Page:Doctors Aweigh.djvu/33

8 For the next three days all hands worked twenty-four hours a day, snatching sleep when they could. In the operating rooms, four operating teams, two teams working at a time in relays, attended to the urgent surgical cases as rapidly as possible. For the next ten days the hospital staff was divided into watches so the work could go on continuously round the clock.

"I was proud of them," said Captain Hayden, "especially of my nurses and hospital corpsmen. Many of these were youngsters doing their first hitch. But they stood their baptism of fire well. As soon as the enemy planes started to roar over and around us, they dashed from their quarters to the main hospital building through a shower of anti-aircraft shell fragments and stray machine-gun bullets. Their first thought was to care for their patients and to get ready for those who they knew would soon be coming. After the raid, all hands worked until they dropped. You never had to keep them at it.

"Our twenty-eight nurses were especially devoted. I will always remember my chief nurse, a frail-appearing little woman who looked as though a good gust of wind would blow her away. But she was made of steel wire. She was everywhere: encouraging, supervising, directing. On Wednesday it was necessary to order her to bed to get some sleep. The staff took great pride in the fact that though we were understaffed for such a great number of serious casualties, we were able to care for our own without any outside medical assistance, except some volunteer trained nurses and 500 flasks of blood plasma from Honolulu."

The staff of the Pearl Harbor Hospital and that of the U.S.S. Solace were cited en masse by the commander in chief, United States Pacific Fleet, for distinguished services during, and subsequent to, the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941! There are combatant units which have been cited for gallantry in action, but this is the first time on record that the entire staff of a hospital or a hospital ship has received that honor. Among the unsung heroes of that opening battle of the war were