Anthony F. DePalma, MD

I went to Paris Island for 14 months right after the war broke out. I was on a hospital ship for two years in the Pacific practicing surgery. There were three ships, called APA ships. We would carry the combat troops into the island, and then we would stand off the shore and act as a hospital base until the local hospital was built on the island. In other words, we took care of all the casualties of the men who hit the beaches. So I saw lots of action.

On our ship, we had a complete complement of all specialties. I was the chief surgeon in orthopaedic surgery and I had another man, a junior man, helping me. For instance, in Guam, we operated on 108 patients right on the shore, coming right off the beach, so we did a lot of work. I have all that stuff categorized; in fact, I have the statistics of that campaign that was written up at the time of the operation by the medical board—how many patients were processed, how many abdominal cases, how many fractured tibias and femurs and so forth—and it was a pretty accurate composition put together.

I think we've learned a lot about orthopaedics. I think a lot of things came out, because at that time during the war skeletal traction on wounds was just beginning to take place and we began to use it. Another big thing that I think came out of that war, for instance, I was on the ship that went into Okinawa, and at that time we had a lot of kamikazes hitting the ships, blowing them up. The injuries there were burn cases. We had hundreds and hundreds of cases totally burned from the blazing ships and we learned a hell of a lot on how to take care of burns.

I don't think any specialty came out of WWII, but I think we certainly learned how to take care of, for instance, open fractures, how to take care of debridement of soft tissues, how to take care of men that had fractures with burns of skin, body burns. I mean, a lot of stuff came out of there. What's commonplace now, of course, is the treatment of acute fractures by means of skeletal traction and open reductions, that's the other thing that came out of there. We didn't have to do the open reductions, the patient came in with the open wounds and we did the reductions. I think we learned a lot about how much a patient can tolerate and how much you can get away with in certain types of treatment right on the operating table at the time of the injury.

I saw not one, but many acts of heroism. For instance, in this ship of ours, the Rixey, and there were two others the same type, we were there under fire for over two weeks before the medical department could take care of some of the casualties there. We were under fire there for weeks, and also in Guam the same way. When we went into the Philippines, that's when we started getting the kamikazes. That was something, because what happened there was that you not only had fractured bones, but you had terrific burns, total body burns. These people looked like charcoal when they were caught in the blaze of the explosion of these 500-pound bombs that the Japs dropped on us.

I think one of the most important things that I learned, was the management of the injured, the casualties when they came in, in shock. I mean, many of these boys, when they were brought on board, they were absolutely in shock. Managing these youngsters with that amount of shock before you could do anything to them other than in the way of repair, was quite a job. For instance, I had about a half a dozen men that came in; everybody gave up on them. One guy, a tank ran over his legs and he came in with both legs as flat as cardboard, and he was in total shock and we couldn't do a damn thing. They just put him aside because, hell, the shock team couldn't get him out of shock. I happened to be passing by where the youngster was and I tried something new at that time. I put the guy in ice. I wrapped his legs up to his pelvis in ice and I froze his legs. What happened was, when we froze his legs, all the absorption of toxins that he was subjected to stopped. I mean everything came down to zero, nothing happened. Blood didn't flow, he was frozen, and I amputated both legs and the kid came about and he came out of shock. I had several patients I treated that way. In fact, I wrote a little paper on them, on the management of these patients in shock that we couldn't get out of shock. We froze their extremities, did the amputation and they came around.

As a matter of fact, I wrote a novel in which all of this stuff is in it. I'm hoping to get it published. It's really following a group of corpsmen, eight corpsmen, who went through this whole thing from the beginning to the end, on a ship like the Rixey. The book is called The Docs. The docs are corpsmen and a group of surgeons, and the Rixey's the ship on which we were working. It's based on real facts. Everything in there is the truth.

The only memento that I have of my WWII experience was that the men of the Rixey, the doctors of the Rixey and the crew, for a while there they had yearly meetings. We used to get together and throw the bull, and I have a model of the ship we were on. It's a beautiful model of the Rixey.

After I got out of the war, out of that service—I didn't get out till the end of '45 after the war was over—I became Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at Jefferson, and I lost all track then of all the military things. I don't remember any men that we treated on the ships.

I was an orthopaedic surgeon before I went into war. Why I became one is a funny tale. When I got through with my internship, I graduated from Jefferson, and I interned at the Philadelphia General Hospital, and that was during the depression in 1931, 1932. When I got through with my internship, I had a surgical internship, one of the surgeons on the faculty there said to me, "Tony, what are you going to do now? You going to open up a practice? There's nobody paying anything for medicine out there, there's no money out there." I told him I don't know what I'm going to do. He said, "I've got a job for you." And he sent me up to Coaldale Hospital. It is a state hospital up in Coaldale, Pennsylvania. It was primarily a hospital for the coal miners. I had never set a fracture while I was an intern; I knew nothing about bones. I knew a lot about surgery, abdominal surgery and that kind of surgery, but I knew nothing about fractures or broken limbs. Well, when I got up there I was faced with this problem when I was in charge of this hospital. One night I must have gotten about 100 fractures, a coal mine caved in, and they brought all these damned fractures in, and I didn't know one damn thing. I swore to God that if I ever lived through this I was going to become an orthopaedic surgeon. So that's what happened. When I got through up there I joined up with an orthopaedic hospital in Jersey, so that's why I became an orthopaedic surgeon.

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