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Show Air Evacuation of Wounded Takes Its Place With Sulfa Drugs and Blood Plasma as One of Modern Military Medicine's Greatest Life-Saving Plans 1 $.: ' ' . - y , , '- l"T - , s K 1 I t I - . - ' W' 1 . , . ,t . ... .V; . . ' !' ' J -....i iil : "lSSia-K i ... - ...... . . d GOING HOME A soldier Is carried aboard a plane operated by the ferrying division of Air Transport command and in a few minutes will be flying to a hospital in the vicinity of his home. Flight surgeons inside the aircraft supervise the job. By EI. MO SCOTT WATSON Released by Western Newspaper Union. HE WAS one of the doughboys dough-boys who jumped down from a landing barge to the sandy shore of Normandy on D-Day. A chattering machine gun in a German pillbox, that hadn't yet been silenced, sprayed lead across his path and he slumped to the ground. There was a cry of "Medic! Medic!" and a moment later skilled hands were binding up his gaping wounds. The next morning four planes (unarmed C-54s) swooped down near the field hospital where he lay. Land mines were exploding 150 yards away when the first two ships landed. Out from these planes sprang two flight nurses Marjean Brown of Columbus, Ohio, and Suella Bernard of Waynesville, Ohio. "All right, soldier, you're going go-ing to take a little trip with us!" smiled one of them. Within two hours they had gathered gath-ered up not only this GI Joe but dozens of other desperately wounded, wound-ed, loaded them into the planes which were soon winging their way back to England. Two weeks in an American army hospital there and then on June 29 a huge Air Transport Trans-port Command plane settled down on an airfield on Long Island, N. Y. It was just 19 hours since it had left the British Isles. A day's rest in a hospital near New York then aboard a plane again. And today this GI Joe is con-pValescing con-pValescing in an army hospital out in the Colorado Rockies, near enough to his home so that Dad and Mom and Sis can come to see him get well. It's several thousand miles from the place where his blood dyed the sands of the French coast to this place where both his body and mind are being healed of the wounds of war but this cycle of life, near-death, then life again, is encompassed within with-in the time span of less than four weeks! The reason for this can be summed up in two words: air evacuation. evacu-ation. No wonder that Maj. Gen. David N. Grant, air surgeon for the army air forces, was able to declare de-clare recently that the army's system sys-tem of air evacuation of its wounded takes its place with sulfa drugs and blood plasma as "one of the three greatest life-saving measures of modern military medicine"! Because of air evacuation, men are alive today who would have perished per-ished in the jungles of Makin island or on the Anzio beachhead, and personnel of the air transport command's com-mand's ferrying division, who have participated in the air evacuation of more than 7,500 war wounded, have no hesitancy in indorsing the air surgeon's statement. It's a part of the army's policy of handling wounded soldiers through a progressive system of unit hospitalization hospi-talization which has been developed to a high degree under the direction direc-tion of Maj. Gen. Norman T. Kirk, surgeon general of the army. Because Be-cause of front-line treatment given American soldiers, more than 97 per cent of the wounded brought from battlefields to evacuation hospitals have been saved. Once the wounded have been treated, treat-ed, they must be sent to hospitals far from the scene of battle where they can rest and recover and, of course, the quickest way to get them there is by airplane. Part of these wounded bave been flown from foreign theaters thea-ters of war to their homeland and thousands of them have been flown from hospitals on the coast to hospitals hos-pitals near their homes where they can convalesce and benefit in spirit from visits of family and friends, for it is a basic army policy to get its wounded soldiers as close to home as possible for the convalescent convales-cent period. In a recent report on the handling of rpen wounded during the invasion of r ranee, Maj. Gen. Paul R. Haw-ley, Haw-ley, chief surgeon of the European theater of war, stated: "There has not been the slightest hitch in the chain of evacuation. As a result of the speed with which these wounded wound-ed were evacuated from Normandy, the condition of the casualties on arrival in the United Kingdom has been surprisingly fine." To that comment com-ment might be added the fact that approximately 4.000 sick and wounded wound-ed have been returned to this country coun-try aboard Air Transport command planes, part of them over regularly scheduled transport services operat- ed by the ferrying division of ATC. Many hops are as long as 12,000 miles. Only one patient among those evacuated by the Air Transport command com-mand has been lost as the result of air travel. Cooperation Does It. Close cooperation between the several organizations of the army makes possible successful air evacuation evacu-ation of the war wounded. The combat air forces outside the United States, the foreign wings of Air Transport command and various air commands in the United States, notably no-tably the First Trooper Carrier command, com-mand, have done experimental work on the problem. In 1943, a total of 173,527 sick and wounded patients were evacuated by American military mili-tary aircraft throughout the world, ATC carrying all those returned to this country. Here is the way evacuation from the combat areas is accomplished: Suppose the scene is Anzio beachhead. beach-head. Medical corpsmen have toiled across the bullet-swept area, given a guy named Jim emergency attention, atten-tion, then inched back with him to the beach where he receives more extended treatment. At a nearby clearing station, the flight surgeon classifies the patients. He determines deter-mines that this soldier, just arrived from the front, has a serious head wound which requires immediate surgical attention. When the transport trans-port plane flies in, Jim is among the outgoing patients. The medical air evacuation units transform the plane from its troop or cargo-carrying mission and do it quickly lest snipers or bombs disable dis-able the aircraft. Litter equipment is installed in three or four tiers and as many as .24 patients are loaded. Two men carry each litter to the plane, two more place it in position inside and a third man inside in-side fastens it in place. In an emergency, emer-gency, the flight nurse in the plane must use untrained .personnel for this work and occasionally she takes the place of a loader. When the plane takes off, the flight nurse is in medical charge. Only in extreme emergencies does the flight surgeon accompany her. A surgeon checks, when possible, during dur-ing the refueling stops. Otherwise the flight nurse and a surgical technician, tech-nician, an enlisted man with noncommissioned non-commissioned officers' rating, handle the patients. The plane is equipped with an ambulance chest which is a small trunk containing bandages, medicine for the relief of pain, equipment for administering intravenous intra-venous medication and blood plasma plas-ma also is on the plane. Once in the air, the flight nurse is in complete charge, aided by a trained staff sergeant. Aloft she handles any emergency and does anything a doctor would have to do except operate. Already the men borne aloft from Anzio were feeling better. Removed from the din of battle, their shock condition improved. im-proved. Jim, for example, mustered sufficient interest in life to ask where he was going. Six hours after he left Anzio he was in a base hospital hos-pital in North Africa undergoing a delicate brain operation. The evacuation chain does not end at the base hospital overseas. Efficiency Ef-ficiency and medical factors suggest that the men- be kept moving rearward rear-ward until they are as close to nnme as possible. Part of the wounded. of course, come home by ship. Patients Pa-tients for the trans-ocean flights are selected by flight surgeons. Four Kinds of Patients. Patients' general fitness for air travel is the deciding factor and they are grouped into four medical categories: (1) Mental patients re-, quiring security accommodations en route; (2) Hospital litter patients who must remain in bed, services rendered by other individuals; (3) Ambulance patients requiring medical medi-cal care en route from other individuals; individ-uals; (4) Troop class patients needing need-ing little medical care en route who can take care of themselves, even in emergencies, j Air evacuation increases enor- mously once the patients have reached coastal receiving hospitals in the United States, either by aircraft air-craft or by surface shipping. The same system of screening is employed em-ployed at the coastal receiving hospitals hos-pitals that was described previously as prevailing overseas. Urgency of the patients' conditions, together with their susceptibility to air transportation trans-portation are primary considerations. considera-tions. Sergt Walter A. Smith of Springfield, Spring-field, Mass., can testify that the army doesn't stint on its resources when one of its wounded needs special spe-cial attention. On May 9, 1944, he was wounded in action in Italy. He reached the United States June 14 in a convoy and entered Baker General hospital at Martinsbury, W. Va. An examination by the staff there revealed re-vealed that immediate surgical attention at-tention was necessary. Ashford General Gen-eral hospital at White Sulphur Springs, W. Va., had the specialist for the type of operation required. Two mornings later a ferrying division di-vision plane was at Hagerstown, Md., when Sergeant Smith arrived by ambulance. He was placed aboard with a full crew making certain cer-tain that the solitary patient received re-ceived every attention. By noon that day, the sergeant was on the operating table at Ashford General hospital receiving the best surgical care that the army has. Ordinarily ferrying division planes engaged in air evacuation are completely com-pletely utilized with all space occupied. occu-pied. Within the continental United States, the evacuation by air of the army's war wounded is the responsibility respon-sibility of the ferryfng division of the Air Transport command. Since this responsibility was assumed more than 7,000 patients have been moved without injury to any of the personnel per-sonnel involved. "The air evacuation of sick and wounded personnel of , the armed forces was pioneered by the medical medi-cal services with the AAF and it can be considered as one of the greatest life-saving measures in modern military medicine," Lieut. Col. Andres G. Oliver, surgeon of the ferrying division comments, "Its rapid and comfortable delivery of the patient to a hospital where he or she will get the best (and most specialized) spe-cialized) treatment; or to another closer to his home, where his convalescence con-valescence will be shorter and far more pleasant, has become a great morale factor among our returning heroes." Thus justice is being served when the aircraft, so terrible an instrument instru-ment of death and destruction, can be converted to such humanitarian functions as air evacuation. |