Weller's War

by George Weller

  Thirty-eight tons of high explosives and fire bombs fell on this Japanese rear base. But the force of the raid cannot be measured even by the fact that its fires could be seen seventy miles away, or that the round-trip distance flown to this former Dutch port was probably well over 2000 miles.

  What is causing uplifted hearts is that for once we have struck deep into Japan's “dead hollow” system of defense. For the first time its triangulated plan for protecting its greatest resources—Tokyo, the Solomons, and Batavia—was pierced. This Macassar raid penetrated the airdrome bases forming their triangle defense along the Indies island chain (from Fakfak and Babo in New Guinea to Somebawa and Kendari in the Celebes) and knifed the Japs in their central area of support.

  In distance alone it equaled the Royal Air Force raids from London to Naples and Warsaw, but it was accomplished not under cover of darkness but by daylight. In other words, the fliers of General MacArthur and Lt. General Kenney deliberately informed the Japanese they were coming in, being obliged to fly directly over the islands' chain of listening and watching posts, and challenged the Jap fighter defenses to do their worst against our B-24s' biting .50-calibers.

  The Japs accepted the challenge by putting up formidable anti-aircraft fire from batteries dug in along the shore and from warships' guns. Apparently this took little effect, despite the advantage of daylight, for the only bomber lost fell due to a collision—possibly suicidal—with the single perforated Jap fighter which tried to repel this heavy American force.

  These Liberator bombers are already known as superlative merchant raiders, their armed reconnaissance having taken over the role that cruisers once held in other wars. But that they could lug bombs this far into Japanese defenses—notably beyond the rear door of Kendari, the air base from which the Japs hammered Soerabaya into submission—is remarkable. It was a demonstration that when General Keene went to Washington, as the last Jap destroyer was sinking in the Bismarck Sea battle, and said, “Give me more aircraft and I will show you more targets,” this energetic stubble-haired little general was ready to fulfill his promises.

  Though Macassar's biggest docks were soundly pummeled, it is clear that bombing these places harasses rather than defeats the foe. Nothing important is manufactured there. But this raid proved our bombers can penetrate more deeply into the Jap defenses than had been expected.

  THE PIN-UP DOCTORS OF TAHITI

  South Sea Medics Find Strange New Cure

  Papeete, Tahiti, Society Islands—August 30, 1943

  The great mid-Pacific campaign of the United States Navy, the mightiest air and naval symphony the world has ever seen, did not open with a crash of great guns. It began with the occupation in early 1942 of a small French possession in the heart of the Pacific: Wallis Island. Nothing could seem more unlikely than that this landing should affect the history of medicine. Yet a series of circumstances was started which has given the Western world the first systematic experience of curing the sick by acupuncture.

  Wallis is the lowermost of the islands and archipelagoes leading up through the Ellices to the Gilberts, and from the Gilberts westward into the Marshalls and Carolines. When the Navy gently arrived it freed a French colonial physician who is one of the most extraordinary figures of the South Seas.

  Doctor Leon Vrignaud, who lives and practices medicine in an obscure corner of Tahiti, is a blue-eyed, bald, stocky thirty-nine. He has accomplished a remarkable series of cures by the unheard-of method of pricking the afflicted with gold and silver needles.

  “I am not a charlatan or a sorcerer,” says Vrignaud. “All I know about acupuncture I learned out of a book. Anybody else could learn it and with practice apply it in the same way.”

  As long as he lived on Wallis in the middle of the Pacific, receiving orders by radio from the Vichyist governor of French Indo-China in Saigon, his work as an acupuncturist was unsung. With his wife, his child and a single radio operator as the only white residents of the island, he was little known to the outside world.

  Taravao, where Vrignaud quietly practices acupuncture today, is at the extreme eastern end of Tahiti. Although only walking distance from Stevenson's one-time villa, it is difficult of access from Papeete except by a single Polynesian-packed autobus. To call on Vrignaud, the writer formed a small bicycle party consisting of James Norman Hall—the kindly and generous-hearted Iowan who has become a kind of American mayor of the South Seas—an Australian friend of Hall's, and the U.S. consul in Papeete. It required a full day, bicycling the long way around the island's road from west to east, to reach Taravao.

  The doctor, a man of almost shy deportment, lives with his small son in a modernized native home lifted several feet above the ground. His spotless clinic, a modest one-story white structure, is equipped with a full complement of surgical instruments and medicines like the much larger government clinic at Papeete.

  Almost from the time Vrignaud arrived from Wallis, a trickle of both Polynesians and Americans and Europeans began to make their way over the approximate fifty miles of highway from congested Papeete to the tiny rural clinic. Taravao became a kind of Tahitian Lourdes. Because he could not singlehandedly cope with all the ailing who came to him to be needled, Vrignaud eventually had to refuse treatments to patients from outside his own country doctor's district.

  The feet of this writer had been operated on in an American army clinic at Aitutaki in the Cook Islands, and the long bicycle ride from Papeete had affected the bandages. It was necessary for Vrignaud and his Polynesian assistant to change the dressing. As he did, Vrignaud remarked: “Perhaps you have heard I use acupuncture to cure all cases. Nothing of the kind. I have seen what it can accomplish, but I never use the needles if I know more conservative methods will give sure results. It is only when the conventional methods have failed that I employ needles. Even if they fail to effect an improvement or a cure, a simple prick cannot harm the patient, and most of the time does not even draw blood. It pierces the skin only for a few seconds.”

  Vrignaud's clinic, of course, was stormed by patients who expected him to cure everything from leprosy to lockjaw. The reason was not in his cures alone. By a totally unreasonable combination of chances the U.S. Navy, when it politely dislodged Vrignaud from the residency at Wallis, was sending him to the only other South Seas island which possessed an acupuncture pioneer.

  As a Cagliostro* of medicine—the reputation which saddles both doctors—Albert LeBoucher, fifty-five, a portly, retired businessman of Papeete, is more improbable than Vrignaud. As a physician he is strictly an amateur. The role of wizard had been thrust on him by his accidental discovery of the art from an American friend. That was a decade ago, about when LeBoucher sold off the department store he had long operated in Papeete. Although it has brought him no financial revenue—French law making gainful practice illegal for a physician without diploma—acupuncture has left LeBoucher little time to himself. (Those physicians who considered him a public danger could not take steps against him, because only the profit motive makes such cures culpable.)

  Vrignaud, through the chronic gasoline crisis which has stripped Tahiti's roads of all but an occasional bus, has been able to keep from being overwhelmed by his clientele. Not so the affable LeBoucher. He works from eight in the morning to eight at night, sticking his indefatigable needles into patients. He never accepts a sou for his labors. This dedicated service has been going on for over ten years. It has survived derision and attack from every side.

  Acupuncture broke in unasked on LeBoucher's contented retirement.

  The tiny office he keeps in the rear of a café-saloon on a side street of Papeete, a clinic hardly bigger than two telephone booths, is nearly always occupied by a client. A characteristic of both acupuncturists is their unpretentious attitude. Vrignaud's fees are the standard clinical ones whether he does acupuncture or not, and LeBoucher's fees are nothing at all. Both say: “What we have done, you or anyone else could do. It is only a matter of practice.”

  Their m
ethods of curing patients, most of whom are educated, fully literate Polynesian natives, cause curiosity among the U.S. Navy officers and occasional airmen who visit Tahiti. According to both men, a difference of a few millimeters between the points pricked may be the difference between cure and failure.

  How valuable is acupuncture? How many cures has it accomplished?

  LeBoucher has been pricking people for ten years, but has no records of his patients. Vrignaud keeps records in his clinic, just as in his previous posts in Dakar and at Lao Kay in French Indo-China. Such records, if shared, might imperil his position with his superiors, who regard his experiments with differing degrees of tolerance. To make a firsthand survey of all the scattered Tahitians treated by the two men would be the work of six months at least (which this writer was unable to do before the next Air Transport Command plane left Bora-Bora).

  “I started this acupuncture very slowly and skeptically,” Vrignaud assured me in Taravao. Although many patients come in the spirit that impels Tahitians to close their windows at night lest a tupapau (ghost) creep in, the majority have the same tentative spirit as the doctor. A good example is Lewis Hirshon, an American family man of means and one of the most stable figures of Tahiti.

  During the years of LeBoucher's practice, Hirshon, a New Yorker who owns a Tahiti canning factory, a dairy, and an inter-island steamer, was unimpressed. He regarded these cures, as did nearly all European residents, as a kind of unconscious quackery. He knew LeBoucher as a businessman, and could not think him a charlatan, but felt there was mutual self-deception going on between “doctor” and patients that persuaded these people they were cured.

  When Vrignaud, with a degree granted by the University of Bordeaux in 1930, arrived from Wallis and began to practice acupuncture, le tout Tahiti, including Hirshon, were upset. Those who made fun of the genial merchant LeBoucher had to consider their attitude afresh in light of the bothersome presence of the experienced colonial physician, whose official medical record was second to none and who had been using the needle longer even than LeBoucher.

  Hirshon, who is in his early forties, over six feet tall and brawny, had been troubled for some time with a pronounced stiffness in his back. The condition grew worse, and he became unable to sit, or stand upright. He tried massages, oils and ointments; all failed.

  In a mood to risk anything, but feeling ridiculous, he motored to Taravao in his big car. He stood in line like all the Polynesian patients. When his turn came, Vrignaud gave him a regular checkup, asked a few questions, then opened his box of gold and silver needles. He pricked Hirshon in the trunk and in the leg. “Do you feel any better?” he asked. “Not at all,” said Hirshon. “If you feel no better in two weeks, come back again,” said Vrignaud.

  Two weeks passed and Hirshon's condition was unimproved. He was as bent over as ever. He reproached himself for acquiescing to a superstition. His gas rationing was low, the distance to the end of Tahiti was long, and he resolved not to go back. At the last moment, acting on impulse, he drove to Taravao and waited in line again, “feeling more foolish than ever.” Vrignaud pricked him again, in almost the same places. Hirshon felt no better, and flatly said so. He left the bottle-lined office and went into the corridor, as painfully hunched as ever.

  “I was kicking myself,” he says, “for having spent the gas to see this phony doctor a second time. I stood reading some document framed on the wall. The print was small and I had difficulty. One minute I was bent over the way I had been for weeks. And the next minute I found I was standing up straight. Don't ask me how it happened; I don't know. And I haven't had another attack since.”

  On this point Hirshon is unshakeable: Vrignaud used the needle on him twice, and his crooked, painful back was straightened and relieved. “They can say all the rest is old wives' tales, if they want to. But not my case. It happened to me.”

  When the writer asked Dr. Vrignaud which cure astonished him most, the acupuncturist said, “They sent me a carpenter who had not been able to lift anything for two years. I cured him. I can't explain it myself. He works, now.”

  LeBoucher preserves even more original wonder than Vrignaud. “I had an American friend,” he says. “He came to the island as a tourist. He had many books. He knew that I used to read a great deal since I retired. When he went away he left me this book which changed the course of my life.”

  The volume which LeBoucher refers to as “the book” is a paper-covered summary of acupuncture, a short popularization of a longer work translated from Chinese—the only such in a Western language—brought out by George Soulé de Morant, at one time French consul general in Shanghai. De Morant is responsible for bringing acupuncture from China, where it originated, to the Occident.

  LeBoucher read this book idly, thought it somewhat occult, but kept it. Not long afterward the youngest of his four sons, then in his teens, fell ill. He lost weight, grew weaker and seemed to waste away, as through tuberculosis. Regular physicians were unable to help. LeBoucher turned to the book.

  Diagnosis for acupuncture is similar to an ordinary medical checkup of temperature, tongue, bowels and symptoms of pain. It has one important difference: acupuncturists consider the master key in the pulse. According to their theory, in each wrist there are not merely a single pulse but six. Three are on the surface, three below. An ordinary doctor is actually taking six pulses at once, though he does not know it.

  Each pulse connects with an organ or a function, one with the heart, another with the kidneys, another with the liver, and so on. By trying each pulse, not for its tempo but for the strength or weakness of its beat, the acupuncturist determines which organ has been affected. If the organ needs stimulation, as shown by a weak pulse, certain points on the body must be pricked. If the pulse is hammering too hard and needs soothing, other points must be touched with the needle.

  LeBoucher studied his son's pulse for the first time. The directions in the book indicated that his son's ailment lay in the bladder and the needle should be applied gently to his knee. Month after month LeBoucher persistently followed the method. At first three times a week, then every day, he placed a needle against his son's knee, penetrated the flesh a fraction of an inch—never enough to draw blood—held it there a moment, then withdrew it. There was no improvement. Feeling a fool, he cautioned the boy to say nothing of the treatment.

  After carrying on this method for more than half a year, discouraged, he chanced to study the diagram more closely. He found he had not read the anatomy correctly. He had been pricking just off the point indicated by de Morant. He changed his attack slightly. “My boy's eyes cleared,” he says. “He sat up. He said he felt better.” The next day LeBoucher renewed the treatment in the new place. The boy continued to improve. Today he is large and healthy, not quite so big as LeBoucher's handsome eldest son Toti, a French officer whom the writer met at a Tahitian wedding, but strong and robust.

  From the day LeBoucher cured his son he had no peace. The public sits in his barroom-anteroom day and night, awaiting free treatments. His bewilderment at the cures has changed slowly into a stubborn faith. “When Vrignaud came here,” he says, “it was not so much that people stopped making fun of me. It was that I had a colleague who really knew his way around in medicine as well as acupuncture, one whom I could lean on.”

  One of LeBoucher's difficulties before Vrignaud arrived was that the Tahitians came to believe he has supernatural powers, since on one occasion he did bring a corpse back to life.

  “I had gone to bed,” he says, “when a phone call came from a village several miles from Papeete. They said a baby there was very ill. I drove out and found they were lying The baby was already dead, but they did not say so because they knew I would not come. Everyone in the village was around the house, waiting for me. I said to them, ‘I am not Christ, I cannot raise the dead. I am leaving.’ They held me by force. They pulled me away from the car and into the house again. It was impossible. There was no pulse. ‘I am sorry’ I said to the parents,
‘but your baby's body is already growing cold.’ Still they would not let me go. So finally I gave in. I got out the needles. I did not know where to begin. I am not a physician. I had no idea what the baby had died of, and there was no pulse to guide me. Not being a doctor like Vrignaud, without a pulse I am lost.

  “Anyway, for fifteen minutes I pricked as I would if the heart were affected. There was no change whatever. It was hopeless. I tried to leave, but the bedroom was filled with villagers and they would not let me. ‘Your baby is dead,’ I told the weeping mother brutally. ‘Let me go home. I cannot cure death.’

  “Still they forced me back. So I got out the needle and began pricking again. The little body was completely icy and white. It was idiotic. At the end of an hour I got up and beat my way out to the door. They tried to hold me, but I managed to reach my car. There I found that the father had let the air out of my tires. It is a Tahitian trick to keep guests. The car was flat on its rims. ‘Go back and try once more,’ said the family. ‘Meantime we shall pump up your tires.’

  “Almost beside myself with anger, I went back. With my hand on the little cold pulse, I began pricking to stimulate the heart the same as before. Suddenly I thought I felt a tremor. I pricked again; again the same flutter. I waited a little. I thought it might be my own nerves. I continued pricking; I got the same tiny reaction. Soon you could see the heart beat. Warmth began to come into the body.

  “I worked until dawn. I was drenched in sweat. I could not believe what I had done. I told those villagers they must not mention it to anyone. They promised, but they did not keep their promise. Never since have I been able to shake off a reputation of sorcery. And until Vrignaud came, the undertakers, my old friends in business life, were looking angularly at me, just like the physicians. They saw in me a competitor. Now I absolutely refuse to touch the dead. Dead is dead.”