Mustering my strongest voice, I screamed: "Everybody! Listen to me! These patients are all bleeding. We've got to stop the bleeding quickly - right now! Elevate extremities! Use anything you can get to stop the bleeding! Tourniquets! Compression bandages! Hemostats! Even your fingers, if they are clean! Bring all bad cases to the operating room!"
During the next thirty-two hours, our medical staff worked around the clock, applying tourniquets and compression bandages, amputating arms and legs (many dangling by only a few shreds of skin or tendons), tying off bleeders, giving tetanus shots, laying the dead in the garage for identification. As soon as we could get each patient through his emergency, we sent him by ambulance to one of the civilian hospitals in Baguio for definitive care, and a few miles distant from any future bombing.
I was very fortunate in obtaining Dr. Beulah Allen (the wife of our Post Quartermaster, Lt. Col. Henderson Allen), a retired surgeon, to assist me. She was a tower of strength. While Dr. Allen and I were operating, Civil War General Sherman's remarks that "War is hell!" kept haunting me.
I was extremely proud of my medics; we took care of wounds, the likes of which none of us had ever seen before! Periodically, a Jap plane would drop a bomb or two-to let us know the war
was still on. They did little damage. After we had our wounded taken care of to the best of our ability, we dared to look outside to see the thirty-foot craters and damaged buildings near the hospital.
For the first time, I realized that I was frightened. I could have been in one of those buildings, or walking across the areas where the craters were.
Dee. 9, 1941: At night our medical teams returned to their individual quarters for their first rest since the bombing exhausted and giddy. I turned on my little radio. Although the signal was badly jammed by the Japanese as it had been for several months, I was able to make out that Congress had declared war on Japan at 1610 hours on December 8, 1941, (0500 hours, Dec. 9 Philippine time). Now it was OK for us to shoot back at the Japs! But with what? I also learned that the Japs had landed large forces in French Indochina.
I was quite sure that all commercial communications with the States had been cut off, but I called the radio station to send a message to my wife, Judy, a teacher at Holton Arms School in Washington, D.C., that I was OK.
Judy and I had arrived in Manila on July 20, 1940, after a delightful trip from New York City through the Panama Canal on the U. S. Army Transport Republic bound for San Francisco, and on the U.S.A.T. Grant via Hawaii, Guam and Manila. We got to see two World's Fairs (New York and San Francisco). It was really our honeymoon, as we had previously been too poor to afford one.
During the six weeks we were on the high seas, history had been taking place. Hitler's armies had blitzkrieged through Holland, Belgium and France; the British Army had a forced evacuation from Dunkirk in an armada of small boats. Mussolini had declared war on Britain and France (actually stabbing France in the back while she was on her knees). Hitler's bombers were causing havoc in England, and his submarines were sinking many Allied ships in the Atlantic. Tojo was vigorously continuing his "undeclared wars" in Manchuria and China. Churchill said, "We shall seek no terms; we shall ask no mercy."