In an interview with the Library of Congress when he was 98, he said this about the large number of wounded: “Shortly after it got quiet at Pearl Harbor and I knew the planes … had left for a while, we started getting casualties by the truckload in our little medical unit. Navy medical corpsman during the Pearl Harbor attack stationed at a small medical unit on shore. Willgrube and Underwood were but two of the many medical heroes that day. The next minute, our chief nurse burst into the room and told me to dress quickly and report to the quarterdeck for duty because were bombing us.” “I looked out the porthole in my room and saw smoke pouring out of the Arizona. “The ship shook, and everyone ran out on deck to see what happened,” Willgrube wrote. She was awakened by what she initially thought was a boiler explosion. West Virginia, torpedoed multiple times, sank at her berth with the loss of 106 men.Īnn Danyo Willgrube was a Solace operating room nurse and recounted her Pearl Harbor story in a 1981 letter. After unloading casualties, Solace’s boats made repeated trips to the battleship USS West Virginia to transport crewmen to the hospital ship, according to Underwood. On their return trip, they picked up a lone sailor swimming in burning water. Pharmacist mates from the Solace boarded the Arizona to rescue as many service members as they could from its fiery, crumpled, and gaping deck. The Arizona sank in the first wave of the attack after taking a direct hit from an armor-piercing bomb that struck the ship’s forward magazine, causing a massive explosion that killed 1,177 officers and crew, nearly half of the total number who died that day. Solace was moored about 125 yards from the battleship USS Arizona. The deck crew served as stretcher bearers, so they came and were taking them away as fast as we could get them in, or leading them away in a lot of cases.” The doctor would designate the ward, and the nurse would give them a shot of morphine if they needed it-and most of them did. “My duty was to attach identification tags and mark the ward where to go to. “We were getting boats from all directions.” They just happened to be leaving the ship” when the attack started. They were coming from boats-other ships’ boats were coming in. “Casualties came up that gangway either by stretcher or ambulatory. “My battle station was at the gangway,” Underwood said. Public Health Service doctors, and civilian nurses, according to the U.S. We didn’t get to bed for three days.” Solace medical staff were aided by deck crew, U.S. We had two nurses and a bunch of 17- and 18-year-old kids. “We did everything that they did on land in taking care of ,” said Underwood. 7 alone, Solace “helped evacuate 464 wounded and others from the water-418 of them survived,” he told a Lubbock, Texas, newspaper in September 2010. The attack, which came in two waves, ended shortly before 10:00 a.m.ĭuring the battle and over the course of three days, Solace’s 466 nurses, doctors, and crew saw an estimated 700 casualties-the wounded and the dying-according to Jim Underwood, then a 19-year-old Solace hospital corpsman, who spoke to a Wisconsin newspaper in June 2011. By 8:20 a.m., Solace received its first patients, according to an account by the U.S. Her name is “synonymous with mercy,” according to her official history from the U.S. It is the “ date which will live in infamy.” 7, 1941, and in the aftermath of the surprise Japanese aerial attack that propelled the United States into World War II. Navy hospital ship Solace and its crew heroically saved many lives and cared for the injured on Pearl Harbor Day, Dec.
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