The 91st Evacuation Hospital was composed primarily of enlisted personnel from Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky. Redesignated from the former 6th Surgical Hospital, which had seen action in France during WWI, the 91st served with distinction in North Africa, Sicily, and the European Theater of Operations.
After training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, doctors and enlisted men departed for Camp Kilmer, New Jersey where they were joined by the forty-eight nurses asigned to the 91st Evac. They set sail from New York Harbor aboard the USS Argentina in December of 1942. Foreign service began in earnest for the men and women of the 91st when they landed in Casablanca on Christmas Eve, bivouacked in a cow pasture, experienced a New Year's Eve air raid, and awaited the arrival of vehicles and supplies.
On January 31st, 1943 the unit departed Casablanca by rail for the site of its first hospital set up at Port Lyautey, French Morocco, a distance of roughly 90 miles. With tents pitched in a surrounding Cork Forest, medical wards and operating room were housed in wooden structures and abandoned buildings. The 91st admitted 1,335 patients at Port Lyautey before the hospital closed on April 24th.
Easter Sunday found the 91st in convoy on a 500 mile journey to the site of it's new set up at Mostaganem, Algeria. An early departure made Easter morning services unfeasible. However, when the convoy camped that night near the town of Taza, the chaplain found the spectacular sight of the sun as it dipped below the mountains to be the perfect backdrop for an Easter "sunset" service.
As a mobile unit, the 91st became both efficient and creative when it came to setting up hospitals in a wide variety of conditions. The set up at Mostaganem is memorable, in that the site was an abandoned racetrack. An oat field was mowed to make room for officers and nurses tents. Always innovative, the 91st made use of both grandstand and stables in housing it's medical facilities. The hospital at Mostaganem closed on June 27th and the unit went into bivouac while awaiting orders.
Long convoys by truck and trailer were trying ordeals for the men and women of the 91st. Nurses made use of two army blankets to create latrine screens at rest stops, dug slit trenches and pitched pup tents as did enlisted men and doctors. The five day trip from Mostaganem to Bizerte, Tunisia in mid July of 1943 was made a bit more bearable for some by the beauty of the mountain scenery. Others, however, may have been just a tad jealous of the hospital equipment that had made the trip by rail!
Transport by LST and motor convoy landed the 91st in Palermo, Sicily near the end of July. An advance detail set to work preparing two buildings of the University of Palermo Medical School for use as an evac hosptial. With the assistance of Italian POWs, the process of clearing broken glass and debris began in earnest. Although the buildings had lost all windows in recent bombing, the facilities were a clear improvement over tents!
Patients began pouring into the hospital in Palermo before set up was complete or its personnel on site. Doctors Edgar Hyde, George Knapp and Harry Meyer worked frantically to care for the several hundred admissions arriving each day. Sleeping only a handful of hours those first three days, they somehow kept pace until the rest of the outfit joined them on July 31st. It was not until mid-August that the hospital census approached anything near a manageable number. By the time the hospital closed on October 31st, the 91st had admitted 10,644 patients.
On November 11, the 91st set sail aboard the USS Santa Rosa, landed at Swansea Wales on November 24, and transported by land to Bristol England. Here, for six months, the unit prepared for the invasion of Normandy and service in the European Theater. Over and over, the outfit practiced setting up and tearing down their hospital so that the task could be preformed rapidly and routinely as the 91st prepared to follow the front toward Germany. In their spare time, doctors, nurses and enlisted men explored the English countryside and visited the sites, biding time until the invasion.
Months of anxious waiting came to an end when the unit sailed for the shores of Normandy on June 9th, 1944. Setting foot on Utah beach the next day, the 91st nurses, closely followed by those of the 128th Evacuation Hospital, became the first members of the ANC to land on French soil during the Normandy Invasion. The hospital was operational by mid morning on June 12 and admitted 261 patients in the first half day of operation. Over the next seventeen days, the 91st cared for 2,142 patients and handled over six hundred surgical cases.
A milestone in the history of the 91st Evac's history occurred shortly after it's next set up at Pont L'Abbe, France with the assignment of Colonel Paul Hayes as commanding officer. Col. Hayes replaced Lieut. Colonel Fred G. Lahourcade, who had, in turn, succeeded Col. Charles Snell, who was relieved of duty and transferred to the 67th Evacuation Hospital on Christmas Day of 1943. Col. Hayes inherited a cracker-jack unit with whom he enjoyed a mutual respect and appreciation throughout the remainder of the war.
Admissions continued to pour in at Pont L'Abbe. By the time the hospital closed for a much needed rest period on July 20th, fifteen days after opening, the unit had received an impressive total of 2,600 patients.
Rest was short lived. As the front moved forward, so did the 91st with successive moves to Marigny on July 31st and Brecey, France on August 9th. Nurse Margaret House would later speak of walking into a deserted house in Marigny to find the food on the kitchen table still warm as the residents abandoned their meal to flee the approaching war. At Brecey, the 91st devised a make shift delivery room for a French woman who gave birth to her baby boy in the hospital's shock ward. As chance would have it, the 91st had at least two obstetricians among the medical staff!
The front moved quickly during the month of August. By August 29th, the outfit was setting up again at Guyancourt amid unrelenting, pouring rain. Just three miles from Versailles and 15 from Paris, the location provided much welcomed opportunities for site seeing and R & R in between hospital duties. The hospital closed officially on September 7th and begain it's journey through France and Belgium to Valkenburg, Holland, just over the Belgian border and no more than ten miles from Germany itself. When the hospital convoy stopped at Liege, Belgium to get their orders, they encountered what must have seemed a small taste of heaven: An ice cream stand!
Valkenburg afforded the 91st the opportunity to set up in a building with electricity and running water in a Reichschule that the Germans had converted from a Jesuit Seminary. The hospital itself was set up on the first floor with housing for officers, including nurses, on the second floor and enlisted men on the third.
The winter of 1944 was a brutal one for allied troops as they pushed through heavily mined territory and battled the damp winter cold. The 91st surgeons, operating room nurses and related enlisted personnel saw increased instances of trench foot and performed countless amputations of legs and feet. On the 24th of November, they received patients evacuated from the 15th General Hospital when it was hit a buzz bomb at Liege. As 1944 drew toward it's close, and a German breakthrough threatened, trucks stood at the rear of the hospital, ready to evacuate at a moment's notice.
The new year brought a decreasing number of admissions as the front moved on. By the time the 91st closed at Valkenburg they had received 12,194 patients.
The front was now moving toward the Rhine and the 91st Evac moved with it, setting up in the countryside outside of the town of Hostert, Germany in early March. Thirteen days later, packed and loaded, they set out again. On March 28th, they became the first Evacuation Hospital in the Ninth Army to cross the Rhine. Set up in tents near Fredrichsfeld Germany, the outfit saw a steady stream of admissions. As the front continued to move forward, the 91st packed up and followed once more.
By April of 1945, the 91st had made its home in a bombed out hospital, a cow pasture, a racetrack, a Reichschule, and in open country. Their next set up came at a most unlikely venue, a health resort and spa at Bad Solzuflen, Germany. Here the hospital cared for 771 patients before moving again on April 14, this time, to an open field near Wiepke.
The afternoon of April 18, 1945 would haunt members of the 91st. Close to Wiepke, near the town of Gardelegen, stood a hay barn, made of brick, with wide wooden doors at either end. Inside, and in a mass grave near the barn, lay the grizzly evidence of Nazi atrocity in the form of the charred remains of 1,016 human beings who had been burned alive by their captors. Upon returning from the site, Margaret House sat down on her army cot and calmly wrote of what she had seen. She concluded her account with these prophetic words:
| I saw it. I saw the bodies. I know it's all true, every word I write here. It isn't the first act that the Germans have done. It is only one of many. We've seen the results of slave labor. We've seen this. Yet there are those who will still say, "It's only another of those stories. Take it with a grain of salt" ... This is April 18. I've returned from seeing all I write here. So when you read of it, know it's true. |
News of VE Day reached the 91st at Wiepke on May 8, 1945. Shortly thereafter the hospital went into bivouac at Wolfenbuttel, Germany. Colonel Hayes was relieved of command at the end of June and left for the 191st General Hospital in Paris. Speculation that the unit would be headed for the Pacific proved unfounded when Japan surrendered on September 2nd, and the men and women of the 91st started on their respective journeys home.
They returned to their families, jobs, farms, neighbors, problems, possibilities, ambitions and dreams. A few chose the army as a career. Most picked up the pace of civilian life and assumed the role of mom or dad, husband or wife, doctor, nurse, employee or employer. They fell in love, raised children, paid their bills, celebrated births, marriages and graduations, delighted in their grandchildren, mourned the loss of loved ones, and watched the events of the passing years unfold around them like the ordinary people they were.
They were, after all, just that: Ordinary people who in an extraordinary time met the challenges history placed before them with creativity, courage, and dedication.
They deserve to be remembered.
If you or someone you know served with or was a patient in this hospital, I would very much like to hear from you. You can reach me by sending e-mail to evac91st@diadic.com.
Copyright © 2004 Deborah Ann Taylor. All Rights Reserved.
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Photos used with permission of Claudia Clark, Carolyn (Gobeli) McGirr and Wilda Rush.