
| Thursday, April 27, 1944 |
| P Y L E | #1 | Ernie Leaves Anzio Beach on Hospital Ship for Naples. . . |
BY ERNIE PYLE
Scripps-Howard Staff Correspondent
NAPLES, April 27 (By Wireless).-- When the time finally came for me to leave the Anzio Beachhead I had a choice of coming out by airplane, by LST supply ship or by hospital ship. I chose the hospital ship, because I'd never been on one.
At the beachhead the hospital ships lie two or three miles out while loading. Ambulances bring patients from the tent hospitals to the waterfront. There they are loaded on the small, flat, docked LCT's, which have canvas over the tops to keep off rain.
Usually more than half the men in each load are walking cases. They sit or stand at one end of the deck, while the litter cases lie in rows at the other. I went out to the hospital ship with such a load of wounded.
Once out there we had to lie off and wait for an hour or so while previous LCT's finished unloading their wounded. As we lay there the officers in charge decided to transfer the walking wounded off another LCT onto ours. So it drew alongside, threw over a line and the two ships came against each other. The slightly wounded and sick men jumped across whenever the ships hit together.
A heavy swell was running and the ships would draw a few feet apart and then come together with a terrific bang. It was punishment to the wounded men. I stood among them, and every time we would hit they'd close their eyes and clench their teeth.
One mature man, all encased in a cast, looked at them pleadingly and said: "Don't those blankety-blank so-and-so's know there are men here who are badly hurt?"
Occasionally shells screamed across the town and exploded in the water in our vicinity. The wounded men didn't cringe or pay any attention to this near danger, but the pounding of the ships together made them wild.
Once alongside the big white hospital ship, the wounded are hoisted up by slings, just as you'd hoist cargo. A sling is a wooden box-like affair which holds tow litters on the bottom and two on top. Up they go as the winches grind. Litter bearers wait on deck to carry them to their wards. The merchant seamen also pitch in and help carry.
Each badly wounded man carries his X-ray negative with him in na big brown envelope. As one load was being hoisted up, the breeze tore an envelope out of a wounded man's hand and it went fluttering through the air. Immediately a cry went up, "Grab that X-ray, somebody." Fortunately it came down on the deck of the smaller ship below and was rescued.
It took about four hours to load the more than 500 wounded and sick men aboard our ship. As soon as it was finished we pulled up anchor and sailed. Hospital ships, like other ships, prefer to sit in the waters of Anzio just as short a time as possible.
Our hospital ships run up to Anzio frequently, because we want to keep our hospitals there free for any sudden flood of new patients. Also, being in a hospital on the beachhead isn't any too safe.
Its officers and crew are all merchant seamen. Its medical staff is all Army--10 doctors, 33 nurses and about 80 enlisted men. Major Theodore Pauli of Pontiac, Mich., commands.
These ships ferry back and forth on trips like this for a few months, then make a trip back to America with wounded. My ship has been back to the States three times since it first came over less than a year ago.
In a sense a hospital ship is the nearest thing to peacetime that I've seen in a war zone. The ship runs with lights on all over it, the staff has good beds and good cabins, there is hot water 24 hours a day, the food is wonderful.
I was given a top bunk in a cabin with one of the doctors. After nosing around into all the nice conveniences of the place, I discovered we also had a toilet and a shower. I asked unbelievingly if the bath worked. They said sure it worked. So I took a bath for half an hour and felt very weak and civilized and wonderful afterwards.
| P Y L E | #2 | Former Caribbean Luxury Ship Is Hospital for Anzio Wounded |
BY ERNIE PYLE
Scripps-Howard Staff Correspondent
NAPLES, April 28 (By Wireless).--On the hospital ship which I rode back from Anzio, part of two decks remained just about as they were when the vessel as a luxury cruise ship in the Caribbean. In this part the permanent staff of doctors and nurses live, and also the officers of the ship.
But the rest has been altered when made into troopships. Cabin walls have been cut out to form big wards. Double-deck steel beds have been installed. The whole thing is fitted like a hospital operating room and wards.
The wounded men get beautiful treatment. They lie on mattresses and have clean white sheets--the first time since coming overseas for most of them.
' There is a nurse to each ward and the bigger wards have more than one. Enlisted men serve the meals and help the nurses.
The doctors have little to do. On this run the wounded are on the ship less than 24 hours. Their wounds have been thoroughly attended before being brought aboard, and it's seldom that anything drastic develops on the short voyage.
One of the doctors took me in tow and showed me the entire ship after supper. He was Captain Benjamin Halporn of Harrisburg, Pa., Captain Halporn's wife is also a doctor back in Harrisburg, practicing under her own name, Dr. Miriam H. Polk.
"We really have so little to do we almost forget how," Captain Halporn said. "My wife back home does more work in one day than I do in a month." But that's nobody's fault. The doctors must be on the ship for advice and emergency
As we went around the ship our trip turned into a kind of personal appearance tour. When we left one war, the nurse came running after us and said to me, "Do you mind coming back?? The boys want to talk to you."
And while I stood beside the bunk gabbing with a couple of wounded men, another one across the ward yelled, "Hey, Ernie, come over here. We want to see what you look like." If this keeps up I'll have to have my face lifted. Nobody with a mug like mine has a right to go around scaring wounded men.
The boys had read about the proposal in Congress to give "fight pay" to combat troops and they were for it. (Editor's note: The proposal resulted from a suggestion by Ernie Pyle!) Most of them said it wasn't so much the money as to give them some recognition and distinction, and money seemed the only way to do it.
As we went around, some of the wounded would call for the doctor and he would have a nurse attend to them. One boy with an arm wound was bleeding too much and needed a new bandage. Another one in a shoulder cast said good-naturedly that he couldn't tell by the feel whether he was bleeding or just sweating under his cast.
A colored boy with a shattered leg said his cast was too tight and hurt his instep. So the doctor drew a curved line on it with his pencil and ordered the cast sawed off there. Each cast has written on it the type of wound beneath it.
We stopped beside one man whose right leg was in a cast. The writing on it revealed that he was a British Commando. The doctor asked him if he were in pain, and he smiled and said with some effort, "Quite a bit, Sir, but not too much."
When you ask a wounded man how he got hit, the majority of them are eager to tell you in great detail just how it happened. But those in the most pain are listless and uninterested in what goes on around them.
When the ship is overcrowded there aren't bunks enough for everybody. So those who aren't in bad shape--merely sick or with slight wounds--sleep on mattresses on the floor of what used to be the salon Everybody does have a mattress, which is just so much velvet to any soldier.
| Clean Sheets, and Safety | By Ernie Pyle |
Naples, April 28--(By Wireless).--A Red Cross worker rides each hospital ship, not only to do anything for the wounded she can, but also to help keep the ship's staff and crew happy.
On our ship the Red Cross girl was Percy Gill, of Palo Alto, Calif. She used to teach physical education at Castilleja School for Girls.
After supper she passed out a bottle of Coca-Cola to every man on the ship. It was the first time most of the boys had had one since leaving America. The merchant-marine seamen in the crew always help her pass the cokes around.
Miss Gill has a tiny office filled with books, toilet supplies, musical instruments and magazines. As soon as the wounded men are brought aboard she gives every one a pack of cigarettes and a toothbrush, for most of them have lost their gear.
As they ware swung aboard, you see some completely empty-handed and others carrying their pitiful little possessions in their tin hats, balanced on their stomach. Some have on hospital pajamas, some just O.D. shirts, some only their dirty gray underwear.
Miss Gill does not intrude herself on the men, for she knows that the most badly wounded want to be left alone. Now and then she'll give a boy a book and discovers that he's still looking at the same page three hours later. Another boy used his as a fan all afternoon.
Miss Gill has books in French, and in German, too. Every shipload has a few wounded prisoners. We had two on my trip. One was a startled looking German kid whose card showed him to be only 17. The prisoners are treated just the same as anybody else.
Miss Fill's musical warehouse includes an accordion, four guitars, a violin, two banjos, two saxophones, a clarinet, a trombone, and two dozen harmonicas. She doesn't have many requests for either the musical instruments or the books on these short trips between the beach-head and Naples, for there's hardly time. But on the long trip back to America they are a godsend, for the men are feeling better by then and time goes slowly. On one trip across the ocean the wounded men read 3,000 books--an average of six to a man.
It is a relief and comfort for men to be on a hospital ship after their months of mud and cold and misery and danger and finally the agony of their wounding. It is a relief because the hospital ship is so little like war, and because those who operate it are in a world apart from the world these men have known.
There's no blackout at all. Nobody is ever dirty or cold. Cabin windows have no shutters. You can smoke on deck. Big spotlights swung on brackets point their dazzling beams at the big red cross painted on the ship's sides.
The ship takes its course far outside the channels of regular war shipping and instead of keeping radio secrecy we broadcast our position every 15 minutes. The hospital ship wants the enemy to know where it is so no mistake can be made.
Our ship has had several "incidents." It has been stopped by surfaced submarines, and been circled by enemy planes. But the enemy has always respected it. The greatest danger is going to such places as Anzio, or standing in ports during air raids.
Usually the ward lights are left on until 10:30 p.m. But on our trip they were turned off at 9:30, for we were to dock very early the next morning and the men had to be wakened by 5 a.m. to give the nurses time to get the wounded men all washed and fed.
#4
By 10 o'clock the inside of the ship was dim and quiet. Nurses went about softly in the faint glow of the blue nightlights. The doctors, all through, were playing chess and solitaire in their small salon on the top deck or hung over the rail. It was warm and gentle outside. The washing of the water seemed like a purring against the ship's side.
It was so wonderful to be going away from the war instead of toward it. For the badly wounded there was a sense of completion of a task, for the others a sense of respite. And the sheets and the soft beds and the security of the walls lent a confidence in things present and to come. There was intense suffering aboard that ship. But by 10:30 you could somehow feel the quiet, mashed composure that comes to men of turmoil when they settle down for the night in the clasp of a strange new safety. And early next morning we were here.
2009