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

by Anthony A. Goodman

  “Stay in the trucks, and keep down. We’ll be done here in a few minutes.”

  No one liked the sound of that very much. How close was this fighting?

  Soon enough, though, the firing ceased, and a few minutes later the trucks began to roll again. Within ten minutes, they were climbing out at their destination. Or nearly so.

  When Hamm bailed out of the truck, he was about a hundred yards from a classic old French farmstead. It was built of a light beige stone with a slate roof and dormer windows on the third floor. The house looked like something off the label of a wine bottle. As he walked closer, he could see the pockmarks of bullets all over the walls.

  “There must have been a hell of a firefight at some point to have made all that damage,” he said to the driver.

  About fifty yards further up, soldiers had taken cover in various positions around the house. Sporadic small arms fire broke the calm of the countryside, but Hamm couldn’t tell where it was coming from, or where it was going. The soldiers around him showed no concern, but the troops closer in kept their heads down, crouching behind jeeps and trucks.

  Hamm asked one of the GIs what was going on.

  “Sniper, sir. In the barn to the left. We can’t see his position. He opens up every now and then with a single shot, and then moves to somewhere else. He’s like a ghost. I don’t know if there’s only one or several. Can’t get a fix on him.”

  “Has he hit anyone yet?” Hamm asked.

  “Yes, sir. We’ve got two down already. Medics are up there with them.” Then he looked from Hamm’s major’s oak leaves to the caduceus on his collar and said, “Maybe they could use you up there too, sir.”

  He pointed to a ditch behind a jeep, a lot closer to the stables than Hamm cared to think about being.

  Hamm let out a breath, picked up his pack, and started running in a crouch as fast as he could toward the jeep. No shots rang out, but he could just feel his chest in the cross hairs of that sniper’s scope. He had heard that hunted animals feel the presence of the hunter; that experienced hunters don’t look directly at the prey until they are ready to pull the trigger. Hamm felt the heat of that sniper’s scope on his chest, and the hairs on his neck stood against his shirt collar as he ran.

  He made it to the ditch and tumbled down next to the two soldiers and a medic already there. Hamm lay panting in the bottom of that little hole, grateful that he was alive and that the steel of the jeep was between him and the sniper

  “Doc! What the hell you doing here?” It was Antonelli. Hamm hadn’t seen him since the day before, when he was busy bringing in the wounded at Fauville.

  “I work here, Gene. What’s up?” he said, trying to lighten his black mood.

  “Leg shot. This guy’s got a pretty bad wound in his thigh; bullet seems to have fragmented when it hit the bone. Still bleeding pretty good, too.”

  The man was lying at the edge of the ditch in the most awkward position imaginable. His legs and pelvis were nearly face up, allowing Antonelli to tend the wound. But, the upper body was twisted almost prone, with the man’s chest elevated to the earth at the edge of the ditch. He was holding a rifle and aiming at the stables.

  “Roll over here a minute, soldier. We need to see this leg,” Hamm said.

  “Can’t, sir.”

  “Well, why the hell not?”

  “Just can’t.”

  As Hamm spoke, his left ear was shattered by a blast. He ducked and dropped deeper into the ditch with Antonelli right on top of him.

  “Got ‘im! I fuckin’ got ‘im!” The soldier was shouting and squirming around the ditch.

  “God damn it! Hamm said, shouting over the momentary deafness in his ear.

  “Sniper, sir! I fuckin’ nailed him!”

  “Jesus Christ!” Hamm said. “Give me that damned gun.”

  He yanked the weapon from the soldier’s hands and threw it to the ground. “What the hell do you think this is?” he said, pointing to the red cross on his own helmet. “You’re wounded, and we’re medics. We’re here under a red cross. We’re not supposed to be shooting at anyone. Now drop it ‘til I’m finished!”

  Hamm took the wounded soldier by the shoulders, pulled him down, and rolled him onto his back. The man moaned with the pain from his wound. “Be still, soldier! I need to get a look at this leg, and don’t even think about reaching for that goddamned gun!”

  “It’s a ‘rifle,’ sir…not a gun,” the boy said.

  “And don’t give me a damned grammar lesson! Jesus! You want me to fix this leg or not?” With that, he cut the soldier’s pant leg from the cuff to the hip to expose the wound.”

  “Well, I got the son-of-a-bitch that shot me! He shot two other of our guys, Major!” the young man shouted.

  “Son, if I hear one more word about—Ah shit.” He looked at the boy and a sadness swept over him. He couldn’t believe he was scolding this teenager who had just been so badly wounded.

  Then he said more softly, “Just take it easy, son. I’ll be finished here in a minute. Then we’ll get you out of here.”

  The soldier reluctantly relaxed his body and gave in to Hamm’s care. Antonelli put the rifle out of reach next to the medical packs. Only now did sensation seem to make its way from the man’s shattered femur and torn muscles to his brain. Before, while he was still in combat, the gates to his consciousness had been closed, his senses focused on killing the sniper who had shot him. Now, all at once, a tear formed at the corner of his eye, and this killer became a scared little boy.

  “Gene, give him a Syrette of morphine and hand me some sulfur.”

  Antonelli injected the painkiller while Hamm sprinkled the sulfur powder onto the wound.

  “Dress it up and get him to pre-op. If there is one. If not, I’ll go set one up right now. I don’t think this is the last we’re going to hear from Jerry snipers.”

  Hamm pulled himself out of the ditch and slung his pack. There was no more firing, and the men around the farmhouse were slowly getting to their feet and coming out of cover. Hamm walked past them on the way back to the medical trucks.

  One GI shouted to him: “Nice runnin’, Doc. You can play for our team.”

  Hamm smiled and waved. Boy jokes.

  By the time he got to the trucks, the engines were running. They drove the final yards toward the house. Then, the whole process of men and machines kicked back into gear. In less than two hours, they had Field Hospital Charlie-7 up and running again. By nightfall, the cots were nearly full, and all the operating tables occupied, including his wounded GI from a few hours before. Schneider and Hammer were up to their elbows in blood again.

  Everything was the same. Just a new address.

  Chapter Fifteen

  11 June 1944, 2200 Hours

  A Concentration Camp near Weimar, Germany

  It was hard to stay awake so late. Berg’s eyes burned. His hands began to shake, and they shook more and more as the night wore on. He sat in his office waiting until the guards had grown sleepy. The officers headed to bed with their women—some willing, some not. By midnight, the chances of Berg being interrupted were very slim. This timing had served him well for four years, but luck was a big part of it. And luck, he knew, could run out.

  Finally, Berg had free reign in his miserable little kingdom. He could make all the decisions necessary to run his hospital (if the unheated, decrepit wooden shack could be called by such a lofty name). He may have had no supplies, but he did his best.

  The SS officer in charge, Standartenführer Himmel, liked to visit Berg during the daytime. The SS doctor in charge, Sturmbannführer Grau, never came by after dark. Grau puzzled Berg. He was a well-educated physician from München, very much respected from what Berg heard. He specialized in heart diseases and taught at the university as well.

  How did this man fall in with such a mob of butchers? How did he forget the oath he swore to care for the sick? What happened to this man that he could join the Nazis and their madness?

  It
was inconceivable that a man could practice medicine his whole adult life and then, in a moment, become a killer, a man entirely without conscience.

  Grau’s job was to oversee the day-to-day operation of Berg’s hospital. He never got his own hands dirty except when it came time to treat one of the German staff or his own SS officers. This would prevent Berg from administering a poison or purposely making some surgical blunder that might put a German out of service. Berg never actually thought of doing such a thing until it became clear that this was the very reason Grau was standing over him. But Berg was not sure he could do it, even if he were given the chance.

  So, Grau was there as a guard in a way, but his main job was to conduct and oversee the experiments that the Nazis had designed even before the war had started. It was a gruesome idea, experimenting on living people. But the Nazis said that these weren’t really people anyway; they were Jews, Untermenschen. Underpeople. Not people at all. By the very fact of their being in that awful place, they were dead already, so what did it matter? Most died within three or four months of arriving there.

  And Hitler is an antivivisectionist! And a vegetarian as well. Imagine that? Berg often marveled at the madness of it.

  The various experiments, if you could call them that, were appalling. Some patients were placed in vats of ice-filled water to determine the effects of freezing temperatures on the body. This was supposed to teach the Nazis something about pilots shot down in the North Sea. Few of the prisoners survived even minutes of immersion. Everyone knew what would happen to the pilots. If you survived the crash, you had about two to three minutes in the water before you died. Everyone died. So, why experiment? Why? Because it was so cruel. Berg witnessed not a single experiment that could be justified even in animals, much less humans. Nothing useful could be learned except how to inflict more pain and more misery on people who were nearly beyond further suffering.

  Joseph Mengele, Berg had heard, was injecting blue dyes into the eyes of living patients to see if eye color could be permanently changed, could be made into the pure blue of the Aryan race. Most of these poor souls went to the gas chambers blind for their troubles. Jewish women were the subject of experiments to increase the efficiency of sterilization procedures. Caustic and toxic chemicals were injected through the cervix and up into their fallopian tubes in an attempt to scar and mangle the organs so that fertilization could not occur, so that no more Jews could be conceived.

  Of course, there was no anesthesia to spare the victims the pain, no narcotics to help them through the post-operative days before they inevitably died of infection or chemical peritonitis, an excruciatingly painful inflammation of the lining of the abdominal cavity.

  In the early years, Berg escaped participation in the terrible ordeals. But, as time wore on, the SS became shorthanded, so Berg was conscripted. They forced him to perform mass sterilizations of both men and women. The Nazis did not want the Jewish vermin proliferating. In a way, it gave Berg a chance to do something of value. Jewish women who were pregnant or became pregnant while in the camps were immediately gassed. So, whenever he could, he performed abortions under the guise of sterilization procedures before it became evident to the guards that the woman was carrying a child. It broke his heart to destroy these lives, but it saved mothers who might still survive the camps to bear children in a better world. Berg did not believe in life after death, but he still believed in life after the camps. Perhaps not for himself, but maybe for someone.

  Later, the participation became more egregious, and when Berg resisted, the threats to him and his patients became very real. Grau made no bones about it. He came into Berg’s little cubicle one afternoon just after rounds. He did not sit, for Jews had sat in the only other chair in front of Berg’s desk, and Grau would not contaminate himself. He feared the lice, and from the lice, the typhus.

  “Berg,” he said, “the time has come for you to take part in our scientific research.”

  Berg dropped his book to the desk and stood. The man could not be serious.

  “I don’t understand,” he said, though, of course, he did.

  “Sit down!”

  Berg sat.

  “Nothing to understand. I need more manpower to cope with the increased load of patients coming into the camp. I cannot do all these procedures by myself, and the assistants I have now are incompetent. I need the kind of manual dexterity that only a surgeon such as yourself, or a heart specialist such as I, possess.” He was almost smiling, expecting Berg to be flattered to be included in this world of abominations.

  “What procedures Sturmbannführer?” Berg could barely say the words that would lead to Grau’s defining Berg’s role.

  “I have received orders to increase the numbers of people who will be…how shall I put this?”

  “I know what you are saying, Sturmbannführer. But how am I to be involved in this?”

  “We are in short supply of Zyklon B, and it’s dangerous to transport and to use. There have been some accidents already. Berlin wants us to see if there is an efficient and more humane way to dispose of the prisoners who are about to die anyway.”

  Berlin wants. Such an easy way to lay the burden of guilt elsewhere, Berg thought.

  Zyklon B was hydrogen cyanide in pellet form. When exposed to the moisture in the air, it became a gas that was almost diabolical in its efficiency. Cyanide poisoned the system by blocking respiration at the cellular level. All the cells of the body are instantly suffocated from within. The very first breath sends a signal to the brain demanding more oxygen, forcing the person to take deep involuntary gulps of air, which in turn takes in more of the cyanide gas. Death occurs in seconds, or at most, a few minutes. The sensation of total suffocation must be awful during those last conscious moments, though there are no survivors to attest to it. A few minutes could be very long. And Grau was correct, it was very dangerous to handle.

  “What do you want from me, Sturmbannführer?” Berg asked again, with increasing dread in his voice, his calm demeanor beginning to fall apart.

  “We will try another way, a kinder way, to bring these prisoners to their end. We will be injecting solutions of phenol or of sodium Evipam directly into the heart. We’ll see which works better. This should send the drugs directly to the coronary arteries and to the brain in seconds, painlessly stopping the heart and the brain function at once. Much kinder, don’t you think?”

  Oh, dear God, that I should be part of this killing machine!

  “Well?”

  “Don’t ask me to participate in this, Sturmbannführer. Anyway, I’m needed here. There is always more work than I can do.” Berg was pleading, and Grau was enjoying it.

  “My dear Berg. Can’t you see what a good thing you will be doing? You will save these people from the showers. You will be helping them with your skill in getting the drugs directly into the left ventricle. Why, none of the Kapos or the unskilled laborers could do such a good job. They would miss the ventricle and get an intramuscular cardiac injection. Painful and slow….” He wrinkled his nose and shook his head as if he had just swallowed an objectionable medicine.

  “But—”

  “No buts!” Grau shouted. Then in a calmer voice, as colleague to colleague: “You will join me in the operating room tomorrow morning at nine. Without fail.”

  Grau turned on his heels without another word and left Berg alone. As he stepped out into the compound, he nearly ran into one of the prisoners coming into the hospital.

  “Schwein! Get out of my way you vermin!” Grau sidestepped to avoid any contact with the possibly typhus-infected Jew.

  Joseph Meyer climbed the two steps, turning to watch Grau disappear from sight. The little climb took his breath away. But he was relieved that all he received was a few choice words, and nothing worse.

  “Hello, Doktor Berg,” Joseph said, as he eased himself into a chair. Joseph was a walking skeleton, not much different from most of the inmates. He was fifty pounds lighter than when he had arrived, and clear
ly burdened by many chronic diseases at this point.

  “Guten tag, Joseph,” Berg said. “What do you need?”

  ‘Me? I need a vacation. And something good to eat. What was the Sturmbannführer, that piece of shit, doing here?”

  Berg shook his head.

  “Careful, Joseph. You might talk too loudly one day,” Berg said. “You won’t believe this but he wants me to help him kill more inmates. For science!”

  “They’re not killing enough already? They better be careful. They might run out of us one day. Then what would they do?”

  “They’ll find someone else to torture and kill.” Berg snuck a peak at the door to be sure no one was near by listening.

  “Why do you let them, Doktor. Why don’t you fight back?”

  “Me? How can I fight back. Why don’t you fight back?”

  “It would be useless. There’s nothing I can do before they’d kill me. But you….”

  “Me, what? What can I do?”

  “There must be many ways for you to hurt them. You have patients dying of contagious diseases, don’t you? Couldn’t you find a way to share them with The Master Race? Typhus? Syphilis? Dysentery? They could just shit themselves to death. Something? There must be something you could do. I would help you.”

  “You? You can’t help yourself fart, Joseph.”

  “Think about it, Doktor. I’ll think, too. Between us maybe we could kill some of them. Even just a few. Even just one.”

  Joseph hunched down into his pitiful coat and left the room. Berg watched as the little man made himself almost invisible walking through the compound. Best not to be noticed.

  Berg sat down at his desk. His face saddened as he realized that a new line would soon be crossed. In the next days, Berg would become part of the Nazi killing machine.

  Berg never slept that night. Pictures drifted through his mind; horrible visions of patients convulsing as the deadly phenol traveled into peoples’ brains. Not peaceful deaths, nothing like a falling off to sleep, but deaths punctuated by spasms and rigors of involuntary muscular contractions, of fecal and urinary incontinence, of frothing at the mouth with eyes wide in terror.