It is always difficult to tell how many Japanese bombers are aloft because the noises seemed to mingle. Searchlights shot up, fingering the heavy monsoon clouds and trying to find their way through the iridescent mist. It was like directing a flashlight into a bowl of milk. Every glistening, moist drop in a cloud threw back the rays a dozen times. The searchlights went on and off, apparently recognizing the Japs could see as little of them as they could of the Japs.
The droning bombers—“Guess they are at about 25,000 feet”—crossed the harbor, probably trying to get their bearings. “Looks as though they dropped their packets somewhere along the road,” muttered someone. Heads appeared in the dugout entrance and men emerged. One man drew out a packet of cigarettes forgetfully, then realized what he was doing and replaced them.
Although the bombers had passed over they were still audible. They made a full swing methodically around the harbor and seemed to be heading homeward. Then abruptly the noise began to increase. The sound of motors was underpinned with a new firmness. For the first time there was something slightly venomous in it.
Again all hands drifted back into the long shelter tunnel. Turner, who comes from Kansas, said, “I think this is it.” As he spoke there came an irregular cracking sound in the air.
There was a momentary pileup at the shelter's entrance, a conventional I-shaped barricade opening into a tunnel. There this correspondent's football training came into good use and he was not the last in jamming through. When women and children are absent from the scene, as in Darwin, and if shelters are ample, there is small ceremony and no Alphonse and Gaston business at the mouths of shelters. The best man is he who has least flesh projecting when the crackling noise begins.
There was a shaking blow, then another, another, another and another. Dirt fell from between the timbered overhead buttresses of the shelter but nobody even ducked. Faces were serious but unworried. That is what fifty feet of solid earth will do for you. In raids men look to heaven for succor, but go as deep as possible into Mother Earth for protection. Paradise is here below, the farther below the better.
“I think they hit the brewery,” said Turner, referring to the establishment which the Aussies built to meet Darwin's perpetual thirst.
From the shelter's mouth the lookout said: “Here comes another pack.”
Everyone's head went down slightly. They hit quite close this time but there was something different in the impact. The dugouters exchanged meaningful glances. Whatever happened was too obvious for old Darwinians even to mention.
“Landed in the water,” whispered Turner. “You can tell by the sound.”
Some began to adjust their tin hats to leave the shelter.
There was one outside—there always is—who had braved the bombs, counting on luck and moonlight for protection. “That last bunch landed right out there,” he said, pointing to a portion of the bay occupied only by moonlight. “A few more fish for the Abos to eat.” (Abo is Aussie slang for aborigines.)
YANK SUB CREW, IN ACTION, STOPS, SNIPS APPENDIX
Saves Life of Stricken Youth as Craft Hides from Jap Ships
Somewhere in Australia—December 14, 1942
“They are giving him ether now,” was what they said back in the aft torpedo rooms.
“He's gone under and they're getting ready to cut him open,” the crew whispered, sitting on their pipe bunks cramped between torpedoes.
One man went forward and put his arm quietly around the shoulders of another man who was handling the bow diving planes. “Keep her steady, Jake,” he said. “They've just made the first cut. They're feeling around for it now.”
“They” were a little group of anxious-faced men with their arms thrust into reversed white pajama coats. Gauze bandages hid all their expressions except the intensity in their eyes.
“It” was an acute appendix inside Dean Rector of Chautauqua, Kansas. The stabbing pains had become unendurable the day before, which was Rector's first birthday at sea. He was nineteen.
The big depth gauge that looks like a factory clock and stands beside the “Christmas tree” of red and green gauges regulating the flooding chambers showed where they were. They were below the surface. Above them—and below them, too—were enemy waters crossed and recrossed by whirring propellers of Jap destroyers, transports and submarines.
The nearest naval surgeon competent to operate on the young seaman was thousands of miles and many days away. There was just one way to prevent the appendix from bursting and that was for the crew to operate upon their shipmate themselves. And that's what they did. It was probably one of the largest operations in number of participants that ever occurred.
“He says he's ready to take his chance,” the gobs whispered from bulkhead to bulkhead.
“That guy's regular”—the word traveled from bow planes to propeller and back again.
They kept her steady.
The chief surgeon was a twenty-three-year-old pharmacist's mate wearing a blue blouse with white-taped collar and squashy white duck cap. His name was Wheeler B. Lipes. He came from Newcastle near Roanoke, Virginia, and had taken the Navy hospital course in San Diego, thereafter serving three years in the Naval Hospital in Philadelphia, where his wife lives.
As a laboratory technician, Lipes' specialty was operating a machine that registers heartbeats. He was classified as an electrocardiographer. But he had seen Navy doctors take out one or two appendixes and thought he could do it. Under the sea he was given his first chance to operate.
There was difficulty about the ether. When below the surface, the pressure inside a boat is above the atmospheric pressure. More ether is absorbed under pressure. The submariners did not know how long their operation would last. They did not know how long it would take to find the appendix. They did not know whether there would be enough ether to keep the patient under throughout the operation.
They didn't want the patient waking up before they were finished.
They decided to operate on the table in the officers' ward. In the newest and roomiest American submarines the wardroom is approximately the size of a Pullman car drawing room. It is flanked by bench seats attached to the wall, and a table occupies the whole room—you enter with knees already crooked to sit down. The only way anyone can be upright in the wardroom is by kneeling. The operating table was just long enough so that the patient's head and feet reached the two ends without hanging over.
First they got out a medical book and read up on the appendix while Rector, his face pale with pain, lay in the narrow bunk. It was probably the most democratic surgical operation ever performed. Everybody from box plane man to cook in the galley knew his role.
The cook provided the ether mask. It was an inverted tea-strainer. He covered it with gauze.
The young surgeon had as his staff of fellow physicians men all his senior in age and rank. His anesthetist was Lieutenant Franz Hoskins, communications officer of Tacoma, Washington.
Before they carried Rector to the wardroom, the submarine captain, Lieutenant Commander W. P. Ferrall of Pittsburgh, asked Lipes as the surgeon to have a talk with the patient.
“Look, Dean, I never did anything like this before,” Lipes said. “You don't have much chance to pull through anyhow. What do you say?”
“I know just how it is, doc,” said Rector. “Let's get going.”
It was the first time in his life that anybody had called Lipes “doc.” But there was in him, added to the steadiness that goes with the submariner's profession, a new calmness worthy of an Aesculapius.
The operating staff adjusted gauze masks while members of the engine room crew pulled tight reversed pajama coats tight over their extended arms. The tools were laid out. They were far from perfect or complete for a major operation. The scalpel had no handle. But submariners are used to “rigging” things. The medicine chest had plenty of hemostats, which are small pincers used for closing blood vessels. The machinist rigged a handle for the scalpel from a hemostat.
When you
are going to have an operation, you must have some kind of antiseptic agent. Rummaging in the medicine chest, they found sulfanilamide tablets and ground them to powder.
One thing was lacking: there was no means to hold open the wound after the incision had been made. Surgical tools used for this are called “muscular retractors.” What could they use for retractors? There was nothing in the medicine chest that gave the answer, so they went as usual to the cook's galley.
In the galley they found tablespoons made of monel metal. They bent these at right angles and had their retractors.
Sterilizers? They went to one of the greasy copper-colored torpedoes waiting beside the tubes. They milked alcohol from the torpedo mechanism, and used it as well as boiling water.
The light in the wardroom seemed insufficient: operating rooms always have big lamps. So they brought one of the big floods used for night loadings and rigged it inside the wardroom's sloping ceiling.
The moment for the operation had come. Rector, very pale and stripped, stretched himself out on the wardroom table under the glare of the lamps.
Rubber gloves dipped in torpedo alcohol were drawn upon the youthful “doc's” hands. The fingers were too long. The rubber ends dribbled limply over.
“You look like Mickey Mouse, doc,” said one onlooker.
Lipes grinned behind the gauze.
Rector on the wardroom table wet his lips, glancing a sidelook at the tea-strainer ether mask.
With his superior officers as his subordinates, Lipes looked into their eyes, nodded and Hoskins put the tea mask down over Rector's face. No words were spoken; Hoskins already knew from the book that he should watch Rector's eye pupils dilate.
The surgeon, following the ancient hand rule, put his little finger on Rector's subsiding umbilicus, his thumb on the point of the hip bone and, by dropping his index finger straight down, found the point where he intended to cut. At his side stood Lieutenant Norvell Ward, of Indianhead, Maryland, who was his assistant surgeon.
“I chose him for his coolness and dependability,” said the doc afterward of his superior officer. “He acted as my third and fourth hands.”
Ward's job was to place tablespoons in Rector's side as Lipes cut through successive layers of muscles.
Engineering officer Lieutenant Charles Manning of Cheraw, South Carolina, took the job which in a formal operating room is known as “circulating nurse.” His job was to see that packets of sterile carlisle dressing kept coming and that the torpedo alcohol and boiling water arrived regularly from the galley.
They had what is called an “instrument passer” in Chief Yeoman H. F. Wieg of Sheldon, North Dakota, whose job was to keep the tablespoons coming and coming clean.
Submarine Skipper Ferrall too had his part. They made him “recorder.” It was his job to keep count of the sponges that went into Rector. A double count of the tablespoons used as retractors was kept; one by the skipper and one by the cook who was himself passing them out from the galley.
It took Lipes in his flapfinger rubber gloves nearly twenty minutes to find the appendix.
“I tried one side of the caecum,” he whispered after the first minutes. “Now, I'm trying the other.”
Whispered bulletins seeped back into the engine room and crews' quarters.
“The doc has tried one side of something and now is trying the other.”
After more search, Lipes finally whispered, “I think I've got it. It's curled way into the blind gut.”
Lipes was using the classical McBurney's incision. Now was the time when his shipmate's life was completely in his hands.
“Two more spoons.” They passed the word to Lieutenant Ward.
“Two spoons at 14.45 hrs,” wrote Skipper Farrell on his notepad.
“More flashlights. And another battle lantern,” demanded Lipes.
The patient's face, lathered with white petrolatum, began to grimace.
“Give him more ether,” ordered the doc.
Hoskins looked doubtfully at the original five pounds of ether now sunken to hardly three-quarters of a can, but once again the tea-strainer was soaked in ether. The fumes mounted, thickening the wardroom air and making the operating staff giddy.
“Want those blowers speeded up?” the captain asked the doc.
The blowers began to whirr louder.
Suddenly came the moment when the doc reached out his hand, pointing toward the needle threaded with 20-day chromic catgut.
One by one the sponges came out. One by one the tablespoons bent into right angles were withdrawn and returned to the galley. At the end it was the skipper who nudged Lipes and pointed to the tally of bent tablespoons. One was missing. Lipes reached into the incision for the last time and withdrew the wishboned spoon and closed the incision.
They even had the tool ready to cut off the thread. It was a pair of fingernail scissors, well scalded in water and torpedo juice.
At that moment the last can of ether went dry. They lifted up Rector and carried him into the bunk of Lieutenant Charles Miller of Williams-port, Pennsylvania. Miller alone had had control of the ship as diving officer during the operation.
It was half an hour after the last tablespoon had been withdrawn that Rector opened his eyes. His first words were: “I'm still in there pitching.”
By that time the sweat-drenched officers were hanging up their pajamas to dry. It had taken the amateurs about 2½ hours for an operation ordinarily requiring 45 minutes.
“It was not one of those ‘snappy valve’ appendices,” murmured Lipes apologetically as he felt the first handclaps upon his shoulder.
Within a few hours the bow and stern planesmen who, under Miller's direction, had kept the submarine from varying more than half a degree vertically in 150 minutes below the stormy sea, came around to receive Rector's winks of thanks.
His only remark was “Gee, I wish Earl were here to see this job.” His brother Earl, a seaman on the Navy submarine tender Pigeon, is among the list of missing at Corregidor, probably captured.
“I'd like to show that cut to Captain Voge,” said Lipes. “I used to tell him how I got my first experience at a morgue and never missed a patient coming or going. I had just as soon try a colostomy on one of that gang. But I could get away with brain surgery if I had to.” Lipes formerly served under a Chicagoan, Lieutenant Commander Richard Voge, until the pharmacist of his present submarine was wounded in the Cavite bombing. Although Lipes' arm was steady in operating on his shipmate, he had suffered four shrapnel wounds when the Japs bombed Cavite.
When the submarine surfaced that night, all hands who had been near the wardroom found themselves frequently grabbing the sides of the conning tower and slightly unsteady on the black, vertical ladders. It was because of the ether they had breathed, which came out again at the lessening of surface pressure.
But all their intoxication was not ether; some was joy.
The submarine again began “patrolling as usual.” Thirteen days later Rector was manning the battle phones.2* And the submarine was again launching her torpedoes.
And in one of the bottles vibrating on the submarine's shelves swayed the first appendix ever known to have been removed below enemy waters.
1*A Martin B-26 Marauder. Presumably, the plane was still under wraps, and Weller was not allowed to identify it. The B-26 participated in the Battle of Midway, and flew on just two powerful engines. Its very short wings terrified many pilots and at first earned it the nickname of “Widow Maker.”
2*Lipes died in 2005, age eighty-four, as a lieutenant commander and one-time surgeon who became a hospital executive. He received the Navy Commendation Medal in old age. Hoskins, who eventually captained a submarine, died in 2001, age eighty-six, having been a family doctor for forty years. Rector died in October 1944 off Formosa, age twenty-one, when his sub's torpedo, fired at a Japanese ship, turned around.
XII
Somewhere in New Guinea
The battle for New Guinea was really the battle for Austr
alia, which it overhangs like a protective bulwark only a few hundred miles to the north. The enormously difficult Allied campaign to hold Papua (New Guinea's eastern half) against the Japanese, under horrible conditions, saw some of the worst combat of the Pacific war and inspired some of Weller's toughest reporting. He covered Papua for over a year—with its new demands of learning to fight jungle snipers—and was the only correspondent to witness all its major struggles.
After a brief first visit, once he returned to the vast island late in 1942, he contracted malaria but kept working and grew ever sicker there for nearly seven months straight. In April 1943 he informed his editor:
I am confined in an advanced portable hospital in Papua with what doctors describe as “benign and malignant malaria in heavy concentrations.” This is not the first time I've had fever, though it is the first time I've mentioned it. I was up and down all through the Buna and early Sanananda campaigns, but kept going by heavier and heavier dosages of quinine. Then I came back to Sanananda for the final campaign here, and still was able to keep going by repressive measures, which did not change the fact that I was full of the disease. This covers the period of December and January, into early February. I finished the Gona-Buna-Sanananda campaign with a complete tour of our troops.
On returning to Moresby, extremely underweight, I cropped out with tropical sores, which I had avoided somehow in northern Papua, and (the doctors said) took nearly a month to heal them because of my generally rundown condition. At this time all the troops with whom I served the earlier three-quarters of the Buna campaign had long been withdrawn. The AP correspondents Spencer and Boni both went to Australia with malaria, and so did UP's Frank Bartlett, the only correspondent of the American press who served as long as I did with the front line troops. At length I was left with AP's Tom Yarborough who arrived in February as one of the two Americans surviving here. I at first made gains in Moresby, where there is more and different canned ersatz [i.e., lousy food—ed.], but rapidly lost ground after the Bismarck Sea battle. All this time the doctors said I had to have a very extended period of rest and several months of fresh food to buy back lost ground.
Weller's War Page 40