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

by Anthony A. Goodman

  Hidden beneath the seething movement of hundreds of men and machines was a plan. An organization. A well-rehearsed play. The two years that they had spent in the English countryside had not been wasted after all. The mind-numbing drills that went on rain or shine—mostly rain—day after day, month after month, were now evolving into one of the most important engines of modern warfare: a highly mobile army field hospital.

  Schneider stood for a moment about fifty yards from the village and watched as the tents went up and crates of materials were carried to their proper place, continually scanning the bustle for Ted and Hamm. Generators were set in place and filled with diesel. Power lines were connected. Latrines were dug away from the tents but close enough to fall under the protective eyes of the infantry. The whole operation was a thing of beauty. After so many hours of helplessness and disorganization, of being lost and fired upon by superior forces, of being totally unable to do his job, Schneider just wanted to sit down and cry with joy. But he didn’t.

  The canvas of a medical tent tightened in the sunlight, and his curiosity had the better of him. Who were the other surgeons, if not Hamm? Did he know any of them? Might they know him? He had to admit, there was always that time when new postings got the better of him. Even as a student, when he rotated from service to service in medical school: from gynecology to psychiatry, from surgery to medicine. Each time he felt he had to prove himself all over again. He would have to show the new teachers, the new nurses, the new colleagues that he was someone to be reckoned with. Later, during his surgical residency years, it was the same. For every new rotation (almost every three months) there was a new team and new teachers, all of whom were watching to see if the new surgical resident knew anything, could do anything, could even operate at all. When those six years were over and he had finished his twelve months as Chief Resident, he went out into practice and realized it never ended. There would always be someone else there to judge him. At every new hospital, with every new operating team, all eyes would be on him to see if he could cut it. Literally. Yes, even each new patient had the same skeptical look in his eye.

  Can this guy help me? Have they sent me to the right surgeon?

  Here he was again, faced with a whole new bunch of medics and surgeons and soon some nurses, who would all want to know the answer to the same damned question: Was this guy any good? Could he cut his way out of a paper bag?

  Of course he could.

  Schneider took a deep breath and walked up to the first of the medical tents. He looked at the big red crosses painted on the roof and the sides. He was home.

  He pushed the flap aside and walked inside. The room was filled with equipment and wooden boxes. The technicians were getting the lighting in place. As he stepped inside, the engine of a generator sputtered and coughed from somewhere outside toward the rear. It kicked in and settled to a steady background hum. The lights flickered and glowed and filled the tent with a yellow brightness that reflected off the white walls. Someone somewhere up the line had realized that, while the outside walls of the tents needed to be camouflaged, the operating room would require less lighting if the interior walls were white. A small thing at home, perhaps, where lighting was plentiful. But not so small out here.

  A group of medical officers were huddled around a folding table at the rear of the tent. They were pouring over several sheets of paper which outlined the procedures and the check lists for setting up their field hospital. Their backs were turned to Schneider as he approached. Schneider started to say something when one of the officers turned at his approach.

  “Steve!” Hamm cried out.

  “Holy shit!,” Schneider shouted, with the biggest grin his face could hold. “You’re finally goddamned here!”

  They shook hands for a moment. Then they broke down and hugged—great strong bear hugs that took their breath away. Schneider just couldn’t believe it.

  “Hey,” Hamm said, letting go of Schneider and spinning him around by the shoulders, “look who’s here!”

  Ted McClintock rushed from the shadows of the tent, and shoved Schneider in the chest.

  “Holy crap! It’s Old Home Week,” McClintock said.

  Schneider shoved back. “Shit, Ted, I’m even glad to see your ugly puss! You gonna pass gas for me?”

  “Damned straight!” McClintock said “So, how the fuck did you get here ahead of us?”

  “A shittyassedratfucked glider. Pilot killed in midair; crash-landed about five miles from our target, long before your asses ever touched the beach. Lost half the men. It was a nightmare. I nearly shit my pants. God damned! I am so glad to see you guys.”

  Schneider hugged Hamm again, then stepped back to look at his friend. Hamm opened his arms and said, “Will you look at this shit.” His khakis were still covered in dirt and wrinkled beyond repair. There were blood stains all over his pants and field jacket, and he wore no socks.

  “We’ve been digging in here for a couple of days,” said Steve. “What the hell happened to you on that beach?”

  Before Hamm could answer, McClintock began to spill it all out. He just couldn’t stop talking.

  “We went back and forth on the god damned LSTs and fucking Rhino ferries. Seemed like we’d never get to the beach. Then we land in a nightmare of bodies and body parts. God, Steve, it was a living hell. Took us forever just to find a live GI to save. Then your pal here opens this poor guy with a gun shot wound to the heart! Can you fucking believe it! We’re operating in a ditch up to our knees in salt water and sand. The medics are pouring in fluids. Hamm opens this guy’s chest and sews the goddamned IV tubing right into the auricle! Right into the auricle! And the guy survives. Jesus. And that wasn’t the half of it.”

  “Holy shit, Hamm…” Schneider said. “And then what?”

  “Well, we…” Hamm started to say.

  Again, McClintock interrupted.

  “We’ve been on the move ever since. Never stopped. It took the rest of the day to get off that beach.” McClintock’s voice started to crack. He stopped talking for a second to take a breath. Then in a slower, more measured voice he said with great sadness, “So many bodies, Steve. I’ve never seen anything like it. All those young kids….”

  Hamm put his hand on McClintock’s shoulder and said, “It was a nightmare. Thousands dead, I think. We took care of most of the wounded right there on the sand, but there weren’t a lot of them alive. Most of them who were still on the beach by the second day were dead. So we moved inland and caught some rides with these guys,” he said pointing to the soldiers setting up the field hospital. “And here we are.”

  “What’s happening with the invasion?” Schneider asked.

  McClintock said, “The Krauts seem to be retreating, but we hear they’re regrouping further inland to the east and we should expect a counter attack pretty soon. This little lull isn’t gonna last long. No idea where the front line is, though.”

  Then all the men were silent. Their heads were lowered and their eyes on the ground. Schneider made circles with his toe in the dust. He was embarrassed now. He had thought his adventure was the nightmare of all wartime nightmares. But he realized that his own group’s losses were a pittance compared to what happened on the beaches.

  For the longest time, no one moved or spoke.

  Finally Hamm said, palms up and shrugging his shoulders, “Let’s get to work. Let’s do what we came here to do.”

  The team spent the rest of the day and all that night setting up the field hospital. Marsh, now working with Higgenson and Antonelli, took over organizing the medics. The organization was a thing of beauty. When all the tents were up, the operating rooms were physically attached to separate pre-op tents where cases were evaluated and prepared for surgery. There was a post-op recovery tent, attached to the operating room on the other side, where the patients recovered for a few hours and stabilized before moving to the post-op ward. The patients would remain in post op until they could be evacuated to the rear. This established a nice flow
from pre-op to operating room to recovery room to post-op.

  Their living tents were a little farther off, separated from the medical area and close to the latrines. The mess tent was at the far end of the compound. The whole place was guarded by two platoons of infantry whose sole task was to keep the medical teams safe. The medical teams could forget about security now and focus on their job: saving lives and getting soldiers back to the front to fight or back to the rear for evacuation to England.

  They were doctors again, and they loved it. Home again, among family.

  Chapter Fourteen

  11 June 1944, 1100 Hours

  Field Hospital Charlie-7, Fauville to Hiesville, France

  Schneider and McClintock had been up working at different tables all night and into the morning. There were many new surgeons coming and going almost daily, but Hamm’s group managed to stay together at least in the same field hospital. Hamm just came off a nice two-hour nap and was feeling remarkably fit, considering that he was getting even less sleep than he did as a surgical resident. It wasn’t the long operating hours so much. Those, he could handle. But being so close to the battle lines got him down. He couldn’t imagine how the medics at the front lines were holding up. The Germans weren’t supposed to shoot at them, but they seemed to be damn well trying to kill as many medics as possible. Hamm thought about these young men, taken from ordinary towns all over America. They had been taught that it was wrong to kill, and that the world was not supposed to be filled with people trying to kill you. Now they were dug into foxholes with no way to defend themselves near some town they’d never heard of, their friends dying all around them, and people were shooting at them in spite of their red-cross arm bands and helmets. It amazed Hamm that everyone wasn’t shell-shocked or suffering from battle fatigue. That would have been the sensible reaction to the constant violence and fear. Behaving the way these men were—following orders, holding unholdable positions—those were the crazy choices. Going crazy would have been the sane thing to do. But they didn’t.

  Still, with all the pressure and the chaos, Hamm did manage to get Sorenson onto an operating table. It really should have been Schneider’s case. Schneider had done the work in the field, and he had become close to Sorenson. Hamm knew that Schneider wanted to be the one who got Sorenson on the road to recovery. But, Schneider was busy with critically wounded men, who always came first. Hamm just happened to have an open table when Sorenson’s semi-elective case came up, so he took over. No sense waiting for Schneider and risking Sorenson getting bumped to the end of the line again. They never knew when it would get busy, only that it would get busy again, and soon. Anyway, Hamm had more orthopedic experience than Schneider did. He had spent more time in his residency in the orthopedics rotation by choice.

  Sorenson bitched and complained all the way to the OR.

  “How am I gonna command my men? Who’s gonna take my place?”

  Hamm didn’t argue with him because, in medical matters, he outranked Sorenson. When they finally got him into the surgical tent, Hamm nodded to McClintock, who shoved an ampoule of Pentothal into Sorenson’s IV, and that was that. Sorenson stopped talking in mid-sentence—he was still bitching—and his eyes rolled up in his head. Out he went. Peace and quiet except for the background shelling and machine-gun fire.

  Hamm cleaned up Sorenson’s wound. There was a lot of dead muscle around the fracture site from all the rough movement, but mercifully there was still no evidence of gangrene or any other infection.

  He’s sure made of good stuff, Hamm thought. He filed down the sharply fragmented ends of splintered bone and put everything back together as close as they had been in nature. It was too dirty a wound to use any hardware or a primary closure, so he covered the exposed bone with healthy muscle and fascia, and left the skin open with several rubber drains in the wound.

  “Let’s pump him full of penicillin, Ted—God bless that stuff.”

  “Yup, I already gave him 10,000 units.”

  Then Hamm splinted the leg from Sorenson’s toes to his upper thigh, leaving two little windows in the plaster cast to observe the wound and to make sure his toes stayed pink and warm. Sorenson got a first-class ticket to the evac hospital now in business near the secured beach at Normandy. The Germans were long gone from the area, and LSTs were landing there hourly with still more personnel and supplies. On the return trip, the LSTs evacuated the wounded back to hospital ships or to England. Hamm didn’t know exactly where Sorenson would go, and Sorenson never woke up in time for Hamm to say good-bye. Hamm wanted Sorenson evacuated as soon as possible, so he ordered him into the first available ambulance. Sorenson slept like a baby all the way to the ambulance trucks, where he was loaded into the racks built along the side walls. There were three men stacked on each wall of his particular truck. Hamm tucked the records into the stretcher with him and silently wished him well. He didn’t think Sorenson was likely to make it back into this war. Not unless the war went on a lot longer than anyone dared imagine.

  After only a short time at Fauville, orders came down to pack it all up again. It would soon become maddening how often and how quickly they had to tear down the hospital and then set up again only a few miles away, so they could be as close as possible to the fighting. But being close to the fighting was what saved lives in the time saved to get the wounded to medical care. It was a sight to see: officers and men running around, looking for all the world as if they were confused and lost. However, behind the illusion of chaos was an orderly system functioning the way it was designed. In an hour, that whole field hospital could be packed up and on its way to where it was needed.

  One hour, Hamm thought. Amazing! Like to see them do that in Philly.

  “Hey, Doctor Hammer. Where’s Doc Schneider?” It was Marsh. He was busy packing up, too, but he never seemed comfortable when he was too far away from Schneider. Something about surviving the glider crash and subsequent battle together seemed to have bound their souls. It was almost as if Marsh had taken responsibility for Schneider’s well-being, a teenaged guardian angel.

  “I’m not sure. He was operating a while ago. Did you look in the OR tent?”

  “Yup. Not there.”

  “Then he might be in town. I think he went back to see one of the locals. Something about Claude?”

  “Oh…,” Marsh’s eyes fell. He turned away and started walking back to the tents.

  Hamm didn’t know what that was about, but Steve would tell him when the time came.

  Before Marsh was too far away, Hamm shouted: “Hey, Marsh. I just operated on Lieutenant Sorenson. I think he’s going to be fine.” He pointed and said, “He’s in that ambulance over there if you want to say good-bye.”

  Marsh brightened up and ran in the direction of the ambulance pool. Hamm had never actually seen Marsh walk anywhere.

  The medical team finished packing the gear and the trucks and loaded themselves into several of them. The doctors almost never rode together in a single truck, in case there was a land mine, or an artillery strike or an ambush. The army didn’t want to lose a whole medical team in one shot. Still, they labored under the delusion that the big red crosses emblazoned on the trucks gave them an umbrella of protection: that they were protected by the Geneva Convention and its rules against firing on non-combatants. They would learn a lesson about that shortly.

  Once the surgical supplies were packed and counted, Hamm headed back to his tent to gather his personal things. Not much of them to pack. He was going to need a resupply of socks and underwear before very long, and he had no idea when that would be.

  “Hey, Major!” It was Marsh, still running. “I saw Lieutenant Sorenson, but he was still out like a light. Hope that leg’s gonna be okay.”

  “He’s going to do great, Andy. You took good care of him from what Major Schneider told me.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Hey, is it my imagination, or are these convoys just getting bigger and bigger?”

  Marsh looked aroun
d.

  “Starting to look like one of those circus caravans used to come to town every summer. We get so many new surgeons and medics every day I don’t who’s who. Barely know who to salute. Must be thirty trucks in that caravan now. All full of wounded too.”

  The ride was slower than the one from the beaches at Normandy. After D-Day, there had been little resistance once the army plowed inland, and those trucks could race flat out to get to the front lines. The Germans were in a full-out retreat and had not yet regrouped or counterattacked in any force. That situation was changing now as pockets of German resistance began to flare up all around them. They never knew which direction was safe. One moment their rear was covered by their own infantry; the next, there were Germans all over the place. Meanwhile, the casualties poured in. It was hard to guess when they would pack it up and leave an area to head for safety or to follow the fight. And that made it impossible to know which wounded GI would have to wait until the next stop for his surgery, if he could survive that long. Tough decisions were part of every day for the whole war.

  Hiesville was supposed to be in friendly hands when the auxiliary surgical group arrived. They had heard there were some good buildings in which they could set up their hospital and living quarters. Hamm fantasized about a real bed and a big old bathtub—maybe the kind with claw feet—and lots of hot water. It would remain a fantasy for some time. In the few days since they had landed, the tents had already grown wearisome, and a solid floor and plumbing would have been welcome. Not to mention that the tents were useless at stopping bullets and shrapnel, whereas some of the old villas and châteaux had thick stone walls.

  The medical group was approaching Hiesville, with the armed jeeps leading the convoy. Hamm could hear a firefight ahead as they approached, but no one knew its magnitude or who was winning. The trucks slowed to a crawl. Then they finally stopped altogether. The medics opened the back doors to try to get a better look, but a marine sergeant waved them back.