The second time I ever flew in an airplane, I jumped out of it. I was a 25-year-old surgical intern when World War II broke out; convinced that there would be more romance in Europe than in the Pacific theater, I volunteered as a battalion surgeon to join parachute regiment 506 of the 101st Airborne Division, also known as the "Screaming Eagles." From D-Day, to the invasion of Holland, to the Battle of the Bulge, I learned firsthand what it means not just to treat casualties of war, but also to become one.
In September 1943, my regiment arrived in England, where we spent the fall and winter in field exercises and training maneuvers. Some of the time I served as a doctor at a jump school for the paratroops. I found it rather boring so, one day, I went up and jumped with the students. When the commander found out, he angrily ordered me not to jump any more. He said he didn't want to lose one of his doctors foolishly. Physician volunteers for the paratroops were scarce.
During the week before D-Day, my battalion and I were intensely briefed on our upcoming mission, which was to secure two bridges behind enemy lines. We studied maps, aerial photos, and sand tables of our objectives. We received repeated instructions down to the very last details. The aerial photos were a few weeks old, though, and did not show that the enemy had closed the locks on the river and flooded large areas of our objectives. This reconnaissance failure was only the first of many problems we would encounter on our foray into enemy territory.
On the two-and-one-half-hour flight across the English Channel, some of the men slept while others smoked. Most of us were scared, not knowing what we were going to face. I passed around what I believed were anti-motion pills but, as the men put them in their mouths, they exclaimed, "My God, these are salt pills!" In my haste, I had mistakenly scooped the wrong pills off the table in my darkened tent. It made little difference, however, as we approached the Normandy coast.
Around one in the morning on June 6, 1944, all hell broke loose. The anti-aircraft and small arms fire from the ground was horrendous. Our planes broke formation and began taking violent evasive action, which they were not supposed to do. When we stood up in preparation to jump, we were thrown about as the plane careened in all directions. The pilot was supposed to slow down to about 95 miles per hour for the jump, to soften the opening shock of the parachute and to limit our dispersal on the ground. Our pilot failed to do so, however, and we were traveling at top speed when we jumped.
I was the last out of the plane and experienced a terrific opening shock. The ground was ablaze with enemy fire. Tracer bullets seemed to be coming from all directions. I pulled my legs up to make myself a smaller target. Loaded down with 150 pounds of equipment, I plummeted 400 feet in 30 seconds, landing a mile and a half away from where I was supposed to be, hip-deep in water covering what had been dry land before the Germans had deliberately flooded it. I was in such a hurry to get out of my chute that I drew my trench knife, cutting my hand in the process.
Once on the ground, I found myself simultaneously in deep trouble and blessed by fate; just before we had boarded our plane in England, the assistant battalion commander had requested that I jump last. The commander wanted the signal captain, who carried special equipment to communicate with an Allied warship in the channel, at his side when he landed. The ship could, at his direction, direct its fire at our objective.
On previous maneuvers, I had jumped directly behind him or the assistant commander, and I was unhappy about being the last one to leave the plane. But this change in position almost certainly saved my life. Both the commander and the signal captain were killed on the jump, as were two others who had the misfortune to land in an area where the enemy was concentrated.
In the water, I met up with three men from my outfit, who had landed nearby. Together, we cautiously swam toward what we thought were American soldiers darting around a burning plane on the ground, only to discover that the figures in question were Germans who had set a building ablaze to illuminate the surrounding area. When we approached to within 75 yards, they heard us and opened fire. We flopped on our backs in the water and paddled away as fast as we could. But in the process of escaping, we became separated from each other.
I passed D-Day perched on my helmet in some brush and up to my neck in water, unable to move without being detected by the heavy German traffic passing on an elevated highway nearby. Heavy artillery starting coming in all around me that afternoon, the shells blasting up huge mounds of wet earth that would have buried me alive had they landed on me. It was almost 11:00 before it got dark enough for me to move. After making it to dry ground, I found a parachute, which I crawled under, and went to sleep. I had not slept for 36 hours.
When daylight came, I found myself only a short distance from a German bivouac area. I could peek out from under my hiding place and watch the enemy. Luckily, no one ventured out to inspect the chute. I had some K rations, a canteen of water, and a canteen of rancid bourbon. I spent the next two nights with the Germans always nearby. I had no place to go because I was surrounded, until American troops finally broke through and drove the enemy out.
The Invasion of Holland
By early September 1944, the advance of the Allied armies had slowed. Then Allied commanders came up with a plan for a daring invasion of Holland. Our division mission was to take two vital bridges and help seize a 60-mile corridor through Holland across the Rhine. Most of us were happy to be making a daylight jump after the confusion and slaughter at Normandy.
After a successful landing, two battalions of the 506th immediately attacked our first objective and met determined resistance. The Germans managed to blow up the bridge before our troops could overrun it. This was our first stroke of bad luck in the invasion.
The Germans defending the bridge fled south to Eindhoven. The next morning, the 3rd Battalion made a direct infantry assault on Eindhoven from the north. We had no artillery or heavy weapons support and were facing heavy fire. I was with Company H, the leading company. A lieutenant who was standing a short distance from me received an immediately fatal gunshot to the head. At about the same time, I was able to start a unit of plasma on another soldier. I stuck his bayonet rifle into the ground and hung the plasma from it.
The company commander, who had been leading the attack, was shot through the shoulder. H Company was then held up at a hedgerow. As I came up to it, a lieutenant yelled, "Doc, get down! They're right on the other side of this row!" I crouched down and went along the row. When I returned a few minutes later, the lieutenant was dead, having been shot through the head.
Shortly afterwards, the regimental commander came up with his adjutant, who was carrying a clipboard. The adjutant said, "We'd better get down or we're going to be shot." The words were hardly out of his mouth when he received a fatal bullet to the head. Since he was carrying a clipboard, the Germans probably mistook him for a ranking officer.
The same night that the Germans eventually surrendered, a British surgical unit arrived. I turned a paratrooper with a severe chest wound over to it. I was able to keep him alive by aspirating his chest and reinfusing his own blood back by vein, as I had no whole blood supply. He needed urgent surgery to stop his bleeding. The next morning, I went to check on him and found out that he had died during the night.
Eventually we were ordered to move north. We set up our aid station in a church in Veghel. Some of the nuns helped us while others prayed in the cellar. The Germans were attacking the town and shelling it heavily. One of our paratroopers had both of his legs blown off at the hips right outside the church. He lived only a few minutes longer.
Two days later, my battalion got involved in a fierce fight to reopen the road leading out of town. A captain and I alternated crawling through the roadside ditches to take care of the wounded. Our evacuation jeep was in the rear. In the midst of the action, Germans in a captured reconnaissance vehicle came alongside the jeep and dropped a grenade into it, wounding our driver.
My regiment eventually moved farther north to a small town on a front line just south of the Rhine. We set up an aid station in the home of the town doctor. The civilians, including the doctor, had all fled. The house was substantial, made of brick, and, fortunately, the doctor's office and supplies were all in order.
Early one morning, while I was still asleep in an upstairs room, an artillery shell exploded just outside the house, shattering window glass all over my bed. Fully clothed, I jumped up and ran downstairs. A fierce, all-day battle had begun. By that afternoon, the Germans had taken the town and our aid station was behind their lines. Attacking German infantry were all around us and we were treating the wounded from both sides. At one point, a German officer came in, looked things over, and left.
Pandemonium raged all day. Although we were behind enemy lines, we were allowed to evacuate both German and American casualties back to our own regimental aid station. Two jeeps went back and forth all day, while bullets were flying everywhere. We evacuated 75 wounded that day, including both our own men and the Germans.
That evening, while I was starting plasma on a soldier, a shell blasted a huge hole in the brick wall of the next room. I was thrown to the floor, covered in plaster and debris. Four wounded Germans were lying on the floor, completely buried under bricks and mortar. We were certain they had all been killed, but we dug them out, and none seemed any the worse for his experience.
Soon after, the fighting ceased and both sides drew back a bit, leaving us stranded in no-man's land. After finishing our work late that night, we finally withdrew to our own lines. Our battalion had been mauled. The 1st Battalion relieved only to face a similar fierce attack the next day; the surgeon for that battalion was hit by shrapnel and eviscerated, his intestines lying outside his abdomen. German prisoners carried him out and he survived.
In the first two days of fighting, my regiment lost 14 officers and 186 enlisted men. We spent the remainder of October and all of November in Holland, shelled during the day, and harassed by enemy patrols at night. We spent most of the daylight hours under cover, as we were under continuous enemy observation.
In the midst of all the chaos, we took an opportunity to rescue a civilian casualty. Against all discretion, the family of a young Dutch girl had remained on their farm, literally in the middle of no-man's land. The girl had run outside to retrieve a lamb when a German machine gun blast from across the river hit her. I received word of her injury from an outpost we had stationed in the family's barn. I gave them instructions about administering morphine and nothing by mouth until we could reach her.
The Germans were firing on anything that appeared in the open. Luckily, dark was approaching. I rounded up some litter bearers and brought along a Catholic chaplain, who had volunteered to come along. We started out across no-man's land in the dark. The Germans were sending up flares, lighting up the whole area. We froze in our tracks whenever a flare went up. When we arrived, we found the severely wounded girl. A machine bullet had pierced her groin and exited through her buttock, leaving a teacup-sized exit wound hole. We carried her back nearly a mile to an evacuation jeep.
We found out later that she survived. In fact, in the early 1990s, I received a phone call from Holland. Dutch television was arranging a kind of "This Is Your Life" reunion between the injured girl (now a woman in her sixties) and the men who had helped save her life so many years ago. She had been brought to the television studio by her daughter under a pretext and was astonished to be reunited with those of us who had helped her.
The Bulge
The Battle of the Bulge broke out in December 1944 while I was on detached service with the 99th General Hospital in Reims, France. My first inkling of the Bulge was a rumor in the hospital one evening that the Germans had launched a serious offensive in the north. At 2:00 in the morning, all of the 101st doctors who were working at the hospital were roused out of our beds and ordered to rejoin our units. To avoid detection by German planes, we moved out by blacked-out truck convoy that night and marched into Bastogne the following morning.
We arrived on a scene of mass confusion, as Allied forces were scrambling to repel an attack from a powerful German Panzer division. In the battles that raged over the next several days, we treated casualties as best we could, hampered by a lack of personnel and equipment. We used jeeps and large trucks as ambulances, patching up the wounded and loading them in tiers on stretchers.
At one point, my battalion took about 80 prisoners, including a German medical officer. I met him in a stable full of wounded men. We shook hands and went to work. After he had tended to his wounded, I sent him back to Bastogne in a jeep with one of my enlisted men. Much later, I found out that my man had taken all of the German officer's valuables, including his watch. I was not very happy about that.
When the Germans struck back with tanks and infantry, my battalion withdrew under heavy fire to woods on higher ground. There we dug in, our aid station consisting of an eight-by-eight-foot hole, five feet deep, where we spent the next two weeks, 100 yards behind the front line. We also dug holes for ourselves that we could crawl into, and we covered the tops with logs, branches, and dirt. Shortly after we moved into the woods, the weather turned cold and snowy. We were lucky to have our holes for protection, and we put evergreen boughs in them to keep us off the ground. During all this time, we were sustaining casualties from both shelling and small arms fire. The wounded were piling up in Bastogne and there was little that could be done.
In the meantime, German aircraft nightly bombed the woods where we were dug in. When the weather improved, Allied planes patrolled the skies during the daytime. They were a mixed blessing, because they shot at everything that moved and didn't know where the lines were. I was strafed by one of our own planes as I was riding in a jeep one day. My driver and I threw ourselves in a ditch and were lucky to avoid being hit by the 50-caliber machine gun bullets being fired at us. Our front line was also strafed by friendly fire. The first sergeant of one company was killed, and one of our men had his penis almost amputated by a bullet. He came from Brooklyn, and I still remember his name.
After a brutal series of advances and retreats over a period of days, we found ourselves back in our original position in the woods. We had gone through a nightmare and gained nothing. And yet, despite our severely depleted condition, we were ordered to launch another attack. I was the only medical officer left, so the two battalions were my responsibility. I didn't sleep that night. After the experience of the previous attack, I had premonitions that this would be the end.
As it turned out, my premonition was not far off the mark. When the attack was launched on January 13, we met fierce resistance from Germans firing automatic weapons at us from cellars and windows in the houses that lined the road leading into town. We decided to convert a stone house that already had several wounded lying nearby into an aid station. Inside the house, we found evidence that the Germans had been there; grenades and an antitank Panzerfaust were lying in the kitchen. As the injured were being placed on mattresses, a platoon sergeant and I moved to the rear of the house to survey our situation.
As we stood framed in the back door, a burst of German submachine gun fire ricocheted off the stone doorjamb and hit us both. The sergeant, his head blown off, died instantly. Because I was taller than the sergeant, my head was untouched but one bullet passed through my chest and another hit a rib and lodged in my lungs. I broke out in a sweat and started to get weak but I was able to go back in the room where the other wounded were gathered and lie down. I knew perfectly well what was going on. I had practically no pain and told them not to give me any morphine. I sent word across the street that another medical officer would be needed. I then started to cough up blood. I thought, this is it, and said an act of contrition.
Shortly after I was wounded, the others and I heard the movements of Germans in the basement of the house. We were terrified that they would fire up at us through the floor on which we lay vulnerable but the four German soldiers who emerged had their hands in the air. "Let's shoot the bastards!" someone said. But I countered, "Hell no, let's make them carry us out of here!" The Germans-now our prisoners-carried us out on litters through two-foot-high snow drifts, where we could be evacuated by jeep.
I was taken to the 60th Field Hospital, where I was operated on that night. I still have the bullet they removed from my lung. Although I remember nothing after the transfer to an ambulance, I can still recall my relief when I woke up from surgery the next day. I opened my eyes and realized that the ward officer taking care of me was none other than Lawrence Kilham, an old Harvard Medical School classmate of mine. Kilham told the nurses to give me morphine for my pain whenever I wanted it, for which I was very grateful. Kilham, who died in 2000, was one of several fellow Harvard Medical School alumni officers with whom I had contact with during the war, including (all now deceased): John Patterson, Hugh MacMillan, Joseph Warren, and Lamar Soutter, who came by glider into Bastogne with a surgical team during the Allied siege, and earned a Silver Star for his efforts.
After my recovery and another six months of surgical service, I returned to the States on the Green Plan, which was designed to facilitate the quick return of physicians to a country facing a severe doctor shortage due to the war. Medical officers received points for long overseas service, military decorations, and participation in battle campaigns. These points were then tabulated to determine preference for this program. I had a high priority for discharge as a veteran of two parachute invasions and three campaigns, including the Bulge, and as a recipient of a number of decorations. During my long postwar career as a thoracic and general surgeon, colleagues would occasionally remark on my calm in the operating room. But after what I went through in the war, nothing really fazed me.
Editor's note: For his service during World War II, Dr. Ryan received the Silver Star, the Silver Star with Oak Leaf Cluster, the Bronze Star, and the Purple Heart.
Copyright 2003 Bernard J. Ryan, MD and Beverly Ballaro, PhD
Beverly Ballaro is a freelance writer from Boston, MA
Published U.S. Legacies April, 2003
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