed it to re-locate repeatedly to be as close to the line of action as possible.¹² Beyond the care for the wounded, medical soldiers also faced a challenge in differentiating war neuroses from shell fright, mental and physical fatigue, or malingering. Additionally, these cases “seriously complicated the problems of evacuation.”¹³ The post-war report of General John J. Pershing labeled the evacuation of the sick and wounded as a “difficult” problem during the battle period.¹⁴ Other analyses noted that a number of officers of “high rank were convinced” that the Medical Department should not be advised in advance of impending combat activities. The report went on to note an overall failure by the AEF to consult Medical Department personnel appropriately and that for the future “military objects can be attained only considering the military machine as composed of numerous reciprocating parts, each striving towards a common end.”¹⁵ This systemic marginalization of the Medical Department in World War I should have been a lesson learned, but the hierarchy issues surfaced again in World War II.

Medical training regimens for those who would serve as ETO combat medical personnel commonly fell into three time frames: peacetime training (1920–39), mobilization training (1939 to December 1941), and wartime training (1942–45). During each period the Army’s intense focus on creating citizen-soldiers shaped the training programs. At the end of World War I an isolationist Congress reduced the Medical Department from ten percent of the total Army personnel to five percent. During the inter-war years this paucity of medical personnel engendered a perception that the medical soldier’s value lay primarily as a provider of routine, peacetime health care. The Army consequently relegated medically oriented field training to secondary concerns. Peacetime training programs for medical so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Chalkboard Training
• 2  Baptism of Fire
• 3  Combat Reality
• 4  The Battalion Aid Station
• 5  Day-to-Day Health
• 6  Company Aid Men
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index