Life and Death on the Front Lines
of World War II
On November 2, 1942, my father, Paul Andrew Kennedy, sailed out of New York Harbor on the Santa Elena. Bound for Casablanca, the Santa Elena was part of the Western Task Force of Operation Torch, the massive Allied invasion of North Africa. He didn’t know this when he embarked. He had said good-bye to my mother at the gates of Camp Kilmer, New Jersey on October 31 wondering “where and why and home and then you, Marion.” Forty-eight hours out of New York, their destination and mission were revealed to them.
Thus began what would be almost three years of foreign service, taking him to North Africa, Italy, France, Germany, and ultimately home again to my mother and to the children he had left behind, Paul and Joan, who were so young they could scarcely have remembered him. Also waiting for him was my sister Ruth, born after he left, whom he had never seen.
He was a surgeon, a member of the 2nd Auxiliary Surgical Group. After an initial period of relative inactivity in North Africa, he spent most of his time in Italy, France, and Germany, working in field hospitals, which were mobile units set up immediately behind the front lines to care for soldiers so desperately wounded that they could not be safely transported back to evacuation hospitals. This was virtual battle field surgery. Often working ahead of their own artillery, the Second “Aux” set up mobile operating theaters, for the most part in tents, to care for grievously wounded boys and young men, many of whom seemed to have no chance of survival.
He was young, relatively inexperienced as a surgeon, and confronted with medical cases of a level of seriousness and complexity that one would rarely encounter in civilian practice. By the end of the war, he had meticulously documented 355 of these cases. For almost three years, he lived a kind of nomadic existence: he broke down, moved, set up, broke down, moved, set up. . . countless times, always keeping pace with the front. He lived underground among the troops pinned down at the Anzio beachhead, while, as he said, German artillery, “the Anzio Express, rode the wind.” He entered Rome the day after it was liberated; he entered Dachau two days after it was liberated. He was uncomfortable, dirty, hot, cold, homesick, and, most of all, lonely. He missed my mother terribly; he longed to see his children. But the term of his service was indefinite. He knew he would return home only after the war ended.
Throughout his tour of duty he kept a personal diary, which was written for my mother. Starting in 1944, he also began to keep a clinical journal of surgical cases, which he illustrated. A talented photographer, he took more than a thousand pictures throughout his time abroad. What emerges from these documents and photographs is a full record of the experience of a medical officer in the European Theater of Operations in World War II.
His plan had been to fulfill his college ROTC obligation with a year’s service at Lovell General Hospital at Fort Devens, Massachusetts. Events, however, proved to be stronger than plans. As it turned out, he served more than four years. During that time he was, as his diaries reveal, miserable. To the pain of loneliness were added the physical discomforts attendant upon living for the most part in tents, and upon the nearly constant mobility that keeping up with the front demanded. He loved to eat, and the generally dreadful food was a real burden to him. Inactivity, particularly early in his foreign service, was nearly unbearable; he was not only separated from home, but he felt he was filling no useful role. Two things helped: mail and work. Mail was his only connection to all that he loved so much. He lived for letters from home, although, as he frequently said, they made him feel worse afterwards. Work made the time go faster and it gave him a sense that all his sacrifice and unhappiness were in the service of useful ends.
Passing in and out of the life of this lonely, homesick surgeon were hundreds of wounded boys and young men. The difficulty of the task was daunting. The wounds he treated were disastrous; the boys for whom he cared were maimed and mutilated. They came from all over the United States to find themselves thrust into a chthonic maelstrom of artillery shells, shrapnel fragments, mines, and bullets. There, in the cold lethality of modern war, they incurred the dreadful injuries that brought them to an operating table in some cold, muddy, make-shift field hospital and into the care of my father, who saved them.
This text is adapted from Battlefield Surgeon: Life and Death on the Front Lines of World War II. (University Press of Kentucky, 2016).
Battlefield Surgeon