Battle Field Angels (14 page)
Forced four-mile marches proved brutal for the smaller Asian Americans who struggled under full combat gear to keep up with their long-legged white officers. Drills in sticky spring mud gave way to summer hikes in suffocating humidity in forests where the shade often harbored snakes. At night, the recruits collapsed on worn cots in drafty barracks with broken windows and leaky roofs. Training deep in the South prepared them for war.
After three years of war, the medical corps had been fully integrated into combat operations, sometimes with disastrous results. In February 1944, during fighting on the Anzio beachhead, German aircraft and artillery pounded military hospitals. Doctors, medics, nurses, and patients alike all had been killed.
In the Normandy invasion on June 6, surgical teams had been aboard gliders that touched down in German territory. More than fifty amphibious landing craft had been modified to become coastline operating rooms for wounded troops. As the Allies pushed inland across northern France toward Germany, field hospital platoons advanced along the front line. Evacuation hospitals of one hundred beds or more were not far behind. Three dozen vehicles could transport the entire facility, though a lack of trucks and supplies sometimes hampered mobility throughout the war.
James Okubo and the rest of the 442nd arrived in Italy on June 10, 1944, and joined the Allied effort to drive the retreating Germans north of the Arno River. After ten weeks of battle, the 442nd boarded transport ships and sailed into Marseilles, France. The combat-hardened regiment had been combined with the similarly segregated 100th Battalion composed of Japanese-American draftees. They formed part of the southern pincer designed to advance northeast from southern France toward Germany. It would be up to each regiment’s medical detachment to keep pace with the combat troops as they fought through forests and negotiated mountain ridges. Okubo had been trained as a medic and, as part of the 442nd’s medical detachment, was assigned to K Company.
In late September, Okubo, K Company, and the rest of the combat team were hiking deep in the Vosges Mountains, home to dense forests that were often wet and dark even at midday. They navigated with the help of maps provided by the French underground. The 442nd neared its objective, a small pocket of French mountain towns—Bruyeres, Belmont, and Biffontaine—on the doorstep of Germany.
The enemy was prepared for the Americans. German defenders had to stop the Allied advance in the Vosges at all costs. Retreat into Germany was out of the question.
Okubo and the 442nd reached the front lines on October 15. They heard American artillery shelling German defenses in Bruyeres and Biffontaine. The rain and fog that had been near-constant companions since the regiment had arrived in France worsened. Okubo’s medical gear never dried. Every infantryman was soaked to the skin. Their foxholes filled with water faster than they could dig. As they pushed through dense stands of timber toward the enemy, Okubo faced widespread trench foot in his company. Left untreated, trench foot led to gangrene and the loss of a leg.
On October 16, after four years of occupation by Waffen-SS troops, Bruyeres was liberated by units of the 442nd. K Company moved through the devastated town that had been hit at least fifteen thousand times by Allied artillery. Okubo and other medics frequently stopped to treat wounded French residents who had somehow survived the Germans and the incessant shelling. As they chased the retreating German soldiers into the Belmont forest toward Biffontaine, enemy positions high on ridges forced K Company to move through heavily mined valleys, where machine gunners waited silently. Once the Americans were exposed, machine guns that fired twelve hundred rounds a minute and were lethal to two thirds of a mile unloaded on them.
Men screamed for a medic as bullets pounded into their shoulders, chests, and thighs. Loaded down with a medical bag on each hip and two canteens on his belt, Okubo crawled from soldier to soldier, ticking off a triage checklist in his mind. His thought process went something like this:
Check his breathing: is it a “sucking” wound? No. Lungs probably okay. At least slow the flow of blood. First, sprinkle sulfa into that gash. Don’t worry about it being packed with mud and pine needles for now. Stabilize him. Battle dressing. Give him a quick Syrette of morphine. Good. Tag him and call out for stretcher bearers. The rest will be up to the aid station down the hill. Okay, stay low, and get over to that guy down in the creek bed. Gotta stay low. Ignore that machine gunner. Can’t worry about the bouncing betties. Go! Go! Go!
Nicknamed “bouncing betties,” the enemy’s s-mines carpeted the forest floor. If a soldier didn’t step on the trigger, he might trip a wire strung from the buried mine to a downed tree trunk. When he did, he had half a second to drop to the ground and pray as a charge propelled the mine up to about chest height before it exploded. Small steel rods, scrap metal, and sometimes as many as three hundred sixty ball bearings flew out in every direction. Each could kill a man twenty-five yards away and injure others up to one hundred yards away. A single tripped mine could wound or kill a dozen soldiers.
By October 24, the Nisei liberated Belmont and Biffontaine, but they had paid a horrific price. In eight days of combat, Okubo and the other medics had treated twelve hundred casualties. When all three battalions of the regiment moved into Belmont, the exhausted men, many of them wounded but still on the front line, were sure the troops would be given perhaps a week to rest and patch their wounds. Maybe their anger would subside during that time.
Pushed beyond all expectations, the Nisei began to resent their Caucasian officers. Hills had been taken at a great cost in blood—and then abandoned to the enemy when orders changed unexpectedly. Were the Japanese-American soldiers being sacrificed in a mad drive into Germany? Many Nisei were starting to wonder whether they were more expendable than “American” soldiers.
Yet duty compelled the exhausted troops to follow orders, regardless of how many men they had lost and despite the bleak prospect of success. The rain remained relentless. Trench foot became epidemic as feet grew numb, turned blue or red, and swelled just before blisters burst and open sores ate into exposed flesh.
Not far from the 442nd, the 1st Battalion of the 141st Infantry Regiment blocked the enemy’s retreat. Originally composed of men from the Texas National Guard, the battalion had driven six miles into enemy territory, deep into the forest. As night fell, they dug in on a hilltop near a small French town, La Houssière. The next morning disaster struck. The Germans had reinforced during the night and at dawn counterattacked, trapping more than two hundred fifty soldiers. The Americans had used so much ammunition the day before that they were nearly powerless to stop the assault on their position on Hill 351.
James Okubo had only two hours to get his medical gear ready when the alert came at 0200 hours on October 26. His unit wasn’t told the mission would be to rescue the “Lost Battalion” that was in serious trouble. The battalion had endured two days of enemy shelling. It had run out of food. Soldiers drank green water filled with algae, which they collected from a pond halfway down the hill. Those who volunteered to fetch the rancid drinking water risked death. German snipers picked off dozens who tried to reach the pond or break through enemy lines. Time was running out.
At 0400, Okubo’s K Company moved out into a fog so thick each man gripped the shoulder of the soldier in front of him. When one slipped on the slick muddy trail, ten others often might fall with him. Crusty mud soon caked their uniforms as the forest lightened and German 88mm shells began pounding them. Ahead, enemy machinegun nests waited to rake across their path. Okubo spent much of the day on his belly in the mud, dragging bleeding men behind tree trunks and patching them up with damp battle dressings. As stretcher bearers carried them back to aid stations, Okubo struggled to keep up with the rest of K Company, which took the brunt of the enemy’s attack.
As darkness fell, the rocky forest floor made digging foxholes nearly impossible. Most Nisei looked for the slightest swale in the ground and curled up as best they could for a long, bone-chilling night. A few pine boughs on top of the mud were a bonus. Unseen tanks and heavy armor rumbled through the forest. The enemy reinforced its positions as the mist thickened.
Okubo ached with exhaustion after two days of the relentless German assault. He was barely upright at 0630 on October 28 when the sky brightened with flashes of enemy artillery. The ground exploded as men dove for cover. The enemy had zeroed in on K Company’s position. One soldier lost an eye; another lost his hand. Others collapsed when red-hot shrapnel lodged in their spines. Soldiers slowly advancing on thin trails detonated mines buried under leaves and disappeared in a flash of flesh and forest debris.
Even those who ducked behind trees, boulders, or fallen timber suffered attacks from above. Enemy mortar and artillery shells that exploded up in the trees showered the ground with deadly splinters and shards sometimes a foot long. Foxholes became useless in the deluge of wooden shrapnel. Okubo not only faced flesh torn by metal but found men with chunks of wood buried in chests, legs, and bellies.
With each thunderous explosion, Okubo saw more men writhing on the forest floor. As he climbed a hill, the quiet medic spotted a wounded Nisei more than the length of a football field away. Somehow the soldier had gotten well ahead of the slow advance and had fallen, bleeding, only forty yards from the enemy. Okubo immediately started crawling toward the injured man. Machine-gun fire ripped the air just over his head. He ignored blasts that stung his eardrums. The soft ground buzzed with vibrations from enemy machine guns only a few trees away.
It seemed hours had passed before Okubo finally reached the wounded Nisei, who was still alive. He shielded the bleeding soldier with his body, staunching the flow of blood before he turned and dragged the man back to safety as mortar shells exploded around him. Through it all he heard the screams: More Nisei had fallen with broken arms, shredded abdomens, and sliced faces. Okubo crawled back onto the battlefield, treating one soldier after another. He hoped there were enough stretcher bearers behind him to take the wounded out of the German killing zone. Evacuation had to be left to others—evacuation that ultimately could carry a soldier all the way back to America.
James Okubo was the first link in a refined method of battlefield care that had changed significantly during the course of the war. Although the Russians used aircraft to evacuate the wounded as early as 1941, America had no medical air evacuation capability at the start of the war. By 1943, however, the first class of flight nurses had graduated, and they were aboard customized aircraft transporting critically wounded men out of war zones. Airborne medical troops were tested in the Sicily campaign. Medics began parachuting with the 82nd Airborne Division. Hospitals, too, were evolving into a fluid chain of care that extended from a French battlefield to a military hospital stateside.
For the overwhelming majority of men fighting in Europe, medical care began when a medic like Okubo braved enemy fire to get to them. Medics applied immediate triage and called for stretcher bearers to take the wounded to an aid station, typically located about five hundred yards from the heart of the battle. Sometimes the stretcher bearers took the wounded to a waiting jeep on the far side of a ridge; other times they carried the wounded all the way to the aid station, under fire for much of the distance. There, a few doctors and assistants waited. A quick diagnosis was made, field dressings replaced, and, perhaps, plasma or morphine administered. There were no beds. Treatment often took place on dirt that quivered when artillery hit nearby and as the dust of battle hung in the air.
Jeeps took the wounded away from battle to a clearing station, which was a cluster of tents, a commandeered church, or an abandoned home. Clearing stations were manned by surgeons, a few dozen enlisted men, a chaplain, and sometimes a dentist who doubled as an anesthesiologist and surgical assistant. Emergency surgery was performed under primitive, largely unsanitary conditions if critically necessary. Sometimes for the third time on the same day, the wounded soldier faced another trip by ambulance to a field hospital.
The four-hundred-bed field hospital was mobile and could be broken down into one-hundred-bed units. Flexibility was crucial as war moved across Europe, Africa, the Pacific Ocean, and the Far East. The wounded were taken to a receiving tent. It was a surprisingly quiet place. Most patients were in shock. Some mumbled about the moment they were hit. Surgeons knew that about a third of the wounds would be to the chest, a third to the belly, and a third to the extremities. Shrapnel made multiple injuries common and sometimes a mystery until blood soaked bandages were removed and wounds examined.
Few soldiers remembered the operating tent. Dim lights were reflected onto the patient off white liners on the inside of the canvas tent. Surgeons often operated while standing in mud or worked bare-chested in the jungle. Then the wounded were moved into a postop tent. Inside, floor-mounted poles held bags of plasma or glucose with plastic tubes connected to patients’ arms. Drainage tubes snaked out of chests, bellies, and bladders to various containers on the floor.
Further to the rear, evacuation hospitals with seven hundred fifty beds were more permanent installations, often situated near railroads. Medical trains carried the wounded to general hospitals, convalescent hospitals, and sometimes to waiting hospital ships and medical transport aircraft. By 1944, the medical corps ferried the soldier off the battlefield along a route that ended only when he reached the level of care demanded by his wounds.
As the hours passed, men kept falling in a blizzard of shrapnel as the 442nd’s advance slowed and then stalled. James Okubo rescued and treated wounded soldiers within a few yards of the enemy. He ignored grenades exploding only a few feet away and somehow escaped whirling shrapnel. Finally, the forest quieted at sunset. While they speculated about the events of the day, the men’s banter would fill the air: