Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (The Pacific War Trilogy Book 3)

by Ian W. Toll

Wounded marines were carried through heavy double-blackout flaps into a long tent serving as the receiving ward, where their stretchers were laid on portable plywood operating tables. Doctors and corpsmen made notations on clipboards affixed to each stretcher. Plasma bottles were often swapped for whole blood intravenous feeds. Bloody or dirty clothing was cut away; wounds were cleaned; preoperative patients were washed and shaved. It was a stifling environment, particularly at night, when the tents had to be sealed against light leakage. The air was stuffy, smelling of blood and antiseptic compounds, and choked with cigarette smoke. Even so, the field hospitals were extraordinarily well equipped, by the standards of mid-twentieth-century medicine—probably the most sophisticated military field hospitals that had ever existed. They were stocked with operating tables, X-ray machines, oxygen masks and tanks, refrigerators for serums, electrical generators, flake ice machines, and banks of whole blood donated by civilians in the United States and flown into the island packed in ice. The more urgent cases were moved directly back into the operating rooms, where surgeons of various specialties went to work immediately. The worst, the doctors agreed, were the “belly cases”—the men who had been shot through the stomach, intestines, or other vital organs. The damaged organs had to be removed, resected, and returned to the wounded man’s abdomen. Such wounds required long, intricate ...