World War II Chronicle: August 19, 1943
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The story of John F. Kennedy and PT-109 is found on page six… The front page reports that the commanding general of the 10th Air Force, Maj. Gen. Clayton L. Bissell, has been reassigned. Bissell was a World War I ace, having shot down five enemy warplanes and forcing another into the ground. He and Maj. Gen. Claire Chennault had served as instructors at the Air Corps Tactical School in the early 1930s, but butted heads during their time together in the China Burma India Theater and Chennault was able to remove Bissell in favor of Brig. Gen. Howard C. Davidson, who would likely have been one of the students taught by Chennault and Bissell. On Dec. 7, 1941 Davidson was Hawaiian Interceptor Command’s skipper, which is now VII Fighter Command — Seventh Air Force’s fighter arm…
Page two: President Roosevelt has publicly congratulated General Dwight Eisenhower on his successful Sicilian campaign. Compared to his enemy counterparts, Eisenhower has his hands terribly full with having to deal with numerous allied countries’ militaries. George Fielding Eliot sums it up nicely in his column on page eight:
It was Gen. Eisenhower’s great task to take British, French, Canadian and American troops, air forces and naval forces, and to weld them into one hard-hitting, smooth-working machine of war. He had to overcome all the obstacles that national pride, personal jealousy, the differences in systems of tactics and administration, differences in armament and equipment, and political complications could throw in his path, in addition to overcoming the resistance of the enemy.
Remember that until recently Eisenhower was an unblooded lieutenant colonel, who now has to command very experienced generals with serious egos… Also, there is discussion that Eisenhower could lead the next invasion. Gen. Bernard Montgomery, currently commanding the British Eighth Army, is also a front-runner to head the next phase of the European war… Congressmen are attempting to get the State Department to stop opposing Jewish immigration into British Palestine (see page three)…
Story of a Mississippi native who joined the Royal Air Force and flew on bombing missions over Germany despite supposed to be convalescing from a broken neck is on page 11. All three of the sergeant’s brothers have been killed… Sports on page 14… Tech. Sgt. Claude Blackwell shares some stories from his 50 bombing raids on page 19.
Roving Reporter by Ernie Pyle
SOMEWHERE IN SICILY — We had so many kinds of human beings among the wounded in our clearing-station tent during the time I spent there.
We had a couple of slightly wounded Puerto Ricans, one of whom still carried his guitar and sat up on his stretcher and strummed on it ever so lightly. There were full-blooded Indians, and Negroes, and New York Italians, and plain American ranch hands, and Spanish-Americans from down Mexico way.
There were local Sicilians who had been hit by trucks. There was a captured Italian soldier who said his own officers had shot him in the face for refusing to attack. There were two American aviators who had been fished out of the sea. There were some of our own medics who had been wounded as they worked under shellfire.
There was one German soldier who had been shot while apparently trying to escape to Italy in a small boat. He was young and thin and scared to death. He objected furiously to being given a shot of morphine, apparently thinking we were torturing him. Then when he discovered he was being treated exactly like everybody else, his amazement grew. You could see bewilderment and gratitude in his face when the ward boys brought him water and then food. And when finally the chaplain, making his morning rounds, gave him cigarets, candy tooth powder and soap, the same as all the rest, he sat up grinning and played with them as though he were a child on Christmas morning.
It took him five minutes to find out how to get the cellophane wrapper off his pack of cigarets, and our whole tent stopped to watch in amusement.
Some of the wounded were sick at the stomach. One tough-looking New York Italian, faint with malaria, tried to crawl outside the tent to be suck but passed out cold on the way. He was lying there on the ground in his drawers, yellow as death, when we noticed him. They carried him back, and ten minutes later he was all over his sudden attack and as chipper as anybody.
Some were as hungry as bears. Others couldn’t eat a bite. One fellow, with his shattered arm sticking up at right angels in its metal rack, gobbled chicken-noodle soup which a ward boy fed him while the doctor punched and probed at his other arm to insert the big needle that feeds blood plasma.
And while we are on the subject of plasma, the doctors asked me at least a dozen times to write about plasma. “Write lots about it, go clear overboard for it, say that plasma is the outstanding medical discovery of this war,” they said.
So I beg you folks back home to give and keep on giving your blood. We’ve got plenty on hand here now, but if we ever run into mass casualties such as they have on the Russian front, we will need untold amounts of it.
They say plasma is absolutely magical. They said scores of thousands who died in the last war could have been saved by it. Thousands have already been saved by it in this war.
They cite case after case where a wounded man was all but dead and within a few minutes after a plasma injection would be sitting up and talking, with all the life and color back in his face.
The doctors asked me to repeat what you have been told so many times already – that it doesn’t make any difference what type your blood is, and that the normal person has no ill or weakening effects from giving his blood.
A front-line clearing station is made up of doctors and men who were ordinary, normal people back home. But here they live a rough-and-tumble life. They sleep on the ground, work ghastly hours, sometimes are under fire, and they handle a flow of wounded that would sicken and dishearten a person less immune to it.
They’ll get little glory back home when it’s all over, but they have some recompense right here in the gratitude of the men they treat. Time and again as I lay in my tent I heard wounded soldiers discussing among themselves the wonderful treatment they had had at the hands of the medics.
I have already written about some of the enlisted men of this clearing station, so before finishing I’ll give you the doctors’ names. This is one of the two clearing stations that are a part of the 45th Division. The station commandant is Capt. Carl Carrico of Houston, Texas. His wife and 8-year-old boy are in Houston. He is a slow, friendly man, speckled all over with big red freckles, who takes his turn at surgery along with the others. He usually works in coveralls.
The other surgeons are Capt. Carson Oglesbee, of Muskogee, Okla., Capt. Leander Powers, of Savannah, Ga., Capt. William Dugan, of Hamburg, N.U., and Lieut. Michael de Giorgio, New York. The station’s medical doctor is Capt. Joe Doran, of Iowa City. The dentist is Capt. Leonard Cheek, of Ada, Okla. And the chaplain is Lieut. Arthur Mahr, formerly of the First United Lutheran Church, Indianapolis. Other chaplains of the division are frequently around inquiring for the men of their outfits or giving last rites.
Evening star. (Washington, D.C.), 18 August 1943. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1943-08-19/ed-1/