Vrignaud's arrival enabled LeBoucher to turn over all doubtful cases to the authorized physician. I asked Vrignaud how he felt toward the amateur; as fifty miles of road separates them, they see each other only rarely. “We are both learning at the same time,” said Vrignaud carefully. “He does not have a medical education, and his text is a vulgarization of the theory. But he is an intelligent and cautious man, who recognizes his limitations and sends me any borderline cases. We do not pretend anything like perfect results, and in this way we avoid giving scandal to acupuncture until we are both better learned.”
Vrignaud's own guide is Volume I of a set of three books on acupuncture by de Morant in Paris. This volume, bigger and more abundantly illustrated than LeBoucher's minor guide, has full drawings of the human body with the Chinese names for the pulses and organs and the points to be pricked. It came out in April, 1940; its two successors were awaiting publication when France fell.
While LeBoucher has only two plain, double-ended gold needles, carefully cauterized after each use, Vrignaud has a boxful of needles, long and short, thick and thin. The needles have no eyes; some have points on each end. Otherwise I could see nothing remarkable about them. Both acupuncturists showed them freely and casually, and allowed me to handle them without inhibition.
Besides the theory of pulses, acupuncture depends on meridians. It is conceived that the body is vertically encircled by girdles of energy, each affecting a given organ, just below the surface of the skin. The apparently arbitrary points at which the needle touches the body are on these meridians.
These points of vulnerability seem wholly irrational, even to Vrignaud and LeBoucher. For an ailment apparently located in the stomach the needle may be applied to the instep of the left foot, or perhaps a point behind the lobe of the right ear. There is no pretense on the part of either doctor that this singular treatment should appear other than cabalistic to one attempting to find its meaning. “We do not pretend to understand it ourselves,” both say. “We are beginners. Each year we know better how to read the pulses. It works; that is all we know.”
Before the war, LeBoucher had some correspondence with de Morant to find out whether acupuncture would cure filiariasis—the first form of elephantiasis—and also malaria. The father-translator of acupuncture replied from Paris saying that he had been unable to make any experiments, because South Sea diseases were rare in Europe. But he suggested certain places that LeBoucher might prick, and asked for an account of results. The war interrupted this correspondence, but LeBoucher looks forward to resuming it. At his age, his studies are inevitably limited. Vrignaud, on the other hand, intends to return to Paris on his first leave and study acupuncture at Saint-Louis hospital, where he first heard of it.
I asked Vrignaud his ratio of cures to treatments. (LeBoucher had said that he found liver and kidney cases most often curable.) Vrignaud's particularized list, in his slanting hand, read: “Female illnesses, neuralgia, sciatica, intercostals pains, headaches—90% successful treatments. Asthma, digestive troubles, disturbances of the liver, illnesses of the mouth and throat—80% successful. Dental pyorrhea, functional heart troubles, and pulmonary diseases—70% successful. Much less successful results were achieved on skin diseases and lockjaw.”
With his small boy nestled in his arm, Vrignaud sat in an armchair of the tiny clinic at Taravao, and gave one last bit of advice. “There is much to be studied,” he said. “Only one thing I have learned. You must never start from a fixed idea. First you give the patient a full analysis. Then you try all the pulses. Keep your mind open. Be willing to learn. Once I even cured a drunkard. One uses the needle gently. Yet there are surprises, there are many bold surprises. I am very much interested in acupuncture and I intend to follow wherever it leads.”
YANK TOEHOLD IN NORTHERN ELLICES THORN TO JAPS
Goads Tojo into Hitting Back by Air—Marines and Sailors Cling to Nanumea Under Heavy Bombing
Funafuti, Ellice Islands—September 8, 1943 (Delayed)
In a whirl of yellow sand and powdery coral dust, two jeeps spun along the bright, greenish-blue edge of the coral lagoon and pulled up to the waterside with inches to spare.
Lt. Commander H. A. Sommer, an able young pilot, his flying boat jacket already strapped on, led us into a small launch. Minutes later we were climbing through the PBY's machine-gun blister and fitting on yellow float vests. Our destination, still mentioned, from habitual secrecy, as “up north,” was Nanumea, or St. Augustine Island, America's newest thorn in the Jap-held Gilberts, 250 miles north from Funafuti, which we had held nearly a year without other progress.
“We may be able to land and may not,” said one member of the crew. “It just depends on whether we can skirt our way among those coral heads. Every lagoon and every atoll is different.”
Then the fitted cord, like that of an outboard motor, whirled the wheel of the flying boat's generator. The cabin filled with stinging gas. One motor caught and ran awhile. Then the flight engineer in his little perch reported that the two big motors had caught and turned over. A moment later the pilot ordered the whole pioneer party forward to lighten the tail. The blister windows were closed after the machine guns were swung in, and we took off in spuming spray.
Constant vigilance was maintained over the guns en route. Jap photo planes which had already been over Nanumea were sufficiently well-armed to strafe the ground, and they might find our far-ranging but slow PBY welcome meat.
With the engines' noise through the warily opened blisters filling first our ears, then all our senses, we droned on northward and Japanward over the sparkling blue sea. The slowly penciled lines on the navigator's chart lengthened as he marked, by minutes, our advance. Some officers loosened their pistols, knives and canteens—drinkable water is very rare on these atolls—dozed, or made notes.
Then came the moment when one of the machine-gunners, his headphones connecting him with Sommer, turned and peered ahead along his blister.
“The pilot says Nanumea is ahead,” he reported.
Soon we came in over what seemed a broken fragment of watermelon rind lying on the azure water. Within the curving lagoon the water was light green, speckled with coral heads.
Four times we circled, trying to land. Sommer brought our big belly down, we touched, and upsurging water obscured the closed blisters as we raced along. The expression of a young Marine captain peering through a blister grew taut.
Then Sommer gunned the motors and the plane lifted suddenly, water drops beating a tattoo on the hull. Almost instantly the green fronds passed beneath, and we barely cleared the palm-fringed end of the closed lagoon.
Again we came down and raced over the yellowish flooded reef, touched experimentally and slowly settled while water churned past the blisters. Before long, two outrigger canoes with three paddlers each came from the beach where the red-roofed cupola of a mission church peeped over the palms. Each paupau, or canoe, had a native paddler fore and aft. One paupau had a tall, blond British lieutenant in Australian field hat, the other a husky Marine lieutenant.
“We've been just about photographed to death by those damned Japs,” said the first Navy man we met as our canoe outriggers grounded on the coral beach. “Yesterday they strafed one of our small craft. I wouldn't be surprised if they were cooking up something.”
Wiping his sweaty sunglasses, this correspondent walked down the palm-sheltered trail and was given a bar of chocolate as a gift.
There was no ceremony to mark the occasion of the first aircraft landing at our farthest point north in the mid-Pacific; everyone was too busy working. Most of the marines and sailors already had foxholes built. One said: “This is better than Funafuti, because you can go down six feet without getting flooded out by the sea.”
This man little knew that within a few minutes he would be huddled in the very slit trench to which he now pointed with pride, as the Japs thundered down with twelve heavy bombers full of explosives.
When our pioneering PBY landed on an
other lagoon farther south as the sun was setting, the first beach officer who greeted us said: “You fellows had a narrow escape. Nanumea was raided by bombers just a few minutes after you left.”
Anxious for those with whom we had just been talking, we pieced together the meager details coming through. Nanumea's guns had opened up bitter fire on the Japs, who, with unusual boldness, came over apparently unprotected by fighter escort. Most significant was that the Japs spent ninety minutes over the atoll, making a dozen separate runs. Though they were at least 450 miles from their nearest air base, this methodical examination of their target, with their fuel reserve constantly diminishing, indicates the body blows being exchanged between the Jap-held Gilberts and the American-held Ellices. For the moment, the Americans hold the offensive upper hand on the island chain but the Japs are retaliating in the air.
While the Japs caused little essential damage, both the Navy and Marines suffered casualties. At the crack of dawn, another flying boat was en route to Nanumea. Our dead were laid to rest, with the coral giving them final protection.
This correspondent had an opportunity to see with what expediency our wounded were handled. Not one injured man was left on Nanumea. Loaded into the big flying boat, they flew a total of 1100 miles, making the last edge to safety in an emergency-rigged transport plane under the care of a short, red-haired doctor. Lieutenant Meyer Zelics is a psychiatrist and an expert on treating battle shock, as well as a g.p. In the transport's chilly cabin two serious stretcher cases, like the blanketed, walking wounded, shared green lime lozenges with this correspondent.
One man, somewhat bomb-shocked, stared straight ahead. The others never failed to respond when spoken to or smiled at. Both serious stretcher cases were operated on minutes after the plane's wheels touched American soil. The one who had lain on the port stretcher lived, the one who rested on the starboard side died.
This correspondent will not soon forget how the shellshocked man looked bound up in a big leather jacket, staring straight ahead.
BRAVES DEATH TO SAVE BUDDY IN JAP BOMBING
Funafuti, Ellice Islands—September 11, 1943 (Via air mail)
When Japanese bombs, aimed for our Army B-24s based on the air field, screamed down over this palm-bordered atoll through skies bathed with moonlight, a tall, 22-year-old marine, Howard Barling, dived from his foxhole. Barling, a well-spoken former General Motors timekeeper in Pontiac, Michigan, had dug the foxhole, with his fellow marines, into hard-as-shale coral.
Somebody yelled: “Here they come.”
One bomb hit Barling's fale, which is Samoan for hut. Another hit the M-shaped foxhole directly.
“I felt the concussion,” says Barling. “Then dirt poured over me.”
Even as he struggled from the dirt, Barling remembered seeing Sergeant Chester Woodward, of Springfield, Massachusetts, beside him in the trench. Nothing was visible of Woodward now but his helmet.
“I dug his face free so Woodie could see and breathe. His poncho still held him down. I dug away on that until it came free.”
Barling remembered having seen another member of their squad lying face up in the dirt and started in his direction. Then an Army bomber loaded with bombs and gasoline, which had been burning, fizzed warningly.
Woodward dropped to the ground. The bomber blew up, wiping out everything in sight.
Both men plunged into a tiny swamp in the middle of the atoll and cooled their burning bodies. Then they started back. They found the man they had been looking for, who was crying: “Get me out of here.” They hauled him free and threw three pails of water on him, but he kept on crying: “Get me out of here.”
A sergeant led the shocked marine to an aid station. Next the two found Calvin Kilpatrick, who had been engaged in distilling drinking water from the sea when the blast came and buried him to the knees. They helped him free himself.
Three fales were burning and crackling around them, furnishing light for Jap bombardiers still cruising overhead.
With the earlier bomb burst, Kilpatrick had pulled William Sleider, gravely wounded, from one burning hut. “They got me,” he said. Now three men hauled him down behind sandbags.
From the burning airplane, .50-caliber machine-gun shells were thudding and spitting against the sandbags. Suddenly another fale blew up and turned into a bonfire. Barling says: “Woodie decided it was too hot to continue there. He changed his mind about bandaging Sleider and loaded him on his back. I got a flat board—I think it was a door blown off a fale—and we put Sleider on that.”
Sleider had been a circus freak specializing in grotesque expressions, and also a fire eater and a human pin cushion. He struggled for a long time in the hospital against his wounds, but finally died.
Barling was recently decorated with the Silver Star and Woodward was strongly commended.
YANKS ON ARUNDEL PROFIT BY POORER TACTICS OF JAPS
With Advanced American Troops on Arundel, Solomon Islands—October 7, 1943 (Delayed)
The American forces that attacked Arundel Island profited by a marked decline in the quality of Jap infantry tactics in the Solomons. American casualties were relatively few, though the engagement was extended.
Comparing terrains, this correspondent finds that the coral surfaces of the central Solomons group present problems of digging in and use of tanks about equal to those imposed by Papua's and New Guinea's fetid marshlands. As far as malaria in the Solomons is concerned, Arundel, New Georgia, Vella Lavella and Rendova islands are far less frequented by anopheles mosquitoes than is Guadalcanal.
The Japs split up their forces on the northern edge of Arundel and allowed themselves to be killed off separately, like segments of a severed snake. A few high officers remain to tell the tale of their debacle to the Son of Heaven, to whom they are directly subordinated. Many doubtless were killed in the several score barges blasted by the five-inch guns of American destroyers. But before they could leave Arundel—whose terrain only this correspondent has covered afoot—the colonel of this crack 13th Infantry Regiment was killed, as were two battalion commanders.
One regiment of our 25th Division, after walking 50 miles in 13½ hours, has all its officers intact. Although this division will have been outside the continental United States for three years this month, its morale remains good. Their attached artillery, which had faced more than 300 air raids in New Georgia and Guadalcanal, once saved all its supplies and ammunition when a determined horde of six Jap dive bombers and five Zeros raided our landing craft near Kokorana Island, southeast of Munda. So accurate was our defensive fire that the enemy bombs were ineffectual.
The Japs dragged a 77-mm field gun through twelve miles of jungle and began shelling the bivouac point-blank. Heading forth with a Browning automatic rifle, Hollis Johnson of Alabama alone killed five Japs and silenced the field gun.
This division is a typical American melting pot, with many Indian members and a considerable number of real or transplanted Hawaiians—like Lt. Colonel Robert Louis Stevenson of Honolulu. Thin, alert Major John Burden, who was a practicing physician in Honolulu and speaks Japanese well, taught the division to prepare and eat Japanese food. When the last Jap barges left Bairoko for Arundel, Burden was close enough to hear a defiant Jap commander give three banzais aloud as a pledge he would someday return in the Emperor's name. Later this challenge was found nailed to a tree and written in English, saying that while Americans might never forget Pearl Harbor, the Japs would concentrate on winning the next American-Japanese war if not this one.
When the 25th Division commander, Major General Joseph Lawton Collins of New Orleans, talks to his men, he says: “The Jap is a tenacious soldier but he's not so big and so strong and smart as you, and his equipment is not so good.”
They have found this to be true. Collins also banned the use of the word “sniper” which has a foolish, panicky sound. He allows only “rifleman.”
One decorated soldier summarized his battle with a Jap: “He missed. I didn't miss.”
TINY, DEMOCRATIC TONGA SALTS AWAY DOLLARS, AND WAITS TO SEE THE ADS
Tongatapu, Tonga Group—October 11, 1943 (Via air mail)
Tiniest and least-known democracy of the United Nations, ruled with a gentle hand by a queen of giant proportions, the Kingdom of Tonga has withstood the distortions of war better than anyone ever expected.
Queen Salote (or Charlotte) Tupou, who celebrates this month the quarter-centennial of her reign, has been able to bring together her cabinet, her parliament, her British advisers and her American visiting commanders in a way that augurs well for the stability of the sole surviving house among the great fallen Polynesian dynasties. With the battle fleet and armies of the United States standing between it and Japan, and its political help confined to the British, this last remaining queen of the South Seas island empires can look forward to another two years of serene reign.
Queen Salote is 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighs more than 300 pounds. She is 43, a Methodist by faith, and the mother of two princes. A serious, dignified and intelligent ruler (contrary to the occasional thoughtless caricature to which her unusual physical dimensions have exposed her), Tonga's third sovereign in a hundred years has busied herself making easier the lot of those Americans and British who have been her guests since Pearl Harbor. In Tonga, the smallest of the powers at war with the Axis, the United Nations have an intelligent, politically alert, democratic ally, who has kept its own house in good order.
The independent Kingdom of Tonga—and very insistent is Queen Charlotte on its independence—lies on a line roughly between Fiji and New Zealand. It is a chain of islands, wholly Polynesian, equable in climate and healthy, and lying on the outer periphery of archipelagoes whose disposition has become extremely important to American interests in Australasia.
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