Medicine: On Iwo Jima

From bloody Iwo Jima, TIME Correspondent Robert Sherrod, veteran of the Aleutians and Tarawa, last week radioed this account of a night in a front-line Marine hospital:

The 4th Marine Division hospital was built low into the bulldozed hillside to afford maximum protection from Jap mortar and artillery fire. It consisted of two long dark green tents plus two operating rooms about 10 by 20 ft. which the Japs had built as concrete rainwater cisterns. The air inside was stuffy with stale cigaret smoke mingled with the smells of dirt and blood and sweat. But the rawboned Division surgeon, Commander Richard Silvis, was very proud of his operating rooms.

Shortly after 8 o'clock on the evening of Dog Day-plus-15, Dr. Silvis and I crawled through the blacked-out entrance into one of these cistern operating rooms. Beneath the big non-shadow electric lamps lay a Marine captain who had been a Jap machine gunner's target about three hours earlier. Dr. John A. Harper held up the wounded man's slashed, liver-colored spleen: "We also took out a piece of kidney," he said, "and he has a bullet through his diaphragm and lung. He asked for a priest right away." Silvis pulled back the wounded man's eyelid and said: "He looks pretty good, though."

Some Would Die. We crossed to one of the long tents—the receiving ward where patients are brought first. At one end were eight operating tables where the wounded were examined immediately. The simpler operations were performed right there. The complex cases went to the cistern operating rooms.

The private on the first table had been wounded only slightly. Dr. Howard Johnson of Uniontown, Pa. was rubbing sulfanilamide powder into a hole about the size of a quarter in the boy's left arm. The marine on another table had his face covered. The doctor examining him said to Dr. Silvis: "I think we had better send him to the Corps Medical Battalion. They are better fixed to diagnose eye cases. It looks like this fellow will lose one or maybe both his eyes."

A very pale and dirty marine lay on another table. A corpsman was adjusting the rubber tube carrying the whole blood to his arm. Dr. Silvis said: ""See his lips. He's washed up." Then he turned to the corpsman and said: "Let's give him another bottle and put it in the femoral [big vein in each groin]—the blood can run in faster than it can through the arm."

More than half the receiving tent, like the whole of the other big tent, was designated as a "recovery ward." After men had been operated on, they stayed there pending evacuation by hospital ship or by airplane.