The United States Army Medical Service Corps
WORLD WAR II
THE SCIENTIFIC SPECIALTIES
The nearly twenty-six hundred scientific specialty officers who served in the Medical Department during World War II played essential roles in the Army`s wartime preventive medicine and treatment activities. Their use demonstrated several major trends: the modernization of the military medical team, the beginning of a standing medical research and development program, the increasing role of preventive medicine, and the growing influence of professional guilds.
Early mobilization efforts had increased the number of Sanitary Corps officers on active duty from 8 in June 1940 to 227 when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The need for those officers was so acute that by July 1943 the Army listed seven groups-sanitary engineer, bacteriologist, biochemist, serologist, parasitologist, nutritionist, and medical photographer-in the category of `scarce` specialties. That made civilians with the proper skills eligible for direct commissioning as Sanitary Corps first lieutenants without the requirement for completing OCS.1 Appointment required a baccalaureate degree and four years` experience. Recruitment took a variety of forms, including articles in professional journals and solicitation of universities, industrial organizations, and professional societies. The effort worked, and by December 1943 there were 2,365 Sanitary Corps officers on active duty. The corps peaked in April 1945 with 2,560 officers. A new entity, the Pharmacy Corps, was established in 1943 as a Regular Army component. By April 1945 it reached its top strength of seventy officers, about a third of whom were pharmacists.2
Brig. Gen. James S. Simmons, MC, the surgeon general`s World War II preventive medicine chief, said that the importance of having scientific specialty officers was one of the three major lessons of the war and that the Sanitary Corps had made possible the Medical Department`s success in preventive medicine. The increased sophistication of medical technology, the demands of meeting medical support requirements worldwide, and the health care requirements of occupied areas greatly expanded the use of these officers. They did not necessarily substitute for medical officers, since they often represented specialties not otherwise present in the department. For example, medical training did not prepare physicians for duties as sanitary engineers, entomologists, or nutritionists.3
War Department policy restricted appointments to applicants over the age of thirty because the government wished to preserve officer candidate school as the preferred route for commissioning draft-age applicants. The Surgeon General`s Office desired relief from the minimum age requirement because it limited the
June 1945 calendar promoting malaria and epidemic disease control
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pool the Medical Department could draw from in the scientific specialties. That made it difficult to comply with the War Department`s policy that directed the maximum substitution of nonmedical for Medical Corps officers in positions not requiring medical training. The Medical Department wanted the latitude to appoint younger, draft-age applicants who possessed the necessary educational background and to compensate for their lack of experience with additional Army training. The War Department accepted the Surgeon General`s Office`s argument, and the rules were modified in 1943 to allow the commissioning of scientific specialty applicants with two years` experience as second lieutenants.4
A Modernized Medical Team
Officers who were experts in emerging technologies enabled an expansion and modernization of the Medical Department team that would otherwise have been impossible. The influence of psychologists, sanitary engineers, entomologists, nutritionists, laboratory officers, social workers, chiropodists, and optometrists illustrated that progress, and the accounts of those specialties reveal different facets of the modernization. Intertwined in those accounts is the desire of each group for professional recognition, especially for the last three, who did not achieve commissioned officer status during the war. Overall, there was an effort to mold the disparate specialties into a unified team operating within the fundamental evacuation and treatment doctrine. The totality of the team that evolved was greater than the sum of its parts.5
Psychology
Demand for psychologists accelerated in World War II as a spiraling psychiatric workload overwhelmed psychiatrists and dictated the acceptance of clinical psychologists into the mental health team for diagnostic testing and therapy-a change from the use of psychologists strictly for personnel management where their testing expertise was utilized in screening recruits and in assessing applicants for various specialties and schools. Part of the workload was caused by psychiatric casualties from combat exhaustion (a condition referred to as `shell shock` and war neurosis in World War I), which inundated the medical treatment capacity in some areas. Psychiatric admissions far exceeded all other nonsurgical admissions in some Army divisions.6
Initially, all psychologists were commissioned in the Adjutant General`s Department where their testing expertise was employed in the classification of recruits. As such they had no prospect of clinical duties, but the Medical Department soon found that they were needed in the hospital setting as members of the emerging mental health team. In 1942 Lt. Col. Patrick S. Madigan, MC, chief of the Surgeon General`s Neuropsychiatric Division, arranged for commissioning six clinical psychologists as Sanitary Corps first lieutenants and assigning them to general hospitals in the Zone of the Interior, where they were well received. Commissioning in the Sanitary Corps halted when the surgeon general agreed that all psychologists would be commissioned in the Adjutant General`s Department and the adjutant general agreed to assign clinical psy?
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chologists to all hospitals of 1,000 or more beds. That arrangement held during most of the war.7
Consequently, Army psychologists in World War II performed both personnel management and clinical functions, with the Adjutant General Corps absorbing the former and the Medical Department the latter. The adjutant general appointed Lt. Col. Morton A. Seidenfeld, AG, as the chief clinical psychologist to coordinate their joint use. This required frequent coordination between the Adjutant General`s and Surgeon General`s Offices.
The opening of clinical opportunities integrated clinical psychologists into the mental health team in the largest program of its kind anywhere. It was strongly supported by successive chiefs of the Surgeon General`s Neuropsychiatric Division, and especially by Brig. Gen. William C. Menninger, MC, of Menninger Clinic fame. In 1945 Menninger succeeded in transferring total responsibility for clinical psychology to the Medical Department, and 340 psychologists were transferred to the Medical Administrative Corps. In addition, five women were commissioned in 1945 as clinical psychologists in the Adjutant General for duty with the Medical Department, one of the earlier programs of opportunity for women in the military.8
Clinical psychologists were usually assigned to general and convalescent hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and disciplinary barracks. They administered tests previously unavailable in Army hospitals, such as Weschler-Bellevue and Babcock-Levy. They performed other diagnostic studies, maintained liaison with Red Cross social workers for social histories of patients, and assisted psychiatrists in certain electroencephalographic studies. The Medical Department found that the use of uniformed, rather than civilian, psychologists enhanced their effectiveness because they were `compelled to live in day-to-day contact with military folk and military problems.`9 In this way they worked on problems that were directly related to the needs of the military.
A survey of fifty clinical psychologists revealed that their principal activity was the administration and interpretation of a battery of tests selected especially for each patient. Psychiatrists used the results of that testing in a way analogous to the use of x-ray pictures by surgeons. The testing, used as it was for clinical diagnosis and treatment, went beyond that performed by psychologists to serve personnel classification needs in the Adjutant General Department. For example, IQ (intelligence quotient) tests conducted by Sanitary Corps officers were supplemented by personality tests such as the Army Weschler and Weschler-Bellevue and used for differential diagnosis. Sanitary Corps psychologists reported that individual therapy performed under the direct supervision of a psychiatrist was their second most common function. Their third principal area of responsibility was the administration and supervision of the clinical psychology staff.10
Some psychologists participated in the Aviation Psychology Program, an effort more closely related to the functions of the Adjutant General`s Office than to those of the Surgeon General`s Office. It carried on the work begun in World War I of selecting and classifying candidates for aircrew training. Sanitary Corps psychologists developed the Army Air Forces Qualifying Examination, which was used to screen one million applicants. Over six hundred thousand aviators took
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another test, the Aircrew Classification Battery, which was used to predict success in pilot, bombardier, and navigator training.11
Social Work
While the use of social workers was expanded in the Army during World War II, they did not achieve commissioned status during the war. They performed in their specialty either as Red Cross civilians or as nonmedical enlisted soldiers. Although some social workers served as officers in the Army, they worked in other branches and not in their professional specialty.
Social workers focused their attention on the human side of medical care, serving as the bridge between the perplexing complexity of hospitals and the reality of patient lives which if not attended to could interfere with or negate the efforts of health care providers. `It is the area of social functioning, coping, and adapting that social workers address as they relate to the needs of the whole patient.`12 In 1905 Richard C. Cabot, M.D., head of outpatient services for Boston`s Massachusetts General Hospital, established a medical social service that set a trend in American medicine. Cabot portrayed the situation he was attempting to rectify in everyday terms. `Without any sense of the humor of the situation, we say (in substance) to many patients: `take a vacation,` or `get a job,` `get a set of teeth` or `get a truss.` There is none in sight and no means of getting any. What do we do? We pass cheerfully to the next patient.`13 Social work services for Army hospitals were first provided by American Red Cross social workers in a program begun in late 1918 and continued during the interwar years at seventeen Army and Navy hospitals. The Red Cross and enlisted social workers during World War II supported mental health units, convalescent and rehabilitation centers, disciplinary barracks, and general hospitals in the United States. At the end of the war there were 711 social workers stateside and 25 overseas.14
The importance of social work was increasingly apparent during the war. This was especially the case as General Menninger developed the mental hygiene consultative service, an interdisciplinary mental health team of psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers, the first of which opened at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, on 4 March 1942. Menninger lobbied for establishment of a social work branch as part of the Neuropsychiatric Division, and he saw that come to fruition in July 1945, when Lt. Col. David E. O`Keefe, AG, became the first chief.15
Sanitary Engineers
Sanitary engineers again played an important part in the Medical Department`s preventive medicine effort, their numbers increasing from sixty-five in 1941 to nearly one thousand by the end of the war. They were assigned to headquarters staffs, to research and development roles, as post medical inspectors, and to positions controlling the environmental factors of water, sewage, and garbage. One hundred officers commanded malaria control units stateside and overseas.16
Col. William A. Hardenbergh, SnC, who had remained active in the Sanitary Corps Reserve during the interwar period, served as chief of the Sanitary Engineering Division. His assistant was Capt. Joseph J. Gilbert, SnC, who also served as chief of the Waste Disposal Branch. Capt. James B. Baty, SnC, was chief
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Sanitary Corps officer at a base hospital in Iceland tests water specimens from camps nearby
of the Water Supply Branch, and Capt. David F. Smallhorst, SnC, headed the Insect and Rodent Control Branch. While he was credited by some accounts as serving as chief of the Sanitary Corps, as Colonel Wrightson had in World War I, Hardenbergh`s attention was principally directed toward sanitary engineers and entomologists. Other scientific specialties were handled elsewhere in the Surgeon General`s Office. All the same, his decisions influenced the direction of the corps. One of his first actions was to release about half of the reserve officers `because they had no training in what we considered to be recognized by our program. This may seem unimportant now, but it was one of the essential steps toward getting the Sanitary Corps truly professional, and so recognized.` Brig. Gen. Stanhope Bayne-Jones, MC, deputy chief of the Surgeon General`s Preventive Medicine Service, credited Colonel Hardenbergh and other Sanitary Corps officers with important contributions to typhus control.17
Another senior sanitary engineer was Col. Michael J. Blew, SnC. Blew had been a Sanitary Corps lieutenant with the 82d Division during World War I, had served in the Sanitary Corps Reserve during the interwar years, and was part of a group that performed its annual training at Carlisle each summer. An engineer with the City of Philadelphia, Blew reentered active duty in 1941. He found the greatest change over the years had occurred in the development of a sense of teamwork among physicians and scientific specialists. Army physicians in World War I had not understood the capabilities of Sanitary Corps officers.18
Sanitary needs varied greatly from one theater of war to another. Waste disposal posed difficult problems for sanitary engineers in England who supported
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the troop buildup prior to the Normandy invasion. Terrain and population density prevented use of routine disposal methods. American units employed `honey bucket` latrines, but emptying the buckets was a most unpleasant chore and `not a task undertaken voluntarily by American soldiers.` Later, on the Continent, they found that the French, like the British, had no sewage system in the provinces, but instead used cesspits whose contents were pumped into trucks for disposal. The GIs ranked the French system above the British, at least from an aesthetic point of view.19
Sanitary engineers were important figures in carrying out the department`s public health responsibilities in occupied areas. In the Philippines, Maj. Lloyd K. Clark, SnC, worked closely with Corps of Engineers units and local civilian officials to reestablish the Manila public water supply. He entered northern Manila on 9 February 1945 with advance elements of Sixth Army engineer units and found the city without water in its distribution system. Restoration of water supplies required repair of the damage from combat action and sabotage by the retreating Japanese forces. It was a difficult undertaking, sometimes done in the face of enemy action.20
Capts. Lawrence S. Farrell, SnC, and Paul J. Houser, SnC, served as sanitary engineers on the Strategic Bombing Survey of Germany in 1944, a study commissioned by President Roosevelt. Farrell and Houser found that bombing hampered the essential services of water supply and sewage and garbage disposal but did not materially alter public health conditions. Certainly the damage was impressive. Water mains and sewer pipes twenty feet below the surface were ripped open by bombing attacks. Air raids on Munich in July and August 1944 caused severe damage to that city`s water distribution system, severing all five main lines feeding the city and breaking the lines themselves in about 850 places. In some cities subjected to fire raids-for example, Stuttgart in 1944-raw sewage was pumped on the fires because of water shortages. Yet the destruction did not cause an increase in communicable disease to the extent anticipated by the team. Farrell and Houser credited that paradoxical result to an excellent public health system, but they also believed that Germany could not have maintained essential services for long if the war had continued.21
Captain Houser also coauthored the environmental sanitation section in the report of the Strategic Bombing Survey of Japan, a study ordered in 1945 by President Harry S. Truman. As in Germany, the study found disruption of basic services without the degree of increase in communicable disease anticipated by the team, but the similar result could not be explained with the same reasons as in the case of Germany. Two factors worked in favor of Japan. Unlike the demolition bombing of Germany, Japan was principally fire-bombed, which may have temporarily sterilized the bombed areas. Second, the common practice of using night soil as a valued fertilizer, while contributing to enteric diseases, rendered waste water in Japan less polluted than in Europe. On the other hand, the authors did not find evidence of an individual understanding of personal hygiene in Japan nor attempts by the government to instruct the population in its principles. Those factors complicate understanding of their finding of an absence of a serious epidemic disease problem.22
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Army Industrial Hygiene Laboratory personnel, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, 1944
Some sanitary engineers contributed to the use of industrial hygiene, especially in the design of military equipment, in order to enhance the ability of soldiers to operate in hostile environments.23 Lt. Col. Theodore F. Hatch, SnC, a sanitary engineer, was assigned to the Armored Force Medical Research Laboratory at Fort Knox, Kentucky, from 1942 to 1945. There, he participated in tests of the M4 tank that revealed that when the tank was `buttoned up` there was no air exchange for the crew. The project manager disapproved a recommendation to install ventilation fans because `the tank already had too many gadgets.` Hatch broke this impasse by arranging for two general officers to take part in test-firing ten 75-mm. shells; one general acted as the gunner, the other was the loader, and Hatch was the tank commander. `When the ammonia reached about 400 ppm after firing four rounds, the generals were weeping copiously and ready to quit.` The fans were installed.24
Entomology
One of the few insects to play a leading role in literature was Archy the cockroach in Don Marquis` delightful tale of life among the unwashed, Archy and Mehitabel. When Archy declared war on mankind, he declared he would `fling a billion times a billion risen insects in an army at the throats of all you humans."25 The first line in the Army`s defense against Archy`s hordes was the Sanitary Corps entomologist. There were 239 entomologists serving as Sanitary Corps officers in February 1945, up from 13 in the Sanitary Corps Reserve at the end of 1940. They were essential members of the preventive medicine team that fought diseases transmitted by insect vectors, often with notable success, such as in the Far East where the reduction in the malaria attack rate was termed an `achievement of historic importance.` One of the entomologists was John N. Belkin, Ph.D.,
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Captain Pletsch (center) in New Caledonia, 1945
who as a Sanitary Corps captain commanded a malaria survey unit in Guadalcanal and the Philippines. Belkin became a prominent figure in mosquito taxonomy after the war, and he named a number of new species after soldiers who had served in his unit.26
Donald J. Pletsch, Ph.D., a professor of entomology at Montana State College, was commissioned in 1942 as a first lieutenant in the Sanitary Corps. In 1944 he took command of the 218th Malaria Survey Detachment, which was initially employed in malaria control efforts in Texas, Louisiana, and Florida. In January 1945 the 218th moved to the Philippines where it was attached to the 81st Infantry Division for mopping-up actions in Leyte and New Caledonia. When Japan fell, the detachment drew winter clothing and went from the Philippines by landing ship, tank (LST), to Hokkaido, Japan. Landing in snow, they undertook operations to control an outbreak of louse-borne typhus among Chinese and Korean laborers who had been used by the Japanese as coal miners. The Americans formed a close association with the Zoology Department of the Hokkaido Imperial University, and their colleagues hosted a Thanksgiving dinner to honor the American medical soldiers. The Japanese went to great lengths to make the dinner a special event, a task made quite difficult by food rationing.27
Entomologists were indispensable in combating arthropod-borne disease, especially typhus and relapsing fever (lice), plague (fleas), and yellow fever and malaria (mosquitoes). DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) was a spectacular addition to their armamentarium, although it was only one factor of many. It became available for mosquito control in the summer of 1944, but by that point the malaria rates had already decreased as the result of actions by malaria control
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and survey units. DDT in powder form was highly valued for delousing operations in the battle with typhus, especially in refugee populations.28 Entomologists in the Southwest Pacific Area established a rodent-control training program in the Philippines as part of the typhus control program there. In yet another function, they served in the U.S. occupation of Germany. Maj. John W. Bailey, SnC, a staff officer of the U.S. Military Government for Germany, surveyed the insect collections in forty-eight museums in eleven countries. He found that there had been universal effort to preserve the collections, and thirty-six collections were unharmed. Six had been totally destroyed. He arranged for the return of valuable entomological collections that had been removed from Holland to Germany.29
Nutrition
Col. Paul E. Howe, SnC, headed the Food and Nutrition Subdivision of the Surgeon General`s Office. Howe was a charter member of the American Institute of Nutrition and a leading biochemist and nutritionist who had been instrumental in popularizing iodization of table salt and enrichment of flour in the United States. He had served as a nutrition officer during World War I and remained in the Sanitary Corps Reserve during the interwar period. He was on the staff of Princeton University when recalled to active duty for World War II.30
Nutrition officers advised commanders on the adequacy of food supply for soldiers. Howe directed a series of 455 food consumption surveys at fifty camps and posts that demonstrated that soldiers at Army training camps had a nutritionally adequate diet-one that averaged 3,700 calories per day, plus another 350 to 400 calories at the post canteens. At the peak, there were 185 Sanitary Corps nutrition officers. They were closely monitored by the Surgeon General`s Office to ensure they were not sidetracked into duties outside their specialty.31
The need for expertise in the medical aspects of food and nutrition as they affected soldier performance (as opposed to the Quartermaster General`s concern with food technology and supply) led to the formation of the Army Medical Nutrition Laboratory at the Army Medical School, Washington, D.C., in 1942. Sanitary Corps officers were part of that effort from the beginning, and in 1944, when the school moved to Chicago, Illinois, it was commanded by Maj. George H. Berryman, SnC.32
Sanitary Corps nutrition officers were a necessary asset in civil affairs operations. In the occupation of Germany, the Army estimated in 1945 that 60 percent of the German population was existing on a diet that could result in disease or malnutrition. In May a team of nutrition officers was assigned to the Belsen Concentration Camp near Hanover, Germany, to evaluate the nutritional status of the survivors and to assist in relief efforts. They found 60,000 men, women, and children in extremely serious condition, so poor that even after two weeks of effort by the team inmates were still dying at the rate of 300 per day from starvation or tuberculosis, pneumonia, and other infectious diseases. Other teams visited American-guarded prisoner of war camps. Surveys of fifteen camps in May 1945 established that the caloric intake of the German prisoners was only slightly below that of American soldiers in the field. Later surveys showed much malnutrition.33
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Nutrition officer (right) weighs plate waste during a mess survey at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, 1942
While on an inspection trip, Colonel Howe observed swelling in the necks of soldiers engaged in arctic and desert training, a sign of goiters caused by iodine deficiency. Howe was able to persuade the Quartermaster Corps to enforce the use of iodized salt. He also found that the American soldiers` ingenuity had conquered a thoroughly despised antiscorbutic artificial lemonade.34 Howe reported to the National Research Council that the GIs had twenty-one uses for the lemonade powder, ranging from tooth cleansing to scouring field ovens.
Laboratory Officers
By August 1944 there were 1,030 Sanitary Corps laboratory officers, a number consisting of 895 bacteriologists and biochemists, 101 parasitologists, 24 serologists, 9 medical photographers, and 1 neuroanatomist. Maj. Arthur Stull, SnC, served as the wartime chief of the Laboratories Division of the Surgeon General`s Office and, as such, as the spokesman for the specialty. Stull had been the first Sanitary Corps officer assigned to that office. Newly commissioned officers were usually former noncommissioned officers who possessed baccalaureate
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and sometimes master`s or doctoral degrees coupled with one to two years` experience in laboratory procedures. Nearly 50 percent of the laboratory officers had advanced degrees, and 29 percent had doctorates. Although their functions proliferated, they were not permitted to serve as chiefs of laboratories. The department continued to restrict those assignments to physicians `because of the broad field of training required.` Maj. Roy D. Maxwell, SnC, broke new ground in 1945 as the first scientific specialty officer to attend the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.35
Experience in World War II demonstrated that such specialist officers were essential for the operation of a good hospital laboratory-one of the significant advances that came out of the war. The department needed as many laboratory officers as it could obtain, but by the end of 1944 found that the manpower pool had dried up. In June 1944 the Surgeon General`s Office estimated that 250 officers were needed but only 100 men were qualified.36
The department considered commissioning women, since some enlisted members of the Women`s Army Corps were qualified by training and experience as biochemists, serologists, parasitologists, and bacteriologists. The Judge Advocate General ruled that no women could be commissioned in the Sanitary Corps, but that they could be enlisted or commissioned in the WAC and detailed for duty with the Sanitary Corps. Therefore, qualified applicants were commissioned in the Women`s Army Corps upon completion of WAC basic training and were assigned to the Medical Department after a one-month course for laboratory officers. They were detailed to the Sanitary Corps and wore the insignia of their new corps after
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a six-month probationary period. Col. Oveta Culp Hobby, director of the Women`s Army Corps, agreed to the arrangement because those officers, by being detailed to the Medical Department, would not reduce her quota of officer candidates. The first group of twenty-four WAC enlisted soldiers was commissioned in the fall of 1944, detailed to the Sanitary Corps, and attended a special orientation course at Billings General Hospital, Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana. By March 1945 thirty-one women were serving as Sanitary Corps officers.37
Some laboratory officers had participated in the Sanitary Corps Reserve during the interwar period. One was Maj. Reuben L. Kahn, SnC, who published Serology in Syphilis Control in 1942, a book based on lectures he had delivered at the Army and Navy Medical Schools in Washington. Kahn, a professor of bacteriology and serology at the University of Michigan Medical School, had developed the Kahn test, a Wassermann-type serological test for syphilis, in 1934.38
Sanitary Corps laboratory officers were members of blood collecting and distribution detachments that collected over thirteen million pints of blood during the war. One of those officers, Capt. Ralph H. Maurer, SnC, a laboratory officer at the 300th General Hospital in Italy, demonstrated that blood could be safely
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stored up to seven days and that the incidence of reaction from stored blood was not greater than fresh blood if it was handled by a competent blood bank team. Maurer`s team prepared 7,150 transfusions of stored blood in one year without a fatality. Medical Administrative Corps officers joined their Sanitary Corps colleagues in transporting blood. In 1944, 2d Lt. Robert E. Pryor, MAC, as head of the medical section of the Army depot at Greenham Common, England, arranged for the use of an air transport squadron to move blood and medical supplies forward and to evacuate casualties to the rear. In a three-month period the squadron moved 30,000 pints of blood.39
Chiropody
The Medical Department`s wartime experience also demonstrated a requirement for chiropody. Basic training in World War II was a seventeen-week course, over twice as long as that of World War I, and marching was intentionally performed over difficult terrain. The orthopedic consultant for the Zone of the Interior believed that the long treks contributed to a higher incidence of foot disability, and the demand for foot care was very high in some units. Seventy percent of the orthopedic clinic visits in the Fourth Service Command, a training organization that covered the southeastern United States, were for foot problems. The regional hospital at Camp Swift, Texas, reported that 30 percent of its orthopedic clinic visits in 1944 were for foot problems. A study of the 29th Infantry Division in Europe, most of whose troops had been in the Army for about two years, revealed that 12 percent of the division went on sick call for foot pain and disability during a two-week training period in the fall of 1942. Navy experience was similar. One report revealed that 17.6 percent of all dispensary visits were for foot problems. Another indicated that women had a much higher rate of minor foot pathology; this was the cause of over 52 percent of dispensary visits by Navy female sailors in another study.40
There was no provision for commissioning chiropodists, but the Medical Department hired civilian practitioners with a Doctor of Surgical Chiropody (D.S.C.) from programs approved by the National Association of Chiropodists. In other cases, chiropodists who had been drafted were assigned to the Medical Department as enlisted soldiers and used in their specialty. The civilian and enlisted chiropodists performed within a tightly defined range of functions under the supervision of orthopedic surgeons. Their practice was limited to diagnosis and treatment of minor foot ailments, minor surgery, and prescribing correct footgear. Surgery was limited to the removal of corns, calluses, and plantar warts. Yet that limited scope of practice enabled them to assume a large workload.41
Optometry
Optometrists were not commissioned either, but the Medical Department allowed the use of enlisted optometrists to perform refractions. There was movement toward more comprehensive eye care for soldiers with the restoration of a spectacle issue program. That was prompted by the surgeon of the IV Corps Area at Fort McClellan, Alabama, who recommended that the Army provide soldiers free replacement spectacles. While claims of broken glasses while performing offi?
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cial duties were not always totally convincing, it was certainly clear that training ceased once a soldier was unable to see.42
The surgeon general took the proposal forward to the War Department, which agreed in 1941 to provide spectacles to active duty soldiers. The surgeon general`s staff attempted to determine an estimated requirement but, unable to obtain `the barest hint` of actual usage records for World War I, estimated that 10 percent of military personnel would have defective vision, a number they `pulled out of the air.` They also assumed that one-half of those soldiers would enter active duty owning their own glasses. Based on those assumptions, the Surgeon General`s Office projected a requirement for 200,000 pairs of spectacles in 1942.43
Unfortunately, they had not allowed for replacements of lost or broken spectacles. Neither had they anticipated that most of those who came in the Army with their own spectacles had glasses that could not withstand the rigors of military life. Indeed, the department discovered that 18 to 20 percent-not 10 percent-of soldiers required corrective lenses. The Medical Department issued well over two million pairs of spectacles in 1943, ten times the original estimate, and the initial lack of an optical program was described as `shortsightedness.`44
In addition to support for soldiers, the Army found a need for optometric support for civilian populations in the areas it occupied. For example, local optical services ceased to function in Germany when that country capitulated. A small forerunner of the Marshall Plan was the Army`s establishment of a bifocal manufacturing capability in Bavaria using ex-POW optometrists.45
There was a requirement for fabrication and distribution of spectacles both in the Zone of the Interior and within the theaters of operation. The necessity for that was underscored by the ophthalmology consultant for the European Theater of Operations, who believed it would have been necessary to evacuate 10,000 soldiers out of the theater monthly if there had been no fabrication capability during the invasion of Europe. Capt. Alfred T. Wells, SnC, was awarded the Legion of Merit for designing and developing a mobile, self-sustained optical unit, and a prototype built by the Medical Field Service School at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, was approved by the Surgeon General`s Optical Advisory Board in November 1943. The field optical unit stocked semifinished lenses in the sizes, shape, and smoothness that would meet most of the demand and reduce the requirements for grinding and surfacing. Its mobility enabled the Medical Department to place optical support near the front lines.46
The mobile optical repair unit was mounted on a 2 1/2-ton truck and was staffed by one Sanitary Corps officer and six enlisted soldiers. It had the capability of repairing or replacing 100 pairs of spectacles a day. A smaller, portable version consisted of two chests that could be carried in a jeep and was operated by two enlisted soldiers who could handle up to twenty jobs per day. The officers and enlisted technicians completed a six-week course at the St. Louis Medical Depot. Officers were selected from candidates with an optical shop background; some were optometrists.47
The effort to place optical support as close as possible to the combat soldiers paid off. `Line officers noted with pleasure, but with little astonishment, that the
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need for spectacle repairs diminished when the repair units began to operate near the front.`48 One hundred and fifty optical units produced one-half million pairs of glasses in fiscal year 1945. The units repaired or replaced about 160,000 pairs of spectacles in the first six months following the Normandy invasion.49
There were no opportunities for commissions as an optometrist, but for some, whether enlisted or officer, the duty was satisfying. Cpl. Herbert Gordon, O.D., for example, was stationed at a Miami Beach hotel in Florida and assigned to an Army Air Forces clinic on Lincoln Road that screened and treated aviation cadets. Cpl. Ernest F. Ames, O.D., was assigned to the optical laboratory at Norcross, England, where he and his compatriots had a sideline of designing cigarette lighters from cartridges, coins, and, in one case, a glass eye-all inscribed with the American flag and the slogan, "Cheers."50
A Medical Research and Development Team
Scientific specialty officers found a natural home in Army medical research and development, a program that became much more sophisticated and broadly based during World War II. As the Medical Department improved its medical technology, it also improved its organizational ability to take advantage of those technological advances. The Research and Development Section was added to the Surgeon General`s Office in 1940, and the Board for the Investigation and Control of Influenza and Other Epidemic Diseases in the Army, later called the Army Epidemiological Board, was formed in 1941.51 Consisting of seven civilian members directing ten commissions of M.D. and Ph.D. specialists in biochem?
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istry, infectious disease, preventive medicine, bacteriology, and immunology, the board provided the Surgeon General`s Office with access to some of the best expertise available in the control of epidemic diseases. Furthermore, the externally based group of civilian advisers provided direction and focus for Army medical research and development and was influential in building permanency into the program after the war.52
The scientific talent of Sanitary Corps officers was also available to the Medical Department for a variety of medical intelligence activities, such as collecting health and medical data on a geographical basis and assessing enemy medical capabilities. In 1944 Sanitary Corps officers headed three medical teams that collected captured medical equipment and materiel in the Pacific and Europe. One item they analyzed was a high-quality folding microscope developed by the Japanese. In Europe, a sanitary engineer, Lt. Col. John H. Watkins, SnC, served on the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. Watkins coauthored two chapters of the medical portion of the report, a study remarkable for the fact that it documented the absence of any epidemics in Germany resulting from the Allied bombing.
Other officers contributed research that helped the United States develop alternate sources of medical equipment for those shut off by the war. For example, Germany had been the principal supplier of surgical instruments, and it was quite important for the United States to develop its own manufacturing capability. It was so important that Maj. Joseph A. Calamari, SnC, received the Legion of Merit for identifying the cause of corrosion in surgical instruments made from stainless steel and plated carbon steel and devising a method of prevention.53
Sanitary Corps laboratory officers contributed to the demonstration of the effectiveness of sulfadiazine prophylaxis in lowering the meningococcus carrier rate among new recruits and to the development of new biochemical methods for the determination of antimalarial drugs in body fluids. They were members of research teams that worked on typhoid, typhus, dysentery, and cholera vaccines and, in tandem with sanitary engineers, developed chemical warfare detection kits for testing food and water supplies. They participated in studies on atypical pneumonia, typhus, and respiratory infections.54
At the Army Medical School, Washington, D.C., 1st Lts. Kenneth Wertman, SnC, and Reginald L. Reagan, SnC, under the leadership of Col. Henry Plotz, MC, operated the Division of Virus and Rickettsial Diseases, the first military or civilian laboratory to provide a single diagnostic source for those infections. They established the division in January 1941, when Wertman and Bergman were still enlisted technicians, and in 1942 Plotz and Wertman confirmed the etiologic agent of Brill`s disease. Soldiers benefited from the research efforts of such scientific specialty officers as 2d Lt. I. Gordon Fels, SnC, of the 67th General Hospital in France, who developed a new test for the rapid identification of gas gangrene, an important development for wound management. In Alaska, 2d Lt. Charles D. Graber, SnC, a bacteriologist, alerted the Army to a deadly flaw in the woolen clothing issued to soldiers when he discovered that gas gangrene bacilli had been introduced into the wool during manufacturing. Soldiers wearing uniforms made from that material who were wounded during a Japanese attack on Attu Island had their wounds contaminated with the lethal infection.55
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In 1943 Capt. Ludwig R. Kuhn, SnC, a bacteriologist, demonstrated that sulfadiazine could prevent the spread of cerebrospinal meningitis in Army camps. In Italy, an outbreak of atypical pneumonia in early 1945 was identified by another bacteriologist, 1st Lt. Robert Rustigian, SnC, as Q fever. Rustigian, who contracted the disease in the course of his laboratory work, developed findings that led to scientific recognition of the worldwide distribution of Q fever, believed until then to be isolated in certain areas of Australia.56
Typhus commanded the attention of a number of Sanitary Corps officers. Lts. Byron Bennett and E. John Bell, SnC, and Capt. Trygve O. Berge, SnC, were among fourteen Sanitary Corps and seven Medical Administrative Corps officers detailed to the U.S. Typhus Commission, which, with its Army and Navy membership, was one of the earliest joint service agencies. The Sanitary Corps officers contributed to worldwide field studies of louse-borne typhus, particularly in North Africa and Italy, and they were important figures in the mastery of this disease. Twelve officers were awarded the Typhus Commission Medal. Brig. Gen. Stanhope Bayne-Jones, MC, the commission`s director, singled out Maj. George Zinneman, MAC, for handling its European support requirements `under incredibly difficult conditions.` Col. Ira V. Hisock, SnC, received the Legion of Merit for his typhus control work in Italy, where his efforts ensured that not a single case of typhus occurred among the thousands of troops who passed through the Naples area.57
Maj. Emory C. Cushing, SnC, an entomologist recruited from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), was the Army`s liaison for research conducted by the USDA at its Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine laboratory in Orlando, Florida. An important product of that effort was the development of the `aerosol bomb` for dispensing insecticides. After the war this invention spawned a multibillion-dollar aerosol industry for everything from hair spray to paint.58 The Orlando research effort was also responsible for the military use of DDT, one of the major technological advances of the war. DDT is a synthetic compound first used as an insecticide in Switzerland, and it was tested in the Orlando laboratory beginning in November 1942. Sanitary Corps entomologists who participated in field studies of DDT were astounded with the potency of their new weapon, one so militarily significant that it was initially classified secret.59
Much of the research that involved Sanitary Corps officers was centered in the Army Medical School, which had been the focus of medical research and development during the interwar period. The school had a tradition of research and teaching in an atmosphere of teamwork among diverse scientific specialties. George W. Hunter III, SnC, was commissioned as a captain in the Sanitary Corps in 1942 and joined the faculty of the Tropical and Military Medicine Course, which expanded from 23 to 200 students. The course prepared medical officers to combat the diseases to which soldiers were exposed in the Army`s worldwide operations.60
Hunter suggested using the outline of the course as the basis for a textbook. It was published by the National Research Council in 1945 as the Manual of Tropical Medicine and became the standard reference in its field. Hunter`s name was not listed first among the principal authors because the company believed that a physi?
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cian`s name would improve sales, but it was retitledHunter`s Tropical Medicine in later editions. With the printing of the sixth edition in 1984, Hunter, then a professor in the School of Medicine, University of California, San Diego, was recognized as `the glue that has held this book together from the very first edition.`61
The medical research effort also included the efforts of psychologists, both in the clinical and testing aspects of the specialty. Some psychologists were employed in the design of military equipment. Others contributed to the refinement of aviator screening and classification tests. But the future of psychological research in the Army was uncertain. Maj. Anthony C. Tucker, PhC, the chief of the Air Surgeon`s Psychology Research Division, cautioned that it would be difficult to retain a sufficient number of commissioned psychologists in the Army. He believed the military did not fully appreciate their value, and his reservations presaged a postwar debate. Robert M. Yerkes, Ph.D., who as a Sanitary Corps officer had headed the Surgeon General`s Psychology Division in World War I, convened two meetings at the National Research Council in 1944 to review plans for the postwar utilization of military psychologists. The conference report recommended formation of a research and development corps for all scientists, including clinical psychologists. That did not occur, but at least the issue of providing a sustaining base for psychological research had surfaced.62
Malaria
Sanitary Corps officers were significant figures in the battle against malaria, the most militarily significant of the arthropod-borne diseases, especially in the
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Pacific, Far East, and Mediterranean. Malaria had the capability of stopping an army in its tracks, and it accounted for nearly half a million hospital admissions and over three hundred deaths during the war. The early campaigns in the Solomons and New Guinea encountered rates so high that operations in some areas of the Pacific and Asia were dependent upon bringing malaria under control. When the 32d Infantry Division withdrew from New Guinea in March 1943, 67 percent of the division exhibited clinical signs of malaria. The 32d had evacuated 4,500 soldiers with malaria in five months of combat operations; most of those soldiers were lost to their units for months. The Sicilian campaign of the Seventh Army from 9 July to 10 September 1943 produced 21,482 hospital admissions for malaria as compared to 17,535 for battle casualties. In Burma, the 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional)-Merrill`s Marauders-was conquered by illness, especially malaria, which in November 1943 was at an annual rate of 4,300 cases per 1,000 troops. Over half of the regiment had suffered one or more attacks of malaria, but a proposal to place soldiers on convalescence following a fourth attack of malaria was rejected because of the desperate combat situation. It was a horror of medical failure that Capt. James H. Stone, MAC, starkly portrayed in his book Crisis Fleeting. `In the end, amoebae and plasmodia, bacteria and rickettsia, rather than Japanese soldiers, vanquished Merrill`s Marauders.`63
The war with malaria needed experts who could advise surgeons and their commanders on how to prevent the disease, train soldiers and their leaders in preventive measures, and operate the specialized units used for survey and control of the mosquito vector. Sanitary Corps officers provided their talents to all of those aspects of the team effort, as well as contributing to the development of the technology, including DDT, used in the campaign. The Medical Department had an extremely limited number of physicians who were knowledgeable in the epidemiology and control of malaria. Sanitary Corps officers with expertise in entomology, sanitary engineering, parasitology, and other fields were thus critically important in the department`s campaign against malaria, and some served as malariologists, the special advisers on malaria to unit surgeons. It was also necessary to set up a special military organization to plan and execute preventive measures.
The effectiveness of Sanitary Corps officers and the Medical Department team can be measured in the Pacific and Asiatic campaigns, which were made possible by the control of malaria. The American rates peaked in 1943, but dropped as the malaria survey and control units were fielded, even though military operations continued in highly malarious areas and with greater troop concentrations. In the Southwest Pacific Theater the rate dropped from 245 per 1,000 troops per year in 1943 to 41 per 1,000 by the end of 1944. In the Pacific Ocean Areas, including the South Pacific, the rate was reduced from 208 cases per 1,000 troops per year in 1943 to 5 cases per 1,000 in 1945. Of course this reflected to a great extent the fact that combat ceased in the South Pacific Area after Bougainville.
The malaria control effort began with control of the mosquito populations near Army bases in the United States. As part of that effort, the department called nine Sanitary Corps Reserve officers to active duty in 1941 and ordered them to training camps in the South. Their number was expanded by entomologists who
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were commissioned in the Sanitary Corps directly from universities and government agencies to conduct entomological surveys and reports and to provide technical supervision of insect control. One, Capt. Stanley J. Carpenter, SnC, was assigned to Camp Robinson, Arkansas, and conducted surveys in 1941 at four Army bases in Arkansas and Missouri. Captain Carpenter found that mosquitos constituted a major problem at Camp Robinson, and his efforts resulted in command action to resolve the situation. Soldiers in Captain Pletsch`s 218th Malaria Survey Detachment who conducted mosquito surveys in Louisiana found that offers of jeep rides and candy made children much more likely to cooperate with the blood testing program.64
The responsibilities for malaria control were divided between the Surgeon General`s Office and the Office of the Chief of Engineers when the Corps of Engineers assumed responsibility for control activities in the Zone of the Interior in 1942. Capt. William D. Reed, SnC, headed an Insect and Rodent Control Section that was organized in the Office of the Chief of Engineers, and Sanitary Corps officers served on the War Department staffs that coordinated the overall effort worldwide. The Medical Department remained responsible for surveys, recommendations, and technical supervision of control activities, and its capability for that requirement expanded in 1943 when Maj. Franklin S. Blanton, SnC, was recruited from the Department of Agriculture as the first entomologist on the surgeon general`s staff. Training efforts included a malariology course at Camp Plauche, Louisiana, as well as a four-week course in Panama at the School of Malariology, Fort Clayton, Canal Zone. The Panama school, whose staff included Sanitary Corps entomologists, graduated 200 Medical Corps and Sanitary Corps officers between February 1944 and September 1945.65
The Medical Department formed two specialized organizations for the war against malaria. Malaria survey units (perhaps more appropriately called vector survey units) consisted of two Sanitary Corps officers-an entomologist and a parasitologist-and enlisted personnel who conducted studies and analyzed conditions in malarial areas. Malaria control units had one Sanitary Corps officer, a sanitary engineer, and eleven enlisted personnel who conducted control measures of clearing and cleaning standing water, ditching, filling, oiling, and applying larvicides. The units were allocated in malarious areas on the basis of one control unit per 7,500 troops and one survey unit per 20,000 troops.66
They battled not only malaria, but other diseases as well. One of those was scrub typhus, of which there were 5,441 cases during the war, with 283 deaths. While statistically unimportant in terms of the total number of cases, scrub typhus was a very dangerous disease. There were some serious outbreaks, notably at Sausapor and Biak during the New Guinea fighting, which strained the medical support capability with heavy nursing requirements and the diversion of medical resources. The fear that scrub typhus engendered far outweighed its incidence, and it became a morale problem in Burma, particularly among troops who patrolled in grassy scrub.
At the end of the war 300 Sanitary Corps officers and 2,700 enlisted soldiers were assigned to 146 malaria control units and 68 malaria survey units overseas, as well as another 16 control units and 3 survey units pending deploy?
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Personnel of the 17th Malaria Survey Unit, Ora Bay, New Guinea, July 1943
ment from the Zone of the Interior. The majority of the units were deployed in the extremely malarious Southwest Pacific. Mosquitos were so bad in an area occupied by the 81st Infantry Division in New Caledonia that training was repeatedly interrupted. The 218th Malaria Survey Detachment conducted mosquito control surveys to pinpoint the breeding areas. This required setting up biting studies in which a 218th soldier, acting as human bait, stripped to the waist, while another member of the unit as quickly as possible used chloroformed tubes to trap the mosquitos that collected on the first soldier`s back. The record was 235 mosquitos in 15 minutes.67
The Sanitary Corps officers assigned to malaria units faced a variety of challenges. Capt. Samuel C. Billings, SnC, commanded the 8th Malaria Survey Unit, which deployed to China in March 1942, the only unit of its type in southwest China. He initially established his unit at an airfield near Chungking where it conducted surveys in the Kunming area. His team was furnished an old British car for transportation. `We nursed this car along for several months with no starter, much engine trouble and many broken springs.` Later the team received an oversupply of insect repellent. They used it for hair tonic, spot remover, lubricant, and `almost any conceivable other use.`68
Capt. Richard F. Peters, SnC, flew aboard a Flying Fortress to New Guinea in early 1943 to organize a malaria survey unit in an area where malaria had devastated Australian and American divisions. He instituted an area-wide program that dramatically reduced the malaria rates, and later, with Capt. Russ Fontaine, SnC, established a malaria control school for medical officers in New Guinea. Capt. Albert W. Grundmann, SnC, commander of the 15th Malaria Survey Unit,
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landed on Guadalcanal in June 1943. His unit`s landing craft was stranded on a sandbar and refloated. It was then dive-bombed, strafed, and sunk, whereupon Grundmann and his unit made their way ashore without any equipment. Capt. Henry M. Chick, SnC, commander of the 20th Malaria Control Unit, demonstrated a secondary use for the power sprayer intended for insecticide dispersal in his attempt to control a fire at an ammunition dump in Mateur, Tunisia. Captain Chick received the Soldier`s Medal for his heroism in the face of shrapnel and exploding ammunition.69
The standard operating procedure for amphibious operations in the Pacific was to attach one survey unit and one control unit to each assaulting division. Beachheads were aerially sprayed with insecticide during the landings in order to protect the soldiers in the amphibious assault waves. The malaria units would go ashore two to five days after the initial landings. Sanitary Corps officers participated in establishing programs for the routine spraying of malarious areas. One officer in charge of aerial spraying of bases from Hawaii to Shanghai logged over 3,400 hours of flight time in carrying out this preventive measure.70
External Influences
The actions of scientific specialty associations, especially pharmacy and optometry groups, reflected the ability of external guilds to influence the fortunes of their constituencies in the Army. They increased the political and War Department pressures on the Medical Department to expand the use of scientific specialty officers. This external influence was not present in the administrative specialties, which, with the exception of the American College of Hospital Administrators, did not have guilds looking out for the interests of their specialties in the military.
The field of sanitary engineering exemplifies that external influence. National leaders of sanitary engineering carefully manipulated the mechanisms that decided among competing claims for draft exemptions or for War Department recruiting objectives. They knew that the Army`s requirements directly affected the needs of municipalities across the country, which depended upon sanitary engineers for the maintenance of clean water supplies and other basic public health measures. Their efforts resulted in assumption by the Procurement and Assignment Service of the same jurisdiction over sanitary engineers that it had over physicians. Abel Wolman, Ph.D., professor of sanitary engineering at the Johns Hopkins University and a nationally recognized figure, became a member of the service`s board of directors and in that capacity influenced the military`s utilization of practitioners of his specialty.71
The impact of the Army`s requirements upon communities in the United States was substantial. By January 1945 about 75 percent of the 970 sanitary engineers on active duty had been recruited from state and local health departments. The Army Specialized Training Program-a program of educational assistance that had been established to supply scientific, engineering, medical, and linguistic specialists to the Army-added sanitary engineering in order to increase the numbers available for military service. Beginning in 1943, selected enlisted soldiers
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enrolled in sanitary engineering at five universities: Rutgers, New York University, Illinois, Michigan, and Harvard. Unlike physicians, dentists, and veterinarians, they were not commissioned upon graduation but had to complete Medical Administrative Corps OCS to become officers before being detailed to the Sanitary Corps. Of 190 graduates, 151 successfully completed OCS and were commissioned. It was the first instance of educational assistance for administrative or scientific specialty officers.72
Formation of the Pharmacy Corps
Pharmacy was another field where the influence of external groups was prominent. Tensions over the status of pharmacists had entangled three surgeons general during the interwar period and continued when World War II began. At the time the Medical Administrative Corps was limited to sixteen Regular Army officers, and Congress had restricted new appointments to pharmacists. But the special provision for commissioning pharmacists in the Regular Army was not matched by commissions in the Army of the United States, the wartime component of the Army, because the Medical Department continued to depend primarily on enlisted pharmacy technicians. Consequently, graduate pharmacists could enlist and attend Army Officer Candidate School, but that did not guarantee their use as pharmacy officers even if they completed Medical Administrative Corps OCS. In June 1943 there were 600 pharmacists serving as MAC officers, but none was commissioned for service as a pharmacist. In other words, nothing had really changed. This stirred up the pharmacy lobby, and cards and letters poured into the Surgeon General`s Office. One writer, urging General Magee to commission pharmacists, told him to `pinch your Adam`s apple and help win the war.`73
Medical Department resistance, however, remained strong, and the surgeon general vigorously opposed the pharmacy lobby. In July 1942 Congressman Carl T. Durham, a pharmacist, introduced a bill to establish a pharmacy corps, stating that the specialty had a status comparable to medicine and dentistry. The legislation was dismissed as unnecessary by the surgeon general`s spokesman, Brig. Gen. Larry B. McAfee, MC, because, as he testified, Army pharmacy was simpler than civilian practice. The department`s three-month pharmacy technician course was sufficient preparation. There was little compounding. Since medications were furnished in tablet form, `any intelligent boy can read the label.`74 The surgeon general`s recalcitrance angered the American Pharmaceutical Association, which claimed that the legislative proposal was nothing more than an attempt to provide soldiers with the same pharmaceutical protection as civilians.
Congressional hearings in March 1943 brought back some familiar faces. Dr. H. Evert Kendig of the American Pharmaceutical Association contradicted the surgeon general, declaring that Army pharmacy technicians were given responsibility beyond that legally permissible in civilian life even as the Army misused its professional pharmacists. He told the committee about a student at his school who was first in his class for four years, had received several prizes, but was drafted and made a dental technician. `He passes the dental ammunition, but he doesn`t praise the Lord while he does it.`75
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Pharmacy officer at the 8th Evacuation Hospital fills a prescription, Teano, Italy, March 1944
Others chimed in. One was New Hampshire`s governor, Robert O. Blood, M.D., who had been a medical officer with the 26th Division in World War I. Governor Blood believed the existence of a pharmacy corps would have prevented the problem he encountered of minimally trained soldiers dispensing pharmaceuticals `at great risk to our soldiers and most certainly at no economy to our Government.`76
Congressman Durham heard the dissatisfaction of Army pharmacy officers at first hand. Capt. James T. Richards, MAC, a pharmacist assigned to the Walter Reed General Hospital, was invited to come to the American Pharmaceutical Association`s Washington, D.C., office. There, Durham listened sympathetically to Richards` description of the frustrations of MAC officers with the Regular Army grade limitation of captain. (According to Richards, the Walter Reed executive officer later chastised him for `politicking` and assured him that remote assignments awaited such transgressors. That may have been, because that same month Richards was assigned to the 43d General Hospital, which was being organized at Camp Livingston, Louisiana, for deployment to Oran, Algeria.)77
Despite Medical Department objections, the pharmacy lobby succeeded in its fight. On 12 July 1943, President Roosevelt signed into law an act establishing the Pharmacy Corps as a component of the Regular Army. The corps was authorized seventy-two officers, with new appointments restricted to graduates of recognized schools of pharmacy. Officers who already held Regular Army commissions in the Medical Administrative Corps were moved to the Pharmacy Corps but did not count against the seventy-two authorizations for officers because so many of the
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Regular Army MAC officers were not pharmacists, having been previously grandfathered by the law in 1936 that had restricted new appointments in the Regular Army MAC to pharmacists. Since the law transferred from the Medical Administrative Corps the only officers authorized for its permanent Regular Army component, this meant that the MAC was now `an empty Corps.`78
Initially, fifty-eight Regular Army Medical Administrative Corps officers transferred to the new corps. Competition was keen for the new appointments, and of 900 applications from pharmacists in January 1944, only 12 were commissioned, having survived two days of difficult written examinations, a physical examination, and interviews.79 By January 1945 the department had appointed eighteen pharmacists. That number, plus the forty-nine officers remaining from the Regular Army Medical Administrative Corps who had transferred, gave it a total of sixty-seven officers. The Pharmacy Corps peaked at seventy officers in April 1945.80
The creation of the Pharmacy Corps did not end the tension between the Medical Department and the pharmacy guild because the irony of a Pharmacy Corps that had pharmacists in the minority did not go unnoticed. By the summer of 1945 the surgeon general was again the target of complaints from across the country. Arthur H. Einbeck, chairman of the Committee on Status of Pharmacists in the Government Service, protested that the Army was dragging its heels in commissioning pharmacists, and the executive secretary of the Texas Pharmaceutical Association wrote to `deplore` General Kirk`s actions. Cora Mae Briggs, the secretary of the Nebraska Pharmaceutical Association, was angered that pharmacists were being enlisted as privates to perform kitchen police and `sell beer at the officers` clubs.` Briggs estimated a shortage of 500 pharmacists in Nebraska because of military conscription, and she believed the remaining pharmacists in the state were overworked. Fourteen had died the previous year, but `they didn`t die of old age.`81 The protests were in vain. World War II was ending, and the celebration of victory in Europe and the Pacific would drown out their voices. That is where the matter rested when the Army went into the postwar period.
Optometry
Optometry also reflected the effect of external influences on military medicine. Although the War Department authorized the use of optometrists to perform refractions, it did not provide for their commissioning. One enlisted optometrist said that while he and his colleagues were proud to do their share in the war, he believed the Army received their service at `a bargain basement price.`82 The American Optometric Association (AOA) pressured the Army for officer status, but that did not come to pass during the war years.
An early initiative of the AOA was to establish a military occupational specialty (MOS) for optometry since none existed.83 That achieved, their principal objective was to obtain commissioned status for optometrists who, with their graduate training in eye and visual conditions, provided a necessary health care service for which general practice physicians were trained too little but ophthalmologists were trained too much.84 In fact, as optometry groups were quick
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to point out, enlisted optometrists were often compelled to straighten out the problems of patients who complained about eye examinations they had received from unqualified general medical officers. `Many came in feeling their way to the door.`85 To make things worse, enlisted optometrists would be brusquely handled by sergeants who held the opinions of privates in low regard. Further, the optical units that filled spectacle prescriptions were headed by officers, making it difficult for optometrists of low rank to demand compliance with their orders. All in all they said it was `mean trickery` that made them `underlings,` and optometry journals filled with letters from disappointed optometrists.86 One editorial, entitled `With Retinoscope and Floor Mop,` fulminated that `in many cases optometrists doing refractions are privates and corporals and frequently are outranked by file clerks.` If that wasn`t enough, `the Army optometrist, by swinging a mop or a broom, is not enhancing his professional appearance or prestige.`87
Not all optometrists in the Army were enlisted. About half were officers, but they were compelled to seek commissioning opportunities in branches outside the Medical Department. "As soon as they got second lieutenant`s bars on they had to put the retinoscope away.`88 For example, five were commissioned in the Coast Artillery to screen antiaircraft crews for depth perception and other visual abilities and to serve as target recognition instructors.
Things took a new turn in 1942 when the AOA selected William P. MacCracken, Jr., as its Washington counsel. MacCracken, a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, had been an Army Air Corps lieutenant during World War I, and he continued his pioneering aviation activities after the war. He was secretary of the American Bar Association from 1925 to 1936 and had served from 1926 to 1929 as the first assistant secretary of commerce for aeronautics, receiving Pilot`s License No. 1. Subsequent activities as an aviation lobbyist caught him in a congressional cross fire that resulted in a ten-day jail sentence for contempt of Congress. As the AOA lobbyist he began a new career.89
As MacCracken described it, optometry `enjoyed only semi-respectability as a profession` in the early 1940s. It was compromised by opportunists within its own ranks and was under the firm heel of the American Medical Association. The specialty needed a systematic plan to reach its objective of professional recognition and a seasoned operator to see that through. MacCracken, it turned out, was just the person.
The AOA undertook a program to educate congressmen (and physicians) in the capabilities of optometrists, citing their wartime service as evidence, and it solicited AOA members to write their congressmen.90 MacCracken unsuccessfully attempted to convince the deputy surgeon general that commissioning optometrists was in the department`s best interest. Although the Army refused to provide this opportunity, the Navy relented and opened up its ranks. Harold Kohn, the AOA chief counsel, attributed the Navy`s receptive attitude to the fact that an AOA president, Lesley R. Burdette, O.D., had played on the same college football team with the Navy`s surgeon general, Rear Adm. Ross T. McIntire.91
Spurned by the Medical Department, MacCracken went to Congress. In 1945 Congressman Dewey Short, the ranking Republican on the House Military
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Affairs Committee, introduced a bill to establish an optometry corps of sixty officers who would perform under the supervision of ophthalmologists. The bill survived two months of hearings and passed the House in the face of American Medical Association and War Department opposition (particularly that of Col. Derrick Vail, MC, the surgeon general`s ophthalmology consultant and a `virulent anti-optometrist`).92Continued opposition in the Senate made approval appear unlikely, but itpassed that chamber without a dissenting vote. The legislative success was credited to MacCracken. Harold Kohn was impressed. `I don`t know how it was done, but I know a miracle when I see one.`93
The optometry corps came very close to reality, but President Truman vetoed the bill. An AOA delegation that included MacCracken and William Ezell, O.D., AOA president, met with the president to plead for reconsideration, since they believed they could again obtain congressional passage. Truman told the group that he had not changed his mind and would veto it again because the war was ending and it was time to consolidate the military and not to create new corps. However, he understood their desire for professional recognition. Consequently, before he vetoed the bill, he had received a commitment from the War Department that it would begin commissioning optometrists in the Regular Army. The AOA delegation did not leave the president`s office happy, but they did leave reassured. Their optimism should have been muted. Commissioning would begin, but not until the Medical Department had stalled for another two years.94
Summary
The pressures that influenced the presence of scientific specialty officers on the military medical team differed in kind and scope from those that compelled the use of administrative specialty officers. The underlying imperative of releasing physicians to practice medicine was the same in both groups. In the case of the scientists, however, the process was abetted by guilds looking out for the interests of their specialty groups.
The establishment of a Pharmacy Corps was the final act in a long-running show. When it was over, no question existed that pharmacy would have a secure place in the commissioned ranks of the Medical Department. Optometry did not succeed in obtaining its own corps, and it also failed to achieve commissioning during the war. But it did succeed in getting the desires of the specialty for professional recognition placed on the national agenda, in securing a president`s promise of commissioning, and in having its portfolio in the hands of a lobbyist who would keep its cause alive after the war. Sanitary engineers, through their national representation, controlled their availability for national military service during the war and their opportunities once in the military. In this way they were protected from the vagaries of conscription, something that other groups (lawyers, for example) did not achieve.
The overtones of political logrolling tend to obscure the point that the efforts of emerging specialties to secure their professional recognition was part of an evolutionary process. As in the case of the administrative specialties, there were elements of recalcitrance-resistance to commissioning of pharmacists and
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optometrists and to placing of laboratory officers in charge of laboratories being examples-but the process could not ultimately be halted. The scientific specialty officers made possible an expanded and modernized team that improved the diagnostic and treatment capabilities of the Medical Department. Pharmacists, optometrists, and laboratory officers were there to stay, and their success provided new opportunities for women as well as men in the scientific specialties. The Army`s mental health team permanently changed its composition and improved its effectiveness with the addition of psychologists and social workers. Commissioning opportunities were available for a broader variety of specialties, and for the first time the Army provided some financial aid for university training in nonphysician specialties. Scientific and administrative specialty officers were permanently reconfiguring the department.
A component of the medical team`s transformation was the emergence of a standing constituency with an external supporting base for Army medical research and development. Experience in wartime demonstrated a need for scientific specialty officers devoted to that function full time and able to respond worldwide. While the Army had sponsored medical research in the past, it had not attempted anything on the scope of what occurred in World War II. Sanitary Corps officers who contributed to medical advances opened permanent positions for themselves on the medical research team.
The United States relearned from the war the fact that global responsibilities meant the exposure of its soldiers to diseases that did not naturally occur at home. Thus, the ability to conserve the fighting strength of U.S. military forces would increasingly depend on the nation`s ability to deal with the global disease threat. The program to combat malaria demonstrated the department`s commitment to preventive medicine and to the application of medical research findings through the talents of scientific specialty officers: it was an extremely significant aspect of the contributions of Sanitary Corps officers. The future military medical mission would demand the full industrial model of research, development, and acquisition of new technology, coupled with the application of that technology through a modern medical system.
The Army`s obligation to care for the civilian populations caught up in the aftermath of the fighting was a new dimension of warfare. American generals were beginning to comprehend B. H. Liddell Hart`s admonition `to conduct war with regard to the peace you desire.`95 They needed a medical team whose scientific specialty officers not only supported soldiers in combat but could enable the United States to prosecute the peace. Those officers were indispensable in providing medical support for refugees uprooted by combat action and for people in areas liberated from the Axis Powers.
Combat units found that public health problems could overwhelm them. American forces retaking the Philippines depended upon the talents of sanitary engineers to ensure the restoration of safe drinking water, a vital necessity for civilian and soldier alike. In Europe, U.S. and Allied forces occupying a ravaged continent desperately needed the skills of the Medical Department`s scientific specialty officers in meeting the enormous public health challenges. When the Third Army reached Frankfurt at the end of March 1945, it found a dying city.
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`There were no telephones, no electricity, no street cars, no water mains, no gas. The sewage lines had spilled contamination into the streets, or what was left of them.`96 The Ninth Army was swamped with refugees when it reached Thuringia, Germany, in April 1945. All had suffered from malnutrition, and many had tuberculosis, typhus, or other diseases. Four and one-half million displaced persons shuffled across Europe`s destitute landscape, and at one point U.S. forces were responsible for the care of hundreds of thousands of displaced persons, enemy prisoners of war, German political prisoners, and Allied prisoners of war. Lice were ubiquitous, as were delousing stations dusting civilians with DDT powder under the supervision of Sanitary Corps officers.97
The unanswered questions at the end of World War I were also present at the end of World War II. The military medical team had been reconfigured by the addition of administrative and scientific specialty officers, and their talents, leadership, and special expertise would be needed in the future to support a world power. Yet none of those officers had any idea of what the postwar Medical Department would offer them, either in its regular or its reserve components. Pharmacists were the only officers assured of a place in the active Army. For the rest, the future was still hazy.
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Notes
1Shortages: DF, Lt Col Durwood G. Hall, MC, Asst to Ch Pers Svc, to Dir, Mil Pers Div, ASF, 29 Jul 43, folder 64, box 5/18, MSC-USACMH.
2SnC numbers: There were 226 reserve and 1 National Guard Sanitary Corps officers. McMinn and Levin, Personnel in World War II, pp. 15, 113. Dec 1943 SnC: This included 696 sanitary engineers, 203 entomologists, 873 laboratory specialists, 335 supply service officers, 138 nutrition officers, 44 industrial hygiene officers, and 76 officers in other duties. Rpt, Sanitary Engineering Div, Preventive Medicine (Prev Med) Svc, OTSG, sub: History of Sanitary Corps Personnel, December 1943, MSC-USACMH.
3Major lesson: Memo, Brig Gen James S. Simmons, Ch, Prev Med Svc, SGO, for Dir, Historical Div, 20 Sep 45, folder 173, box 11/18; Simmons to TSG, sub: Postwar Sanitary Corps, 5 Nov 45, folder 89, box 6/18, both MSC-USACMH. The other two lessons were the need for a peacetime medical research and development program and the need for dissemination of current directives, technical bulletins, manuals, and geographic assessments. Need: See Sanitary Engineering Section, History of Sanitary Corps Personnel. TSG`s arguments: Memo, Thomas G. Ward, sub: Objection by the War Personnel Board to Appointment in the Sanitary Corps, Army of the United States, 17 Apr 42, MSC-USACMH.
4Procurement: OTSG, Cir Ltr 2, sub: Qualifications for Appointment as First Lieutenant, Sanitary Corps, 7 Jan 42, MSC-USACMH. Age: Memo, Henry L. Stimson, Sec War, sub: Appointment of Officers from Civilian Life, 12 Jan 42, MSC-USACMH. TSG opposition: Lt Col John A. Rogers, MC, XO, TSG, to ACS, G-1, sub: Increase in Sanitary Corps, 18 Feb 42; Memo, Capt Thomas G. Ward, MC, sub: Objection by the War Personnel Board to Appointment in the Sanitary Corps, Army of the United States, 17 Apr 42; TSG to CG, SOS, signed Rogers, 22 Apr 42; Col George F. Lull, MC, Asst to TSG, to CG, SOS, sub: Appointment in Sanitary Corps of the United States of Applicants Below the Age of 30, 18 Aug 1942, all in folder 36, box 4/18, MSC?USACMH. Change: OTSG, Cir Ltr 2, sub: The Sanitary Corps: Qualifications and Assignment of Its Officers, 2 Jan 43, MSC-USACMH.
5Team: The team also included thirty-seven acoustic officers, rehabilitation officers for the blind and deaf, and physical reconditioning officers appointed in the Medical Administrative Corps for rehabilitating disabled soldiers. SGO Annual Rpt FY 1945, file Research Notes WWII, box 2/18, MSC-USACMH.
6Clinical psychology: Morton A. Seidenfield, `Clinical Psychology,` in Glass and Bernucci, vol. 1 of Neuropsychiatry in World War II, pp. 567-603, hereafter cited as Seidenfield, `Clinical Psychology`; Eli Ginzberg, `Logistics of the Neuropsychiatric Problem of the Army,` American Journal of Psychiatry 102 (May 1946): 729-31; John G. Jenkins, `New Opportunities and New Responsibilities for the Psychologist,` Science 103 (1946): 33-38, hereafter cited as Jenkins, `New Opportunities`; Seidenfield, `Clinical Psychology in Army Hospitals,` Psychological Bulletin 41 (1944): 512-13; James W. Layman, `Utilization of Clinical Psychologists in the General Hospitals of the Army,` Psychological Bulletin 40 (1943): 212-16; Max L. Hutt, `Report of Duties Performed by Clinical Psychologists,` Medical Bulletin (February 1947): 233-35, hereafter cited as Hutt, `Clinical Psychologists`; T.G. Andrews and Mitchell Dreese, `Military Utilization of Psychologists During World War II,` American Psychologist 3 (1948): 533-38; Notes of discussion, Charles A. Ullmann, Ed.D., Consulting Psychologist, with Ginn, Washington, D.C., Sep 83, MSC History Files, DASG-MS; WD Cirs 392, 2 Oct 44; 270, 1 Jul 44; 71, 6 Mar 45; 77, 10 Mar 45; PL. Combat exhaustion: Robert E. Hales and Franklin D. Jones, `Teaching the Principles of Combat Psychiatry to Army Psychiatry Residents,` Military Medicine 148 (January 1983): 24; Albert J. Glass, ed., Overseas Theaters, vol. 2 of Glass and Bernucci, Neuropsychiatry in World War II (1973), p. 999 David K. Kentsmith, `Principles of Battlefield Psychiatry,` Military Medicine 151 (February 1986): 90-92; Shabtai Noy, `Battle Intensity and the Length of Stay on the Battlefield as Determinants of the Type of Evacuation,` Military Medicine 152 (December 1987): 605. It is estimated that there was one psychiatric admission for every two medical admissions in the First Army during the first two months following the Normandy invasion. In one division the rate was so high that the entire division would have been depleted in a year without proper treatment of the cases. Fortunately, the World War I lesson of forward treatment prevailed and reduced the losses.
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7SnC commissions: The six SnC psychologists were 1st Lts. Michael Dunn, Robert M. Hughes, James W. Layman, William C. Murphy, Lawrence I. O`KeIly, and L. Grant Tennies (Seidenfield, "Clinical Psychology," p. 569).
8Transfer: WD Cir 264, 1 Sep 45; Seidenfield, "Clinical Psychology," p. 585. Women: Seidenfield, `Clinical Psychology,` p. 576.
9Quoted words: Jenkins, `New Opportunities,` p. 38.
10Survey: Hutt, `Clinical Psychologists,` pp. 233-37.
11Psychology: Anthony C. Tucker, `The Role of Research Psychologists in the Military Service,` Medical Bulletin (August 1947): 727-28.
12Quoted words: Bascom W. Ratliff, Elizabeth M. Timberlake, and David P. Jentsch, Social Work in Hospitals (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1982), p. 3.
13Quoted words: Thomas V. DiBacco, `Social Work`s Slow Rise,` Washington Post, 7 November 1994.
14Social work: Malcolm J. Farrell and Elizabeth H. Ross, `Military Psychiatric Social Work,` Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic 8 (1944): 153-55; Daniel E. O`Keefe, `Psychiatric Social Work,` in Glass and Bernucci, Neuropsychiatry in World War II, 1: 605-30; Israeloff, Winning the War, pp. 56-57; WD Cir 295, 13 Jul 44, PL.
15Menninger: O`Keefe, `Psychiatric Social Work,` p. 610.
16Sanitary engineering: Speech, Joseph J. Gilbert, presented at the Conference of Sanitary Corps Officers, sub: Sanitary Corps, U.S. Army, 24 Nov 44, HQ, 2d Service Command, MSC?USACMH; Col Stanley J. Weidenkopf, MSC, draft chapter, sub: Sanitary Engineering, for 1958 MSC History Project, p. 66, hereafter cited as Weidenkopf, Sanitary Engineering; Sanitary Engineering Section, Medical Service Corps, OTSG, Personnel Card Files 1941-60, DASG-MS; Simmons, `The Division of Preventive Medicine,` pp. 60-68; Stanley J. Weidenkopf, `Sanitary Engineers in the Army Medical Service,` Military Surgeon 115 (July 1954): 55; Maj Raymond J. Karpen, MSC, Environmental Sanitation (Env San) Br, OTSG, to Herbert M. Bosch, Env San Div, Minnesota Dept of Health, 24 Nov 48, DASG-MS; Israeloff, Winning the War, p. 30.
17Duties: Ibid.; Michael J. Blew, `A Sanitary Engineer Views the Post War World,` Military Surgeon 100 (May 1947): 410-11; THU, 1958 Board for MSC History. Hardenbergh: Stanhope Bayne-Jones, `Typhus Fever,` in Ebbe C. Hoff, ed., Communicable Diseases: Arthropodborne Diseases Other than Malaria, vol. 7 of Preventive Medicine in World War II, in the series Medical Department of the United States Army in World War II (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army, 1964), pp. 185-86, 189, hereafter cited as Hoff, Arthropodborne Diseases Other Than Malaria. Quoted words: William A. Hardenbergh to Brig Gen Stanhope Bayne-Jones, 2 May 66, MSC-USACMH. From 1927 to 1940 Hardenbergh was vice president and general manager of Public Works Magazine.
18Blew: Sanitary Engineering Section, Medical Service Corps, OTSG, Personnel Data Cards, 1941-60, DASG-MS; Joy Day, `Oldest-Living MSC: One of First Environmentalists,` Army Medical Department Newsletter (Fall 1971): 40, JML.
19Quoted words: Ralph S. Cleland, `Sanitary Engineering in the European Theater of Operations,` Military Surgeon 101 (July 1947): 36-40; Presentation, Cleland, same sub, at the meeting of the Association of Military Surgeons of the United States, Detroit, Mich., 9-11 Oct 41, folder 110, box 7/18, MSC-USACMH. Also see Jack G. Seig, `Disposal of Liquid Wastes in the Field,` Medical Bulletin of the North Africa Theater of Operations 2 (November 1944): 132-34, USACMH.
20Manila: Lloyd K. Clark, `Restoring Manila`s Water System to Service,` Journal of the American Water Works Association 38 (May 1946): 614-17.
21Germany: Lawrence S. Farrell and Paul J. Houser, "Environmental Sanitation," in U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, The Effect of Bombing on Health and Medical Care in Germany (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 30 October 1945), pp. 238, 263. The study did not support the more extravagant claims of air power proponents.
22Japan: Ralph E. Tarbett and Paul J. Houser, `Environmental Sanitation,` in U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, The Effects of Bombing on Health and Medical Services in Japan (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1 June 1947), pp. 119-21, and `Introduction,` pp. 4-5. Brig. Gen. Crawford F. Sams was chief of the Public Health and Welfare Section of the HQ, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), from 1945-1951. Sams reported that there was a high
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incidence of diarrhea, probably because of the practice of using night soil. See Sams, unpublished MS, sub: Medic (an autobiography), pp. 2: 349-428, USACMH, and Cowdrey, The Medics` War, pp. 38-44.
23Industrial hygiene: Theodore F. Hatch, `The Armored Force Medical Research Laboratory in WWII,` Medical Bulletin of the U.S. Army Europe 42 (January 1985): 22-26.
24Quoted words: Ibid., p. 24.
25Quoted words: Don Marquis, Archy and Mehitabel (New York: Dolphin Books, Doubleday, 1930), p. 128.
26Entomologists: Rpts, OTSG, sub: Entomologists on Duty with the Sanitary Corps, AUS, 4 Dec 43 and 6 Feb 45, DASG-MS. Quoted words: Henry S. Fuller, `Introduction,` in Hoff, Arthropodborne
Diseases Other Than Malaria, p. 6. 1940: Ralph W. Bunn, `Entomological Service in the Army,` Military Surgeon 101 (July 1947): 40. Quoted words: Brig Gen Guy B. Denit, Ch Surg, Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA), Dec 44 Msg, quoted in Medical Bulletin (March 1945): 10. Capt. Belkin: Donald J. Pletsch, Ph.D. to Maj Joe C. Crain, MSC, Asst to Ch, MSC, 30 Jul 86, DASG-MS.
27218th: Msg, HQ Eighth U.S. Army (EUSA), to 218th Malaria Survey Unit, sub: Eichelberger, 19 Oct 45, DASG-MS; Wartime notes, Capt Donald J. Pletsch, SnC, sub: Foibles of the 218th Malaria Survey Detachment on Hokkaido, or, The Rover Boys in Japan, 24 Oct-18 Nov 45; Rpt, Capt Champion C. Coles, Jr., SnC, sub: Unit History, 218th Malaria Survey Detachment, undated [Dec 1945], hereafter cited as Coles, 218th MSD Unit History, both in DASG-MS; Notes of telephone interv, Pletsch with Ginn, 9 Jan 86, DASG-MS; `Mosquito-Fighting Detachment Holds Reunion,` Gainesville (Florida) Sun, 22 July 1984; `WWII Medical Unit Reuniting; Generations Brought Together,` Stoddard (Missouri) County News, 26 July 1983. Thanksgiving: Remarks, Inukai, Ph.D., Chm, Zoology Dept, Imperial University, sub: Greeting by Dr. Inukai to the Members of the 218th Malaria Survey Detachment, 25 Nov 1945, DASG-MS.
28DDT: James A. Baty, `Role of Auxiliary Medical Service in the Control of Tropical Diseases,` Military Surgeon 101 (August 1947): 137; Bunn, `Entomological Service in the Army,` p. 41.
29Rodent control: Baty, `Role of Auxiliary Medical Service in the Control of Tropical Diseases,` p. 8. Occupation of Germany: John W. Bailey, `Report on the Status of the Entomological Collections in Certain European Museums, 1945,` Annals of the Entomological Society of America 40 (1947): 203-12.
30Howe: Franklin C. Bing, `Paul Edward Howe (1885-1974),` Journal of Nutrition 115 (March 1985): 297-302; Ltr, Col David D. Schnakenberg, MSC, Dir, Nutrition Task Force, U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, to Ginn, sub: History of the MSC Nutrition Officer, 25 Mar 85, DASG-MS.
31Nutrition: OTSG, Cir Ltr 15, sub: Functions of Food and Nutrition Officers, 21 Feb 42, MSC-USACMH; Eliot F. Beach, `The Sanitary Corps Officer in Nutrition,` Military Surgeon 101 (September 1947): 222-23. Surveys: Paul E. Howe and George H. Berryman, `Average Food Consumption in the Training Camps of the United States Army,` American Journal of Physiology 144 (September 1954): 588-94. Also see Berryman, Cyrus E. French, and Howe, `Nutritional Evaluation of Overseas Rations,` Military Surgeon 95 (November 1944): 391-96; Howe, `The Dietaries of Our Military Forces,` Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (January 1943): 72-79.
32Nutrition laboratory: Lt Col Robert Ryer, MSC, draft chapter, sub: Nutrition, 1958 MSC History Project.
33Occupation of Germany: Rpt, Office of the Chief Surgeon, Seventh Army, sub: Public Health in Post Hostilities Germany, undated, p. I-13; Joseph Israeloff, draft chapter, sub: Winning the War, 1965 MSC History Project, p. 45, DASG-MS, hereafter cited as Israeloff, Winning the War. POWs: SGO Annual Rpt FY 1945, file Research Notes WWII, box 2/18, MSC-USACMH. Malnutrition occurred as German soldiers were taken out of POW status and more food was allocated to Allied civilians, displaced persons, and German civilians.
34Lemonade: In Burma, dental officers of the 14th Evacuation Hospital found that Merrill`s Marauders threw theirs away also, as they did every other preventive medicine measure. Stone, Crisis Fleeting, p. 303.
35Laboratory officers: Ibid.; Memo, Maj Arthur Stull, Ph.D., SnC, sub: Laboratory Services, Aug 1944, MSC-USACMH, hereafter cited as Stull, Laboratory Services. Stull, a Ph.D. research
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chemist, was employed in the allergy department of Roosevelt Hospital, New York, prior to the war. Interv, Israeloff with Stull, 13 Jun 67, cited in Israeloff, draft chapter, sub: Gearing for Global Conflict, 1965 MSC History Project, box 1/18, MSC-USACMH, hereafter cited as Israeloff, Gearing for Global Conflict. Academic training: Laboratories Div, OTSG, extract from Annual Rpt for 1944, 23 Jan 1945, folder 183, box 12/18, MSC-USACMH; Philip R. Carlquist, `The Sanitary Corps Officer in the Laboratory,` Military Surgeon 101 (August 1947): 131. Maxwell: Interv, Col Roy D. Maxwell, MSC, Ret., with Ginn and Col Charles R. Angel, MSC, Ret., the Pentagon, 5 Dec 83, DASG-MS.
36Personnel needs: Memo, Maj David A. Smith, MAC, for Dir, Officer Procurement Service, sub: Procurement of Laboratory Sanitary Corps Officers, 7 Dec 44, MSC-USACMH; Gustave J. Dammin and Elliott S.A. Robinson, `Medical Laboratories,` in Ebbe Curtis Hoff, ed., Special Fields, vol. 9 of Preventive Medicine in World War II, in the series Medical Department of the United States Army in World War II (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army, 1969), p. 434.
37Women: Memo, Mason Ladd, Legislative (Leg) Div, for Lt Col Teasley, sub: Appointment of Female Scientists in the Sanitary Corps, Jun 44, MSC-USACMH. WAC commissions: Maj Bernard Sobol, Actg Dir, Legal Div, OTSG, to TAG, 15 Sep 43, and 1st Ind, Lt Col William T. Thurman, JAGD, Asst Ch, Mil Affairs Div, TJAG, to TSG, 30 Sep 43, folder 183, box 8/18; Col K.R. Hudnall, MC, through ASF to ACS, G-1, 1944; WD Cir 370, Section VI, sub: Sanitary Corps, 12 Sep 44, and WD Cir 462, 6 Dec 44, all in MSC-USACMH; Israeloff, Winning the War, p. 33. Also see Mattie Treadwell, The Women`s Army Corps (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1954), pp. 344, 573. Special course: Rpt, History Div, OTSG, sub: The History of the Training of Medical Department Female Personnel, 1 Jul 1939 to 31 Dec 1944, undated (1945), MSC-USACMH. March 1945: Stull, Laboratory Services. At this point there were also 75 female physicians in the Medical Corps. Ch, Ops Svc, SGO, General Bliss` Notebook, vol. 1, Rpt, sub: Trend of Medical Corps Strength in Relation to Established Ceiling, 17 Jun 45, folder 176, box 11/18, MSC-USACMH.
38Kahn: Reuben L. Kahn, Serology in Syphilis Control, (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1942); also see Kahn, Diagnosis of Syphilis by Precipitation (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1925); Kahn, The Kahn Test-A Practical Guide (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1928); and Kahn, Tissue Immunity (Baltimore: Charles C. Thomas, 1936).
39Blood: Douglas B. Kendrick, Blood Program in World War II, in the series Medical Department of the United States Army in World War II (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army, 1964), pp. 157, 180, 465. Blood detachments: Draft MS, Donald O. Wagner, sub: The System of Field Medical Service in a Theater of Operations: Its Principles and the Types of Units Authorized, THU, OTSG, 30 Nov 59, file 258, box 16/18, MSC-USACMH. WD T/O 8-500 established two detachments, one for field army support (1 MC, 2 SnC, 26 EM) and one for corps support (1 MC, 1 SnC, 13 EM). Maurer: Ralph H. Maurer, `Blood Bank in a Fixed (General) Hospital: Analysis of 7,150 Transfusions of Stored Blood,` Medical Bulletin of the Mediterranean Theater of Operations 3 (June 1945): 218, 223. Pryor: Kendrick, Blood Program, pp. 533-36.
40Podiatry: Cleveland Mather and Alfred R. Shands, Jr., eds., Orthopedic Surgery in the Zone of Interior, volume in Surgery in World War II in the series Medical Department of the United States Army in World War II (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army, 1970), pp. 133, 51, 227-28; Mather, ed., Orthopedic Surgery in the European Theater of Operations, volume in same series, 1956), pp. 23-24, 84, 187, 781-82. Navy: V.H. Witten and M. Lieder, `Minor Pathological Conditions of the Foot in Navy Personnel,` U.S. Navy Medical Bulletin 41 (1943): 764; T.B. Marwil and Charles R. Brantingham, `Foot Problems of Women`s Reserve,` Hospital Corps Quarterly 16 (October 1943): 98-99.
41Use of chiropodists: Mather and Shands, Orthopedic Surgery, pp. 23-24, 84, 781-82.
42Spectacle policy: TSG to TAG, 5 Jun 41; Maj L. L. Barrow, MC, Asst to Ch, Finance and Supply (F&S) Div, SGO, to Ch, F&S Div, SGO, 22 Aug 41; TAG to CG, 1st Corps Area, Boston, sub: Repair and Replacement of Eyeglasses, 24 Sep 36. All in RG 112, Accession 69A-0127, Box 10/32, NARA-WNRC.
43Optical planning: Memo, Capt D.A. Peters, SnC, for Chief, Finance Br, F&S Div, OTSG, sub: Mobile Optical Unit, undated; Rpt, Capt Richard E. Yates, MAC, OTSG, sub: The
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Procurement and Distribution of Medical Supplies in the Zone of the Interior During World War II, 31 May 46; Memo, Robinson for TSG, 7 Sep 42; Resume of 1943 Activities-Special Programs Branch, 24 Jan 44; Memo, Lt Col W.H. Potter, SnC, for XO, Supply Svc, OTSG, 6 Jun 44, all in RG 112, Accession 69A-0127, Box 10/32, NARA-WNRC. Actual Demand: Memo, Yates, 31 May 46; Rpt, Supply Svc, OTSG, sub: Resume of 1943 Activities, 24 Jan 44; Memo, Lt Col Paul I. Robinson, MC, Fiscal Officer, for TSG, sub: The Surgeon General`s Spectacle Program, 7 Sep 42, all in RG 112, Accession 69A-0127, Box 10/32, NARA-WNRC.
44Expanded requirement: Rpt, Silas B. Hays, Louis F. Williams, and Robert L. Parker to Dir, Planning Div, ASF, sub: Supplementary Material To Be Included in ASF Manual M409, 18 Feb 46, DASG-MS, hereafter cited as Hays, Williams, and Parker, Supplementary Material. Quoted words: Memo, Stanley W. Ryak, Optical and Artificial Eyes Sec, Distribution Div, Supply Svc, OTSG, for Ch, Supply Svc, sub: History of the Optical Program, 28 Dec 45, RG 112, Accession 69A-0127, Box 10/32, NARA-WNRC, hereafter cited as Ryak, History of the Optical Program. Rather than costing $150,000-$200,000 a year, as originally estimated, the optical program was actually costing $8-$10 million a year by the fall of 1942.
45Occupation of Germany: Seventh Army, Public Health in Post Hostilities Germany, p. II-10.
46ETO requirement: Rpt, Lt Col James M. Greear, MC, Ophthalmology Consultant, ETO, cited in Memo, Stanley W. Ryak, Optical and Artificial Eyes Section, for Col Silas B. Hays, MC, Dep Ch, Supply Div, sub: Optical Support Program, 20 Nov 45, RG 112, Accession 69A-0127, Box 10/32, NARA-WNRC, hereafter cited as Ryak, Optical Support Program. Optical laboratory: Rpt, Special Programs Br, Supply Svc, OTSG, sub: Resume of 1943 Activities, 24 Jan 44; WD GO 76, 22 Sep 44, in file Extracts from General Orders Concerning Sanitary Corps, box 6/18, MSC?USACMH.
47Optical units: Hays, Williams, and Parker, Supplementary Material; Ryak, History of the Optical Program; Ryak, Optical Supply Program; Wiltsie, Medical Supply in World War II, pp. 82-86. Initially the Army issued one mobile and two portable units to each medical depot. This was extravagant, and in 1944 the basis of issue changed to one mobile unit per 150,000 troops, supplemented by one portable unit where troops were widely dispersed.
48Quoted words: Wiltsie, Medical Supply in World War II, p. 85.
49Numbers: Ibid.; Ryak, Optical Support Program.
50Optometrists: Robert S. Keller, O.D., to Ginn, 12 Aug 85, DASG-MS; Lt Col R.R. Patch, SnC, Chief, Liaison Br, Supply Svc, OTSG, sub: Annual Report of Liaison Branch, Purchase Division, Supply Service, FY 1944, 30 Jun 44, MSC-USACMH. Miami Beach: Herbert Gordon, O.D., to Ginn, 15 Jul 85, DASG-MS. Lighters: Ernest F. Ames, O.D., to Capt Albert L. Paul, MSC, 21 Feb 60, folder 58, box 8/18, MSC-USACMH.
51R&D: Blanche B. Armfield, Organization and Administration in World War II, volume in the series Medical Department of the U.S. Army in World War II (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army, 1963), pp. 93-96. The AEB later became the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board.
52Board: Stull, Laboratory Services.
53Commissions: James S. Simmons, `The Division of Preventive Medicine,` Medical Bulletin (July 1941): 65. Intelligence: The officers were Maj. M.J. Plishner and Capts. Robert G. Gould and R.W. Cumley. Lt Col Raymond J. Cramer, draft chapter, sub: Intelligence, 1958 MSC History Project. Watkins: Scott V. Hitchcock and John H. Watkins, `Civilian Deaths from Air Attack,` pp. 6-29; Franz K. Bauer and Watkins, `Communicable Diseases,` pp. 30-82; and George A. Wulp and Watkins, `Tuberculosis,` pp. 83-101, all in U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, Effect of Bombing on Health and Medical Care in Germany. Calamari: WDGO 18, 15 Mar 45, cited in Journal of the American Medical Association 128 (19 March 1945): 210.
54R&D: Stull, Laboratory Services.
55Wertman and Reagan: Col Trygve O. Berge, MSC, draft section, sub: Virology and Immunology, 1958 MSC History Project, pp. 4-5, hereafter cited as Berge, Virology and Immunology. Fels: I. Gordon Fels, `A Rapid Cultural Method for the Presumptive Identification of Clostridium Welchi,` Medical Bulletin, Office of the Chief Surgeon, European Theater of Operations (January 1945): 22-24, USACMH. Graber: Lt Col John R. Ransom, MSC, draft chapter, sub: Microbiology, in MSC History Project, 1961, folder 253, box 16/18, MSC-USACMH.
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56Kuhn: Ibid. Rustigian: Berge, Virology and Immunology, pp. 9-10; Frederick C. Robbins, Robert Rustigian, Merrill J. Snyder, Joseph E. Smadel, `Q Fever in the Mediterranean Area; Report of Its Occurrence in Allied Troops. III, The Etiological Agent,` American Journal of Hygiene 44 (1946): 62.
57Typhus Commission: Berge, Virology and Immunology, pp. 5, 10; Stanhope Bayne-Jones, `Typhus Fever,` in Hoff, Anthropodborne Diseases Other Than Malaria, pp. 201-02, (quoted words, p. 240); Israeloff, Winning the War. Typhus medal: Capt. Robert Traub, Assam and Burma; Maj. Thomas H.G. Aitken, Naples; 1st Lt. Harold A. Pfreimer, ETO; Capt. Robert E. Bellamy, Naples; Maj. Charles C. Agar, ETO; Capt. Raymond C. Bushland, New Guinea; Lt. Col. Cornelius B. Philip, SW Pacific; Maj. Glen M. Kohls, New Guinea; Capt. E. John Bell, SW Pacific; Lt. Col. Emory C. Cushing, ETO; Maj. Charles M. Wheeler, Naples; Capt. Byron L. Bennett, Cairo. File, sub: Extracts from General Orders Concerning Sanitary Corps, folder 89, box 6/18, MSC-USACMH. Hisock: WDGO 28, 25 Apr 45, cited in Journal of the American Medical Association 128 (12 May 1945): 134; Israeloff, Gearing for Global Conflict. U.S. troops were immunized with the Cox vaccine. Hisock returned to Yale in 1945 as chairman of the Department of Public Health.
58Cushing: Biographical data card, THU, OTSG, USACMH. Cushing received the Typhus Commission Medal in 1945 for his service on the staff of the Chief Surgeon, European Theater of Operations. Insect control: Bunn, `Entomological Service in the Army,` p. 41. Aerosols: Col Ralph W. Bunn, MSC, and Col Joseph E. Webb, Jr., MSC, draft section, sub: Entomology, 1958 MSC History Project, pp. 31, 124, hereafter cited as Bunn and Webb, Entomology; H.L. Haller, `Wartime Development of Insecticides,` Industrial and Engineering Chemistry 39 (1947): 467-73; E.F. Knipling, `DDT Insecticides Developed for Use by the Armed Forces,` Journal of Economic Entomology 38 (April 1945): 205, hereafter cited as Knipling, `DDT Insecticides.`
59DDT: In the fall of 1943, the surgeon general informed the under secretary of war that the Medical Department had adopted dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) to supplant pyrethrum in delousing powders and insecticides and was testing its effectiveness for mosquito control. Memo, Edward Reynolds, Actg Ch, Supply Svc, OTSG, for Under Sec of War, 4 Nov 43; Notes of discussion, Donald J. Pletsch, Ph.D., entomology consultant, with Ginn, Rosslyn, Va., 27 Feb 86, both in DASG-MS; Knipling, `DDT Insecticides,` p. 205. Development: Harrison, Mosquitos, Malaria and Man, pp. 218-19; Knipling, `DDT Insecticides,` p. 205.
60Army Medical School: Simmons, `The Division of Preventive Medicine,` p. 61. Hunter: Rpt, Col George W. Hunter, MSC, sub: Reminiscences, 1971, DASG-MS; Notes of telephone interv, Hunter with Lt Col Richard V. N. Ginn, 1 Feb 86, DASG-MS; Lt Col Lyman P. Frick, draft section, sub: Parasitology, 1958 MSC History Project, hereafter cited as Frick, Parasitology. Hunter had resigned a reserve infantry commission in 1933 when he could not obtain an appointment in the Sanitary Corps Reserve in spite of a Ph.D. in parasitology and microbiology.
61Book idea: Hunter, Ginn telephone interv 1 Feb 86. Tropical Medicine: Thomas T. Mackie, George W. Hunter III, and C. Brooke Worth, Manual of Tropical Medicine (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1945). Major Hunter, SnC, and Captains Mackie and Worth, MC, were all fellow instructors in the course. Another ten Sanitary Corps officers contributed to the book: Maj. Gordon E. Davis and Capts. Luther S. West and William N. Sullivan, Jr.: entomology; Maj. Kingston S. Wilcox and Capt. Russell W. H. Gillespie: bacterial diseases; Capt. Reginald D. Manwell: malaria; 1st Lt. Joel Warren: viruses; and Capts. Curtis Saunders, A.E.A. Hudson, and William G. Jahnes, Jr.: diagnostic methods. Quoted words: G. Thomas Strickland, in introduction to Hunter`s Tropical Medicine, 6th ed. (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1984), p. xvii.
62Research psychology: Hutt, `Clinical Psychologists,` p. 235; Tucker, `The Role of Research Psychologists in the Military Service,` p. 731; Robert M. Yerkes, `Post-War Psychological Services in the Armed Forces,` Psychological Bulletin 42 (1945): 396-97.
63Malaria: Baty, `Role of Auxiliary Medical Service in the Control of Tropical Diseases,` pp. 134-38; Bunn and Webb, Entomology, pp. 12, 31, 58; Ebbe C. Hoff, ed., Communicable Diseases-Malaria, vol. 6 of Preventive Medicine in World War II, in the series Medical Department of the United States Army in World War II (Washington D.C.: Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army, 1963), pp. 2, 6, 116, hereafter cited as Hoff, Communicable Diseases-Malaria; Stone, Crisis Fleeting, pp. 296, 304 (quoted words, p. 396).
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64Recruitment: Bunn and Webb, Entomology, pp. 23-24, 26; Rpt, sub: Entomologists on Duty, 6 Feb 45, DASG-MS. Carpenter: Stanley J. Carpenter, `Mosquito Studies in Military Establishments in the Seventh Corps Area During 1941,` Journal of Economic Entomology 35 (August 1942): 561. Blood smears: Coles, 218th MSD Unit History.
65Engineers: Bunn, `Entomological Service in the Army,` p. 40. Blanton: Bunn and Webb, Entomology, p. 26. Panama: Ibid., pp. 34, 71.
66Vector units: Notes of Pletsch, Ginn interv, 9 Jan 86.
67Scrub typhus: Bunn, `Entomological Service in the Army,` p. 27; Hoff, Communicable Diseases, p. 280; Stone, Crisis Fleeting, p. 123. Biting studies: Coles, 218th MSD Unit History.
68Billings: Rpt, Samuel C. Billings, sub: Summary Report of Military Duty as an Entomologist of the Sanitary Corps, U.S. Army-July 24, 1942 to January 30, 1946 (1954), folder 103, box 7/18, MSC-USACMH.
69Peters: Society for Vector Ecology, Santa Ana, Calif., Vector Ecology Newsletter (April 1992), DASG-MS. Peters joined the California Department of Health after the war and was head of its vector control bureau when he retired in 1978. The Society for Vector Ecology awarded him its Distinguished Service Award in 1989 and the Meritorious Service Award in 1992. Grundmann: Frick, Parasitology. Chick: GO, HQ, MTO, 15 Feb 45, in file Extracts from general orders concerning Sanitary Corps, folder 89, box 6/18, MSC-USACMH.
70Amphibious operations: Bunn, `Entomological Service in the Army,` pp. 41-42. Bunn states the beaches were sprayed before the landings. Aerial spraying: Lloyd K. Clark, `Sanitary Corps in Forward Areas,` Military Surgeon 101 (July 1947): 33.
71Personnel: McMinn and Levin, Personnel in World War II, pp. 201-06, 211. The change occurred in January 1943. Wolman: Wolman, active to the end, died in 1989 at the age of ninety-six. He pioneered the use of chlorine to purify water and had served as the adviser on water systems to fifty nations. U.S. News and World Report (6 March 1989): 16.
72Training program: Weidenkopf, Sanitary Engineering, p. 29; McMinn and Levin, Personnel in World War II, pp. 201-06.
73Pharmacy Corps: U.S. Congress, House, H.R. 7432, 23 July 1942; Hearings, House Military Affairs Committee, 17 November 1942 and 2 March 1943; and H.R. 997, Hearings, Senate Military Affairs Committee, 29 June 1943, MSC-USACMH; Israeloff, Winning the War, pp. 1-17; THU, Board for 1958 MSC History, pp. 5-10; `Bill Introduced to Establish Pharmacy Corps in the Army,` Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association 3 (November 1942): 227-28; `Army Presents Its Objections at Pharmacy Corps Bill Hearings,` Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association 3 (November 1942): 370-72. Quoted words: Postcard to TSG, anonymous, 25 Feb 43, folder 73, box 6/18, MSC-USACMH.
74Comparable status: `Bill Introduced,` Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association 3 (November 1942): 277. Quoted words: Hearings on H.R. 7432, p. 8.
75Quoted words: Hearings, H.R. 7432, 2 Mar 1943, p. 27. Kendig was chairman of the Committee on a Pharmacy Corps in the Regular Army.
76Quoted words: Ibid., p. 19.
77Quoted words: Col James T. Richards, MSC, Ret., to Ginn, 28 Feb 86, DASG-MS. The events occurred in March 1943.
78Pharmacy Corps: 57 Stat. 430, 12 July 1943; Memo, Capt E.R. Taylor, JAGD, Legal Div, OTSG, for Col Kintz, sub: Brief Summary of Medical Administrative Corps Legislation, 12 Feb 46; Memo, Pers Div, OTSG, sub: Problems Incident to the Utilization of Medical Service Corps Officers in Narrow Specialty Fields Upon Attaining Field Grade, 23 Dec 52; Rpt, OTSG, sub: Evolution of the Pharmacy Corps, Jan 45, all in MSC-USACMH; Samuel Milner, draft of first chapter, CMH History Project, sub: Troubled Decade: The U.S. Army Medical Service in the post World War II and Korean Eras, undated (1965), pp. 48, 67, box 1/18, MSC-USACMH. Pharmacy schools were restricted to those that required a four-year academic program for graduation.
79Appointments: Col Glenn K. Smith, MSC, draft chapter, sub: The Pharmacy Corps, undated (1961), in 1958 MSC History Project, folder 249, box 16/18, and Rpt, Maj Arthur H. Einbeck, MSC, Ret., sub: The History of the Pharmacy Corps, 29 Feb 56, folder 72, box 6/18, both in MSC?USACMH.
195
80Pharmacy Corps numbers: McMinn and Levin, Personnel in World War II, pp. 13, 15; Rpt, OTSG, sub: Evolution of the Pharmacy Corps, Jan 45, MSC-USACMH. A Pharmacy Corps song was apparently written in 1947, but was not located by the author. It is referred to in Ralph Biengang, `The History of Military Pharmacy in the United States: A Progress Report,` American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education 11(1947): 155.
81Complaint: Arthur H. Einbeck, `Army Must Be Made To Respect the Pharmacy Corps Act,` Journal of the National Association of Retail Druggists (21 May 1945): 837. Actions Deplored: Robert G. Dillard, Executive Secretary, Texas Pharmaceutical Association, to Kirk, 20 Nov 45, folder 78, box 6/18, MSC-USACMH. Quoted words: Cora Mae Briggs, Secretary, Nebraska Pharmaceutical Association, to Sen Hugh Butler, 8 Jun 45, folder 78, box 6/18, MSC-USACMH.
82Quoted words: Robert S. Keller, O.D., to Ginn, 12 Aug 85, DASG-MS. Also see `Progress of an Optometrist in the Army,` Optometric Weekly 33 (16 April 1942): 274.
83MOS: Otto R. Englemann, O.D., to Hon Paul McNutt, Chm, Manpower Commission, 14 Jan 43, folder 51, box 5/18, MSC-USACMH.
84AOA efforts: Michael Osborne and Joseph Riggs, Mr. Mac (Memphis, Tenn.: Southern College of Optometry, 1970), pp. 187-95.
85Quoted words: Ltr, John H. Smith to the editor, Optometric Weekly (20 December 1945): 1308.
86Quoted words: Carel C. Koch, `Action Now Required on Army Discrimination Against Optometrists,` American Journal of Optometry 20 (July 1943): 252. Letters: For examples, see Daniel O. Elliott et al., `Army Recognition Through Unity,` Optical Journal and Review of Optometry 79 (15 November 1942): 29; Daniel O. Elliott, Optical Journal and Review of Optometry 80 (1 February 1943): 21; Army Private, `Plaint of Optometrist in Uniform,` and Just Buck Private, `The O.D. Was on K.P.,` Optical Journal and Review of Optometry 81 (15 February 1944): 33.
87Quoted words: Editorial, `With Retinoscope and Floor-Mop,` Optical Journal and Review of Optometry 80 (1 October 1943): 28-29.
88Quoted words: Osborne and Riggs, Mr. Mac, p. 194.
89MacCracken: Ibid., p. 216.
90AOA solicitation: Charles Sheard, O.D., `Report of the Council on Education and Professional Guidance,` Journal of the American Optometric Association 15 (November 1943): 110. Also see Ewing Adams, O.D., President, AOA, to Otto R. Englemann, Illinois Optometric Association, 8 Feb 44, folder 51, box 5/18, MSC-USACMH. Adams encouraged Englemann to contact Governor Paul McNutt, chairman of the Wartime Manpower Commission, `using whatever influence he could to obtain proper recognition and utilization of optometry`s services in the armed forces.` Some optometrists in the Army noted that their prestige was rising as physicians and patients witnessed their professionalism. See Ltr, Sgt. Herbert Verner to the editor, `Prejudices Be Damned. They`re Doing the Job,` Optical Journal and Review of Optometry 81 (August 1944): 20-21.
91Kohn`s views: Osborne and Riggs, Mr. Mac, pp. 194-98.
92Quoted words: Ibid., p. 198, quoting Harold Kohn.
93Proposal: Ibid., pp. 196-99; U.S. Congress, House, Rpt 7905, `Establishing an Optometry Corps in the Medical Department of the U.S. Army,` 79th Cong., 1st sess., 14 July 1945. Quoted words: Osborne and Riggs, Mr. Mac, p. 199.
94Veto: Ibid., p. 197.
95Quoted words: B. H. Liddell Hart, Strategy (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), p. 366.
96Quoted words: Seventh Army, Public Health in Post Hostilities Germany, p. 1-6.
97Refugees: The number was estimated at 450,000. Rpt, Army Service Forces, sub: Statistical Review: World War II, 1945, p. 68, copy in JML. Also see William M. McConahey, Battalion Surgeon (Rochester, Minn.: privately published, 1966), p. 159. The 90th Infantry Division occupied a sector in eastern Bavaria during May 1945, and McConahey`s aid station in Maxhutte was quickly swamped with civilian health problems. Germany: Seventh Army, Public Health in Post Hostilities Germany, pp. I-6, II-18. Germany completely collapsed. Nearly 65 percent of the infants born in Berlin in 1945 died of tuberculosis or dysentery in their first year of life.
