Naval officers seldom had command over the corpsman. He was responsible directly to the platoon, company, and battalion to which he was assigned.
Ashore on D-Day with the invading troops, Pharmacist’s Mate Second Class Andrew Bernard later remembered setting up his 3d Marines regimental aid station, just inland in the muck off the beach beside the “C” Medical Field Hospital. Later, as action intensified, Bernard saw 15 to 20 wounded Marines waiting at the hospital for care, and commented, “this was when I noticed Dr. Duncan Shepherd.... The flaps of the hospital tent went open, and there was Dr. Shepherd operating away, so calm, so brave, so courageous—as though he was back in the Mayo Clinic, where he had trained.”
On 7 December, the Japanese attacked around the Koromokina. The official history of the 3d Marine Division described the scene:
The division hospital, situated near the beach, was subjected to daily air raids, and twice to artillery shelling.... Company E of the 3d Medical Battalion, which was the division hospital under Commander R. R. Callaway, USN, proved that delicate work could be carried on even in combat. During the battle the field hospital was attacked, bullets ripped through the protecting tent, seriously wounding a pharmacist’s mate.
Painting by Franklin Boggs in Men Without Guns (Philadelphia:/The Blakiston Company, 1945)
Hellzapoppin Ridge was the most intense and miserable of the battles for the corpsmen of Bougainville, according to Pharmacist’s Mate First Class Carroll Garnett. He and three other corpsmen were assigned to the forward aid station located at the top of that bloody ridge. The two battalion surgeons were considered indispensable and discouraged from taking undue risks. Regardless, Assistant Battalion Surgeon Lieutenant Edmond A. Utkewicz, USNR, insisted on joining the corpsmen at the forward station and remained there throughout the entire battle. The doctor and his four assistants were often in the open, exposed to fire, and showered with the dust thrown up by mortar explosions.
The corpsmen’s routine was: stop the bleeding, apply sulfa powder and battle dressing, shoot syrette of morphine, and administer plasma. The regular aid station was located at the bottom of the ridge where the battalion surgeon, Lieutenant Commander Horace L. Wolf, USNR, checked the wounded again, before sending them off in an ambulance, if available, to a better equipped station or a field hospital.
Corpsmen (and Marines) were in deadly peril atop the ridge. Corpsman John A. Wetteland described volunteers bringing in a wounded paramarine who was still breathing when he and the medical team were hit anew by a shell. One corpsman was killed, another badly wounded, and Wetteland was badly mauled by mortar fragments, though he tried, he said, “to bandage myself.”
Dr. Wolf later painted a grim picture of the taut circumstances under which the medics worked: