Making Varsity
Welcome to Ridgway’s Notebook, your home for airborne PME. We offer penetrating essays on military history. Through the World War II experiences of General Matthew Ridgway and the 82nd Airborne Division, we illustrate some of the similarities between the questions asked by officers of the 82nd yesterday and today—and dissect how they came to be.
At an Army training event within the last year, a Forward Surgical Team was struck and “killed.”
A division staff officer responded, “But doctors don’t get killed.”
This is a rebuttal.
General Swing was incensed when the issue of Time reached him. The cover was graced by the side profile of General Matthew Ridgway, displaying an upthrust chin and a martial bearing, as if he were looking over his victorious troops. The pages were filled with the journey of the airborne division, culminating in Ridgway’s triumph in Germany. A bitter Swing took to the pen in response. He felt forgotten. Not for any sake of self-interest but for his men, who had been fighting a war no less airborne, in seemingly forgotten places. Swing was particularly spurred to action by the article’s mere mention of his unit’s “notable work at Corregidor.” The problem was that none of his men had ever been there. In the spirit of resentment harbored in his command, he wrote the General Headquarters in Washington, DC that if they couldn’t get it right, don’t mention them at all.
Swing took personal offense to something in the article too — they called him a “hunk” of Ridgway, as they lauded him with praise for his employment of the airborne corps in the most proficient manner yet. (Swing would feel he was his own man, equally responsible for development of the airborne practices Time embodied in Ridgway.)
Operation VARSITY, that pinnacle airborne operation, will have taken place 79 years ago, March 24. It bore the benefit of lessons learned in all the operations before it, and the executioner, the 17th Airborne Division was well-trained. A robust series exercises forced the division to work as a cohesive unit of action. These advantages ensured the 17th’s medical arm was ready. But it didn’t protect them from heavy casualties, even amongst doctors and aidmen.
THE PLANNING
War defined Lieutenant Colonel Edward Sigerfoos’s life. The only American general killed in World War I was his father. Unlike him, a career officer, young Sigerfoos commissioned into the reserves upon graduation from medical school, yet little time passed before he inherited the martial vocation. Young Sigerfoos trained his medical units ruthlessly. Tunings were constant. His men looted steel tubing from wrecked gliders in England to fashion litter racks on all their jeeps for when ambulances were impractical. He, or his designee, inspected all division medical sets was weekly, ensuring condition and completeness. In November, he traveled to Holland to observe the casualty clearing stations of the airborne division still in action; he made still further refinements to his own plans. In March, he would be running his own airborne operation.
Colonel Sigerfoos was handsome, broad, and hard-set like his father. And he planned Operation VARSITY with a professionalism equal to his father’s. By map and aerial photo, a clearing station site was picked. No matter where the division medical men landed, here they would assemble. Taking a lesson from the 82nd, he ordered every glider in the division to carry a blanket and litter, items the 82nd never had enough of. A full dry run was held before departure, where surgical tents and equipment were tested. Yet for all the planning and rehearsal, once in the air, Sigerfoos was a victim of circumstance, like everyone else — like his father before him.
THE PARACHUTE LIFT — 10:24 A.M.
Parachute field artillery was nearly dead before General Jim Gavin resuscitated it. Recovery of guns was always a challenge, and sometimes as few as one was recovered. General Gavin brought it back because it used so few planes and such little airspace compared to glider artillery. In the daylight of Operation Market Garden, parachute artillery faired successfully. Two such battalions would jump in Operation VARSITY.
Captain Loran Morgan stood behind the colonel in the plane. The surgeon was waiting for his commander to leap out the door into the morning air. They crossed the Rhine and passed lazily over an emerald field, none of which Morgan could appreciate from inside the tin cylinder. That’s when the colonel disappeared. In an instant, Morgan was on the ground. They fell into a buzzsaw.
The rest of the 466th Parachute Field Artillery Battalion jumped on the sight of the colonel’s and surgeon’s parachute domes. In the doorway of Captain Morgan’s anticipated aid station was a German machine gun. He turned to the orchard and into the field, plugged by small arms fire and mortars and artillery. Wounded were littered, many hit while descending on the drop zone, and Morgan set out to work his way through the field, treating wounded as he came upon them. The infantry regiment which was set to jump ahead of them had been miss-dropped, and the artillerymen had to fight to clear the drop zone.
Battery C fell into the sharpest buzzsaw. T/5 Donald Stanford, the senior aidman to the battery, landed 25 yards from a German machine gun emplacement. It was a slaughter. Running to the aid of wounded from his stick, he was murdered in “cold blood,” large red cross markings providing no protection. Every member of his plane was killed within minutes. Pfc. Fred Reeves, the junior aidman, was wounded in the thigh while helping with later evacuation.
One hundred yards away from where Captain Morgan was working, T/4 Manuel Campos and T/4 Marion Daugherty, two operators of the battalion aid station, likewise worked slowly across the field, tending to the wounded as they went, making mental note of their locations for when the jeeps arrived.
While they worked the field, Staff Sergeant Robert Carr set up the aid station after the enemy machine gun was pried out of the threshold. When Captain Morgan returned an hour later, casualties were aplenty. Soon the five men of the aid station group coalesced and earnestly began their work.
THE GLIDER LIFT — 12:20 p.m.
Captain Morgan’s jeep-ambulances were precious. Not only were they severely needed for evacuation, but they were saddled with their stock of bandages, plasma, and splints. But it was an item which could not land below a parachute. It careened into the earth inside a steel-tubed cage wrapped in olive canvas. Gliders, these winged matchboxes, delivered Morgan’s jeeps, the 244th Airborne Medical Company, and Colonel Sigerfoos to combat — in (loosely) controlled crashes. Colonel Sigerfoos was especially jarred, Major Arthur Hessin recalled. As a psychiatrist, the was unassuming to be sharing the glider with the surgeon on a combat flight.
The glider…was struck by another glider at an altitude of approximately 250 feet, and the left wing was torn off. After smashing through a set of abandoned high tension wires and two fences, it pancaked to the edge of a large bomb crater. Since the glider was almost completely demolished, the enemy made no attempt to fire an 88mm shell into it, as they were doing with the others. All the passengers, the pilot, and the copilot sustained injuries but were not incapacitated.1
The field that finally embraced them was seething. As paratroopers cleared the area, Colonel Sigerfoos and Major Hessin harbored in the bomb crater. Medical gliders were set afire; two jeeps and four trailers loaded with supplies and hospital rations were destroyed. Aloof to danger, medics boldly unloaded their gliders of the supplies, jeeps, and tents needed to operate the clearing station. Team 3, 4th Auxiliary Surgical Group was cut down to a man: two surgeons killed outright, the third wounded. Of their two aides, one was missing. The second made for the clearing station site — alone.
Every solitary medic moved with one mind. They set for the station site from every point of the compass, as individuals or as groups. Their numbers built as they encountered one another in the fire-swept fields, and the thickets, and the fences of skeletal trees yet to bud spring leaves. They moved with one purpose — to get to the station site. There was work to be done.
THE GROUND PHASE
One of Captain Morgan’s precious jeeps missed the landing zone. This jeep was his link to the site on which all the division doctors were marching. When his clerk, Corporal Carl Greene, hobbled in with two bullets in his leg, Captain Morgan learned the fate of one of his jeeps. Greene was wounded when the driver, Walter Dzieniszewski, was killed, and they were unable to recover the jeep. The jeep that was recovered, was the one that landed in the wrong place.
Private First Class James Lefler ignored the German fire when he and his jeep careened into the far corner of the parachute drop zone. He drove straight to the aid station and unloaded all his plasma, bandages, and splints and set immediately out to the field and picked up the wounded.
An hour after Captain Morgan shucked his parachute harness, he was in operation with Lefler’s supplies. He employed his skeleton crew efficiently, divided into teams of two men each. The weighty decisions were shouldered by T/3 Steve Miladinovich.
Miladinovich showed great skill and medical knowledge… to him fell the job of triage (sorting). It was his duty to see the wounded men first and send him to the correct section of the aid station, which now occupied four large rooms: (1) the seriously wounded department, operated by [myself] and S/Sgt Robert Carr; (2) the walking wounded or less seriously wounded department, operated by T/4’s Manuel G. Campos and Marion S. Daugherty; (3) treated cases needing immediate evacuation; and (4) treated cases who could be handled by our own station for several hours without jeopardizing the patients chances for complete recovery. Such classification is very difficult and requires constant examination and scrutinization, for a patient can rapidly pass from one classification to another. To T/3 Steve Miladinovich goes the credit for the outstanding achievement that although approximately 106 patients were treated, not one patient died in our aid station.2
The patient soon found his way back to the litter-racks of Lefler’s jeep, moving with dispatch to the clearing station’s tentage. He, and drivers like him, were aided in navigation by the power lines, under which the station had been erected. The medical company had set up an hour after landing, despite all that conspired against them; in two hours, contact with all outlying aid stations (like Morgan’s) was established; and in three, major surgeries were underway. The tent complex was alive with activity. The collecting platoons of the medical company were roving the landing fields, seeking out wounded paratroopers still in harnesses. In three hours, they — and drivers like Lefler — had deposited 300 casualties to the station.
Outside the tents, aidmen popped up and down, moving amongst casualties like pollinating bees. Sprawled across the ground, keeling in the grass beside laden litters deposited by drivers, they triaged.
Inside the tents, the surviving surgical team3 was performing major surgery. Most were chest wounds, and limbs fractured and shattered by jagged shrapnel.
German prisoners, which were aplenty, were impressed to dig trenches to protect litter patients. Now all that was left was to await the ambulance convoy across the Rhine.
WET GAP CROSSING
Major Hessin worked in the crisp night air. The activity of the day had somewhat settled, and deep rows of wounded unrolled across the dirt before him; there was 100, all told. The sky was filled by a glow, in tension with the darkness, and which unveiled the sprawling men on litters with a peculiar way. Hessin treated four men directly outside the tentage. He noted the tracers in the sky, but not, as others did, the small steel fragments that fell strangely from it. The anti-aircraft shells those fragments once constituted exploded in the same sky, creating that same peculiar light, two miles away.
The light and steel were evidence of a battle for their relief. It was progressing along that narrow corridor connecting the 17th Airborne to the Rhine, which they had leapt with parachutes and gliders. German planes attacked the small bridges being erected, which would carry the land convoy. In planning, Colonel Sigerfoos secured priority for the ambulance convoy, which made the west bank at breakneck speed. Owing to the volume of fire, it was checked there. (German respect for the red cross was also in doubt.) Under that night sky, late, they crossed, and halted until daylight. In the two hours between their arrival and departure from the clearing station, the 500 wounded on hand were mounted and evacuated in every ambulance, every jeep, every enemy conveyance, and every vehicle which could be marshaled.
Although they had left, it was as if they’d never gone. As soon as the hundreds came out, hundreds more came in — 270 that day (March 25), to be precise. The battle to push out the airhead line was moving quickly, and after two-and-a-half days and 1,000 causalities, the tents came down as quickly as they’d come up. Germany was collapsing.
I am playing assist to an Army surgeon. Our anticipated piece of writing — which obviously will not reflect the views of the Army, US Government, or any entity thereof — will bear on the ambulance crunch faced by the 17th Airborne as they pushed into Germany. The longer the line, and the broader the front fanned, the more ambulance capacity required. Operating an airhead, usually round, required — and requires — less. Because of the short interior distances and concentration, an airhead can be managed with fewer litters per trip and fewer (jeep)ambulances because they can make more trips per hour. But as the 17th pushed the airhead line deeper into Germany, their remoteness from rear installations increased. And they transitioned to a more linear, broader front: there was more distance and less concentration. Yet their ambulance capacity did not increase in tandem. Thus, ambulances needed to be attached from corps units. Today, division operations and large scale combat operations are all the rage. But the keyword in LSCO is scale. Can the Army support it?
📚READ OF THE WEEK📚
Arthur L. Hessin, Neuropsychiatry in World War II, Volume II, Overseas Theaters. Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army, 1973.
“Report on Medical Detachment.” Headquarters, 466th Parachute Field Artillery Battalion, n.d.
Team 10, 1st Auxiliary Surgical Group