Date sent: Thu, 06 DEC 2007 07:08:15,0500
To: Business Net "usma55bus@west-point.org"
From: -w "wwelter@cox.net"
Subject: usma55bus: Re: A Pearl Harbor Short Story: "A Surgeon’s Unforgettable Emergency Recall to Duty"
Bill, here is the story, below the line. The photograph, follows, and if possible should be inserted in the text right after Dr. Heaton's first diary entry, right before the next section titled: "Saving Lives and Counting the Losses." Sara and Pres Mayson have seen and given me permission to put the story on line with the class. Thanks for helping out on this, Bill McWilliams
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The following is a short story excerpted from three chapters of the manuscript From Pearl Harbor With Love, which, among numerous other stories in the manuscript, includes the attack on Pearl Harbor as seen from the perspective of the people on the receiving end of the bitter surprise. This is about Major Leonard D. Heaton, MD, and his wife Sara Hill Heaton, and their young daughter Sara Dudley Heaton – who years later met and married the class of 1955’s Pres Mayson. It also provides a glimpse into the December 1941 beginning of the evacuation, by sea, in convoys, of more than 20,000 people from the island of Oahu. The passengers on the first three convoys, which left Honolulu on 19, 26 and 31 December respectively, each escorted by a cruiser and two destroyers, included some wounded and widows of the attack, military dependents, tourists
[including two college football teams] "trapped" on the island by the attack, non-essential government employees ordered to leave the islands, and passengers from two outbound Pan American Airways Clippers, which had left San Francisco and were on round trips toward the southwest Pacific when the attack occurred. The first two convoys had to go through Japanese submarines ringing Oahu, and operating on nine stations, near our major port entrances on the US west coast.
All source notes have been removed from this short story, but are in the draft manuscript, and nearly all sources are primary sources.
© Bill McWilliams
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A Surgeon’s Unforgettable Emergency Recall to Duty
Eleven A6M2 “Zeke” fighters from the first wave of 183 Japanese aircraft from Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s First Carrier Striking Force, began ravaging Naval Air Station Kaneohe first – at 0742 hours, followed moments later with 25 Aichi D3A1 “Val” dive bombers and 14 Zekes on Wheeler Field, with the remainder of 18 Zekes and 26 Vals targeted against Hickam Field
[Bomber Command], Naval Air Station Ford Island, and Marine Corps Air Station Ewa. In the meantime, 40 Nakajima B5N1 Type 97 “Kate” torpedo bombers were descending, and 40 additional Kate high level bombers, flying at approximately 10,000 feet pressed toward the Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor. The Japanese intended to destroy the Navy’s PBY long range patrol aircraft based at Kaneohe to keep the Americans from finding the Japanese surface force, the Army Air Force fighters on the ground at Wheeler Field and the Navy and Marine Corps fields to ensure the Japanese maintained air superiority over the island while the raid was in progress.
Schofield Barracks, located next to Wheeler Field, also appeared to be under attack with all the aircraft flying in the area; however, other than isolated individual strafing attacks, on targets of opportunity, the Japanese did not specifically target Schofield and the 25th Infantry Division. Nevertheless, there were several first-wave strafing attacks at Schofield, on the Engineer, Artillery and Infantry quadrangles, the post hospital, and at least two attacks on officers’ quarters. Unquestionably, the Japanese considered military housing areas valid, though lower priority targets. As a result of attacks at Schofield and various other locations, two 25th Division soldiers were killed and seventeen were wounded.
Major Leonard D. Heaton, physician and surgeon at Schofield’s Army Hospital, and two other Army physicians, both captains assigned to the Schofield Hospital, were stunned to find themselves dangerously close to becoming casualties in two strafing attacks in the Schofield housing area. After dodging a Japanese fighter on the first firing pass down Major Heaton’s street, by going inside the house, the three doctors and Sara Hill Heaton, his wife, again stepped outside – then had to scramble for cover inside the house a second time. Throughout the Sunday morning moments of shocked disbelief, their young daughter, Sara Dudley Heaton, was in their officers’ quarters in bed, ill. Leonard Heaton wrote in his diary:
Sunday – Dec. 7, 1941.
The best and happiest days of our lives went up in the smoke of Pearl Harbor, Wheeler Field, and Hickam Field today. I wonder if, when and how they will ever return.
I was standing with Capt’s Bell and
[Harlan] Taylor in front of my quarters about 8 o’clock this day. We were about to get in the car to pick up Col. Canning and thence to Queen’s Hospital to attend a lecture by Dr. Jno. Moorhead of N.Y. who has been talking of traumatic surgery. We hesitated before entering the car because our attention was called to the great number of planes in the air and some very loud distant noises. Soon one plane came quite close to us and in banking to come down our street I distinctly saw the rising sun insignia on his wings. Soon he was coming down the street with machine guns blazing away at us. We rushed into the house.
As long as I live I shall never forget my feelings and emotions when I saw and realized that these were Jap planes and that we were in for the real thing. Something we never thought could ever happen to us here due to primarily our great naval force and implicit faith in such.
Back in the house Sara Hill inquired of the situation and I told her. Sara Dudley was sick with the nasal bronchitis and in bed. The four of us went back out on the sidewalk. Then we distinctly saw dive bombers and bombs over Wheeler Field and much black smoke in the direction of Pearl Harbor. There were many planes by now all over and around us. I remarked as must have many others before us in situations like this, “Where are our planes?” Whereupon another Jap plane came down our street spraying everything and everybody with machine guns. We rushed back into the house again and at this time I got an urgent call to come immediately to the hospital. I hurried off after comforting Sara Hill and Sara Dudley as best I could. The first wounded had arrived from Wheeler Field and we immediately set our operating teams in action…
The attacking Zekes that swept through the Schofield housing area left an indelible mark on the Heaton family’s lives, and a souvenir to remind them of that day. An empty shell casing from an expended 7.7-mm machine gun was ejected from the aircraft and landed in their front yard, a family keepsake and reminder for the generations. Dr. Heaton wrote much more in his diary on 7 December, after working tirelessly among the four surgical teams throughout a long, bloody day on into early evening, struggling to save lives. Many could not be saved.
The Wheeler Field hangars and aircraft on the flightline burn during the Japanese first wave attacks by 25 Val dive bombers and 14 Zekes. The view looks south, roughly parallel with the axis of attack by the Zekes, which peeled off from the north after the Val dive bombers had begun their attacks from west to east along the flightline.
Saving Lives and Counting the Losses
When the tally of killed and wounded was finally complete, in reality not until many days afterward, 2,335 military and 68 civilians had been killed or died of wounds, a total of 2,403. In addition, 1,143 military and 35 civilians were wounded, or 1,178 total. The totals included “friendly fire” dead and wounded.
The devastating total of 3,581 killed and wounded, plus an unknown number who received minor wounds and medical treatment and weren’t recorded, or didn’t bother to seek medical attention, tell nothing of the human suffering and family losses. Exploding bombs and torpedoes, and powerful, fire-setting machine gun and cannon rounds, plus exploding ammunition magazines, fires feeding on huge oil tank ruptures and attendant massive fuel spills from ships, parked aircraft loaded with fuel and fuel storage areas, resulted in shattered and dismembered bodies, making many of the dead impossible to find or identify, and maiming many of the wounded for life.
A thoughtful examination of the attack’s aftermath clearly indicates the Japanese fighters and dive bombers specifically targeted fire stations, and the red-painted fire fighting equipment and their crews, with the military purpose of permitting their incendiary and tracer rounds to cause as much damage by fire as possible. Deep penetrating, high-explosive bombs and torpedoes tore through heavy armor plating on ships to both set massive fires and cause flooding. Armor piercing, tracer and incendiary rounds penetrated thinner armor plating on ships, and tore through key targets of all types on airfields, with devastating effects. The tactics and selected weapons loads paid off for the attackers.
The threat of fire on board ships is always a matter of great concern, a reason for frequent inspections and improvement of equipment, fire fighting and damage control drills. Ships are in fact enormous, high-powered, high-energy-driven floating cities loaded with hundreds of thousands of gallons of flammable fuel, and Naval combatants are literally floating arsenals and ammunition depots with redundant safety systems, partitions
[bulkheads], and procedures designed around them to avoid catastrophe.
There were numerous fires on airfields, but few were as deadly and massively fatal as on the ships. Fires on ships, and on the surface of oily waters injected a different kind of horror into that day, and into the tortured memories carried in the years ahead. The images of the walking dead seen on the Arizona and men struck down or trapped by exploding bombs and horribly burned or nearly consumed by fire on the battleships West Virginia, Nevada, California, Nevada, and Pennsylvania; the destroyers Shaw and Downes; the repair ship Vestal, moored to Arizona when the attack began; and the seaplane tender Curtiss. Some were burned to death before the eyes of their comrades and others who could only stand by helplessly, unable to reach them, bodies burned beyond recognition, and others burned beyond any hope of surviving, unrecognizable and lingering in slow deaths.
The tidal wave of casualties coming from ships, airfields, the city of Honolulu, and outlying areas at first seemed beyond comprehension and initially overwhelmed temporary available transportation, aid stations, designated medical treatment centers aboard damaged and sinking ships, receiving clinics, hospitals, the hospital ship USS Solace, ambulance and volunteer transportation, doctors, nurses, emergency rooms, operating rooms, pharmacies, morgues, cemeteries, and casualty identification and notification systems. While total bed capacity at the existing military and civilian hospitals was far more than sufficient to eventually absorb the influx of wounded and dying, it came at the expense of convalescing patients who had to move to make room.
Scheduled training and no-notice exercises prepared military and civilian doctors, nurses, medics, ambulance, firemen and supporting medical staffs to respond calmly and professionally to the stream of casualties, but it was, in some instances, impossible to keep up with the numbers pouring into the primary and back-up treatment centers. The number of severely wounded inevitably increased beyond the capability to give them immediate, possibly life-saving treatment.
As the streams of dead and wounded poured off the ships, airfields, and other locations, the task of identifying the dead, dying, and the units or ships they came from was all too often impossible. The urgency of getting the badly wounded to treatment overcame on-site note taking or record keeping. Many men carried no identification, frequently because it was left behind when they rushed to battle stations or fled impossible circumstances. Some volunteered to assist on other ships such as Pennsylvania, turned up missing, and it took days to find out what happened to them. Many of the wounded couldn’t be found by their unit supervisors and commanders for days, and in some instances, men were declared dead who were only slightly wounded, and instead were “missing” somewhere in a hospital.
Many men were dismembered in violent explosions, their bodies separated from any form of identification they might have carried. Others were burned beyond recognition, along with any hope of identification. The recovery and rescue work, official records, and accounts of efforts by doctors, nurses, medics and volunteers tell the story. Both the Army’s Hawaiian Department, Office of the Department Surgeon, and the Navy’s Medical Department at Pearl Harbor were well prepared and responded magnificently to the crisis they confronted.
Immediately, at the Hawaiian Department’s Station Hospital at Schofield Barracks – which serviced Wheeler Field, the Station Hospital at Hickam Field, and Tripler General Hospital in Fort Shafter, as casualties began coming in, sixteen civilian surgical teams, previously assigned and organized, were dispatched to various hospitals to assist in the care of battle casualties. Additional people promptly went to open up Kamehameha School and Farrington High School as auxiliary hospitals. The same day, the Hawaiian Department issued orders to open St. Louis College as a hospital. Plans for the conversion of these schools into hospitals had previously been made, and if the battle had continued their use as auxiliary hospitals was available. Four Provisional General Hospitals and six Hawaii District Hospitals, added to three large military hospitals offered the possibility of 3,472 normal beds available, with emergency and expansion beds totaling 5,340 and 7,009 respectively – more than enough to accommodate the influx of wounded that day.
At the Station Hospital at Schofield Barracks, the second largest of the Army hospitals on Oahu, Doctor Heaton, Medical Corps and Chief of Surgical Services, arrived at the hospital minutes after he was recalled to duty. For months he and the men and women in the hospital planned and prepared for such an emergency. The Hospital staff rapidly cleared convalescent patients from beds to make room for the arriving wounded. In his diary he described what he and his operating teams faced beginning just thirty minutes after the first bomb fell on Wheeler Field:
The first wounded arrived from Wheeler Field and we immediately set our operating teams in action. We worked all that day up until early evening. I had already set up 4 of these teams on paper and they started to function as all were present. We were not caught short on personnel or equipment. Such wounds!! – eviscerations of brains, neck, thorax, abdomen – traumatic amputations, etc. No burns of any consequence. No cardiac or neurological operated cases…
Surgical teams at Schofield Barracks worked tirelessly, treating 117 wounded that day. The speed with which the wounded were handled and the calm thoroughness of their treatment had much to do with the saving of life and limb. Thirty-eight of them died, most having arrived with fatal wounds. No cases of gas gangrene developed or caused deaths, a form of deadly infection in wars past, and a tribute to a new, simple life-saving procedure begun by Dr. Heaton and later recognized and used throughout the Army.
Epilogue
On Friday, 19 December 1941, the first of more than 20,000 people began an exodus by sea from the island of Oahu to the West Coast, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The great majority were military dependants ordered to leave the islands following the attack. Three convoys carrying more than 5,000 evacuees left Honolulu in December, and sailed through waters patrolled by six Japanese submarines in the vicinity of Oahu and on nine stations off the West Coast. The crews and passengers on the convoys’ two to three passenger liners knew of the submarine threats, were aware of several sinkings which had occurred in the days following the attack, and didn’t know their planned destinations when they departed Honolulu. Their five to six day voyages were filled with tension, though a cruiser and two destroyers escorted each convoy. The evacuations continued on through the summer of 1942.
On Friday, 20 February 1942, Sara Hill Heaton and Sara Dudley Heaton, wife and daughter of Major Leonard D. Heaton, the Army surgeon at the North Sector General Hospital in Schofield Barracks on 7 December, left Oahu for the mainland on the Matson Liner, SS Lurline. On an island with a population still deeply worried about another air raid, or worse, an anguished Dr. Heaton wrote in his diary the night after his wife and daughter departed Honolulu into waters still haunted by Japanese submarine attacks.
What can I write – all I love near aboard the Lurline at 10:45 AM today. Oh God please please help me to bear up under this cross. And God please be with them every step of the way. Sara Hill held up well and I would have too but Sara Dudley started crying and then I was literally torn to shreds – this is almost like going thru the Valley of the Shadow of death – but I pray God that it is his will that in some distant day we shall draw together again. I can’t write more – tears just can’t be held back.
Three days after they left Honolulu on the Lurline, Japanese submarine I-17 shelled the oil production facility at Goleta, California, north of Santa Barbara. En route, Mrs. Heaton wrote in her diary, describing the convoy and conditions similar to those experienced by Joey Border, the wife of Ensign Robert L. “Bob” Border on the USS Tennesse, and other passengers in the December 1941 convoys. “…9 beds in a stateroom…put on and told to keep on life belts…1700 women, 800 children and quite a number of men…sea sickness…twins and other babies born en route…heard some women lost babies…zigzagging.”
The relatively large convoy she described in part in a simple diagram in her diary included a destroyer in the lead, the SS President Garfield on the port bow of Lurline; on her starboard bow was the British-owned Curnard Line’s giant, 901 foot-long, 45,647-gross ton SS Aquitania, which took her maiden voyage from Liverpool, England in May 1914, and was built to carry 3,230 passengers as a grand cruiser liner.
A cruiser was in the formation, beyond Aquitania, and the SS President Grant was on the starboard abeam of Lurline. An unnamed transport and another cruiser were off Lurline’s starboard quarter, and the 13,788-gross ton transport USS Wharton
[AP-7], was off Lurline’s port quarter. Astern of Lurline came the aircraft transport USS Kitty Hawk
[AKV-1], which in early February had carried a load of airplanes to Pearl Harbor to replace those lost in the 7 December attack, and another destroyer off the starboard quarter of Kitty Hawk. Mrs. Heaton described Navy and Army airplanes overhead, escorting the convoy from Honolulu “for some distance, then disappeared.” When they were en route the Grant broke down, which slowed progress considerably. Then, because of the submarine threat off the West Coast, the convoy veered considerably off the great circle route, all of which stretched five days into nine. Sara Heaton was heartened and the passengers were cheered considerably to see a Catalina PBY aircraft meet and begin escorting the convoy into its San Francisco destination.
Sara Hill Heaton’s husband completed a distinguished 40-year career as a surgeon in the Army, devoting his life to healing and saving the lives of soldiers and their families. The first surgeon in the Army to become a lieutenant general, he was named the Army’s Surgeon General from 1959 to 1969, which spanned in part the Vietnam War. During that period he became President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s personal physician, and provided devoted treatment to retired General of the Army Douglas MacArthur in the days before he died in 1964.
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