None But The Brave: A Novel of the Surgeons of World War II

by Anthony A. Goodman

  Hamm fell to his knees behind a truck lying on its side, still burning slightly. McClintock fell down next to him.

  “Holy shit, Hamm! Oh, dear God!”

  Hamm said nothing as he shook his head in disbelief. He had expected the destruction: the wrecked vehicles, the fire, the craters, the scorched sand, the debris of unnamed and unnamable military gear.

  But the bodies! He had no idea there would be so many bodies. Hamm had seen his share of trauma in the emergency room: the damage done by five thousand pounds of a steel car colliding with a hundred and sixty pounds of human flesh, or by an ounce of lead entering the body at a thousand feet per second, or by four or five drunks in a brawl.

  Nothing in the world could have prepared him for this.

  All at once, Hamm’s stomach tightened. Even with all his experience in the many ways humans can destroy other humans, he knew he was going to be sick. His breathing increased until he was panting like a puppy on a hot day. But he couldn’t stop. He knelt there in the bloodied sand and puked up the last of what remained in his stomach. He looked at McClintock, who had the same expression on his face and was puffing away as well. Then, Antonelli and Higgenson crashed in and fell down alongside the truck.

  “Oh, Jesus, Doc. Look at this. Jesus!” Antonelli said.

  Higgenson was, as usual, silent. His face said it all. There was no obvious fear. No revulsion. A quiet resignation was written there, a terrible sorrow for all the fallen men. For the first time in Hamm’s life, he envied another man’s complete faith in God. His own faith fell far short. He could see it in Higgenson’s eyes, and he was sad that he did not have similar spiritual support as he entered this modern-day Valley of Death.

  The lifeless bodies of not hundreds but thousands of men littered the wet and bloodied beach. They lay in every imaginable pose. Were it not for the uniform and the rifle, some could have been asleep in the sand on a chilly June afternoon, their faces cradled in the crook of an elbow. Others lay face up, in a pose of surrender, like a sleeping baby with one arm extended and the other cocked behind an ear. Still others were in pairs, and threes, and fours, victims of a single blast from a mortar shell or machine gun burst. Others hung like laundry from the steel beach obstacles and barbed wire. Those men, suspended in the air, did not look as much at peace as those nestled in the sand. Then there were the others, or the parts of others, mixed and spread over the sandy floor without order or reason. Hamm thought of a junk yard filled with used car parts, and he shuddered.

  He could not tell which limb belonged to which soldier—sometimes even which head. The ghastly panorama, the remains of the first day of the invasion, was so bizarre, so grotesque, that the impact was at first nearly lost on him.

  Can the pieces all fit together to make a man again? he wondered. A terrible thought. The sheer scope of the carnage swept over him with the realization that these were the men that they had come to save; had they arrived sooner, some of these souls whose bodies littered the sand might still be alive. He was ashamed of the frail safety that the crippled Rhino ferry and the LST had afforded him while these young men were dying there on Dog White Beach.

  Several GIs flung themselves down in the sand alongside the wrecked truck, blocking Hamm’s view and interrupting his thoughts.

  “Who the fuck are you guys?” asked the sergeant who knelt gasping in the sand. He looked at Hamm’s insignia of rank and added, “Uh, sir?”

  He set down the end of a litter bearing the body of a wounded GI. At the other end of the litter, a medic was also gasping, trying to get a brief second’s rest. A third man carried a plasma bottle, holding it high in the air while maintaining pressure on blood-saturated gauze against the GI’s upper chest.

  “Well, we’re supposed to be a field hospital in a little while,” Hamm said. “A clearing station right now, I guess.” He quickly looked over the wounded man and moved to the side of the stretcher. The man was pale and breathing with difficulty. His breath came in short panting gasps as if starving for air, as if he had been carrying the stretcher himself.

  “What’ve you got here?” Hamm said.

  “Chest wound,” the sergeant replied. “Got to get him back to the LSTs, ASAP.”

  “He ain’t gonna make it to that LST, Doc,” Antonelli said to Hamm, already clearing away the bloody dressing and taking fresh supplies out of his own kit.

  Hamm moved nearer the chest and looked at the wound. He tore open the GI’s field jacket and pressed his ear to the man’s chest. Bubbles were coming out of the hole just above the nipple on the left side.

  “He’s got a sucking wound of the chest, Sergeant,” Hamm said. “He needs a chest tube right now, like this minute, or he’ll never make it off this beach.”

  Hamm turned to Antonelli, who was already pulling a thick rubber tube out of a sterile cloth wrapper. He handed it to Hamm, who grabbed a large curved Kelly clamp from the pack. He held it in his bare hand—no time for sterile technique there on the beach. They could deal with infections later. Seconds would count on this one.

  Hamm grabbed the tip of the tubing with the tip of the steel clamp, skipping an incision, and shoving it forcefully through the bullet hole in the man’s chest. Pretty crude stuff. The man cried out with pain, arching his back and rising off the stretcher for a moment. Then he relaxed and fell back.

  A large volume of blood poured from the tubing onto the stretcher and the sand, clotting and making a puddle of crimson jelly next to Hamm’s knee. He forced the air out of the soldier’s chest with one hand, while Antonelli put the open end of the tubing under the water in the man’s canteen, sealing it from the atmosphere. Bubbles appeared in the canteen as the air left the man’s chest, the water sealing off any reentry. Then Hamm ripped open a paper pouch with his teeth and sprinkled the wound with Sulfanilamide powder. Antonelli taped the chest tube to the top of the canteen, while Hamm secured the rest of it to the soldier’s skin with more tape. No sutures. It all took less than two minutes.

  The man was looking pinker already as his lung expanded, but he was not nearly out of the woods yet. Along with the air bubbles, telltale traces of blood were also coming through the tube and into the canteen. He was bleeding internally.

  “OK, sergeant, get him out of here and back to the ships. He still may need that chest cracked,” Hamm said. “And give me his first aid supplies: tape and bandages, sulfur powder. He’s not going to need them now, and we do.” The sergeant handed over the man’s entire pack.

  “Hang on a second,” said McClintock putting a hand on the sergeant’s arm. “Let me see if he needs to be intubated.” McClintock took out his stethoscope, slipped it under the torn shirt, and listened to both sides of the man’s chest. Out of habit, he held up a hand for quiet as he listened for the man’s breath sounds. It was a ridiculous gesture there on the beach with guns blasting away from both sides.

  Hamm chuckled to himself, looking up to see if the Germans would stop the shelling so that McClintock could hear the man’s breath sounds.

  “OK. Breath sounds are great. Well, not great, but good enough. No need to tube him. Get him out of here.”

  The sergeant and the medic struggled to their knees, then to their feet. Crouching low, they ran toward the water and the LST that had just delivered the medics to the beach.

  “Now what?” McClintock asked.

  “I’d say we have to get off this beach and set up a clearing station somewhere. And get our supplies—wherever the hell they are.”

  “I haven’t seen one damned truck on this beach with a red cross on it, have you?”

  Hamm looked around. The beach was littered with bodies and craters and the smoking debris of burning vehicles. It looked like a wasteland.

  “No. Nothing. Where do you think they might be?”

  McClintock looked back toward the water and motioned with his head. “Back there, I guess. Underwater.”

  McClintock and Hamm remained kneeling in the protection of the smoldering wreck. Neither spoke
for a moment.

  “Sir,” Higgenson said, “there’s an antitank ditch about a hundred yards inland and to the right. I passed it when I was lookin’ for bodies.”

  They all looked in the direction Higgenson was pointing.

  “You won’t see it from here because it’s completely dug out and level with the sand. But it’s deep and wide: deep enough to stop a tank from crossing it, and wide enough, too. We could set up in there.”

  “In a ditch?” McClintock said.

  “Yessir.”

  McClintock looked at Hamm and said. “It ain’t the Philly General Hospital, man, but it’s protected. I think Dick’s got a point. We can’t stay here. We can’t even do anything here. Might as well try for the ditch. At worst, we can hole up there until we get some supplies. Maybe even do some good.”

  Hamm shook his head from side to side, smiling. “Let’s do it.”

  They crouched for a minute as they assessed the intensity of the firing from the German gun emplacements at the top of the hills along the beach. Small arms fire was sporadic, but didn’t seem to be threatening them. The few heavy guns left were concentrating on the landing craft.

  Higgenson took off, leading the way. McClintock and Hamm raced after him, with Antonelli bringing up the rear. The four ran in a crouch, stumbling over debris and body parts. From time to time, one of them would stop and kneel beside a body. He would roll the body onto its back and feel for the carotid pulse in the neck. The battle gear made it impossible to get to the chest. Radial pulses at the wrist were often hard to feel in the wounded if they were in shock, even if the heart was beating. The first ten bodies they examined were dead and had been dead for several hours. Then Hamm saw Higgenson stooped at one body a few yards away. He could see Higgenson do a double take as he felt for the pulse.

  Hamm scrambled over to them. The soldier was pale with the waxy dry-eyed stare of the dead. His skin was cold and clammy. To Higgenson’s surprise, he felt just the faint suggestion of a throb under his fingertips. Nothing certain. Just a hint. He tore open the man’s field jacket, noticing as he did so the blood coming out of a small bullet hole in the upper chest on the left side. The blood was moving! It was not the clotted dark color of an old wound, but real blood flow. Such bleeding should have alarmed Higgenson, but it made him smile.

  “Son of a gun! You’re alive, man!”

  He tore open the man’s shirt and put his ear to the chest. “You’ve got a heartbeat! Hey, Doc, he’s alive! Barely.”

  He looked for Antonelli, who was still stopping at body after body, running hundred-yard, low hurtles as he careened toward the tank ditch.

  “Hey, Gene! Over here. I’ve got one! A live one!”

  Antonelli stopped. He turned, trying to figure out what Higgenson had said. One look told him. There was Higgenson opening up his field pack and rummaging through the contents. Nothing else but a live GI could make him do that. In that very instant, the beach around them erupted, driving sand into their eyes and faces. They flattened against the sand, impotently covering their heads with their arms. The sand continued to fly, and they realized at once that they were bracketed.

  Hamm flattened out in the sand behind a small mound of dead GIs and waited. Antonelli got to his knees and set up like a sprinter in the starting blocks. Then he burst forward screaming as he ran.

  “You dumb motherfuckers, don’t you see the red cross on my helmet?” He dodged and weaved as he went.

  “Shittyassratfuckingcocksuckingkrautassholes!” he called to the German gunners, never stopping to catch his breath. He covered the distance to Higgenson, drawing fire as he went. For a moment, Hamm thought he might be endangering all of them if he kept going in their direction.

  Hamm took a deep breath, then rose and sprinted to where Higgenson was working with the GI’s body, in the direction Antonelli was running.

  Higgenson rose slightly and dragged the body toward the cover of some anti-tank hardware a few yards away. When Antonelli was only yards away, the German firing ceased. He tumbled into a depression in the sand and took shelter behind the crossed steel beams.

  Hamm tumbled in seconds later, practically on top of Antonelli. He shook the sand from his face and nodded to Higgenson. “What’ve we got?” he said, gasping.

  Higgenson held a pressure dressing hard against the entry wound in the man’s chest.

  “Just a single shot through the chest. But he’s pretty shocky. I’m gonna hold pressure here. Gene, you start some plasma, then we’ll get him to the ditch. What else, Doc?”

  Hamm quickly evaluated the situation. “Keep on doing what you’re doing,” he said. “I’ll get my gear out.”

  Antonelli quickly started an IV line, attaching one of the two bottles of plasma he carried in his own pack. He had no idea where he could get any more. But now it was first come, first served. They had a patient who needed the plasma—maybe all of it. They would worry about the next wounded man when the time came.

  Hamm tried to start another IV in the other arm, but there were no veins to be found.

  Antonelli grabbed the strap of the plasma bottle in his teeth and using both arms, hoisted the GI by the legs. Higgenson took the man under the armpits, holding the compression dressing with his left hand. At an eye signal, they both lifted and began to run and stumble their way to the tank ditch. Hamm followed, dragging all the rest of the gear behind him. Unencumbered by the heavy body, he moved a lot faster than the medics could.

  McClintock was just tumbling into the ditch as Hamm got there. None of the four had come across a single living soldier except for this one.

  As they settled into the ditch, Hamm was shocked at the size and depth of it. It was several hundred feet from end to end, parallel with the ocean, and almost twelve feet wide. It was dug down to more than seven feet in depth, with seawater in the bottom.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” McClintock said. “Look at this place, will you?” They immediately began to unload their packs. Suddenly, there was a shower of sand as Antonelli and Higgenson scrambled over the edge of the ditch, dragging the wounded GI behind them. They slid down into the wet bottom of the ditch pulling the man with them, then cradled the wounded GI across their knees to keep him out of the water.

  “Hey, Doc,” Antonelli said to McClintock. “Look what we found.”

  “Looks dead,” said McClintock.

  “Unh unh,” said Higgenson, shaking his head slowly and gasping for breath.

  Higgenson and Antonelli cradled the GI’s body across their knees, and opened his field jacket to expose the entry wound in the left upper chest wall. They all could see the chest move slightly. It wasn’t much, but the man was trying to breathe, trying to live.

  “Ted, break out whatever gear you’ve got,” Hamm said as he opened his own pack.

  “I haven’t got much,” said McClintock. “I’ll do what I can with an IV morphine drip to start. But let me get him intubated first.”

  McClintock took out a steel laryngoscope and an airway from his field jacket pocket. There wasn’t going to be much sterility for a while. He put the blade of the scope down into the man’s mouth and, pushing the tongue down, searched for the vocal cords. When he could see them, he slid the tubular airway between the cords and into the trachea, more by feel than sight. He taped the tubing in place then squeezed the black rubber respirator bag, breathing for the young GI. The chest moved up and down. It was only air: there was no pure oxygen or anesthetic to use at the moment. But, mercifully, the man was unconscious and felt nothing.

  Hamm felt again for the pulse. Then raised the soldier’s eyelid and looked for a pupillary reflex. He didn’t see many signs of life.

  “He’s got no volume, Ted, he’s almost bled out.” Hamm said. “I’ve got to get some plasma into this guy or he’s dead.”

  The plasma wasn’t dripping. The one puny IV was not going to do it. Too slow. Hamm looked carefully at the two IV lines.

  “It’s blown. Must’ve come out while you were dragging hi
m.”

  “What do you want to do?” McClintock asked. “His veins are all collapsed.”

  “I’m going to crack his chest and try to control whatever’s bleeding. Otherwise, the plasma’s just going to run in and right out the hole again. You’ve got the airway covered. I can’t think of anything else.”

  “You’re gonna crack him in a foxhole? Right here?” McClintock was incredulous.

  “What have we got to lose? He hasn’t got much more than a couple of minutes anyway. He might even be brain dead already,” Hamm answered, lifting the man’s eyelids and looking at the pupils. “Pupils are equal and reactive though. Let’s go.”

  He rummaged around in his pack and found a large scalpel handle. As Higgenson worked to clean off the chest as best he could with water from his canteen, Antonelli made ready another bottle of plasma, pulling out the useless IVs.

  With the scalpel blade loaded on the handle, Hamm drew a long incision across the man’s right chest, cutting deeply into the space between the ribs. Ominously, only a small amount of very dark blood flowed from the incision. As his blade entered the chest, a soft hiss of air came from the injured lung. McClintock’s artificial respiration just kept up with the leak.

  Hamm inserted a large steel chest retractor between the ribs and quickly cranked it open with the ratcheted handle. There was a loud sound of two ribs cracking

  “Look at that, guys.”

  Hamm was pointing to the heart, where there was a shrapnel tear in the right auricle. Blood was clotted around the heart muscle edges, but more blood was streaming from the hole in the heart itself.

  “Give me that IV tubing, Gene. This ought to put the plasma where it’s needed.”

  Antonelli handed Hamm the tip of the IV tubing attached to the second plasma bottle. Hamm took it and shoved it inelegantly through the ragged hole in the auricle and into the right atrium of the heart. He held it in place with his fingertips and said, “Open her up wide, Gene.”