Mission at Nuremberg (10 page)

By now Geist was directing a chapel choir and a glee club. A member of the Ninety-Eighth, Captain Friedland, led Jewish services on Friday nights at six, and Gerecke convinced Sullivan to allow an army transport to shuttle a local rabbi, Rabbi Ginsberg, to the hospital twice a week to minister to Jewish patients. “Our Commanding Officer never hesitates to give every available help to his Chaplains,” Gerecke wrote. “Our wounded men are deeply grateful.”

In an efficiency report for Gerecke, written on March 1, Sullivan gave the chaplain the highest marks possible on categories like “attention to duty,” “cooperation,” and “judgment and common sense.” His lowest marks, perhaps predictably for a somewhat plump fifty-one-year-old, were for “force” and “physical activity and endurance.”

“A cheerful, loyal, devout officer,” Sullivan wrote in the report, “intensely concerned in the spiritual welfare and morale of all members of the unit, tolerant and kindly to all, not sparing himself in the performance of duty. He has the affection as well as respect of all.”

Sullivan's push for morale-boosting distraction expanded during the spring. The intrahospital softball league competition was fierce. The unit's clinicians, officers, patient detachment, administration, and mess each fielded a team. A Ninety-Eighth baseball team (with uniforms) formed to compete against nearby hospitals and other installations, playing six home games in March and April.

Sullivan chartered a boat for enlisted personnel to float from Oxford, down the Thames twenty miles and back. Staff and patients could play golf, tennis, and basketball, and the hospital loaned out fifteen bicycles for patients to explore the surrounding countryside. Anyone who had a camera could take his film to the hospital photo lab, where pictures could be developed and printed at cost.

Three days after the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945, Gerecke organized memorial services. “It was the desire of our Commanding Officer that ambulatory patients and members of the unit attend the Service of their choice,” Gerecke wrote. That month, he also visited an American cemetery in Cambridge to take part in a mass burial. “An unforgettable experience,” he wrote. “I feel more qualified to write better condolence letters.”

As Allied forces began breaking through German defenses in May, the Ninety-Eighth had a new patient class: American soldiers flown in from newly liberated German POW camps. The unit set up delousing stations, and doctors studied up on the treatment of severe malnutrition. The hospital saw more cases of trench foot and frostbite suffered by men on forced marches. As the Allies pushed farther into German-occupied zones, more former captives were sent to the hospital, and the Ninety-Eighth was soon packed to capacity again.

In mid-April, Sullivan received orders that as of May 1, those patients whom doctors determined could not be returned to duty within sixty days were to be sent back to the United States. It was a signal that the war was coming to a close. And indeed, within a week, Hitler's successor, Admiral Karl Doenitz, ordered General Alfred Jodl to surrender to General Dwight Eisenhower.

On VE day, Hank was on the Champs-Élysées, waving with thousands of others as General Charles de Gaulle paraded into Paris. A few days later, Hank met his father in London and they spent a week together. “My son could have gone anywhere he wanted on his leave, but he chose to come spend it with his father,” he told his friends in the Ninety-Eighth. “Isn't that something?” In his May report, Gerecke wrote, “We thank God for Victory in Europe. May victory come to our men in the Pacific area soon.”

After VE Day, May 8, 1945, the flow of patients at the Ninety-Eighth slowed to a trickle, and rumors began to circulate that its staff would be going home. Other rumors had the unit packing up and moving to the Pacific to help in the final push against the Japanese. The unit spent much of its time breaking down the hospital they'd built and sending any remaining patients to other hospitals. Orders eventually came that key doctors—the chief of surgical services, the chief of X-ray services, the heads of the neuropsychiatric, anesthetic, and gastrointestinal divisions—had been reassigned, along with some officers and enlisted men, “throwing the smoke grenade of rumor and conjecture into our midst,” Sullivan wrote.

The Ninety-Eighth stopped admitting patients on May 22, and Sullivan told the staff to prepare for another ocean voyage. Finally, the commander received instructions to report to Southampton, where the Ninety-Eighth boarded the MS
Dunnottar Castle,
a troop ship named for a medieval Scottish fortress, and on June 15 crossed the English Channel to Le Havre.

Sullivan was clearly proud of his unit's success. “A newly formed and trained organization had established itself in England to perform its primary mission,” he wrote. “Every type of operation which could possibly confront a fixed hospital left the unit with a wealth of experience, a pride of achievement and confidence in any future task.” It was that achievement that kept most of the Ninety-Eighth in Europe. Instead of being sent home, Sullivan and his team would be sent to resurrect a battered hospital in the middle of Munich—Bavaria's capital, the newly crushed heart of Nazism.

 

THE NINETY-EIGHTH LANDED IN
France on June 18, 1945, and after ten days at Camp Pall Mall near Le Havre, Sullivan was ordered to take his unit to Eagle Main, an Allied staging area in Verdun where Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton, and Omar Bradley had planned the final stages of the war just before Christmas. On July 2, the unit arrived in Verdun, about eighty miles from Nancy, France, where Hank was stationed. Gerecke sent a message to his son that the Ninety-Eighth was just up the Meuse River, but Hank was not on post. By the time Hank got the message and rushed to Verdun, the Ninety-Eighth had departed for Munich.

By now, Gerecke knew how to minister to a large military group, and he wasn't impressed with what he'd seen in Le Havre and Verdun. He attended a conference with eighty-five other chaplains in Reims. “There should be a Post Chaplain at Eagle-Main to coordinate the Lord's work,” he wrote in his monthly report. “If the Chaplain at Etretat is in charge of Pall Mall, he should arrange for organ and hymnals. I pray God the Chaplains do not let down on our ‘Fathers business' since VE Day. Seems to me our fighting men and women need special attention right now.”

The majority of the Ninety-Eighth personnel arrived in Munich on Sunday, July 15, after an arduous three-day train journey aggravated by a number of detours. Almost before unloading their bags, Gerecke and Father Walsh were leading Sunday services in the hospital chapels. “Both chaplains had been with the unit in England,” Sullivan wrote. “Both were devoted to their duties, kindly, tolerant.”

An advance party that included Sullivan arrived at the former Municipal Hospital of Munich, known as
Schwabinger Krankenhaus,
to find “enormous problems” facing the Ninety-Eighth's mission. Schwabing, named for the district of Munich where it sat, had been a two-thousand-bed building before it was pummeled by Allied bombers, suffering seventeen direct hits, including several incendiary bombs.

The hospital consisted of seven large buildings and several smaller buildings—all connected by corridors, basements, and sub-basements. Each building had three floors and each floor seventy-five beds. But when Sullivan arrived, he found Schwabing barely usable, with half its windows blown out, corridors between wards crushed, roofs open to the sky, and equipment strewn throughout the building “from attics to basements.” Two bombs had destroyed the operating room, physiotherapy clinic, and X-ray clinic. The dental clinic had been reduced to a single chair.

A large incinerator hadn't been used for months, and it took two hundred German POWs from the beginning of August until the end of September to clean up the papers and garbage that the hospital's former staff had simply thrown into the basements. The heating system was decrepit and didn't work in some buildings. The mess hall was large but unusable. The kitchen had excellent gas range ovens, but there was no gas to be found in Germany and even coal was difficult to come by. The water was not chlorinated. A garage for ambulances and other vehicles had been destroyed.

Despite the conditions, eight hundred patients, most suffering from typhus fever, were being cared for by German doctors and nurses. As the Ninety-Eighth took over, Schwabing was “literally bulging with Germans,” Sullivan wrote, “some working on the premises and others just living there.” The mayor of Munich was living in one ward. The mass influx of Americans meant members of the Ninety-Eighth had to join them, sleeping in wards for the first weeks while other quarters were decontaminated from the typhus patients. In August, the Ninety-Eighth confronted a “full blown typhoid epidemic,” necessitating the vaccination of staff and the emergency treatment of those who'd contracted the fever. In the mess, Germans had been eating spoiled food, and the condition of the latrines was “deplorable.”

Sullivan also found an attitude toward illness that was symptomatic of life under Hitler. “It was found that under the Nazi period any individual who was sick was told he was sabotaging the institution,” he wrote. “Apparently this fact was so ingrained into the minds of the employees that they would only report sick when ready to collapse physically. For example, a cleaning woman worked in my office for two weeks wearing a coat in summer, finally reported that she was sick, and promptly died.” Six patients died from typhus, but the unit eventually got the spread of the disease under control. It helped that two parts of the campus left standing were a huge laundry facility that employed seventy-five people and a well-equipped laboratory that the Americans eventually organized into bacteriology, serology, histopathology, hematology, urinalysis, chemistry, photography, and blood bank departments.

The only members of the Ninety-Eighth who were thrilled with the facilities they found at Schwabing were the chaplains. The hospital's Catholic and Protestant chapels had both survived the bombing. “Beautiful chapel designated for Protestant Services,” Gerecke wrote. The chapel seated 125 people in pews and had a two-manual pipe organ in working condition and a piano. The altar and pulpit were built into the architecture of the chapel, which meant Gerecke's army-issue chaplain outfit could largely remain packed. Each chaplain even had his own office attached to the worship spaces. Having two chapels meant each chaplain could offer more services, so Gerecke began leading worship at 9:00
A.M.
, 10:00
A.M.,
and 7:30
P.M.
on Sundays.

Chaplain Walsh was greeted by fellow Catholics at the hospital—a group of one hundred nuns who worked and lived in an attached cloister. Each day, seventy-five of them worked in the laundry facility, in the kitchen, or as ward attendants. The language barrier was a problem for the Americans with all the German hospital workers, including the nuns. But in time, the sisters worked with the Ninety-Eighth's nurses and soon took over the routine menial functions, becoming the most dependable civilian employees of the hospital. Nuns were also given part of the kitchen and mess to provide food for the German hospital workers from the sisters' own stores.

Despite the typhoid epidemic, the mess, and the communication difficulties, the Ninety-Eighth began accepting patients on July 22. The initial patient load of 896 grew to 1,073 by mid-September, and the surreal experience of operating a destroyed hospital continued. The Germans introduced the Americans to a woman bathing in a tub in one corner of the hospital. She wouldn't leave the tub and told the staff she'd been immersed in it since the end of the First World War, as a treatment for a venereal disease she'd contracted from an American soldier.

In addition to doctors and nurses, 350 Germans worked for the Ninety-Eighth as cooks, housemaids, and secretaries. Nearly all of them lived “in undesirable quarters at the top of several of the ward buildings,” Sullivan wrote. Polish and Hungarian workers joined the Germans as hospital employees. Aside from the work of the nuns, which he considered invaluable, Sullivan was unimpressed with the work ethic of the unit's civilian employees. “The average German worker, despite all claims to the contrary, has been found to be a somewhat slow-moving individual, who usually does a good job, but takes his time about it,” he wrote. “One German bricklayer, for example, has been found to lay only 1/3 of the bricks of his American prototype.”

Motivation and morale problems were not limited to Germans. After July, the Ninety-Eighth slowly began coming apart. “The juggernaut of redeployment struck in August,” as the army transferred 57 officers out of the unit in the next few months, and 116 new officers in. By December, most were replacements and not happy ones. The war was over, and nobody wanted to be living in a bombed-out hospital in Munich. The possibility of a transfer to the Pacific still loomed for many, and the army's point system, which determined when individuals could go home, kept changing and was thought by most to be unfair.

The staff of the hospital remained “competent if unenthusiastic,” Sullivan wrote.

 

Since arrival in Germany, redeployment remains uppermost in the minds of practically all officers, nurses and enlisted personnel, especially those that have been in the theater for any length of time. The point score's constant changing, the uncertainty of when they will return, premature information often released in the ‘Stars and Stripes,' false rumors such as the fact that ASTP [Army Specialized Training Program] graduates will not be sent overseas, and a general feeling that injustice has been done in having such a discrepancy in points between those eligible to go overseas and those eligible to return in the theater, has created a feeling of unrest in the command which at this stage of operation is extremely difficult for a unit Commander to combat.