by Tim Townsend
Geist was an accomplished musician, and when he wasn’t playing Gospel hymns for Gerecke, typing up the chaplain’s reports, driving him around in his jeep, organizing the chapel, or riding his bicycle, “Old Faithful,” in service of whatever Gerecke needed him to do, he also played piano in the Ninety-Eighth General Hospital Orchestra.
Gerecke and Geist became close to Rev. O. E. Owens, the local vicar in Hermitage, and his wife, Win. The couple had twin daughters, Menna and Eryl, and Gerecke visited their home for dinner at least once each week. Pastor Owens helped the hospital chaplains when the patient load grew unmanageable. The Owens home was one of about three hundred British homes near Hermitage that welcomed members of the Ninety-Eighth during the hospital unit’s yearlong stay.
Sullivan encouraged exchange visits for his staff with other Allied bases and British civilians. He invited both groups to dances on post and loaned out the Ninety-Eighth General Hospital Orchestra to other nearby units for their dances. He believed that recreation was an important component for patient recovery and staff morale, so he encouraged a lot of it. Immediately after the unit’s arrival, he asked that three movies be shown each week. Over time there were nightly screenings in two locations on the hospital campus, and Sullivan requisitioned a local projectionist on a full-time basis.
There was a heavy emphasis on physical conditioning and reconditioning at the Ninety-Eighth, and the unit offered daily calisthenics, road marches, and bike rides. A large Nissen hut was built to house a gymnasium. The unit organized frequent dances, including a monthly dance at the Corn Exchange—a nineteenth-century building once used as a corn and wool market in nearby Newbury that had been transformed into a public entertainment space—for the medical detachment. The nurses organized weekly dances at the Officers and Nurses Club, and enlisted men invited local girls to their dances.
Besides a dedicated chapel, another bonus, Gerecke noted, was that the army had finally supplied the Ninety-Eighth with a Catholic chaplain. The unit was made up of 56 percent Protestants by the time it reached England. But more than a third of the Ninety-Eighth was Catholic, and Gerecke was desperate for a priest to help minister to them.
That promising situation didn’t last. Geist reported to Gerecke that the new Catholic chaplain treated his own clerk badly. “Stay out of it,” Gerecke advised Geist. But not long afterward, as Gerecke approached the chapel office, he heard yelling, followed by a distinct slapping sound. Gerecke walked into the office and saw the private holding his jaw. He asked what had happened, but the clerk rushed past, and the priest ignored him. Gerecke reported the incident to Sullivan, who was Catholic. Within days Sullivan had the priest removed and put in a request with the Chief of Chaplains office for a replacement.
As Gerecke settled into a routine, he was pleased with how his colleagues were participating in worship and making it easy for patients, too. “Our Medical Staff is cooperating in every way that ambulatory patients may attend divine services,” Gerecke wrote. “Many nurses attend with their charges.”
In May, he led seventeen services for more than 500 people and had visited 750 patients in the hospital’s wards. Gerecke met with every patient, either on the day he arrived or the next day. The chaplain received a daily sheet with the religious affiliation, ward number, and operation schedule for each new patient. Those scheduled for immediate surgery took priority on his visitation list. When the chaplain visited with patients, he typically started with a friendly greeting to everyone, then a walk up and down the rows of beds, stopping at the side of the most seriously wounded for a brief prayer with any patients who were conscious and able. Each time he met with a patient, he left a folder “containing a spiritual lift”—usually Christian tracts supplied by religious organizations in the United States and the name of the appropriate chaplain, based on the soldier’s designated religious preference.
During one of his rounds, Gerecke discovered a soldier with a serious head injury. He’d lived through his operation but had permanently lost his sight. The soldier was a Missouri-Synod Lutheran from Nebraska who had performed his confirmation in German. After Gerecke said a prayer in German, the soldier wouldn’t let go of his hand. Finally, he said, softly, “God, help me see again.” The man wanted to know how his family would treat him now. Would his girlfriend still want to marry him? Gerecke had plenty of hospital ministry experience in peacetime, but sitting with young men whose lives had just changed so dramatically was new, and it took him some time to get used to it.
The body of a pilot named Henry Smith had been ripped apart by shrapnel. He was close to death for nearly a week after he arrived at the hospital. His nurse, one of Gerecke’s Christian flock, asked the patient to allow the chaplain to pray with him. Breathing heavily, the pilot’s words came in short bursts as he labored to say the Lord’s Prayer with the chaplain. As they prayed, both Gerecke and the nurse dropped to their knees next to the pilot’s bed. It was the first devotional prayer Smith had ever been part of, he told the chaplain later, and in the coming weeks he would not go to sleep until Gerecke visited his bed at 10:00 P.M. each night to pray with him.
Gerecke also talked to hundreds of men in the hospital’s rehabilitation ward. The army had designated the Ninety-Eighth a Neurological Center in addition to its status as a general hospital. The influx of patients suffering from what the army then called battle fatigue meant another round of expansion to accommodate a program for soldiers suffering from the psychological horrors of war. The neuropsychiatric recovery section had its own corner of the hospital campus with 120 beds. Here patients were screened, sorted, and organized into platoons.
The symptoms may have been less severe than those Gerecke had been accustomed to in his visits to the asylums of St. Louis during the Depression, but these psychological wounds were fresher. The men were given lectures about combat fatigue and what the army was doing to try and help them deal with it. Most were given duties around the hospital, and after observation, some returned to duty. In the first two months of the hospital’s British operation, 829 officers and enlisted men came through the doors of its neuropsychiatric division. More than 450 of those men were sent back to the United States.
AS GERECKE SETTLED INTO his new job in the military, back in St. Louis Alma’s loneliness was mitigated slightly by an easier lifestyle. With three fewer bodies in the house, and money coming in from Henry’s army paychecks—the first real money she’d seen in years—Alma could enjoy life a bit more. Hank, Henry and Alma’s eldest and a first lieutenant, was sending his mother $100 a month from his army paycheck. Alma added some of that to what Henry was sending her, but she saved much of it for Hank (he later used it for his wedding to Millie Curtis, a pretty army nurse he met in France). Corky, the couple’s second child, drew only a corporal’s paycheck, so there wasn’t much left over to send home to Mom. But the financial contributions from Henry, Hank, and Corky went only so far.
Like most of Henry’s cars, the family’s 1939 Chrysler Imperial came from an estate sale, and St. Louis Lutheran City Mission donors had helped the pastor pay for it. When Henry left for Harvard, he wasn’t sure if the army would send him overseas. He wanted to keep the car—probably worth about $1,200—so that he wouldn’t have to go through the trouble of finding another one if he was asked to return to St. Louis and serve the war effort from there. Alma didn’t drive, and she had wanted Henry to sell the Imperial before he left for Harvard.
Instead, Henry made a deal with a friend—a woman named Rosella—to use the car while he was away. In May 1944, Henry sent a letter to his former secretary, Dot Williams, to help smooth things over with Alma. “Dot, if you can do something about the car business, I shall thank you for the rest of my life,” he wrote. “Mrs. G. insists I sell it. For the sake of peace, I must sell it. The Hitch: Rosella does not want to deal with Mrs. G. . . . Maybe you can be the mediator as a special favor to me? Mrs. [Gerecke] claims she’s persecuted because another woman is driving our car. Of course, Dot, you must be very
subtle about this. If Rosella gives you an opening, just offer to lend a hand. Thanks, Dearie. I’m really anxious to get out of the dog-house.”
Henry and Alma were both flirts, but Alma was beautiful, so her flirtations got her things. Apparently Dot wasn’t able to broker a deal between Alma and Rosella, so when one of Alma’s admirers offered to buy the car, telling her he’d take it off her hands for $600, she smiled and took the deal. She sent her husband $300 in England and bought a fur coat with her half.
FOR THE FIRST SIX weeks or so, the Ninety-Eighth functioned, as advertised, as a general hospital for American and Allied troops based in the United Kingdom. It also served as an outpatient clinic for thousands of GIs, treating eye, ear, nose, and throat; dental; venereal; dermatological; orthopedic; and neuropsychiatric conditions. The hospital was only fifteen miles east of the Ramsbury and Membury airfields, and in June, as the D-day landings began, the Allies used the Ninety-Eighth as a transit hospital for air evacuations from the Continent. The Ninety-Eighth was a big, busy place, and the busier it got, the bigger it had to become. As more patients arrived, the hospital expanded. Tents rose to accommodate 345 more beds and extra supplies.
The hospital had become its own small town. The unit built two messes—one for officers, one for enlisted men—and installed electric warming tables. The 786th Airborne Engineers helped the hospital’s own men build gravel roads between wards. Twenty British civilians worked at the hospital as stenographers, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, seamstresses, laborers, stokers, and sewage attendants. The original sewage system was inadequate for the new hospital’s numbers and had to be expanded. The unit built a combination post office and barbershop in one Nissen hut.
Six ambulances—really just retrofitted buses—supplied by the Newbury Chapter of the British Civilian Defense Organization picked up patients from one of the two airfields and brought them back to the hospital, where a receiving officer and assistants sorted and assigned the patients to the appropriate wards. There a ward officer checked casts and bandages and separated the patients into “evacuables” and “non-evacuables.” When the officer recorded enough evacuables to fill a train (usually 292 patients), the patients were put back on a bus or ambulance and taken to Newbury Race Course to load onto the train, which delivered them to static hospitals in and around London for long-term treatment.
From June to November 1944, the unit received 16,380 patients from the front lines, about 95 percent of which were evacuated by train and treated elsewhere. The Ninety-Eighth’s job was, actually, to stop the bleeding. They were treating men almost directly off the battlefield, trying to stabilize as many as they could and then get them out the door before more came in on the next flights.
As the Allies invaded Normandy that June, the army promoted Gerecke to captain, and he became the ranking chaplain officer at the hospital. (Another priest, Father Walsh, had by now replaced the problematic Catholic chaplain.)
Leaning on his old Moments of Comfort radio program, both in title and in feel, Gerecke instituted “Moments of Prayer,” a short daily devotion at 3:15 P.M. in the chapel. “This spot offers daily opportunity to ambulatory patients and members of our personnel to meet in the Chapel for prayer,” he wrote. “I read a portion of the Scripture and conduct the prayers during which time my clerk does a soft background of Gospel melodies. The attendance is small. The Chapel is too far removed from the patients.”
The chapel’s distance from the hospital’s living and working areas led to another annoyance for the chaplain. He began noticing used condoms discarded in the vicinity of the chapel. First a few condoms, then many more as weeks went by. Gerecke complained to an embarrassed Sullivan that the wooded area around the chapel had apparently become a desirable location for clandestine sex among staff members.
But the chapel’s distance from the wards never kept the Ninety-Eighth staff from summoning Gerecke when he was needed. One evening, a nurse called and asked him to report quickly to one of the wards housing the most seriously wounded. When Gerecke arrived, he made his way through the flurry of doctors and nurses to the correct patient. “God bless you, son,” Gerecke said into the man’s ear as he sat down next to the bed. The soldier’s eyes opened, and he saw the cross on Gerecke’s uniform. He gave the chaplain a sad smile and said he’d been brought up in a Christian home. Gerecke said the Lord’s Prayer, and the soldier followed by praying the Twenty-Third Psalm: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want . . .” Gerecke sat with him, and later, when a nurse came by with another needleful of morphine, the soldier told her she was wasting her time. As he lay dying, the soldier looked at Gerecke, “The Lord is my shepherd,” he said again.
Gerecke encountered only three atheists when he was with the Ninety-Eighth. One saw him from several beds away, as the chaplain was working his way from patient to patient. “Don’t bother about me, I’m an atheist,” he called out. Another smiled when Gerecke tried to hand him a devotional booklet and suggested the chaplain spend his time elsewhere. The third said he hadn’t had time for religion before the war and refused to take it up until he could consider it more seriously when he returned home. Gerecke prayed at the beds of these men and blamed himself that he couldn’t bring them around to the faith. “I failed to win any of these atheists,” he said.
To mitigate the frenetic pace, long hours, and grim work, Sullivan tried to keep morale up with his team. Weekly bus trips took members of the command to Bournemouth, Oxford, or Stratford-Upon-Avon. As long as it was possible, everyone got one day off duty each week, and an occasional forty-eight-hour pass. Enlisted men who wanted to visit family, or visit cities in England, Scotland, or Wales, got five-day furloughs. Nurses could visit family, and those who were married were encouraged to visit their husbands if they were stationed in England. Each night, buses took off-duty staff members on Liberty Runs to Newbury. On the hospital campus, the unit put two Nissen huts together to form a patient dayroom—102 feet long by 16 feet wide—with a brick fireplace at each end, a bar, dartboards, a Ping-Pong table, pool and snooker tables, a radio, a library, a phonograph with records (classical and popular), a piano with sheet music, books, newspapers, British and American magazines, and writing tables. A hospital library stocked eighteen hundred books. The Ninety-Eighth basketball team—complete with uniforms supplied by the Special Services Division—practiced on a backboard near the rehab center and entered the Airborne League.
By August, Gerecke was visiting 2,000 patients each month and counseling more than 150 staff members. He made it a practice to seek out each member of the 650-member-strong Ninety-Eighth General Hospital staff to deliver a personal greeting when it was his or her birthday. Or, as the chaplain called it, “birthday anniversary.” “You only have one birthday,” he always said. “The rest of them are anniversaries of your birthday.”
The hospital was chaotic, with medics moving hundreds of patients in and out of the various wards every hour of the day. The staff was overworked, and it showed at chapel, but Gerecke knew the reasons and tried to bring faith to the tired doctors and nurses, rather than wait for them to come to him. “There is splendid cooperation among the doctors, the nurses and the Chaplains,” Gerecke wrote. But “members of our unit find it difficult to attend services due to the present status of our hospital.”
He began saying short devotions at 12:45 each day, making it as easy as possible for the staff to take advantage of a short spiritual breather during the lunch hour. As candles on the altar flickered and Geist softly played a hymn in the background, Gerecke read a verse or two from the Bible, then simply prayed. Between prayers there was what the chaplain called a “be still and know that I am God” silence.
“It makes your heart skip a beat to see enlisted men, nurses, doctors and a few patients on their knees speaking to God,” he wrote. “It’s the sweetest ten-minute period in the whole day.” Doctors and nurses handed Gerecke the names of the seriously sick. “Prayers for the sick ones here are my very own, and are ex cord
e”—from the heart—“to the nth degree,” he wrote. “Others speak to me concerning their loved ones scattered all over the world.”
Gerecke’s loved ones were certainly scattered. That made an unexpected visit from his oldest son the highlight of an otherwise hellish September. Hank arrived in England and traveled straight from London to Hermitage. Gerecke picked him up from the train station at the Newbury racetrack in an ambulance. They hugged tight, overjoyed at the sight of each other, then retreated to Gerecke’s quarters to catch up.
Hank, an officer with the army’s military police, left in the morning but came back later that month, when the two went into town and had tea at the community hall. A four-piece orchestra playing the hall noticed the Yanks and began playing the “Star-Spangled Banner.” But father and son were engrossed in conversation and didn’t catch on at first. Finally, Gerecke noticed and both men scrambled to their feet, hands over hearts, just as the band finished the tune.
Gerecke took Hank to visit Rev. Owens and his family, and Hank attended his father’s chapel services. On Saturday night, they went to the officers’ club and Gerecke introduced Hank to his colleagues. Everywhere they went, Hank noticed that his father was greeted with beaming smiles, backslaps, and booming greetings of “Hey, Chappie!” or “Padre!” At the officers’ club Hank was amazed and amused that a lot of the prettiest nurses were flirting with his father. “Dad, those girls are hitting on you,” Hank said to the chaplain. “Happens all the time,” Gerecke said smiling. “They think I’m safe.”