Somewhere in Australia—"They are giving him ether now," was what they said back in the aft torpedo rooms.
"He's gone under, and they're ready to cut him open," the crew whispered, sitting on their pipe bunks cramped between torpedoes.
One man went forward and put his arm quietly around the shoulder of another man who was handling the bow diving planes.
"Keep her steady, Jake," he said. "They've just made the first cut. They're feeling around for it now."
"They" were a little group of anxious-faced men with their arms thrust into reversed white pajama coats. Gauze bandages hid all their expressions except the tensity in their eyes.
"It" was an acute appendix inside Dean Rector of Chautauqua, Kansas. The stabbing pains had become unendurable the day before, which was Rector's first birthday at sea. He was nineteen years old.
The big depth gauge that looks like a factory clock and stands beside the "Christmas tree" of red and green gauges regulating the flooding chambers showed where they were. They were below the surface. And above them were enemy waters crossed and recrossed by whirring propellers of Japanese destroyers and transports.
The nearest naval surgeon competent to operate on the nineteen-year-old seaman was thousands of miles and many days away. There was just one way to prevent the appendix from bursting, and that was for the crew to operate upon their shipmate themselves.
And that's what they did; they operated upon him. It was probably one of the largest operations in number of participants that ever occurred.
"He says he's ready to take his chance," the gobs whispered from bulkhead to bulkhead.
"That guy's regular"—the word traveled from bow planes to propeller and back again.
They "kept her steady."
The chief surgeon was a twenty-three-year-old pharmacist's mate wearing a blue blouse with white-taped collar and squashy white duck cap. His name was Wheeler B. Lipes. He came from Newcastle near Roanoke, Virginia, and had taken the Navy hospital course in San Diego, thereafter serving three years in the naval hospital at Philadelphia, where his wife lives.
Lipes' specialty as laboratory technician was in operating a machine that registers heartbeats. He was classified as an electrocardiographer. But he had seen Navy doctors take out one or two appendixes and thought he could do it. Under the sea, he was given his first chance to operate.
There was difficulty about the ether. When below the surface the pressure inside a boat is above the atmospheric pressure. More ether is absorbed under pressure. The submariners did not know how long their operation would last.
They did not know how long it would take to find the appendix. They did not know whether there would be enough ether to keep the patient under throughout the operation.
They didn't want the patient waking up before they were finished.
They decided to operate on the table in the officers' wardroom. In the newest and roomiest American submarine the wardroom is approximately the size of a Pullman-car drawing room. It is flanked by bench seats attached to the wall, and a table occupies the whole room—you enter with knees already crooked to sit down. The only way anyone can be upright in the wardrooms is by kneeling.
The operating room was just long enough so that the patient's head and feet reached the two ends without hanging over.
First they got out a medical book and read up on the appendix, while Rector, his face pale with pain, lay in the narrow bunk. It was probably the most democratic surgical operation ever performed. Everybody from boxplane man to the cook in the galley knew his role.
The cook provided the ether mask. It was an inverted tea strainer. They covered it with gauze.
The twenty-three-year-old "surgeon" had, as his staff of fellow "physicians," all men his senior in age and rank. His anesthetist was Communications Officer Lieutenant Franz Hoskins of Tacoma, Washington.
Before they carried Rector to the wardroom, the submarine Captain, Lieutenant Commander W.B. Ferrall of Pittsburgh, asked Lipes as the "surgeon" to have a talk with the patient.
"Look, Dean, I never did anything like this before," Lipes said. "Your don't have much chance to pull through, anyhow. What do you say?"
"I know just how it is, Doc."
It was the first time in his life that anybody had called Lipes "Doc." But there was in him, added to the steadiness that goes with a submariner's profession, a new calmness.