The United States Army Medical Service Corps
KOREA
In June 1950 the Army was organized, at least on paper, into ten divisions plus nine separate regimental combat teams and the division-size European Constabulary. With a total strength of under six hundred thousand soldiers, it was a force that was insufficient to meet the nation's commitments, which had grown with the onset of the Cold War and the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. Combat units were frequently manned at half strength-divisions were short a brigade, brigades short a battalion, and battalions short a company.1
One point where Soviet and American power touched was the Asian peninsula of Korea. Soviet forces had entered Korea in August 1945, established a Communist government in the north, and as relations with the United States deteriorated they had fortified the frontier at the 38th Parallel. In this way a supposedly temporary division between two zones of occupation became a permanent division into two nations: the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the north, and the Republic of Korea (ROK) in the south. Increasing antagonism between North and South Korea resulted in incidents of armed conflict. In June 1949 the United States withdrew from Korea, as the Soviets had done previously. The 500 American military advisers left behind reported to General of the Army Douglas MacArthur's Eighth Army in Japan.
The North Korean Army (NKA) was a Soviet-trained force of seven divisions and five separate brigades supported by Soviet-made tanks and aircraft. South Korea, with a weak army supported by an unprepared American ally, could mount little resistance when the North Korean Army crossed the 38th Parallel without warning on Sunday morning, 25 June 1950. Premier Kim Il Sung ordered his commanders to conquer the south by 15 August. He would have succeeded if it had not been for the quick reaction of U.S. President Harry S. Truman, who ordered naval and air support for the ROK on 27 June and requested action by the United Nations (U.N.) Security Council. The South Korean capital of Seoul fell on the twenty-sixth, and two days later Truman committed American ground forces. U.N. forces deployed rapidly, but within a month the Communists had pushed them southeast into a 200-square-mile area around the port city of Pusan. The defenders were now no farther than fifty miles from the sea. Less than two months after the invasion, the United States had sustained over ten thousand casualties, including 543 killed. A 24th Infantry Division medic summed it up: 'We were outmanned, outgunned, outtanked and outflanked.'2
Helicopter landing on the deck of the Haven
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For two months Americans led a growing international army in defense of the Pusan perimeter. Then, on 15 September, General MacArthur staged a classic amphibious assault, landing at Inchon on the northwest side of Korea. He maneuvered east, recaptured Seoul on 26 September, severed NKA lines of communication, crossed the 38th Parallel, and pushed on to the Yalu River, North Korea's border with China. But on 25 November the war took on a dramatically new dimension when 180,000 Chinese attacked MacArthur's widely separated forces. By the end of January 1951 Seoul had again fallen, and U.N. forces had been pushed back to the 37th Parallel. In April Truman relieved MacArthur, the climax of a deep rift between the old general and the president.
General Matthew B. Ridgway replaced MacArthur and by June 1951 led the U.N. forces back to the 38th Parallel. Here the battle lines stabilized, and the conflict changed from a war of movement to a positional war. Battles of attrition on Heartbreak Ridge, Old Baldy, and Pork Chop Hill made headlines. The North Koreans dragged out truce negotiations, which began in July 1951, until the armistice was finally signed two years later. The Army maintained an average strength of 208,000 soldiers in Korea during the war. Military forces of twenty-two allied nations saw combat there, and over one million people died.3 The United States had 54,260 deaths, including 33,643 battle deaths.
The MSC Contribution
MSC officers, like personnel of all branches, were immediately affected by the United States redeployment to Korea, often responding to a 72-hour alert notification.4 The Eighth Army surgeon, Col. Chauncey E. Dovell, MC, moved to Korea from Japan with a small staff as part of the advance section of the Eighth Army headquarters. Dovell, described as burly and a bully, was one of the more colorful characters of the war.5 He arrived in Korea on 12 July 1950, accompanied by Lt. Col. Charles A. McAllister, MSC, his executive officer, and his key staff, nearly all MSC officers. They set up operation in an old schoolhouse at Taegu, north of Pusan. They were at the right place to participate in one of the most desperately convoluted military actions in American history.6 Colonel Goriup wrote in the fall
of 1950 that the reports of MSC officers in Korea were 'enough to warm the 'cockles of one's heart.'' Twenty MSCs received Silver Stars in the first year of the war.7
Lt. Col. William A. Hamrick, MSC, on leave, was en route to Japan when the war broke out. Diverted to Korea as Colonel Dovell's personnel officer, he reported to Taegu in July only to join an evacuation of the headquarters back to Pusan. Hamrick and most of the other staff officers returned to Pusan by boxcar, sleeping on the floor. Later, when they returned to Taegu, they quickly settled in to a round-the-clock operation. Capt. Paul M. Levesque, MSC, an operations officer, worked from 0700 to 2400 seven days a week. Some of the staff would sleep in the office each night to take advantage of clear phone lines for calls from hospital commanders and division surgeons throughout Korea.8
Regimental Medical Service
Each Korean War division had thirty-eight MSCs, more than any other corps except the infantry and artillery.9 They were essential components of the regi?
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mental and division levels of medical service, beginning with the medical platoons of the maneuver battalions. One of the first heroes of the war was 1st Lt. Raymond (Bodie) E. Adams, MSC, battalion surgeon's assistant of the 1st Battalion, 21st Infantry, 24th Infantry Division. His platoon was part of a task force of two reinforced rifle companies commanded by infantry Lt. Col. Charles B. Smith. Maj. Gen. William F. Dean's orders to Smith were to go to Pusan and head for Taejon, south of Seoul, to 'block the main road as far north as possible.' While other division elements followed by sea, Task Force Smith flew to Korea on a perilous mission intended to provide a show of force to deter the North Koreans.10
The unit landed on a muddy airstrip in Pusan on 1 July, arrived in Taejon by train the next morning, and moved north. At 0300 on 5 July, Smith's men dug in to form a roadblock straddling a ridge north of Osan about eighty miles from Taejon. That was as far as they got, because a column of about thirty T34 tanks rolled through five hours later, followed an hour after that by trucks loaded with North Korean infantry who dismounted and began encircling the Americans. They were lead elements of a column estimated to be six miles long.
Adams and the battalion surgeon, Capt. Edward L. Overholt, MC, located their aid station within the defensive perimeter in a twelve-foot-square hole dug five feet into the ground. There, the medics did the best they could to keep their patients alive. As the day went on North Korean attacks (controlled by voice and bugle) became more intense as they surrounded the defenders, who were running out of ammunition.
Smith eventually ordered his command to withdraw in groups back to friendly lines, and they took off in several directions. Only 185 of the more than 400 soldiers made it back safely. The medical platoon, the second group to leave, left two medics behind to care for the patients that were unable to move. Adams led a group of about seventy-five soldiers, including walking wounded, south to the American positions. As they began to pull out they were held up by a North Korean machine gunner, whom Adams, the pitcher for the regimental baseball team, took out with a hand grenade. (Later Smith jested that he had always thought more of Adams' pitching than his medical knowledge.) None in Adams' group were lost in the escape, and Adams and Overholt received Silver Stars for their valor. For his part, Adams said Task Force Smith was 'an example of what a few can do when esprit, commitment, and leadership all come together in a cause you believe in.'11
Medical units encountered overwhelming casualty loads. At one point in November 1950, after the Chinese attack, one of the 25th Medical Battalion's clearing stations had 750 patients, with more coming all the time. In the 7th Division, Sgt. Donald E. Wagoner's medical platoon at Hargaru-ri had nearly four hundred patients when they were ordered to 'make a break for it' at the end of November. The battalion surgeon, wounded and unable to walk, was one of the patients. Leading the platoon's vehicles in column, Wagoner, who received an MSC battlefield commission, came upon a Chinese soldier armed with a potato-masher hand grenade at a roadblock. Wagoner shot the soldier with his pistol at such close range that he could watch the North Korean's 'look of stunned surprise.'12
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1st Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment, aid station
Combat support units were staffed at little more than a fourth of their authorized manning levels. Medical Corps officers were at about half strength. There were not enough physicians to assign one to each maneuver battalion, and some MSC battalion surgeon's assistants became battalion surgeons. Some divisions substituted MSCs for the battalion surgeon in all but the infantry battalions. The 7th Infantry Division, for example, consolidated as many of its physicians as it could into the medical companies. It depended upon MSC battalion surgeon's assistants as the only medical officers in engineer, tank, and artillery battalions (and reported 'no impairment of essential medical activities').13
The engineer battalion surgeon was 1st Lt. Robert Levi, MSC, and 1st Lt. Robert N. Gilliam, MSC, was the tank battalion surgeon when the 2d Infantry Division deployed from Fort Lewis, Washington, in August 1950. The division received more physicians in the spring of 1951, but both battalion commanders declined the offer of replacing their MSCs. One week before the invasion of Korea 1st Lt. Paul A. Lavault, MSC, arrived in Japan and was assigned to the 1st Cavalry Division as a battalion surgeon's assistant, becoming the battalion surgeon since there was no physician assigned to his battalion. Lavault remained in that capacity for the movement to Korea, the defense of Pusan, and the Inchon landing.14
The movement phase of the Korean War tested the mobility of medical units at all levels of the combat zone, and MSC battalion surgeon's assistants learned that things did not always go smoothly. Lieutenant Lavault found his platoon's ability to keep up with its battalion severely compromised when the battalion operations officer would occasionally fail to tell him that the battalion was relo?
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cating. Consequently Lavault's aid station would end up stranded in enemy territory. A battalion surgeon's assistant in the 3d Infantry Division, 1st Lt. Rudolph A. Sarka, MSC, established a forward battalion aid station in December 1950 on a ridge west of Hamung, while the battalion surgeon established the principal aid station farther back with the battalion trains. Sarka was located within a few yards of the battalion's riflemen. He was authorized to administer plasma and blood and to call for helicopter evacuation from his forward position.15
Division Medical Service
Medical companies also had to be able to keep up with the units they supported. The principal duties of Capt. Lewis H. Huggins, MSC, executive officer of a 25th Infantry Division clearing company, included site selection for the clearing stations and coordination with the battalion aid stations so as to maintain an uninterrupted evacuation flow. Standard operating procedures dictated that the two clearing platoons of each clearing company would leapfrog each other to keep up with the tempo of battle. As one platoon set up and operated a clearing station the other would displace to a new location, and, when the second was operational, the first platoon would shut down and relocate. This was an exhausting regimen. The company operated in shifts whenever it was able to reassemble and operate a single clearing station. Then the soldiers could get some rest.16
In some cases medical units engaged in direct combat. In May 1951 a Chinese unit was bypassed by U.S. elements and stumbled into the hillside location where the 21st Medical Company of the 24th Infantry Division had set up for the night about three hundred yards from the regimental command post. The chance encounter turned into a general melee in which the lightly armed medical company killed twenty-three enemy soldiers and took fifty-eight prisoners. The medical company had one killed and ten wounded, and 1st Lt. John Atkins, MSC, received the Silver Star for his valor. In the same month, 1st Lt. William W. Cook, MSC, was killed in action when his 38th Regimental Combat Team battalion aid station was cut off by North Korean Army forces. In another case, Capt. Clarence L. Anderson, MSC, a battalion surgeon's assistant, along with his battalion surgeon, Capt. Alexander M. Boyson, MC, were captured at Chochiwon. They spent three years in North Korean hands.17
Because of the Medical Corps shortages, MSCs filled administrative positions, such as command of medical battalions, that were designated as physician assignments. Consequently, when those units deployed to Korea, they remained under the command of their Medical Service Corps commanders. By 1951 Medical Service Corps officers commanded four of the six division medical battalions in Korea. The 24th Infantry Division reported in 1953 that its medical battalion was under MSC command nearly the entire year, and the arrangement was successful.18 When the 7th Medical Battalion redeployed to Korea from Japan, it did so under the command of Maj. Oren C. Atchley, MSC. His battalion covered the Inchon landing and then provided evacuation over a 230-mile route in temperatures as low as -24? F. In November an ambulance with five patients was lost. Major Atchley led a search party, which was ambushed; the survivors included one soldier whose feet were so severely frostbitten his toenails
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were dropping off. Atchley became separated from the group, was listed as missing in action, and later presumed killed.19
Maj. Herman A. Walker, MSC, was commanding the medical battalion of the 25th Infantry Division in Japan at the time of the invasion of South Korea. Walker deployed his battalion to Pusan on 10 July and moved north. The battalion received its first patient on 12 July and by the end of the month had cared for almost eleven hundred patients. Over nine hundred had to be further evacuated, but since the Eighth Army was unable to provide casualty evacuation support, the battalion assembled rail cars to move patients to the rear. Not unlike other medical units at that time, Walker's unit was one-third understrength. The personnel situation became so critical that one of his clearing companies had to be augmented by fifteen soldiers from the division band. As Walker summed up his battalion's actions, 'we were too busy to worry.'20
Command opportunities extended to other positions normally reserved for physicians. For example, Capt. Herman Richards, MSC, commanded a medical company in the 7th Infantry Division that deployed from Yokohama, Japan, for the Inchon landing. His unit moved to the Pujon Reservoir where it provided medical support to the regiment in an area so cold that Richards wrapped his feet first in toilet paper and then multiple layers of socks for warmth. Soldiers in Richards' company received nineteen Silver Stars for their heroism.21
Operations in Korea taught that medical operational planning must account for refugees, enemy prisoners of war, and support for allied forces-missions that
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can utterly swamp a medical unit. After the Inchon landing Captain Richards' company discovered that although the division's aid stations and clearing stations had their hands full with the American wounded, 'it was clear something would have to be done for the civilian casualties who were streaming to the rear piggy?back, on wheelbarrows, and some even crawling.' Richards put 2,500 patients in a three-story rice warehouse on the banks of the Han River near one of the battalion aid stations. Major Walker's battalion also encountered refugees streaming through the American lines during the winter of 1950-51. His medics found the South Korean hospital at Sangju so low on medical supplies that its surgeons were performing amputations without anesthesia.22
Field Army Medical Service
Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals (MASH), operating under tents close to the divisions they supported, proved their worth in casualty resuscitation and stabilization. The staff of the 8055th MASH, the model for the 4077th MASH of movie and television fame, routinely worked twelve-hour shifts, the standard practice for medical units in combat. President-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower visited the hospital in December 1952 and thought it was too cold. Later the medical supply officer was able to cite presidential authority as justification for space heaters.23
Rail lines came close to the front lines in Korea, and trains became workhorses for the United Nations units. As a result, some MSCs got into railroading. Colonel Dovell, the Eighth Army surgeon, gave Maj. Matt Kowalsky, MSC, now an operations officer on his staff, the mission of putting together hospital trains to move patients from Taegu south to the hospitals in Pusan and, after the Inchon landing, from Seoul to Pusan. Kowalsky located some Korean coaches; shingled the roofs with flattened gas cans; covered the windows with sheet metal and wood; put in 55-gallon drums for heat, water, and fruit juice; and placed the trains in service, using Korean crews. Litter patients were loaded into the cars through the windows and placed across the seat backs or on the floors.24
The trains were continually subjected to ambushes and sniper attacks. Kowalsky put sandbagged flatcars mounted with heavy machine guns on the front and rear of the trains and loaded patients at night so as to reach Pusan by daylight. He also had his share of excitement. After the capture of Pyongyang he set up a train between that city and the port of Chinnamp'o. On one run the MSC major had the feeling that something was amiss. He stopped the train, interrogated the crew at pistol point, and found it included two North Korean infiltrators who planned to drive the train into the sea with all aboard.
The United States shipped some hospital trains to Korea. They were too big for the Korean railbed and tunnels, so Kowalsky had to rig a system of jacks and pulleys to get cars back on the track when they derailed. One figure-eight tunnel was much too small, and the cars would scrape the sides as they went through. It made a perfect ambush site, and there were about twenty-five attacks at that spot. On one of those occasions Colonel Dovell was on the train when it came under fire from front, rear, and both sides. The flatcar weapons kept the North Koreans pinned down while Kowalsky called for a 7th Division patrol to clear out the
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45th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH)
enemy positions. Dovell characteristically braved enemy fire, crawled under the last car, and fired at the enemy soldiers. Kowalsky went forward to get the train moving after the action ended, and a North Korean soldier jumped him. He was able to lay his attacker out with a single blow to the head.25
Other MSCs had a taste of hospital command, even though it was officially not possible. The 64th Field Hospital, commanded by Lt. Col. Joseph Bornstein, MC, left San Francisco in August 1950 and set up in Pusan, a city described by the hospital's executive officer, Maj. Rudolph P. Czaja, MSC, as 'a dirty, filthy place, full of refugees and a health hazard itself' Bornstein split the 64th into two hospital units, taking one unit forward to relieve Major Walker's battalion and leaving the other at Pusan under Major Czaja.26
After the Inchon landing, the United Nations forces began establishing prisoner of war camps around Pusan, and Czaja's Hospitalization Unit 1 began receiving POW patients. Within ten days his hospital had 2,000 POWs, a population he supported with 3 physicians, 2 MSC officers (including himself), 10 nurses, and 2 dentists. In October, Czaja's unit was relieved by the 14th Field Hospital, and he took his unit north to rejoin the rest of the 64th, which had reassembled in the Pyongyang area.
When the Chinese attacked, the 64th Field Hospital commander went to Inchon to find a relocation site while Czaja remained behind. The situation worsened, and after some time had elapsed Czaja began to feel that they had been forgotten in the confusion of the Eighth Army withdrawal. He called the switchboard (before it also left) and found that no one left in Pyongyang had the authority to order the 64th's withdrawal.
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Deciding that he was not going to let his unit be captured, Czaja moved 1,200 patients to safety in twenty-four hours through the Pyongyang airfield, dispatched the unit's vehicles and equipment south under the command of a dental officer, and sent most of the hospital cadre by rail to Seoul. He placed himself and the physicians in two rail cars attached to a train that evacuated the Turkish Brigade. Czaja said that Colonel Dovell later told him the 64th had been given up as lost. The exhausted unit returned to Japan for refitting.27
Prisoners of war were another challenge. Stanley Weintraub, MSC, a first lieutenant, was stationed in Pusan as the patient administration officer of the 1st POW Field Hospital (Provisional), a unit formed from the 3d and 14th Field Hospitals. His book, War in the Wards, is a hair-raising account of operating a prisoner of war hospital in the face of overwhelming resistance by the prisoners. When Weintraub arrived in the summer of 1951, the hospital was admitting and discharging over a thousand patients a day, and its daily census approached eleven thousand patients. It treated nearly ninety thousand patients during the period of its operation and performed about thirteen thousand operations, all the while fighting a 'private little war.'28
American experience with POWs in World War II had not prepared them for North Korean soldiers who did not stop fighting when captured, even if they were hospitalized. Nor were they prepared for the North Korean government's use of the POW camps for propaganda claims of mistreatment. Weintraub wrote that the Americans could not understand the duplicity of their communist prisoners, nor comprehend 'that amputees, tuberculars and the dying could be used as a fighting force' by a disciplined band of fanatics.29 The patients laid siege to the hospital, rioted, held kangaroo courts, and executed fellow prisoners until the situation was brought under control by an infantry attack.
In Korea, the Army was part of a combined U.N. force. This posed interoperability challenges for some MSCs. In September 1950 Capt. Robert I. Jetland, MSC, was detached from the 1st Cavalry Division and sent to Pusan to head an American liaison unit of thirty-four personnel attached to a Swedish Red Cross hospital. Sweden had agreed to provide the 200-bed unit if the Americans would supply and equip it. About one hundred fifty Swedes under the command of Col. Carl Erik Groth had come to Korea with some international fanfare. Jetland acted as the executive officer, and his detachment provided the administrative functions
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for the hospital, which expanded to 450 beds and treated over seven thousand patients. Jetland received Sweden's King's Medal for his service.
International staffs produce multilingual communications problems. This was demonstrated when an American officer came to the hospital with an ear problem. The American was greeted by one of Captain Jetland's soldiers, who told one of the Swedish medics that a 'full colonel' wished to see a physician. Jetland happened by as the Swedish soldier was taking the colonel by the shoulders and maneuvering him into a small closet. It turned out that full colonel meant a drunk colonel to the Swedes, and the physician had directed the medic to place the officer in the closet until they could get to him.30
Scientific Specialties
Scientific specialty officers were essential members of the medical team in Korea as they had been in World War I and World War II. Again, diseases that were not significant threats in the United States were militarily significant in a theater of operations. The mission of conserving the fighting strength required the expertise of MSC specialists in preventive medicine, the biosciences, and clinical specialties such as optometry.
Preventive medicine units deployed early in the conflict. One, the 37th Preventive Medicine Company under the command of Maj. Arthur Kidwell, MSC, was activated on 12 August 1950, arrived in Pusan on 30 October, and moved to Seoul to undertake pest control operations. It went into North Korea in November but pulled back when the Chinese invaded. By December it was back in Pusan. There it performed vector control for the POW camps, where over 75 percent of the prisoners were infested with body lice. In less than two weeks the unit twice deloused 150,000 POWs, learning in the process that the Korean body louse was resistant to DDT.31
Sanitary Engineering Section officers were important members of the preventive medicine team in Korea. Lt. Col. Stanley J. Weidenkopf, MSC, as the X Corps sanitary engineer concentrated on water supply problems. Some developed from the use of oil and gas tankers-which first had to be cleaned out-to transport water for the Inchon landings. Another was the restoration of public water systems in liberated towns. The shortage of Medical Corps preventive medicine officers necessitated the use of MSC officers in some of those positions, and both Lt. Col. Floyd Berry, MSC, and Maj. Marlo E. Smith, MSC, were assigned as preventive medicine officers in 1952.32
Malaria was a constant threat in Korea because of a large civilian reservoir of the disease and the presence of anopheline mosquitoes. There were 311 cases of malaria and 29 deaths among United States troops during 1950. Over 106,000 gallons of insecticide were aerially dispersed the following year as part of the malaria control program. The program highlighted the need for a portable apparatus that could be carried by the Army's light aircraft. Maj. William Wyatt, MSC, developed an improved apparatus for that purpose at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland.33
The importance of optometric support for combat operations was again demonstrated in the Korean War. Soldiers would frequently appear at the hospitals in Korea for replacement spectacles, but without their prescriptions. As in
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previous wars, they could lose their glasses or the prescriptions unintentionally, but it was also an effective way for a respite from combat. Maj. Anthony J. Zolenas, Jr., MSC, commander of the 8065th Medical Depot, discovered at one point that over two hundred soldiers were at the 8054th MASH waiting for new spectacles. Zolenas dispatched a forward optical platoon and the problem ended.34
One of the medical surprises of the war was the outbreak in 1951 of epidemic hemorrhagic fever. Laboratory officers at the 1st Medical Field Laboratory and Hemorrhagic Fever Center in Korea spent countless hours in unsuccessful attempts to identify the etiologic agent. Capt. Eugene D. Shaw, MSC, described his experience.
The incessant work, the frustration of negative diagnostic tests, the despair of one doctor over his patients' deaths (sometimes four to five per day), the hot Korean summer, the dedicated nurses and members of the unit, the tarpaulin floor of the laboratory tent, the shock of Radio Peking listing us by ranks, names and serial numbers as Bacteriological Warfare Criminals, the rare sojourns back to 'civilization' in Seoul, Korea, and the friendships made-each contribute to my memory when the two words 'Hemorrhagic Fever' are mentioned.35
Aeromedical Evacuation
The existence of functional helicopters at a time when the Army was faced with the inadequate road net and inhospitable terrain of Korea hastened their use as air ambulances. The helicopter was much less punishing to patients than ground vehicles, provided quicker transport time, and was not slowed by roadblocks and destroyed bridges. Initially Air Force, and later Marine and Army, aviators, employing the primitive equipment available to them, used innovation to forge an aeromedical doctrine that would become a sophisticated part of the Army's medical evacuation and treatment system. The helicopters were piloted by officers from a number of branches during the war, some of whom later transferred to the Medical Service Corps.36 They moved a large number of patients-some estimates run as high as 22,000.37
An Air Force unit, the 3d Air-Sea Rescue Squadron, arrived in Korea in July 1950 under the command of Capt. Oscar N. Tibbetts, USAF. There was little air opposition in Korea. Consequently there were few pilots to rescue, and one of the squadron's detachments began responding to evacuation requests for Army casualties. On 3 August Capt. Leonard A. Crosby, MSC, a former Army glider pilot and an operations officer on Colonel Dovell's staff, set up a demonstration for Dovell in the courtyard of Taegu Teachers' College. It was a convincing show, and a week later the Fifth Air Force commander authorized the use of helicopters for frontline evacuations.38 The marines were also quite active in the use of helicopters for evacuation of casualties, although they did not develop units or aircraft specifically dedicated to this mission. The Marine Corps Sikorsky HRS-1 transport helicopter could carry up to five litter patients inside the aircraft. A Marine observation squadron, VMO-6, flying the more primitive HO3S, evacuated casualties throughout the Inchon-Seoul operation, including the movement of Army casualties, principally from the 1st Cavalry Division.39
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In October the surgeon general, Maj. Gen. Raymond W. Bliss, visited Korea where he became convinced that the Medical Department needed its own air ambulance helicopters. The deputy surgeon general, Maj. Gen. George E. Armstrong (who succeeded Bliss in 1951), successfully carried the argument to the Army Staff. The Air Force and Army agreed that Army units would provide frontline evacuation and Air Force units would evacuate patients outside the combat zone.40
Four helicopter detachments arrived in Korea for assignment to the Eighth Army surgeon beginning in January 1951. Each detachment had four helicopters; two had Bell H-13s, and two had Hiller H-23s. Each helicopter had one pilot and was rigged with two exterior pods for litter patients; one ambulatory patient could be carried at the same time under ideal conditions. One detachment never became operational because its aircraft were diverted to other units immediately upon arrival. The remaining three detachments were each attached to a forward-deployed MASH. On 3 January 1st Lts. Willis G. Strawn, Artillery, and Joseph L. Bowler, Infantry, flew the first mission. Bowler went on to set a record of 824 medical evacuations in ten months.41 The first detachments were general aviation units, but in November 1952 the 49th Medical Detachment (Air Ambulance), commanded by Capt. John W. Hammett, Artillery, was organized as the first purely medical aviation unit. Hammett, a World War II artillery liaison pilot, later transferred to the MSC.42
The helicopters were primitive aircraft. The Army's H-13 had a ten-gallon gas tank with a sixty-mile range, and the pilots had to either carry extra gas cans or refuel en route for longer missions. Because its weak battery system gave no guarantee of restarting the engine, the pilots engaged in 'hot refueling.' Leaded gas would foul sparkplugs and cause forced landings, so the pilots had to clean the plugs every day. The power transmission systems depended on a series of fan belts, which added more excitement, and with two outboard litters the aircraft would get nose heavy if the fuel ran low. Its gas tank was not self-sealing and the gear-box was exposed to enemy fire. Furthermore, the aviators did not have formal training in casualty care.43
Almost any damage from enemy fire was fatal to the helicopters. Therefore, the rules for their use were strict and tightly monitored by the Eighth Army Surgeon's Office. Missions were restricted to serious injuries, and the pilots had a right to refuse any mission that would damage the helicopter. Pickups were supposed to occur only at medical treatment facilities and only in daylight hours. However, the plucky aviators often ignored the rules when there were emergencies. As one put it, they would go to 'any spot that was big enough to get the blades into.'44
The pioneers had to be adept at improvisation. Intravenous bottles would freeze outside. Lieutenant Bowler and Lt. Col. James M. Brown, MC, commander of the 8063d MASH, devised a rig for suspending bottles for infusion of plasma or blood inside the cabin with a tube that ran outside to the litter. The door would pinch off the line to the patient, and Capt. Hubert D. Gaddis, Artillery, devised a notched opening in the fuselage large enough to accommodate the bottle while allowing the tubing to clear the door.45
Lieutenant Bowler also rigged covers for the Stokes litters mounted on each side of the helicopter. The cover and the litter were fashioned into a coffin-like
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Wounded United Nations POW is loaded into an evacuation helicopter, April 1953
box that protected the patient from the elements, but few patients were prepared for a flight in the claustrophobic airborne capsules. Colonel Dovell tried it for himself 'By the time I got to Pusan, I was wringing wet and I'm not a fearful individual as my record will show.' He directed that the medics would sedate all patients evacuated in this manner.46
Developments in the Corps
Colonel Goriup's four-year term as chief of the corps ended in September 1951, and he was replaced with Col. Robert L. Black, MSC (see Appendix G). Both chiefs faced the tasks of fielding MSC officers to a theater of operations, meeting added demands for the use of MSCs, responding to concerns over the quality of the corps, expanding incentives, and encouraging developments in the administrative and scientific specialties. Their efforts included initiatives to improve morale and cohesion in the corps. One began in 1953, when Colonel Black attempted a draft of a history of the corps, the first in a series of attempts over the next forty years.47
The chief's office was affected by pressures on the Department of the Army and the Surgeon General's Office from the demands of the Korean War and the political developments of the time. The war was not popular, and General Dwight
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D. Eisenhower's successful campaign for president was highlighted by his promise to go to Korea and end the fighting. The Cold War was a reality when Eisenhower took office in 1952. Communist hegemony in Eastern Europe as well as the intransigence of the People's Republic of China had created a fear of Communist domination of the world. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin fanned the fear of communism into a hysteria.
That tension was part of the milieu surrounding the day-to-day duties of MSC officers in the Surgeon General's Office. For example, Lt. Col. Elwood Camp, MSC, chief of the Social Work Branch, was ordered to terminate the appointment of a civilian consultant whose name had surfaced in one of Senator McCarthy's lists of 'known Communists.' When the appointee asked why, Camp was allowed only to say: 'I am sorry, but I have no comment.'48
Although the Surgeon General's Personnel Division continued to exercise primary authority in personnel assignments, the corps chief was involved with establishing the governing policies. One was the commissioning of women. Colonel Black served as a member of an ad hoc DOD committee on the utilization of women. There he supported commissioning women in nearly every specialty of the corps. However, he opposed a Medical Department proposal to use second lieutenant MSC authorizations as a vehicle for commissioning medical, dental, and veterinary school students while they were still in school. Nevertheless, this eventually became a common practice.49
A major policy issue which concerned the chief was the replacement and substitution of physicians with MSC officers.50 The physician shortage kept the fire under this problem, along with the continuing scrutiny of the department's use of its Medical Corps officers and strong pressure to replace those in administrative positions with MSCs. A Washington Star article on the 'extravagant use of medical manpower by the Armed Forces' got the attention of the Surgeon General's staff, as did a telegram to the secretary of defense from Leland S. McKittrick, MD, president of the Massachusetts Medical Society. McKittrick wired that his organization was 'deeply disturbed by [the] Army threat to call up medical officers.' When the department proposed extending the physician draft in 1952, the American Medical Association proposed ending dependent care instead.51 The external pressure contributed to a running debate within the department over the proper number of physicians on active duty. Surgeon General Bliss was sensitive to physician overstaffing. 'We do not want to repeat the mistake made in World War II; i.e., having doctors idle and, therefore, disgruntled and unhappy.' By and large it appears his dictum was followed in Korea.52
The shortage of physicians again dictated the substitution of MSCs in patient care roles, for example as battalion surgeons. There was trepidation over this practice. Col. Douglas Lindsey, MC, the Eighth Army surgeon's operations officer in 1953, was an outspoken critic because he believed MSC battalion surgeon's assistants did not receive adequate training for those medical responsibilities.53
In fact, there was a renewed debate over the use of MSCs as battalion surgeon's assistants, and in some cases MSCs were replaced by warrant officers. By March 1953 there were forty-three warrant officers assigned to different medical units in Korea, thirteen of whom were serving in divisions as battalion surgeon's
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WACs checking a blood machine at the Camp Roberts Army Hospital, California, August 1951
assistants. Brig. Gen. L. Holmes Ginn, Jr., who became Eighth Army surgeon in January 1952, strongly favored this approach, citing insufficient medical training of young MSCs. In fact, Ginn proposed reducing by twenty-six the MSC positions in an infantry division and adding sixteen medical warrant officers. The surgeon general rejected his proposal, reaffirming the department's position that the medical treatment function was a secondary consideration for the utilization of MSC battalion surgeon's assistants. Their primary role was to support the administrative functions for that segment of the first level of the medical evacuation and treatment system. Further, the surgeon general viewed the positions as an excellent first step on a career ladder that 'proves of inestimable value to the officer in later years as a result of the experience gained.' That philosophy led to changing the administrative MSC specialty title to field medical assistant.54
The replacement of physicians in administrative duties included command positions. While command of active medical treatment facilities remained the province of Medical Corps officers, the shortage of physicians continued to prevent the department from always adhering to that doctrine. In 1950 the Surgeon General's Office considered assigning an MSC officer to command the 3,000-bed Philippine Scout Hospital. That did not occur, but there was regular use of MSC
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officers as medical battalion commanders during the first year of the Korean War, a reality recognized by the surgeon general's staff, which also accepted the assignment of MSC officers in lieu of physicians as medical company commanders.55
Personnel policy changes and wartime needs doubled the requirement for MSCs. The strength of the corps had dropped to 2,428 (and only 15 colonels on active duty) just prior to the outbreak of hostilities, a number that included less than 600 Regular Army officers. By 1952 the corps numbered over forty-seven hundred officers on active duty. The Pharmacy, Supply, and Administration Section accounted for 75 percent of the corps; the Medical Allied Sciences Section totaled 20 percent; and the Sanitary Engineering and Optometry Sections rounded out the picture with 3 and 2 percent, respectively. The increased use of MSC officers was evident when compared to the World War II ratio of MSC precursor officers to Medical Corps officers of approximately 1:2. By 1951 it was 3:4.56
The Medical Service Corps principally depended upon Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) and officer candidate schools (OCS) for its accessions. A monthly quota of sixty OCS candidates was established for the MSC beginning with the class graduating in July 1952; by the spring of 1953, there were 600 OCS graduates on active duty. Another source was the direct commissioning of noncommissioned officers, and an additional 100 officers had received battlefield appointments at that point.57
The Medical Department discarded one option from the outset for, with some exceptions in the scientific specialties, it elected not to recall senior reserve officers to active duty. In the first place, Colonel Black reasoned that the greatest demand in Korea was for junior officers to fill assignments in combat units. Second, there had been no temporary (i.e., accelerated) promotions after World War II for the MSC officers who had remained on active duty, and they had received permanent promotions only. Consequently, they enjoyed no advantage in rank over MSC officers who had returned to civilian life but stayed in the reserves. The chief believed that recalling reservists to active duty would have caused a morale problem for those who had remained on active duty.58
There continued to be concerns about the quality of MSC officers, and discussion in the surgeon general's staff meetings on several occasions turned to problems with MSC officers in terms of performance, discipline, attitude, and capability. Those concerns seemed to be supported by the results of interviews with 56 direct-commissioned MSC officers that the Personnel Division conducted at the Medical Field Service School in 1952. They reported that 12 were 'good officers,' 30 were in a middle category ranging from 'indifferent to low grade of satisfactory,' and 14 'should have never been commissioned.' Colonel Black believed some of the applicants for Regular Army commissions were not academically qualified and had mediocre performance records. Further, the officers who were OCS graduates or direct commissioned did not have college degrees.59
Maj. Gen. Joseph I. Martin, MC, commandant of the Medical Field Service School, tackled the issue of quality head-on in a controversial address to a monthly meeting of MSC officers at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. General
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Martin prefaced his remarks by saying that he spoke as a supporter of the MSC and saluted it for the superior performance of its officers in Korea. He complimented the corps on its great improvement since the prewar period when some Medical Administrative Corps officers were 'nothing short of criminals.'60 But the general, who said there is 'no wisdom like frankness,' said he would be candid.
Martin challenged his audience to further improve the quality of MSC officers in terms of performance, dependability, honesty, and loyalty. He called for removing poor performers from active duty, beginning with clock watchers and avoiders of extra work. 'You will always be judged by the weakest of your members. Get rid of them.' By the same token, he urged the corps to bring in higher quality officers. He suggested raising the education prerequisites for commissioning and recruiting top graduates from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He urged the corps to stress generalization in the development of the administrative specialty officers. Martin believed there was too much emphasis on specialization, to which he feared weaker officers escaped as a way to avoid command or leadership positions, duties which required a diverse background.61
Perhaps most significantly, General Martin urged complete integration of MSC administrative specialty officers within the Medical Department in such a way as to prevent their removal. To that end, he insisted that MSC officers gain a practical knowledge of medicine, and he praised efforts along those lines at the Medical Field Service School to include basic medical skills in the training of MSC officers. Martin believed that MSCs, especially administrative specialty officers, must internalize the special ethos of the patient care environment. In other words, being a medic was different. The department stood to lose its MSC officers if it could not inculcate that distinction.
Unless good improvement is made in this area you will have to fight off, again and again, the challenge to the specificity of your position by members of the line and by the other administrative service officers who today, in most cases, are equal to you in general administrative background and ability.62
He warned that there had already been an attempt to group all Army administrative officers into a single corps, and he predicted that more would follow. General Martin's comments were prescient, and his speech was remembered long after his retirement.63
Colonel Black recognized that improving the quality of the corps depended in great measure upon incentives that would attract and retain the highest quality officers. Thus he kept up the initiative begun by Colonel Goriup to remove the 2 percent cap on the number of full colonels. The effort advanced when DOD included a proposal to remove the 2 percent cap in its 1952 legislative program. Fred A. McNamara, chief of the Hospital Branch of the Bureau of the Budget, supported the initiative, introduced in Congress as House Resolution (H.R.) 5509. Black presented the proposal before a Pentagon legislative policy group in September, but he found both the Navy and Air Force lukewarm about a peculiarly Army problem. He lobbied for hearings on H.R. 5509, a proposal he described as 'not a promotion bill but, rather, an equality of opportunity bill.' Unfortunately the effort would not succeed during the Korean War period.64
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MSC officers continued to break new ground. In 1951 Lt. Col. Frank K. Lawford became the first MSC in the Office of the Secretary of Defense when he was assigned to the Armed Forces Medical Policy Council. The corps passed an important military training milestone in 1951 when Lt. Col. Bernard Aabel, MSC, returned from attache duty in Finland to attend the Army War College.65
The Army-Baylor Program in Hospital Administration was an educational opportunity for MSC officers as well as officers of all the Medical Department corps and other federal agencies. Baylor awarded the first four degrees to Army-Baylor students at commencement exercises on 29 May 1953. Two officers received master's of hospital administration (MHA), a 'professional' degree that required completion of course work, a residency year, and a thesis acceptable to the Graduate School. The other two received master's of science in hospital administration (MSHA), an 'academic' degree that permitted waiver of the residency year based upon an individual's experience in supervisory positions. The MSHA was especially designed for Army Nurse Corps and Medical Corps officers, but was eventually abandoned.66
Students completed the first part of the program at the Medical Field Service School in an academic year of three quarters, which began the first week of September and ended the following June. The second half of the program was a residency year conducted according to the standards of the Association of University Programs in Hospital Administration (AUPHA). It was intended as the field work component of the program, a concept patterned after residency training performed by physicians in medical specialties.67
Col. Frederick H. Gibbs, MSC, replaced Colonel Richards in 1953 as the program director. When Gibbs took over, the class had sixty students, of which thirty-eight were 'special students,' or those ineligible for matriculation in the Baylor Graduate School-a situation that was not looked upon favorably by Baylor-and Colonel Gibbs himself was not a college graduate. Baylor maintained academic pressure on the program, and the percentage of fully eligible graduate students gradually increased.68
Gibbs took to task Dean Conley, executive director of the American College of Hospital Administrators, when Conley failed to include the Army-Baylor program in a list of twelve United States graduate programs he published in a 1953 article. Conley 'broke out in profuse apologies' and explained that he wrote the article before the AUPHA had accepted the Army-Baylor program into its membership. The slight was so keenly felt that Hardy Kemp, M.D., director of graduate studies for Baylor University's School of Medicine, threatened to pull the program out of the AUPHA. 'Here we put in more than three years of work piecing, splicing, stretching, sewing, stitching, and otherwise trying to join these things together. . . it burns the pants off me to be slighted in this way.'69
Developments in the Administrative Specialties
Growth continued in the different administrative specialty fields. One, medical logistics, was an essential element of the Medical Department's capability in Korea and a specialty dominated by MSCs. The 8065th Army Medical Depot deployed
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from Yokohama on 8 July 1950. Its commander, Maj. Anthony J. Zolenas, Jr., MSC, said he 'bottled every type of diarrhea mixture I could.' By September 1951, when Maj. Marvin Ware, MSC, replaced Lt. Col. Carrol C. Barrick, MSC, as the Eighth Army surgeon's medical supply officer, there were base depots at Pusan and Taegu and an advance platoon with each of the three United States corps.70
Medical supply officers utilized supply schedules that were marginally useful in Korea because the usage factors did not account for new drugs or the increased use of others. They certainly did not allow for the astronomical rates of pilferage caused by widespread black market activity. Maj. Lynn B. Moore, MSC, in 1953 the Eighth Army medical supply officer, found that military police arrested some black marketeers as many as sixteen times for selling medical supplies. Lt. Col. Edwin D. McMeen, MSC, head of the medical depot at Yongdongpo, and Maj. Samuel Gottry, MSC, commander of the 60th Medical Depot, began using the steel shipping containers that were being tested beginning in 1950 for a container express (CONEX) service to store medical materiel. They found that the reusable CONEX containers, which measured approximately 8 by 6 by 7 feet, were very helpful in preventing pilferage.71
Operations and training officers did the hard staff work that made possible the deployment of the field medical support capability to Korea. Some officers served as instructors at the Medical Field Service School and in medical units. There was a sense of urgency in their training responsibilities, especially in preparing physicians for field medical service in Korea. Some observers strongly believed that the department's postwar emphasis on clinical training had gone overboard in correcting clinical deficiencies and failed to keep physicians current with the military side of their duties as Army officers. General Ginn said they had not received 'the simple fundamentals of the care of the wounded man, or of the problems involved in the management of battle casualties.'72 Albert E. Cowdrey, author of The Medics' War, the definitive study of Army medicine in Korea, said that for the residents and interns quickly pulled from training and sent to Korea, 'the general picture was one of innocents in the field.'73 The department benefited from the military training and experience of the MSC officers who coached Medical Corps officers assigned to their first field unit. A representative case was the 2d Infantry Division. Some of its physicians received their initial weapons training by firing off the fantails of ships transporting them to Korea.74
A new operations field was aeromedical plans and operations, and in November 1952 Maj. Leonard Crosby, MSC, returned to Washington, D.C., from Korea to head a newly formed Aviation Section in the Surgeon General's Office. Early ideas of training physicians as pilots were discarded as the department specified MSC aviators. In April 1953 the first seven earned their wings. All but one of the officers were assigned to Brooke Army Medical Center where the first United States-based air ambulance detachment, the 53d Medical Detachment (Air Ambulance), was formed. The first MSC aviators reached Korea on 29 August 1953, shortly after the cessation of hostilities.75
An out-of-the-ordinary operations job was performed by Maj. Thomas O. Matthews, MSC, who was stationed in Japan as the head of Far East Command's psychological warfare operations. Matthews began daily broadcasting two days
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after the invasion-initially from Japan and later from Korea-as the Voice of the United Nations Command. At its peak he directed thirty-nine stations broadcasting in Korean and Chinese.76
Some officers in the medical registrar specialty served as medical regulators controlling movement of patients along the evacuation chain. Officers, such as Lt. Col. Vincent J. Amato, MSC, medical regulating officer for the Pusan area, had to be fully conversant with each hospital's location, its language capability, bed availability, and specialty mix. Expanded use of air evacuation for overseas movement out of the theater led to the formation of the Armed Services Medical Regulating Office in October 1950, located in Washington, D.C. Maj. Donald E. Domina, MSC, became its first chief. He described it as the agency that matched patients to beds in the United States without regard to branch of service.77
MSC officers filled personnel positions at all levels of the Medical Department. In 1951 Maj. Vernon McKenzie, MSC, was assigned to the Surgeon General's Personnel Division where his duties included developing legislation for career incentive pay for physicians and the 1952 extension of the physician draft. In a routine action he authenticated the order promoting a dental officer, Capt. Irving Peress, DC, to major. Peress turned up on one of Senator McCarthy's lists, and the incantation became, 'Who promoted Peress?' The answer was, of course, Major McKenzie. A sound truck circled the Pentagon blaring, 'Who promoted Major Peress?' The surgeon general was required to furnish a list of all who had been involved with the case. McKenzie had to testify twice before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and he was investigated by the FBI and the CIA. 'I lost about seven or eight months struggling with that case.'78
Hospital administration was beginning to flourish as a profession. By 1953 there were about six thousand hospitals in the United States with an estimated ten thousand administrator and assistant administrator positions, the two top executive levels in hospital administration. The profession progressed in the Army with the results of Medical Department studies and the maturation of the Army-Baylor program. Yet the emergence of MSC graduate hospital administrators was threatening to traditionalists. One wrote that physicians who denigrated assignments to hospital administration positions were making an error since 'every profession has found that it is unsound to turn over top authority to essentially housekeeping personnel.'79
Lt. Col. Frederick H. Gibbs, MSC, returned from Japan to an assignment in Washington, D.C., as the executive officer of the Surgeon General's Plans and Operations Division. There he played an important role in the modernization of Army hospital administration. Gibbs was instrumental in setting up and later heading the Surgeon General's Hospital Management Improvement Branch, which conducted a number of innovative studies from 1948 to 1952. With the solid backing of General Bliss, the surgeon general, the branch analyzed the organization, structure, and staffing patterns of Army hospitals using the Valley Forge Army Hospital in Pennsylvania as a test site for experiments. It was a remarkably productive period of innovation.80
The program established the hospital executive officer as the chief of administration and the principal adviser on management to the commander. It reduced
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the number of administrative divisions from twenty-two to nine and developed automated hospital procedures using IBM data-processing equipment for supply and medical registrar functions. The team designed an intensity of care measurement for grouping patient care and developed a new food service operation that employed a central kitchen and airline-style carts and trays. Based on its findings, the responsibility for hospital food service was transferred to dietitians of the Women's Medical Specialist Corps.81
The studies also influenced MSC opportunities for hospital administration positions. Gibbs recommended filling all hospital executive officer positions with MSC officers, and General Bliss approved that recommendation in 1949, with the proviso that the second in command, the deputy commander, would always be a physician. The change of the executive officer position was adopted in pilot tests of a revised standard organization for the Class I (or community) hospitals beginning in May 1950.82 Although the position of hospital commander (in civilian life, the hospital administrator) remained closed, opening the executive officer position (the civilian hospital assistant administrator) to MSCs assured the Army that its hospital executive officers-in effect the chief operating officers-would be trained in hospital administration. Col. William Hamrick, MSC, was one of the first MSCs to benefit from the new policy when he was assigned as the executive officer of Fitzsimons Army Medical Center, Denver, Colorado, upon his return from Korea in 1951.
MSC hospital administrators participated in national professional organizations. Many were active in the American College of Hospital Administrators, which had grown to nearly twenty-five hundred members in the twenty years since its formation. Colonel Gibbs served on the American Hospital Association's Council on Administrative Practices. In 1952 the council established a Committee on Methods Improvement. That group, which Gibbs chaired, gave a national forum for the Medical Department's hospital management developments.83
Developments in the Scientific Specialties
In 1952 Lt. Col. Henry D. Roth, MSC, a pharmacy officer and chief of the Pharmacy, Supply, and Administration Section, could point to 'great strides' achieved by pharmacy officers over the previous decade.84 The surgeon general
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had directed that whenever possible pharmacies would be under the supervision of commissioned pharmacists, and that was the case at the general hospitals and the larger station hospitals. The pharmacy ROTC programs were popular, and by 1951 three of the pharmacy officers assigned as professors of military science and technology had taken advantage of their university assignments to earn master's of science degrees. The fourth had earned a Ph.D. A pharmacy officer, Lt. Col. Ralph D. Arnold, MSC, was chief of the pharmacy technician course at the Medical Field Service School. In addition, commissioned pharmacists had opportunities for positions that went beyond strictly pharmacy duties. Those included medical supply officer, battalion surgeon's assistant, hospital administrator, administrative assistant to major command surgeons, instructor, and medical unit commander.85
However, the Medical Department had backtracked from promises made to the American Pharmaceutical Association (APA) when the MSC was formed. General Armstrong, the surgeon general, told the 1952 annual meeting of the APA that although his predecessors, Surgeons General Kirk and Bliss, had both pledged that a pharmacist would always head the MSC, Armstrong was breaking with that policy. He said that pharmacists would always be a minority in the corps and the promises had been unrealistic. However, he assured his audience that a pharmacist would always be chief of the Pharmacy, Supply, and Administration Section.86 Of course, as time would prove, that too was unrealistic.
In 1951 the Medical Allied Sciences Section included nine specialties: bacteriologist, biochemist, parasitologist, entomologist, serologist, clinical psychologist, research psychologist, and psychiatric social worker. In addition, there were sixty-nine physical reconditioning and six nutrition officers, although those specialties were phasing out of the MSC. The rehabilitation of veterans was now the responsibility of the Veterans Administration, and the last class of the Physical Reconditioning Course graduated in November 1953.87
While the specialties of the Medical Allied Science Section were well established within the Medical Department's clinical and research organizations, there were still concerns for their opportunities as MSC officers, and there were further recommendations for establishment of a separate scientific corps, as well as a proposal for a preventive medicine corps.88 A study by the Surgeon General's Office addressed the problem of MSC officers in narrow specialty fields whose small numbers limited the number of field grade officer positions and constrained their promotion opportunities. The study conclusions provided no pathway through that situation because the positions-in Army force development terms-were characterized by 'limited responsibilities and, for the most part, no command responsibilities.' The report recommended that the department establish a combination of commissioned and warrant officer spaces and save its commissioned officer authorizations for key positions. Educational status was suggested as a criterion for determining commissioned or warrant appointment. Applicants with doctoral or master's degrees would qualify for commissions, while those with baccalaureate degrees would be appointed as warrant officers. The recommendation was not acted upon.89
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There were recommendations in the press to commission chiropodists in 1949, and by 1952 the matter was under active consideration. The Armed Forces Medical Policy Council, a tri-service group operating under the auspices of the DOD Office of Medical Services, considered a proposal to include chiropodists in the MSC. General Hays, General Armstrong's deputy, opposed this and said the Army was considering a warrant officer option. While chiropody was seen as 'a useful medical adjunct,' the Medical Department viewed commissioning with disfavor since, among other things, it was believed that osteopaths would then desire recognition comparable to the chiropodists'. The department reversed its position later that year when Surgeon General Armstrong considered formation of a chiropody section, but it went no further.90
Army medical research provided MSC officers opportunities for worthwhile contributions. Lt. Col. Roy Maxwell, MSC, left the Crocker Radiation Laboratory in 1949 to head the Department of Biophysics at the Army Medical Service Graduate School. Maxwell's team of pioneers in the nuclear medical science specialty investigated the uses of radioactive isotopes in diagnosis and therapy. Capt. Joseph V. Brady, MSC, initiated studies of behavior measurement, later called the Conditioned Emotional Response, a step in the evolution of test systems used in the development of tranquilizers and psychoactive drugs. Another researcher, Lt. Col. Joseph F. Ackroyd, MSC, conducted studies that inaugurated research into platelet immunology.91
Col. George W. Hunter III, MSC, gained international recognition for his work with schistosomiasis. United States forces occupying Japan required food handlers to be free of parasites, and Hunter fielded a mobile laboratory outfitted in railroad cars that tested nearly nineteen thousand Japanese over a four-month period in 1949. The researchers found that 93.2 percent of those tested were infected with some form of intestinal parasite. Demand always creates a supply, and the team also found that there was a black market for parasite-free stools.
One of the parasitic diseases was schistosomiasis, a disabling and potentially fatal disease. Hunter concentrated his research effort on that endemic problem, and by 1951 his team had eliminated it in the Nagatoishi district of Kurume City, Japan, using a landmark program of molluscicides to control the snail host. Japan
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Colonel and Mrs. Hunter on a visit to Japan, April 1976
adopted Hunter's methods and by 1970 had virtually eliminated the disease. Hunter became a public figure in Japan, and in 1952 the townspeople of Kurume erected a bust of him as a permanent tribute to their 'great benefactor.'92
Social work entered a period of rapid growth in March 1950, when General of the Army George C. Marshall, president of the American Red Cross, announced the withdrawal of Red Cross social workers from Army hospitals, a move precipitated by budget cuts. The Medical Department expanded its number of social workers with programs that included commissioning women as reserve officers in the MSC, one of whom, Maj. Barbara B. Hodges, MSC, was appointed head of the Medical Social Work Section of the Surgeon General's Office. By May 1951 there were 129 social work officers on active duty, including 7 women. They served at Army hospitals, mental hygiene consultation services, and Army disciplinary barracks.93
Psychologists with a Ph.D. were well established as members of the neuropsychiatric team, although there was frustration that they were not treated as 'real doctors.' Lack of professional recognition was reflected in the entry grade of first lieutenant, as compared to captain for physicians. In March 1953 there were 56 psychologists on active duty, but the department had identified a requirement for 149.94
Col. Frederick A. Zehrer, MSC, an innovator in child psychology and the psychology consultant to the surgeon general, directed the revision of the department's manual for psychologists, Military Clinical Psychology, which was published in 1951.95 It updated a scope of practice for clinical psychologists that was princi?
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pally confined to diagnostic testing, but with provisions for psychotherapy and clinical research.
There were fifty-two positions for commissioned optometrists, a number insufficient to meet the workload. As a result, some optometrists were drafted and employed as enlisted soldiers in their specialty. An example of this practice was John Herron, O.D., an optometrist serving as an enlisted optician with an optical repair unit who was loaned by his first sergeant to the 121st Evacuation Hospital to perform refractions.96 Not surprisingly, the Army's return to old habits prompted complaints by the American Optometric Association (AOA). The solution was to increase the authorized positions for commissioned optometrists to match the actual requirement for that specialty. Colonel Black was able to report to the AOA in 1952 regarding efforts to establish optometry positions at all levels of deployable hospitals.97
The AOA was convinced that some optometrists were assigned administrative specialty duties, a perception given credence by suspicions on the part of the surgeon general's staff of an 'undercover campaign' by optometrists to thwart their utilization in positions not requiring their specialized training. Colonel Black attempted to defuse the controversy with the president of the AOA, an effort made difficult because of the latter's belief that the MSC chief encouraged the assignment of optometrists to administrative positions in field units.98
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An example of what they were referring to was 1st Lt. Aaron Ryan, MSC, a World War II Navy veteran who completed optometry school on the GI Bill. Unable to obtain a commission as an optometrist, Ryan had received an infantry commission through OCS. He then transferred to the MSC and volunteered for duty as a battalion surgeon's assistant in Korea where he was decorated for valor. Colonel Black said that Ryan's record proved that 'a person with a scientific background can ably be put to use in military medical fields other than his profession."99
Unfortunately, assignments such as Ryan's did not help make up the department's shortcomings in optometric capability, and that incongruity had piqued the interest of organized optometry. A trade journal article criticized the department for not first filling its requirements for optometry duty, even though it was understandable that some optometrists wished to volunteer for combat duty in administrative positions. What further complicated the matter was a turnabout of the substitution of MSCs for MCs when some physicians were pressed into optometry duties. In 1951 the Eighth Army began using physicians in the division medical battalions to handle eye refractions.100
A new regime of occupational vision programs at Army installations created additional demands for optometrists to screen employees for visual defects, to provide protective eye wear, and to analyze jobs for vision requirements and eye hazards. The Occupational Vision Section of the Army Environmental Health Laboratory at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland, was headed by 1st Lt. Robert J. O'Shea, MSC. His program was based on pilot studies that had shown that approximately 30 percent of the Army's civilian employees had visual deficiencies.101
Summary
The Medical Service Corps was an important asset for the Medical Department when a 'come-as-you-are' war required deployment of a precariously understaffed and unprepared field medical force. The MSC provided the range of specialty expertise the Army needed to support its combat operations. It also provided officers to substitute for or replace physicians during a period of shortages. Replacement of physicians in administrative positions gave the department the means to prevent the inevitable political fallout from using drafted physicians for nonclinical duties. A reflection of that migration was that nearly all the staff officers of the Eighth U.S. Army Chief Surgeon's Office were MSCs, and at all levels of the evacuation chain they were a repository of the 'soldier' skills that had become rusty throughout the Medical Department.
The valor and hard work of MSC officers made a difference in Korea. Lt. Bodie Adams, a battalion surgeon's assistant, was one of the first heroes of the war. Other names come to mind: Maj. Matt Kowalsky, an operations officer running a railroad in combat; Capt. John Atkins, executive officer of a medical company in a firefight; Lt. Col. Stanley Weidenkopf, a sanitary engineer getting clean water supplies to the Inchon landing; Capt. Robert Jetland, executive officer of a Swedish hospital; Capt. Eugene Shaw, a laboratory officer at a hemorrhagic fever laboratory hearing his name broadcast as a war criminal; Lt. Stanley Weintraub, a registrar with a ringside seat for a hospital under attack by its own patients; Maj.
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Arthur Kidwell, commander of a preventive medicine company that ranged from Pusan to Inchon, to Seoul, to Pyongyang, and back to Pusan fighting plague; and Maj. Oren Atchley, a medical battalion commander killed in action searching for a lost ambulance crew and its patients.
MSC officers participated in the development of new medical technologies. Col. George Hunter's pioneering medical research in schistosomiasis was memorialized by one of the few statues in Japan erected to the memory of an American. Innovations by Col. Frederick Gibbs led to genuine improvements in Army hospital administration. Some MSCs attended flight school to take over the operation of the Army's fledgling aeromedical evacuation capability. That humanitarian advance had its beginnings in ungainly Korean War helicopters that called to mind the Ford Model T ambulances of the U.S. Army Ambulance Service in World War I. The care and feeding of those machines included careful attention to fan belts and batteries. Intrepid pilots, some of whom later transferred to the MSC, flew patients in coffin-like boxes suspended outboard in a fashion guaranteed to terrify those occupants who remained conscious.102
The corps was challenged to improve the quality of its officers, and its first two chiefs looked for ways to provide incentives that would attract and retain good officers. Opportunity for training advanced with the selection of the first MSC to attend the War College. Unfortunately, promotion opportunity remained abridged by the 2 percent ceiling on the number of colonels. Five years' worth of initiatives to turn that aside were not successful, but the corps remained hopeful. There was some advancement in position opportunity as the hospital executive officer was designated for MSC officers, although the senior hospital administrator position, the commander, remained closed.
MSC officers showed that they had the ability, training, and experience to serve in all kinds of leadership positions, including command. The department's actions in Korea demonstrated the tenuousness of its doctrine, which restricted the selection of commanders of operational medical units to physicians. When push came to shove, MSCs commanding medical battalions remained in command of their units. The department was very fortunate to have had those officers available for that duty, but the lesson would fade as the department entered another postwar period. MSCs were unsure what their future would bring. But General Martin had lifted the curtain on one possibility, the potential for efforts to remove some or all of their specialties from the Medical Department.
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Notes
1Army strength: Weigley, History of the United States Army, p. 502. The Army strength was 591,487 in June 1950. The Air Force totaled 411,000 personnel. Korean War: Numbers are based on U.S. Department of Defense, Defense 86, September/October 1986, pamphlet (Arlington, Va.: Armed Forces Information Service, 1986), p. 46, and Frank H. Reister, Battle Casualties and Medical Statistics: U.S. Army Experience in the Korean War (Washington D.C.: The Surgeon General, Department of the Army, 1972), hereafter cited as Reister, Battle Casualties. An essential source is Cowdrey, The Medics' War. A good chronology and critique of the war are in T. R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study of Unpreparedness (New York: Pocket Books, 1964). A helpful bibliographic survey is Terrence J. Gough, U.S. Army Mobilization and Logistics in the Korean War: A Research Approach (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1987).
2Quoted words: Sgt. Daniel Cavanaugh, Medical Company (Med Co), 34th Infantry, 24th Infantry Division (Inf Div), in Donald Knox, The Korean War, Pusan to Chosin: An Oral History (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1985), p. 60.
3Forces in Korea: Reister, Battle Casualties, p. 1.
4Notifications: See intervs, Samuel Milner with Lt Col Robert A. Byrne, MSC, OTSG, 15 Jul 66, and with Maj Edward J. Kelly, MSC, OTSG, 9 Sep 66, interview files, USACMH.
5Dovell: Rpt, Charles W. Ellsworth, Jr., THU, OTSG, sub: Biography of Col Chauncey E. Dovell, MC, undated, USACMH; Cowdrey, The Medics' War, p. 81. Sixty years old at the outbreak of the Korean War, Dovell was a holder of the Distinguished Service Cross from World War I and had served as a regimental surgeon in World War II. He made it a point to be as far forward as possible. In September 1950 he was personally responsible for the capture of thirteen enemy soldiers, for which he received the Silver Star.
6Advance staff: The initial staff was Maj. Sam Hill, MSC, entomologist; Maj. Fenner Whitely, MSC, sanitary engineer; Capt. Harry L. Gans, MSC, supply officer; Capt. Leonard A. Crosby, MSC, operations officer; and 2d Lt. Joseph A. Mikos, administrative assistant. They were soon joined by other officers, including Lt. Col. William Moore, MC, the deputy surgeon. Intervs, Milner with Col Harry L. Gans, MSC, OTSG, 29 May 66; Col Paul M. Levesque, MSC, OTSG, 30 Sep 59; Col William A. Hamrick, MSC, OTSG, 7 Jul 66, all in USACMH; Hamrick to Ginn, 15 Sep 88; Gans to Hamrick, undated (1988); Col Leonard Crosby, MSC, to Hamrick, 14 Mar 88, DASG-MS; Cowdrey, The Medics' War, p. 81; Medical Sec, HQ, EUSA, Annual Rpt 1950, extract, box 13/18, MSC-USACMH. Casualties: SG Conference, 14 Aug 50.
7Quoted words: Col Othmar F. Goriup, MSC, to Lt Col James T. Richards, MSC, 10 Oct 50, DASG-MS. Awards: Rpt, TLO, OTSG, sub: Army Medical Personnel-Decorations, Aug 51, DASG-MS.
8Levesque: Levesque, Milner interv, 30 Sep 59.
9Division MSCs: Speech, Col. Bernard Aabel, MSC, Chief, MSC, to Idaho and Oregon state pharmacy conventions, Jun 57, folder 78, box 6/18, MSC-USACMH.
10Task Force Smith: Interv, Brig Gen Charles B. Smith, with Milner, 15 Jun 65, USACMH; Cowdrey, The Medics' War, pp. 73-74; Michael W. Cannon, 'Task Force Smith: A Study in (Un)Preparedness and (Ir)Responsibility,' Military Review 68 (February 1988): 63-73; Intervs, Lt Col Raymond E. Adams, MSC, with Milner, OTSG, 16 Jun and 22 Jul 65; Milner, draft chapter, sub: North Koreans, in MS, U.S. Army Medical Service in the Post-World War II and Korean Eras, undated (1965), box 1/18, MSC-USACMH.
11Smith: Smith, Milner interv, 15 Jun 65. Quoted words: Adams to Ginn, 2 May 86, DASG?MS. Pfc. Max Myers and Cpl. Ernest Fortuna volunteered to stay with the wounded. They were repatriated at Operation BIG SWITCH.
1225th Medical Battalion: Interv Maj Herman A. Walker, MSC, with Milner, OTSG, 28 May 66, USACMH. Wagoner: Interv, Maj Donald E. Wagoner, MSC, with Milner, OTSG, 5 Oct 65, USACMH. The battalion surgeon was Capt. Vincent J. Nevarre, MC.
13Shortages: Cowdrey, The Medics' War, pp. 66-68. Utilization: Surgeon, 1st Cav Div, 1952 Annual Rpt; Med Sec, HQ, Far East Command (FEC), 1950 Annual Rpt. The 40th Inf Div surgeon said that MSCs were 'of highest caliber.' Surgeon, 40th Inf Div, 1952 Annual Rpt. However, the EUSA found that the preparation of battalion surgeon's assistants was uneven and established a
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refresher training program in 1952. Surgeon, 3d Inf Div, 1953 Annual Rpt; Med Sec, HQ EUSA, 1952 Annual Rpt, all from extracts in box 13/18, MSC-USACMH. 7th Inf Div: Surgeon, 7th Inf Div, 1952 Annual Rpt, extract in box 13/18, MSC-USACMH.
14Levi and Gilliam: Lt Col Andrew J. Colyer, MSC, draft chapter, sub: Medical Field Service, 1958 MSC history project. Lavault: Interv, Lt Col Paul A. Lavault, MSC, with Milner, 14 Jul 66.
15Lavault: Lavault, Milner interv. Sarka: John G. Westover, Combat Support in Korea (Washington, D.C.: Combat Forces Press, 1955), pp. 109-10.
16Leapfrogging: W.H. Thornton, 'The 24th Division Medical Battalion in Korea,' Military Surgeon 109 (July 1951): 13. Huggins: Interv, Lt Col Lewis H. Huggins, MSC, with Milner, OTSG, 11 Aug 66, USACMH. Huggins' most enduring lesson of the war was the 'utter dedication to duty' of his enlisted medics.
17Atkins: Med Co, 21st Inf Rgt, 24th Inf Div; Surgeon, 24th Inf Div, Annual Rpt, 1951, extract, box 13/18, MSC-USACMH; Cowdrey, The Medics' War, pp. 161-62. Cook: Surgeon, 2d Inf Div, Annual Rpt, 1951, extract, box 13/18, MSC-USACMH. Anderson and Boyson: Cowdrey, The Medics' War, p. 75.
18MSC battalion commanders: Cowdrey, The Medics' War, p. 142; Surgeon, 24th Inf Div, Annual Rpt, 1953, extract, box 13/18, MSC-USACMH.
19Atchley: DF, Cdr, 7th Medical Battalion (Med Bn), to Surgeon, 7th Inf Div, sub: MIA Report on Battalion Commander, 7th Med Bn, 28 Nov 50, and encl 1 to Command Rpt, 7th Med Bn, 1 Dec 50, RG 407, entry 529, box 3185, NARA-WNRC.
20Walker: Walker, Milner interv, 28 May 66; Interv, Col Richard H. Ross, MC, with Milner, OTSG, 28 May 66, USACMH. Quoted words: Annex 11 to 25th Inf Div History, July 1950, RG 407, entry 429, box 3747, NARA-WNRC.
21Richards: Interv, Lt Col Herman Richards, MSC, Ret., with Milner, OTSG, 19 Aug 66, USACMH. His company was attached to the 32d Infantry.
22Refugees: Richards, Milner interv, 19 Aug 66; Walker, Milner interv, 28 May 66.
238055th MASH: Suzanne Ward, 'And Now, Will the Real M-A-S-H Please Stand Up,' AMEDD Spectrum 1 (1974): 11, copy in JML. Also see Intervs, Milner with Col Kryder E. Van Buskirk, MC, CO, 8076th MASH, OTSG, 7 Jul 66, and Col George Zalkan, MC, CO, 8054th MASH, OTSG, 9 Aug 66, both in USACMH.
24Hospital trains: Cowdrey, The Medics' War, pp. 149-50; Levesque, Milner interv, 30 Sep 59. Kowalsky: Intervs, Milner with Kowalsky, 29 May 66 and with Col Chauncey E. Dovell, MC, Hampton, Va., 21 Sep 66, USACMH.
25Train ambush: Kowalsky tried unsuccessfully to get an award for Dovell. Yet Maj. Gen. Edgar Erskine Hume, MC, FEC surgeon, who was visiting Korea and was also aboard, received a Silver Star and a Purple Heart. Kowalski could not account for that, because 'told to stay out of sight, the General did so.' Hume is criticized in several accounts for his love of medals and decorations (Dovell called it 'a positive mania'). See intervs, Milner with Kowalsky, 29 May 66; Dovell, 21 Sep 66; Lt Col Richard Stacey, MSC, OTSG, 28 Sep 66, USACMH; and Maj Gen Silas B. Hays, MC, OTSG, 25 Oct 63, USACMH.
26Quoted words: Interv, Col Rudolph P. Czaja, MSC, with Milner, OTSG, 1 Jul 66, USACMH. 64th Field Hospital: Czaja, Milner interv; Cowdrey, The Medics' War, pp. 123-24, 310.
27Given up for lost: Czaja, Milner interv, 1 Jul 66.
28POW hospital: Stanley Weintraub, The War in the Wards: Korea's Unknown Battle in a Prisoner-of-War Hospital Camp (1964; reprint, California: Presidio Press, 1976), p. 10; Cowdrey, The Medics' War, pp. 316-19. After the war Weintraub became an English professor, Guggenheim fellow, and distinguished writer and critic.
29Quoted words: Weintraub, p. 89.
30Swedish hospital: Interv, Col Robert I. Jetland, MSC, with Milner, OTSG, 7 Sep 66, USACMH. Colonel Groth said, 'One thing I'll always remember about the Americans is how easy they made it for us doctors to practice our profession.' Jetland, 'Medical Service Corps Duties in Korea,' Military Surgeon 112 (May 1952): 353; 'Featured Retired Alumnus,' The Bear Facts: U.S. Army-Baylor University Alumni Club Newsletter (Winter 1990), DASG-MS.
31DDT resistance: Herbert S. Hurlbut, Robert M. Altman, and Carlyle Nibley, Jr., 'DDT Resistance in Korean Body Lice,' Science 115 (4 January 1952): 11; Col Ralph W. Bunn, MSC, and
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Col Joseph E. Webb, Jr., MSC, sec. 7, sub: Entomology, of draft chapter 8, sub: Laboratory Specialties, 1958 MSC History Project, pp. 108-09, DASG-MS.
32Sanitary engineering: Rpt, Col Raymond J. Karpen, MSC, Ret., to Col Earl J. Herndon, MSC, sub: Preventive Medicine Activities, 1950-53, 7 Nov 83, DASG-MS, hereafter cited as Karpen, Preventive Medicine, 1950-53; Cowdrey, The Medics' War, pp. 145-46; Lt Col Sam Hill, FEC, to Lt Col Webb, OTSG, 13 Sep 50, DASG-MS; Interv, Col Stanley J. Weidenkopf, MSC, with Milner, OTSG, 18 Feb 67, USACMH. Preventive medicine officers: Med Sec, HQ, FEC, 1952 Annual Rpt, extract, box 13/18, MSC-USACMH.
33Malaria rates: Karpen, Preventive Medicine, 1950-53. Wyatt: Ibid.
34Optometry: Memo, Col Howard W. Glattly, MC, Chief; Pers Div, OTSG, for Chief, Med Plans and Operations Div, OTSG, sub: Utilization of Optometrists (including extract from ltr by FEC chief surgeon), 22 Aug 52, DASG-MS; Interv, Col Anthony J. Zolenas, MSC, with Milner, OTSG, 13 Jul 66, USACMH; SG Conferences, 18, 20, and 26 Jun 52; 'Army M.S.C. Optometrist Is Cited' Southern Optometrist (January 1954): 23-24. Respite from combat: Glattly, FEC extract, DASG-MS.
35Shaw's experience: Capt Eugene R. Shaw, MSC, to Lt Col John R. Ransom, 6 Nov 59, cited in Ransom, section, sub: Microbiology, in 1958 MSC history project, folder 253, box 16/18, MSC?USACMH.
36Aviation: Intervs, Col Leonard A. Crosby, MSC, OTSG, 25 Aug 66, USACMH; Dovell, 23 Sep 66; Col John D. Davenport, MSC, OTSG, 28 Oct 66, USACMH; and Levesque, 30 Sep 59, all with Milner; Interv, Lt Col John W. Hammett, MSC, with Capt Peter Dorland, MSC, THU, OTSG, undated, USACMH; Ltr, Col Kryder E. Van Buskirk, MC, to Dorland, 24 May 74, USACMH; Richard P. Weinert, Jr., A History of Army Aviation-1950-1962 (Fort Monroe, Va.: U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, 1991), p. 203-04; Robert F. Futrell, Lawson S. Mosley, and Albert F. Simpson, The United States Air Force in Korea 1950-1953 (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1961), pp. 543-46; Lynn Montross, Cavalry of the Sky (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954), pp. 134-35, 154-55; Peter Dorland and James Nanney, Dust Off Army Aeromedical Evacuation in Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: United States Army Center of Military History, 1982), pp. 10-20; Allen D. Smith, 'Medical Air Evacuation in Korea and Its Influence on the Future,' Military Medicine 110 (May 1952): 323-32; Spurgeon H. Neel, Jr., 'Helicopter Evacuation in Korea,' U.S. Armed Forces Medical Journal 6 (May 1955): 691-702; Cowdrey, The Medics' War, pp. 163-67; Martin Blumenson, 'Helicopter Evacuation,' in Westover, Combat Support in Korea, pp. 111-13. Air ambulance pilots in Korea were Artillery, Infantry, Signal Corps, Corps of Engineers, and Transportation Corps officers. The first MSC graduates of flight school did not arrive in Korea until after the hostilities had ended.
37Number evacuated: Dorland and Nanney put the number evacuated at 17,700. Lt. Gen. Heaton, TSG, cited 20,000 in 1967, and Col. Leonard Crosby put the total at 21,852, based on his records. Remarks, Heaton, sub: Dedication of Kelly Heliport, 7 Apr 67, and Crosby to Hamrick, 14 Mar 88, both DASG-MS. Kelly heliport was the airfield located at Fort Sam Houston, San Antonio, Texas. Lt. Col. Kryder E. Van Buskirk, CO of the 8076th MASH, lauded the benefit of speedy evacuation. 'It is not uncommon for casualties to arrive in such excellent shape that they are ready for immediate operations.' Van Buskirk, 'The Mobile Army Surgical Hospital,' Military Surgeon 113 (July 1953): 31.
38Demonstration: Crosby, Milner interv, 25 Aug 66.
39Marines: Lynn Montross, Hubard D. Kuokka, and Norman W. Hicks, The East-Central Front, volume in the series U.S. Marine Operations in Korea, 1950-1953 (Washington, D.C.: Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, 1962), pp 49, 56, 188-90. VMO-6 evacuated 1,396 casualties in the first six months of 1951. Montross, Cavalry of the Sky, p. 155.
40TSG requests helicopters: SG Conference, 9 and 13 Oct and 15 Nov 50.
41Bowler and Strawn: Tierney and Montgomery, The Army Aviation Story, p. 208.
4249th Medical Detachment: Crosby to Hamrick, 14 Mar 88. On 1 June 1953, Hammett's detachment, along with five others, combined to form the 1st Helicopter Ambulance Company (Provisional) under the command of Maj. Rusty Russell, FA.
43Need for medical training: Interv, Col Hubert D. Gaddis, MSC, Ret., with Dorland, OTSG, 2 May 74, USACMH.
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44Quoted words: Hammett, Dorland interv, undated, USACMH.
45IV bottle hatch: Gaddis, Dorland interv, 2 May 74; Cowdrey, The Medics' War, p. 166.
46Quoted words: Dovell, Milner interv, 21 Sep 66.
47Draft history: Rpt, Col Robert L. Black, Chief, MSC, OTSG, sub: History of the Medical Service Corps (draft), 1 Jun 53 (32 pp.), DASG-MS.
48Quoted words: Elwood Camp, As I Remember Social Work.
49Role of chief: Interv, Brig Gen William A. Hamrick, Ret., with Col Ernest J. Sylvester, MSC, San Antonio, Tex., USAMHI Senior Officer Oral History Program, 21 Feb 84, USAMHI; Interv, Louis F. Williams with Ginn, 15 Nov 84, DASG-MS. Women: Memo, 1st Lt M.E. Snyder, MSC, sub: Medical Service Corps Policy Council Meeting, 1000 Hours, 9 Jan 1952, 14 Jan 52, citing Memo, Black for DSG, 2 Jan 52, DASG-MS, hereafter cited as Snyder, 14 Jan 52 Memo; SG Conferences, 26 Jun and 14 Jul 52; Robert S. Anderson, ed. in chief, Army Medical Specialist Corps (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army, 1968), pp. 402-04. Opposition to use of spaces: Snyder, 14 Jan 52 Memo.
50MSC use: Isaac Cogan, head of TSG's Resources Analysis Division, took the argument a step further and argued that MSCs were performing jobs that should be handled by warrant officers and sergeants (SG Conferences, 26 Mar 51 and 15 May 53). That did not appear to be a concern of TSG.
51Quoted words: 'Extravagant Use of Medical Manpower by the Armed Forces,' Washington Evening Star, 24 October 1951; SG Conference, 25 Oct 51. Quoted words: Telegram (Telg), Leland S. McKittrick, M.D., President, Massachusetts Medical Society, and seventy-five representatives of hospitals and medical schools, to Louis Johnson, Sec Def, Stuart Symington, Chm, National Security Resources Board, and Sen Millard E. Tydings, Chm, Senate Armed Services Committee; SG Conference, 25 Aug 50. AMA: Interv, Lt Col Vernon McKenzie, MSC, with Milner, OTSG, 4 Nov 63, USACMH.
52MC strength: See Bliss in SG Conferences, 21 Feb 51 and 8 Aug 50; Armstrong in SG Conference, 23 Mar 51. Korea: Col. Harold W. Glattly, MC, chief of the Personnel Division, OTSG, reported after a visit in October 1952 that 'not one complaint was received from a medical officer based upon inactivity.' Memo, Glattly for TSG, sub: Personnel Survey of Medical Activities and Installations in FECOM and USARPAC, 13 Oct 52, in SG Conference, 13 Oct 52.
53MSC substitution: SG Conference, 1 May 51; Lt Col Douglas Lindsey, MC, Dir, Med Research, U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Laboratory, to Col Gene Quinn, MSC, 3 Jun 59, USACMH; Interv, Col Lynn B. Moore, MSC, with Milner, OTSG, 28 Jul 66, USACMH. Lindsey said his opinion was 'unprintable.' The department's performance was one of its 'blackest chapters' because it 'lost the lives of 10,000 men in Korea who would have been saved by the Marine Corps medical service in the same war. I lay a lot of the blame for this on the policy of giving, to the MSC assistant battalion surgeon, responsibilities for which he was and always will be totally unprepared.' MC shortages: Interv, Col John W. Wisearson, MSC, with Milner, OTSG, 22 Sep 66, USACMH.
54WO/MSC debate: Brig Gen L. Holmes Ginn, Jr., Surgeon, EUSA, to Maj Gen George Armstrong, TSG, 8 Mar 53; Lt Col Thomas P. Caito, MSC, Pers Div, OTSG, to Chief, Pers Div, sub: Utilization of Warrant Officers in Lieu of MSC Officers to Staff Divisional Type MOS 3506 Positions, 27 May 53; Col O. Elliot Ursin, MC, Asst Ch, Pers Div, OTSG, to Maj. Gen William E. Shambora, MC, Ch Surgeon, U.S. Forces, Far East, 8 Apr 53, all in DASG-MS. Quoted words: Ursin to Shambora, 8 Apr 53.
55Company command: SG Conference, 7 Jul 52. Philippine Scout Hospital (10th General Hospital): SG Conference, 16 Sep 49.
56MSC:MC ratio: Cowdrey, The Medics' War, p. 21. Corps strength: Heaton, Statement Before the Committee on Armed Services, U.S. Senate, 8 Sep 66, DASG-MS; Memo, Lt Col Manley G. Morrison, Pers Div, OTSG, sub: Structure of the Medical Service Corps, 16 Apr 53, file 228-01, box 4/18, USACMH; Andrew J. Colyer, 'Career Management for the Medical Service Corps,' U.S. Armed Forces Medical Journal 1 (June 1950): 709.
57OCS: MSC Historical Rpt, 1 July-31 December 1951, file Post World War II, box 2/18, MSC-USACMH. Accessions: SG Conference, 23, 25 Apr 53.
58No recall: Robert L. Black, 'The Army's Medical Service Corps,' Military Surgeon 115 (July 1954): 12.
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59Concerns: Maj. Gen Bliss, TSG, and Col Schwichtenberg, MC, SG Conference, 8 Sep 49; Maj. Gen Bliss, TSG, SG Conference, 14 Nov 50; Maj Gen Hays, DSG, SG Conference, 7 Sep 51; MFSS Study, SG Conference, 13 Feb 52; Maj. Gen Armstrong, TSG, SG Conference, 15 Feb 52; Maj. Gen W.E. Shambora, MC, SG Conference, 7 Aug 53; Col. Ursin, MC, SG Conference, 4 Nov 53.
60Quoted words: Speech, Maj. Gen Joseph I. Martin, MC, sub: Address to Medical Service Corps Officers, MSC Officers Meeting, Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC), 1953, file 228-5, box 5/18, MSC-USACMH, hereafter cited as Martin, Address to MSC Officers. MSC meetings: SG Conferences, 21 May 50; 10 and 13 Oct 52; and 14 Jan 53. Colonel Goriup started the meetings in 1950 for MSCs stationed in the Washington, D.C., area. General Armstrong said Goriup 'gave a most impressive talk' at the first one.
61Generalization: See Colyer, 'Career Management for the Medical Service Corps,' p. 709.
62Quoted words: Martin, Address to MSC Officers.
63Martin's influence: See quote by Col Caroll C. Barrick, MSC, in Rpt, 549th Hospital Center, sub: Proceedings of the MSC Conference in USAREUR, 2-4 April 59, DASG-MS.
64Two percent cap: Snyder, 14 Jan 52 Memo; MSC Historical Rpt, 1 July-31 December 1951, file Post World War II, box 2/18, MSC-USACMH; Memo, Black for Chief, Pers Div, OTSG, 9 Mar 53; Memo, Glattly for Chief, MSC Div, OTSG, 24 Jun 53; Cmt 2, Brig Gen R.E. Chambers, MC, Ch, Professional Div, OTSG, to Memo, Ch, MSC, sub: Position Authorizations for Colonels, MSC, 14 Sep 53, all in DASG-MS.
65First OSD: Lt Col Andrew J. Colyer, MSC, draft chapter, sub: Administrative Specialties, 1958 MSC History Project. War College: SG Conference, 18 Jul 51; Interv, Col James T. Richards, MSC, Ret., with Ginn, San Antonio, Tex., 28 Feb 86, DASG-MS.
66Degrees: The first degrees were awarded to Lt. Col. Helen Abromoska, ANC (MSHA); Lt. Col. Juanita Costa, ANC (MSHA); Lt. Col. Glenn C. Irving, MSC (MHA); and Maj. Herman Jones, MSC (MHA). 'Unique Program Graduates First Class,' ACHA News 16 (June 1953): 3; Memo, Gibbs, 7 Nov 52; Col Melvin E. Modderman, MSC, Dir, Army-Baylor Program, to Ginn, 23 Apr 87, both in DASG-MS.
67Course structure: Ltr, Gibbs to American Council on Education, Washington, D.C., 17 Dec 53; Ltr, Hardy Kemp, M.D., Dir Grad Studies, Baylor College of Medicine, to Maj Gen R. W. Bliss, MC, TSG, 1 Nov 50, both in DASG-MS. It was important to call the practicum year a residency 'to have them equated with the senior medical personnel in the hospital, the residents, and certainly not the interns, or clerks, or anything of that variety.' Interv, Gary Fillerman, President, AUPHA, with Lewis E. Weeks, American Hospital Association (AHA), Chicago, in McLean, Va., 28 Dec 79, copy in AHA Library, Chicago.
68Gibbs: Memo, Gibbs, 7 Jan 53, DASG-MS. Baylor's acceptance of Gibbs was based on his experience in hospital administration, not his academic background. Gibbs earned a baccalaureate degree in 1958, following his retirement from the Army in 1957. Student composition: Dean Conley, 'Army Course in Hospital Administration,' Higher Education 10 (September 1953): 7; Ltr, Maj. H.M. Noolf, USAF, Med Svcs Career Control Br, USAF SGO, to Richards, 30 Jun 52, DASG-MS. Objections: Ltr, Wilby Gooch, Baylor Admin VP, to Harvey Kemp, 9 Nov 53, DASG?MS. The mixing of undergraduate and graduate students was 'foreign to graduate standards.'
69Conley's slight: Conley, 'Professional Education in Hospital Administration,' Higher Education 9 (1 May 1953): 193-97; Conley, 'Army Course in Hospital Administration,' pp 6-7; Kemp to Gibbs, 14 and 22 May 53; Gibbs to Kemp, 18 May 53, all in DASG-MS.
70Medical logistics: Cowdrey, The Medics' War, p. 136; Intervs, Milner with Col Marvin Ware, MSC, OTSG, 19 May 66; Col Philip L. LaManche, MSC, OTSG, 12 Aug 66; Maj. Gen Silas B. Hays, OTSG, 25 Oct 63, all in USACMH. Quoted words: Zolenas, Milner interv, 13 Jul 66, USACMH.
71Pilferage: Interv, Col Lynn B. Moore, MSC, with Milner, 28 Jul 66; also see Rpt, Office of Chief of Transportation, DA, sub: CONEX: A Milestone in Utilization, 22 Mar 57, DASG-MS. The surgeon, Brig. Gen. L. Holmes Ginn, refused to use McMeen as his MSO. See DA rpt, above, and Ware, Milner interv, 19 May 66.
72Quoted words: Ginn, cited in Cowdrey, The Medics' War, p. 191. See Cowdrey's discussion, 'How Good Was the Medical Service?' on pp. 187-96. Also see Brig Gen Crawford F. Sams, Chief,
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Public Health and Welfare Section, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), unpublished MS, sub: Medic: An Autobiography, p. 2: 668, USACMH. 'None of them had been trained in that basic function of all military medical officers which is the evacuation and care of the sick and wounded.'
73Quoted words: Cowdrey, The Medics' War,p. 140.
74Lack of training: Interv, Maj. Gen Albert H. Schwichtenberg, USAF, with Milner, 4 Oct 63; SG Conference, 26 Jun 50; Wisearson, Milner interv, 22 Sep 66.
75Aviation section: Crosby to Hamrick, 14 Mar 88; Tierney and Montgomery, The Army Aviation Story, p. 190. MC pilots: SG Conference, 23 Apr 51; Silas B. Hays, 'The Army Medical Service,' U.S. Armed Forces Medical Journal 4 (February 1953): 172. First pilots: SG Conference, 7 Jul 52; Press Release, OTSG, '1st MSCs Earn Helicopter Wings,' 11 April 1953, USACMH. The first MSC pilots graduated at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, on 11 April 1953: 2d Lt. Marian Burroughs, Capt. Warren Garfield, 1st Lt. William R. Knowles, 2d Lt. Frank Mettner, Capt. William R. Schmidt, 1st Lt. Eddie G. Sullivan, and Capt. Richard K. Whitehouse.
76Matthews: Brig Gen William A. Hamrick, MSC, Ret., to Ginn, 21 Dec 88 and 23 Mar 89, incl Cv, Col. Thomas O. Matthews, MSC, Ret., DASG-MS. Matthews later became the executive producer of the Peabody Award-winning television series 'The Big Picture.'
77Medical regulating: Cowdrey, The Medics' War, p. 257.
78Peress: Interv, Col Vernon McKenzie, MSC, Ret., with Ginn, Pentagon, 19 May 84, DASG?MS; McKenzie, Milner interv, 4 Nov 63, USACMH; SG Conferences, 3, 4, 8, and 16 Feb 54. Peress left active duty on 2 February 1954. McKenzie said the whole thing was an error to begin with, since Peress should have entered active duty as a major, not as a captain. Quoted words: McKenzie, Ginn interv, 19 May 84.
79Hospital administration: Conley, 'Professional Education in Hospital Administration,' pp. 193-94. Quoted words: Col William S. Stone, MC, Commandant of the Army Medical Service Graduate School. Stone, 'Military Medicine as a Career,' Military Medicine Notes I (1951), p. 3, JML.
80Management improvement: Rpt, Lt Col Fernando S. Rojo, MSC, sub: A Historical Account of Organized Methods Improvement Efforts in the United States Army Medical Service, 31 Mar 62, folder 268, box 17/18, MSC-USACMH, hereafter cited as Rojo, Methods Improvement Efforts; Gibbs, Milner intervs, 24 Oct and 8 and 11 Nov 63. The branch was known variously as the Medical Administration Branch, Management Improvement Office, Management Research and Planning Branch, Hospital Methods Improvement Branch, and by various other titles.
81Organization: DA Cir, sub: Organization of U.S. Army Hospitals Designated as Class II Installations or Activities, 15 Sep 59; DA SR 40-610-5, sub: Organization Structure for Hospitals in the Continental United States Designated as Other than Class II Activities, 16 Jan 52, both in PL. Valley Forge closure: The experiments were continued in a reduced fashion from 1952 to 1959 by a research unit at Brooke Army Medical Center. Dietitians: Anderson, Army Medical Specialist Corps, pp. 515-18.
82Executive officer (XO): Memo for Record, Col A.M. Schwichtenberg, MC, Ch, Med Plans and Ops Div, OTSG, sub: Medical Service Corps Officers, 27 Mar 49, folder 133, box 9/18, MSC?USACMH. Gibbs recommended MSC executive officers on 15 March; Hays approved that on 16 March. XO position: Hamrick to Ginn, 1 Sep 88, DASG-MS; DA SR 40-610-5, 16 Jan 52; SG Conference, 17 Mar 49. According to Gibbs, General Bliss, TSG, 'very definitely' wanted physicians in the top two administrative positions (commander and deputy commander) 'regardless of what their titles might be.' Gibbs, Milner intervs, 1 and 11 Nov 63.
83AHA leadership: Rojo, Methods Improvement Efforts. ACHA: Col. James T. McGibony, MC, commander of the hospital at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, in 1954 became the first Army officer to advance to ACHA fellowship. ACHA News 17 (October-November 1954): 3.
84Quoted words: Henry D. Roth, 'The U.S. Army,' Bulletin of the American Society of Hospital Pharmacists (July-August 1952): 264-67. Also see SG Conferences, 3 and 29 Dec 52.
85Progress: Speech, Roth, sub: The Role of the Pharmacist in the Medical Service Corps, Philadelphia College of Science and Pharmacy, 21 Feb 52, folder 43, box 4/18, MSC-USACMH.
86APA promise: SG Conference, 30 Aug 51.
87MAS specialties: Rpt, Lt Col Joseph J. Gilbert, MSC, to Col Thomas F. Whayne, MC, Ch, Prey Med Div, OTSG, 20 Sep 51; Lt Col Robert Ryer, MSC, draft chapter, sub: Nutrition, and
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Maj Walter F. Robbins, MSC, draft section, sub: Reconditioning, both 1958 MSC History Project.
88Preventive medicine corps: Proposed in report to Col. T.F. Whayne. Gilbert, the World War II assistant to Colonel Hardenbergh, was a reservist on a two-week tour with OTSG tasked with evaluating the status of sanitary engineering.
89Utilization study: Memo, Pers Div, OTSG, sub: Problem Incident to the Utilization of Medical Service Corps Officers in Narrow Specialty Fields Upon Attaining Field Grade, 23 Dec 52; Memo, Arthur Stull, Ph.D., Laboratory Consultant, Office of Chief, Pathology and Allied Sciences Consultants, OTSG, for Ch, Prof Div, OTSG, sub: Positions for Colonels, MSC, Medical Laboratory Officers, 1953, both in box 5/18, MSC-USACMH.
90Podiatry: SG Conferences, 2 Sep 49 (which also cites Drew Pearson column) and 29 Apr 52; Memos, Capt Charles J. Simpson, MSC, sub: Twenty-Eighth Meeting of the Armed Forces Medical Policy Council, 0900 Hours, 28 April 1952; and 1st Lt B.W. Wingo, MSC, Staff Asst to TSG, sub: Thirty-Sixth Meeting of the Armed Forces Policy Council, 3 November 1952, at 1330 Hours, in SG Conferences of the respective dates.
91Medical research: Hays, 'The Army Medical Service,' p. 167; Berge, Virology and Immunology, pp. 15-16; Rose C. Engleman and Robert J.T. Joy, Two Hundred Years of Military Medicine, (Washington, D.C.: The Historical Unit, Office of the Surgeon General, 1975), pp. 32-35; Col Raymond J. Karpen, MSC, Ret., to Col Earl J. Herndon, MSC, 7 Nov 83, DASG-MS; Intervs, Col William H. Meroney, MC, with Milner, OTSG, 26 Aug and 7 Sep 66, USACMH. Maxwell: TLO, OTSG, Biography of Col Roy D. Maxwell, MSC, Feb 62; Rpt, Col Charles R. Angel, MSC, sub: Development of Nuclear Science Within the MSC, undated [1976], both in DASG-MS.
92Hunter's team: Speech, Yamashita Kuranosuke, Chief, Construction Committee for Hunter Statue, sub: Congratulatory Address, Kurume City Hall, 15 Jul 52 (translation), DASG-MS; George W. Hunter III et al., 'Control of the Snail Host of Schistosomiasis in Japan with Sodium Pentachlorophenate (Santobrite),' American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 1 (September 1952): 831-47; 'Fruitful Result of Cooperation,' Mainichi Shimbun (Daily News), Japan, 9 August 1968 (translation), DASG-MS; Hunter et al., 'Control of Schistosomiasis Japonica in the Nagatoishi Area of Kurume, Japan,' American Journal of Tropical Medicine 31 (1982): 760-70; Hunter and Muneo Yokogawa, 'Control of Schistosomiasis Japonica in Japan: A Review, 1950-1978,' Japanese Journal of Parasitology 33 (August 1984): 341-51; Notes of telephone interv, Col George W. Hunter III, MSC, Ret., with Ginn, 1 Feb 86, DASG-MS. Hunter headed the Medical Zoology Section of the 406th Medical Laboratory in Tokyo from 1947 to 1951. Schistosomiasis: The team eliminated 99 percent of the snail population over a two-year period beginning in 1949.
93Social work: Camp, As I Remember Army Social Work; Camp, 'The Army's Psychiatric Social Work Program,' Social Work Journal29 (April 1948): 76-78, 86; Camp, 'Psychiatric Social Work in the Army Today,' in Henry S. Maas, ed., Adventures in Mental Health (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951); Memo, Maj Barbara B. Hodges, MSC, Ch, Med Social Work Sec, Social Svcs Br, Prof Div, OTSG, for Ch, Prof Div, sub: Position Utilization for Colonels, MSC, Social Workers, USACMH; Speech, Camp, sub: Notes for Presentation at Army Social Work Meeting, National Conference of Social Work, 78th Annual Meeting, Atlantic City, New Jersey, May 1951, DASG-MS; SG Conference, 9 Nov 50.
94Psychology: Memo, Brig Gen R.E. Chambers for Ch, Pers Div, SGO, sub: Report of Structure of MSC, 18 Mar 53, box 5/18, MSC-USACMH; Memo, Lt Col Frederick A. Zehrer, MSC, for Ch, MSC, sub: Grade of Colonel, MSC, for Clinical and Research Psychologists, 1953, MSC?USACMH; Paper, Harold D. Rosenheim, 'A History of the Uniformed Clinical Psychologist in the U.S. Army,' presented to the American Psychological Association, 2 Sep 80, DASG-MS; DA Technical Manual (TM) 8-242, Military Clinical Psychology (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army and U.S. Air Force, July 1951), copy in USACMH; 'The U.S. Army's Senior Psychology Student Program,' American Psychologist 4 (1949): 424-25; Hays, 'The Army Medical Service,' p. 169; Col. Charles A. Thomas, Jr., MSC, Ret., 'Contributions of and Challenges Faced By AMEDD Psychology: 1950's-1970's,' Proceedings of the 1982 AMEDD Psychology Symposium, 14-19 November 1982, Dwight David Eisenhower Army Medical Center, DASG-MS.
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95Zehrer: Zehrer established the first Army child guidance clinic in 1948 while assigned at Brooke General Hospital. Col Frederick A. Zehrer, MSC, Ch, Off of Educ Svcs, Army Med Svc School, Fort Sam Houston, Tex., to Dir, THU, 8 Feb 60, box 9/18, MSC-USACMH; Arnold B. Schiebel, Zehrer, and Rawley E. Chambers, 'The Establishment of a Child Guidance Center in an Army General Hospital,' Medical Bulletin (June 1949): 449.
96Number: MSC Newsletter, September 1956. Enlisted optometrists: Speech, Capt George B. Coyle, MSC, sub: The History of Army Optometry, 8 Nov 65; Col Robert L. Black, MSC, to Fred Niemann, General Counsel, Texas Optometric Association, 23 Nov 51; Leon Hoffman, O.D., to Capt Albert L. Paul, MSC, THU, 2 May 60, all in folder 58, box 5/18, MSC-USACMH. Hoffman enlisted in the Scientific and Professional option. He was the only optometrist at the 25th Evac Hosp at Taegu, Korea, from 1951 to 1952. Dr. Herron: Intery, Maj Francis L. McVeigh, MSC, with Sgt Maj (Ret.) Melvin E. Johnson, in unpublished paper, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, sub: The History of Army Optometry: The Battles, Triumphs, and Future Challenges, June 1993, DASG-MS.
97Positions: Address, Col Robert L. Black to AOA meeting, Miami Beach, Fla., 8-11 Jun 52, folder 63, box 5/18, MSC-USACMH.
98Quoted words: SG Conference, 18 Jun 52. AOA: SG Conference, 20 and 26 Jun 52.
99Ryan: 'Army M.S.C. Optometrist Is Cited,' pp. 23-24; News release, OTSG, January 1965.
100Use of physicians: Interv, Capt Daniel B. Sullivan, MC, with 1st Lt Martin Blumenson, 3d Historical Detachment, in Westover, Combat Support in Korea, pp. 113-14.
101Occupational vision: Address, 1st Lt Robert J. O'Shea, MSC, sub: Occupational Vision Program at Army Installations, presented to AOA seminar, 30-31 March 1952, and Pamphlet, Army Environmental Health Laboratory (AEHL), Essentials of an Occupational Vision Program (Army Chemical Center, Md.: AEHL, 2 March 1956): 1, both in folder 59, box 5/18, MSC?USACMH.
102Helicopter: Armstrong called it 'the most humanitarian advance that has been made in the evacuation of the wounded in the past fifty years.' Armstrong, 'Recent Advances in Military Medicine,' Military Medicine 114 (January 1954): 31.
