By Emily Greene
WASHINGTON -- Seventy years ago, Dec. 7, 1941, Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Lee B. Soucy, a medical laboratory technician assigned to the USS Utah assumed the blasts outside his porthole were practice maneuvers; “crazy Marines,” maneuvering on a Sunday.
“Even after I saw a huge fireball and cloud of black smoke rise from hangers on Ford Island and heard explosions, it did not occur to me that these were enemy planes,” Soucy said in an interview conducted by the Navy Medical Department in 1995. “It was too incredible! Simply beyond imagination! ‘What a SNAFU,’ I moaned.”
All too soon, Soucy and every other inhabitant of Pearl Harbor knew this was a real attack. From their first realization of an enemy attack the doctors, dentists, nurses and corpsmen at and around Pearl Harbor lept into action, displaying personal bravery, determination and resourcefulness in the treatment of the day’s victims.
After swimming ashore through oil spilled from the damaged vessel, amidst gunfire and continued bombing, Soucy was rushed to a nearby bachelor officer’s quarters to set up an emergency treatment station for oil-covered casualties. It did not take long to exhaust readily available medical supplies.
“A line officer came by to inquire how we were getting along. We told him we had run out of everything Lee Soucy was a medical laboratory technician in Pearl Harbor in 1941. and we were in urgent need of bandages and some kind of solvent or alcohol to cleanse wounds. He turned to us and said, ‘alcohol? alcohol?’ he repeated. ‘Will whiskey do?’” Before we could mull it over, he took off and in a few minutes returned and plunked a case of Scotch at our feet,” Soucy recounted. “I am sure denatured alcohol could not have served our purposes better for washing off the sticky oil, as well as providing some antiseptic effect for a variety of wounds and burns.”
Navy Capt. Ruth A. Erickson, was a nurse at Pearl Harbor and said in a 1994 interview with the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery that she also initially thought nothing of the sounds of planes outside of the dining hall where she was finishing breakfast. However, she soon realized the noises were different.
“I lept out of my chair and dashed to the nearest window in the corridor. Right then there was a plane flying directly over the top of our quarters,” Erikson said. “The rising sun under the wing of the plane denoted the enemy. Had I known the pilot, one could almost see his features around his goggles.”
The first casualties began arriving at the U.S. Naval Hospital at Pearl Harbor within 10 minutes after the attack. According to the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, a total of 546 battle casualties and 313 dead were brought to the hospital that day. Approximately 452 casualties were admitted to the naval hospital in less than three hours. By midnight, the census of patients was 960.
“The first patient came into our dressing room at 8:20 a.m. with a large opening in his abdomen and bleeding profusely,” Erikson remembered. “They started an intravenous and transfusion.”
Burns were a major cause of injury, making up approximately 60 percent of the day’s casualties. Some were caused by burning fuel and many were “flash burns” caused by intense heat from exploding bombs. Some casualties suffered as much as 80 percent of their body surface burned, with the extent of burns depending greatly on how much clothing each person was wearing.
Navy Lt. Rosella Asbelle, was a nurse at Pearl Harbor working in the burn ward at the hospital. In her interview with the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery Navy in 2002 she remembered treating the burns with tannic acid.
“I remember a radio blaring the song, “I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire,” when some kid at the end of the ward yelled out, ‘Lady, you’re too late. It’s done been set,” Asbelle said.
On the day President Franklin D. Roosevelt said “will live in infamy,” military medical personnel risked their lives to help those in need. They acted the Hippocratic Oath and applied, for the benefit of the sick, all measures required to care for the wounded despite the challenges they faced.
See more photos of Pearl Harbor on the MHS Blog. To read more about Pearl Harbor medical activities during the time of the attacks visit the Navy History and Heritage Command.