When World War II ended, I hurriedly distanced myself from anything military and once again entered civilian life. My interrupted surgical training was resumed, and my time and energies were devoted in the years following to a career in teaching, research, and the practice of surgery at the University of Pennsylvania. However, in time the pace of life slackened, and the events of my war participation gradually returned to my thoughts as a story waiting to be told.
I realized that a record of the part played by the 95th Evacuation Hospital and the many other hospitals working in the combat zone must not be put off any longer, as by now there are fewer left to tell the story, and their ranks are thinning with each passing year. It became my obligation to pay homage to the spirit, energy, and heroism of the members of the 95th Evacuation Hospital and the thousands of wounded soldiers it treated. I assumed the mantle of historian and chronicler, reliving those years and recording their achievements. The narrative of the 95th Evac is the subject of this book, but this hospital is merely representative of all the evacuation and field hospitals in theaters of combat during World War II.
Those years of world upheaval were unique in the history of humanity. World War II was the most cataclysmic event of the twentieth century. The entire United States, with little dissent, plunged into the task of rescuing the world from Satan. The central theme of the war effort was to give people in all countries freedom and dignity. For this ideal, millions enlisted, and many thousands sacrificed their lives.
When the doctors, nurses, administrative, and enlisted personnel of the 95th Evac reported in Kentucky in early 1943, they were disparate groups, unrelated to each other, individuals required to satisfy the numbers and ranks of the tables of organization provided for an evacuation hospital. By its participation in the invasion of the Italian mainland at Salerno, the siege of Anzio, and the wintry retreat during the Battle of the Bulge, the hospital was welded into an inseparable whole, working selflessly with a single objective—to provide help for the casualties from the battlefield. Those of us who worked in the hospital during those trying . . .