Thanks to the ability of the helicopter to land “on a dime,” staff liaison missions and command visits were greatly facilitated. The helicopter had become the modern general’s steed, and the gap between staff and line was narrowed by rotary wings.
The importance of wound evacuation missions can hardly be overestimated. Surgeons stressed the value of time in treating the shock resulting from severe wounds. The sooner a patient could be made ready for surgery, the better were his chances of survival. Definitive care had waited in the past until a casualty was borne on a jolting stretcher from the firing line to the nearest road to begin a long ambulance ride. Such a journey might take most of a day, but there were instances of a helicopter evacuee reaching the operation table only an hour after being wounded at the front, 15 or 20 miles away.
Captain J. W. McElroy, USNR, commanding the famous hospital ship Consolation, asserted that his experience had “proved conclusively the superiority of the helicopter method of embarking and evacuating casualties to and from the ship.”[262] A helicopter loading platform was installed on the Consolation in July 1951, during an overhaul at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard in California. Marine helicopter pilots advised as to landing requirements, and eventually all the hospital ships had similar platforms.
[262] CO USS Consolation rpt to ComNavFE, 26 Jan 52.
At a conservative estimate, the 1,926 wounded men flown out by VMO-6 helicopters during the squadron’s first year in Korea included several hundred who might not have survived former methods of evacuation.
Marine Body Armor Tested in Korea
Another far-reaching tactical innovation was being launched at this time as Lieutenant Commander Frederick J. Lewis (MSC) USN, supervised a joint Army-Navy three-month field test of Marine armored vests made of lightweight plastics.
A glance at the past reveals that body armor had never quite vanished from modern warfare. European cavalry lancers wore steel cuirasses throughout the 19th century. During the American Civil War two commercial firms in Connecticut manufactured steel breastplates purchased by thousands of Union soldiers. So irksome were the weight and rigidity of this protection, however, that infantrymen soon discarded it.
World War I dated the first widespread adoption of armor in the 20th century. The idea was suggested when a French general noted that one of his men had survived a lethal shell fragment by virtue of wearing an iron mess bowl under his beret. France led the way, and before the end of 1915 steel helmets were being issued to all armies on the Western Front.
When the United States entered the war, General John J. Pershing put in a request for body armor. Some 30 prototypes using steel or aluminum plates were submitted but rejected. In every instance the weight and rigidity were such that too high a price in mobility would be paid for protection.[263]