Hospital Ship

The bombs which fell on Pearl Harbor caught the U.S. with only two hospital ships to its name. By this year's end it will have 24. TIME Correspondent Robert Sherrod described one of them in highly graphic detail in this cable from Saipan:

Tourists who used to ride the Clyde Mallory liner Iroquois on the New York-Miami run will probably be interested to know that she is now shipping out of the Marianas, almost half a world away. Her name is now the Solace and her tourists are wounded marines and soldiers.

This week when I was aboard the Solace Dr. Richmond Beck of Huntington, Long Island, a psychiatrist, was the embarkation officer. It was 7 o'clock in the evening and the Solace was receiving her second shipload of Saipan wounded.

I watched for a while as the wounded were brought up the gangway from the amphibious ducks which had evacuated them from shore. The first patient, a soldier, had been wounded in the back and arm by mortar fragments. Dr. Beck examined his tag and pried under his bandages. "Put him in Surgical One Lower," said the doctor. The bearers lifted him gingerly and walked up the stairway.

"God Is Good." As the wounded were brought in from portside and starboard gangways Dr. Beck examined them briefly and said, "Medical One," "Medical Two," "Orthopedic." It was almost mechanical. One marine had been shot through the throat. A few minutes after he had been assigned to a ward another doctor came back and reported to Dr. Beck, "He got it through the larynx and he is spitting some blood, but there is no paralysis. He can even talk. God is good."

After examining one particularly bloody case Dr. Beck said, "There is a delicate one. Looks like he got a hand grenade between his legs but I think we can save one testicle." A marine was set down with a shattered kneecap. "Sure, he'll be as good as new," said the doctor, when someone asked if the marine would walk normally. Then came a man who was shot through the thigh, another who had at least five wounds around his chest, neck and right arm, another with a chest wound to whom the doctor said, "What's the matter with you, son?" The boy told him and said he had been shot about noon. "Keep him level," said the doctor, then turned and said, "Apparently he isn't suffering, but it might have gone through his lung."

Each man was tagged with a piece of white cardboard from a compartmented box. "When we run out of tags we know we've got a shipload," one doctor explained. Each wounded man's clothes are thrown overboard. He is refitted with fresh dungarees when he goes ashore.

To Make the Wounded Forget. Hospital ships, incongruous in the midst of heavy artillery, machine-gun fire and blackouts, are painted spotless white; a broad green band around the ship has large red crosses superimposed. They sail through the South Seas brilliantly illuminated and they even show movies on deck at night. They may not even carry mail or any kind of supplies.

Their sailors and hospital attendants, doctors, nurses and enlisted medical corpsmen, all in white, contrast sharply with other ships' blue-dungareed sailors, and with the dirty, sweaty, bearded soldiers and marines whom they serve.

Everything about a hospital ship is intended to make the wounded man forget about mud and foxholes, the blackout and the whine of artillery shells. Most soldiers, when asked about their main impression of battle, would probably name the dirt and filth. That is one reason why every effort is made aboard the Solace and her sister ships to keep everything white.

The Solace has built-in beds for 480 wounded men. In emergencies, as at Saipan, additional cots and sofas can be put up and some ship's personnel can be routed out of their beds onto the decks to make room for about 100 more.

Howard K. Gray, the famed Mayo Clinic surgeon, is aboard the Solace with the rank of captain. The senior surgeon, Dr. (Captain) John T. Bennett, is a Navy regular of nearly 30 years who acts as general medical supervisor. The Solace has 17 other doctors, two dentists, 13 nurses.

"Not So Much of Me To Hurt." "The most amazing thing is the way these healthy young kids bounce back," said Dr. Gray. "Good food, fluids and rest work wonders for them. What they get is the best of attention with a salt-air luxury cruise thrown in. We pull out with nearly 600 bedridden patients. By the time we reach port about half of them are walking. Every night more and more of them appear at movies topside."

Another thing that impresses Dr. Gray is the courage and sense of humor of the average American boy. "Coming out of Tarawa we had to amputate a young marine's leg. He cried a little bit when we told him we had to do it. But next morning when I asked him how he felt, he grinned 'Okay! There's not so much of me to hurt now.' There was another kid who was in extremis when we brought him aboard. He had been shot from only a few feet away and he had a big hunk of his chest blown out. He pulled out of it somehow. When we got to talking to him we found that his attitude was one of complete disgust with Jap marksmanship. He said, 'If that had been a marine he would have shot me right square through the forehead.' "

Hospital ships get first priority on everything. Because of this, some shore hospitals' doctors are likely to growl when the hospital ships come around. The Japs sank the Australian hospital ship Centaur last year. But Captain Bennett believes that was a mistake and that hospital ships are relatively safe. After all, the Japs have registered more than 20 hospital ships themselves.

Chicken and Ice Cream. In a battle like Saipan, where casualties are heavy, hospital ships cannot evacuate more than 20 or 30% of the wounded. The rest, except for the driblet evacuated by air, return to rear areas aboard transports, which are usually crowded and cannot hope to have the exceptional facilities of a hospital ship.

There are five operating tables aboard the Solace. There are six regular wards--all of them with double bunks except the convalescent ward, which has three tiers of bunks for the lighter cases. The wards accommodate 50 to 70 men each. The 40-odd officers bunk four and six to the room. The X ray, the pharmacy and all the assorted medical and surgical equipment are as good as in the best U.S. hospitals. But to the marine or soldier arriving from the battlefield's filth, the most wonderful thing about the Solace is the food. The night I was there supper was chicken a la king and strawberry ice cream.

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