James Royce Thomason
S/SGT U.S. Army
1941-1945
(Dr. J. Royce Thomason, in his autobiography, shares accounts of his service as a medic during WWII. The following is an excerpt. Read more of his story here. )
Some are wondering what the most unusual case has been. It is hard to pick between two of the outstanding ones. One happened on a train in Turkey and one in a bombing raid in Belgium during World War II. It was Christmas Eve. A bomb had fallen in our compound that afternoon and killed one of our soldiers. Some of the fellows came to me and asked that as soon as the supper dishes had been cleared from the mess hall tent, would I lead them in some Christmas carols and then preach. I agreed to do so. There was a chaplain across the way at the Second Field Hospital who had as his chauffeur a young man who played a portable pump organ, so I asked him to come and bring us his organ and help us cheer things up a bit. He gladly came.
I had just started the service when a runner came saying that a bomb had fallen up the street about two blocks away and an American soldier was lying there in the snow, possibly dead, and unattended. I turned the service over to the chaplain, took my medical kits, and went to see about the soldier. The electric wires were all down, snow was about 18 inches deep, and the temperature was about 35 below zero. The soldier seemed lifeless. I could not detect any heartbeat, but he was still warm and I felt I should do something radical that might just bring him around. So I intravenously injected five ampules of caffeine sodium benzoate, enough to equal about 20 cups of coffee. It was a case of cure or kill for ordinary efforts were useless. Soon I began to feel a faint pulse, and I felt he was going to come around. So I busied myself gathering some pieces of wood from the ruins around me to make splints for both legs and one arm that was broken. By the time I got that done, his pulse was much stronger, but he was still unconscious. I had no ambulance so I put him in the back of a weapons carrier and sent him to 122nd Field Hospital. Doctors there worked on him most of the night. A buzz bomb hit the hospital the next day, throwing him, casts and all onto the floor. He was still unconscious. They then took him to another hospital, and I lost track of him.Many, many times I thought of him and of what looked like the enemy’s determination to kill him, wondering if he pulled through, and if so, would he be normal, etc. Some 15 years later I was holding a revival in Melrose, New Mexico, and walked into a little store and struck up a conversation with the manager. I asked him was he a veteran and he told me he was and inquired as to where I was during the Battle of the Bulge, and I told him I was in a little place called Loncin.
He said, “My best buddy went to Loncin on Christmas Eve that year and a buzz bomb fell on him. . .” I butted in saying: “And a medic found him and revived him and sent him to another hospital that was hit the next day by a bomb.” He said, “How did you know about that?” It was then I told him that I was the man who had found him and saved his life. I made inquiry and was told by this store owner that my patient did live and was then living in Illinois, doing fine, but that so many years had expired that he had lost trace of him. I did not find him again, but did put my questions to rest. The soldier had survived.
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