The doctors and nurses of the 38th Hospital occassionally had difficulty, because of language barriers, in communicating with patients brought in for treatment. One week after they had set up the hospital in the mud field at Vairano, near Riardo, for example, a soldier was brought in with a small leg wound who merely shook his head when the doctor began to question him. Continue reading chapter 20...
The day before the 38th's mess officer wrote his first letter home dated Italy, Captain Montgomery added two lines to his diary to record a trip he had taken. Continue reading chapter 19...
The official business of the 38th Evacuation Hospital day by day was reported by the Daily Bulletin and these reports, supplemented by the occasional and generally terse diary entries of Captain Montgomery, provide a factual chronology of the unity's service in Africa and Eurpoe, but letters of Captain Pickens from Italy, as those he wrote from Africa had done, provie illuminating detail and frequently important additional data.
While the 38th's mess officer was recording in his long letter home the experiences of the unit as he observed them during the movement from North Africa to Italy and the settlement there, which embraced virtually all of September 1943, Captain Montgomery was adding entries in his diary that served to supplement the information provided by Captain Pickens. Continue reading chapter 17...
Three weeks after Colonel Bauchspies was transferred from the 38th, his adjutant, Captain A. J. Guenther, was transferred to another unit. His last signature on the Daily Bulletin was on August 20. Continue reading chapter 16...
Within less than two weeks after Colonel White assumed temporary command of the 38th Evactuation Hospital and three weeks before the uit would be moved from its base in Tunis to follow the fighting front into Italy, the unit would receive further national recognition. Continue reading chapter 15...
Captain Jack Montgomery's next entry in his diary was again characteristically of few words.
Sicily invaded at 0300 hours. We expect casualties from these tomorrow.
Eight days later, on July 18, he added another two lines:
Casualties have been very light. Hospital never as much as half-filled.
The 38th Evacuation Hospital had been settled at Beja in Tunisia hardly a month when another distinguished newspaper correspondent visited it and wrote of his impressions of the hospital's operations and particularly of the treatment of German prisoners, who by that time were swarming back from the battlefronts where they were suffereing one defeat after another. Continue reading chapter 13...
What the war-ravaged country between the 38th's base at Beja and the coastal city of Tunis, as well as Tunis itself, ilooked like in the closing days of May 1943 is revealed in a letter written by Captain Pickens on May 20, three days after he had provided what he described as his worm's eye picture of the German prisoners he had been observing and with whom he had been talking. Continue reading chpater 12...
In the same concise manner in which he had reported the movement of the 38th's Hospital from St. Cloud to Telergma, Dr. Stokes Munroe in his account of the North African experience wrote of the transfer of the hospital from Telergma in Algeria to Beja in Tunisia and then after a stay of about two weeks there on easward to a new site near Tunis. Continue reading chapter 11...