"No, no, we're not going to take the eye. We can save it"
When I learned of my grandfather's skill as a surgeon, it reminded me of a particular interview
My grandfather, Dr. Milton Reder, was a plastic surgeon and an eye, ear, nose and throat specialist who graduated from NYU Medical School in the 1920s and served in World War 2. He was highly skilled and attributed his success in saving soldiers’ eyes by carefully removing shrapnel to having watched his mother crochet growing up. I didn’t know my grandfather well and learned this thirdhand from an elderly cousin who was his niece. She also told my sisters that our grandfather was traumatized by the war.
I wish I had gotten to know him better because I would have known how to ask him more about the war, but the only time I spent any time with him was when I helped out in his office in the late 1980s, and I was still in the early stages of recording the stories of the veterans in my father’s tank battalion. Gramps was my father’s father-in-law and my father once said he wished he could have gone for a beer with Gramps but he never did, so he likely didn’t know him any better than I did.
But it’s easy to see how he could have been traumatized by the war. Several of the veterans I’ve interviewed credited doctors with saving an eye or a limb after they were wounded, while others praised their doctors and nurses even though they underwent amputations and other life-altering procedures. One story in particular came to mind to illustrate the type of injury my grandfather might have had to treat, and then I thought of several others, so I’ll share some of them with you today.
Jim Gifford
Lieutenant Gifford was shot in the head during the Battle of the Bulge. The bullet struck near his right eye and when he was in the hospital he went temporarily blind. He credited a doctor with saving the eye, but it was his description of another patient that made me think of the things my grandfather must have had to deal with.
“When I got around that cliff, there was a big old farmhouse laying there, and back of it there was a barn with a lot of manure, some cows in there, and a couple of wounded guys were laying there; they laid them out because it was sheltered there. I went over there and then I sat down, then I laid down. I was feeling lousy. So I was laying there, and I remember Tony D’Arpino and one of the other boys came up to see how I was, and about that time an ambulance started backing in. So I got up and I got in the ambulance, and there were some German guys in there that had been badly wounded. There were about six or seven of us in that ambulance. The war was over for both of us. The one German guy was carrying on kind of bad; he was hurt, he was moaning and groaning a lot, and we’d try to comfort him, you know, even though he was the enemy, you know what I mean, you become a human being when you get into the hospital.
“We went back to Luxembourg, and we went to the main hospital in Luxembourg, and when they unloaded us there, they brought the guys in my ambulance that were on stretchers, they brought them out. I was a walking patient, and then when I got into the hospital I fell down, and they put me on a stretcher, and it was a big wide staircase going up to the second floor, it was probably ten feet wide, and it circled, up, there was a veranda up there. Every single step had a stretcher case on it. They put me on one of those steps, and the other, the German soldiers that were with us, and the doctors and nurses were all running around, they were trying to evaluate who was wounded, who to wait on first and second, because they were pouring into that hospital from the whole front there, and they were overwhelmed with wounded, I mean, guys were laying there, some of them died, some of them had half their leg off and a tourniquet, it was a mess, and they were working like crazy those doctors and nurses. All of them deserve medals; they were really doing their best. But anyway, because of my bullet in the head they took me right up to an operating room, and there was a doctor from Long Island, I don’t know what his name was, at one time I remembered, I’ve forgotten now, but I was on the operating table, and two or three doctors were looking at my eye, and the one from Long Island [my grandfather was from Long Island, but there is no way I can figure out of this was him] , they were saying take the eye out, get the bullet and take the eye out, and I was just laying there, whatever they do, that’s it, they know more than I do about it, and the one from Long Island, that surgeon from Long Island, says “No,” he said, “We can save this eye. No, no, we’re not going to take the eye. We can save it.”
Were you sedated?
“I don’t remember whether they gave me shots or not. No, they must have, because I don’t remember. They must have. Because the next thing, I was in a room. Whatever clothes we had on when we were operated on were the clothes that we wore. There was no such thing as going into a hospital and getting out of your clothes and getting into something else, in those days, forget about that. At that stage, whatever we had on. So I got a blank there from the time they operated on me until I ended up in a room somewhere, and so I must have been sedated. They must have knocked me out, because I don’t even remember them operating on my head. But then I had patches, the side of my head was all patched.
“Then they put me in an ambulance and took me down to a field hospital somewhere. Then they transferred me, the next hospital I was in was a Paris hospital. How I got there, I think I went there by train, I don’t remember. I don’t remember. I was in bad shape. But I ended up in a hospital in Paris. And then I was in the head injuries ward. Oh, no wonder I don’t remember! By the time I got to Paris I was blind. I went blind somewhere after the operation.
“When I was in the hospital in Paris, I was laying in the head injuries ward, and they had ropes going from behind your bed to different locations. If you want to go to the bathroom, you follow the rope that was the thickest, and whatever the size of the rope was told you where you were gonna end up. If they allowed you out of bed you could do that. So they allowed me to follow those ropes to the bathroom so I didn’t have to use bedpans.
“Then one day I’m laying in bed, and everything is grey, and all of a sudden I saw something up above me, a square. And the next thing I saw a grill. And I just hollered. I didn’t move my head or move my body, I just hollered to the guy in the bed next to me, I said, “Tell the doctors I can see, I can see a square.” They came running in and they sandbagged me. They said, “Don’t move.” The coagulation of the blood behind the optic nerve was breaking up, and so they sandbagged me for the rest of the day and into the night, and the vision came back in my left eye.
“Up until then, I was prepared to study braille, I thought I was going to be blind for the rest of my life.
“So it cleared up. And then I stayed there for a few days, and there was a guy in the bed next to me that came in with me, he had been hit in the face with a hand grenade and he was all bandaged up. The doctor came in one night, and he’s got the flashlight, you know, the war’s on, at night there’s no lights in the hospital, so the doctor came in with a flashlight, and he’s got the flashlight in his armpit, and he’s trying to do this guy’s, redo the bandages on his head. So I got up, I said ‘Give me the flashlight, you know, Doc, I’ll help you.’ He said ‘Oh, good, okay, hold it right there.’ So he starts unraveling this guy’s, the guy was 19 years old, I’ll never forget it, he started taking the bandages off, and I have never gotten sick at the sight of anything in my life, never, but standing there, when he took those bandages off and I saw this kid’s face, there was no nose, no left eye, no cheek, no upper teeth, a couple of broken bottom teeth, and I looked right down into his lungs practically, he was a mess, he was a mess. And his tongue was there, and he was saying, ‘I’m scared.’ Well, anyway, I said to the doctor, ‘Doc, you want to hold this light a minute?’ And he took one look at me, I guess he knew I was, I said ‘Just hold it a minute.’ He said, ‘Oh yeah, it’s okay.’ He understood. I walked over, there was a door there and I stepped out into the snow and took some deep breaths, and then I came back and I was all right. I held the light, and he bandaged him up.
“Then they took us down to Normandy to a field hospital there. It was near an airport somewhere in Normandy. Then they put us on an airplane and flew us to England, and this guy was still with me, we went back together.”
Did he survive?
“Well, he went crazy. When we got back to England we were in a hospital, oh, I can’t remember the name of it, north of London, very close to London, then we were being checked out all there, and then he started, we were in a ward now, and there was another guy, a paratrooper who had been wounded with me, and he and I were on the same wall and our friend with the bad, the terrible head injury there, he started, during the night he started hollering and crying and carrying on and talking. He was losing his mind. So they came in and they took his bed and rolled it down the hall and put him into a private room, so I never saw him again. I imagine he died, I don’t know. He was a terrible mess. He was better off, if I were him, I would have preferred to die, he was a terrible mess.
“I don’t recall his name. I don’t know if he could see out of his right eye. He was totally bandaged up; his face was a horror. He was hit in the face with a hand grenade, that’s what happened to him.”
Judd Wiley
I was interviewing Judd Wiley, a sergeant in the first platoon of C Company of the 712th Tank Battalion, at his home in Seal Beach, California, on Oct. 2, 1994. Judd was the platoon sergeant for Lieutenant Jim Flowers, but was injured when a hatch cover slammed down on his hand while his tank was backing over a hedgerow under fire, and he was evacuated a day before the platoon was ambushed with the loss of four tanks and nine crew members killed during the battle for Hill 122. Judd’s wife, Donis, sat in on the interview, and as he was describing his six days in combat, she said, “Then that poor infantry captain. He still cries [when he thinks about it].”
“Oh, yes,” Judd said. “We were told to work with a 90th Infantry company. The day before the Germans had counterattacked and it made a big bulge in the line. This bulge sticking out. So they called for tanks. Well, there was a captain of the company that was on his knees talking to me all the time, go this road over here, go that one over there, because he had been there, you know, it was all recaptured ground. And I mean I had those guns going almost all the time; if there were any Germans in the area they sure got out. And anyway, we gained more ground than he lost, by two or three hedgerows, you know, that’s quite a distance; that might be half a mile. So then it made a bulge in the line instead of a hole. And so it was just about dusk, see, you don’t fight at night — you do, the 712th is all full of it, the history of it, of fighting at night — well, anyway, the captain crawled down off the tank, and I got down off the tank, and he came over to me and he said, ‘Sergeant, I thank you a lot. We got all the ground back and gained more.’ And so he stuck his hand out, and we were still shaking hands when a bullet, sniper, came right through, took out both eyes, and I’ve never, I could hear those screams right now, oh that poor guy. And the medics came and hauled him away immediately and gave him a shot of morphine and everything they could.”
“He was shaking your hand?” I asked.
“Yeah, our hands were still together. It could have been me. And he was such a good guy, a nice guy, or he wouldn’t want to come up and shake a sergeant’s hand. You know, he was a nice guy, and his company all told me later that they all just loved him because he was such a good officer.”
Lou Putnoky
“I’ve got to ask you,” I asked Coast Guard veteran Lou Putnoky, a radio operator on the USS Bayfield and a D-Day veteran, “because I saw that photo there of you with the jacket on, hunched over those wounded guys, what was that like, bringing back the wounded from the beach? You went down and carried them off of the...”
“Let me tell you, it’s heart ... heartrending,” Lou said. “Awful. Awful feeling. How the hell do you describe it? These are all seriously injured men from all parts of the service. This is a whole landing barge, or landing craft here, a bigger one. One of them was, I remember vividly, he lived. He was shot just forward of the temple, right across both eyes, the bridge of the nose, both eyes were blown out. And he was just bandaged up. That one I remember more than any of the others. The bullet caught him but not directly, both eyes, the bridge of his nose. Big gap. I don’t know what ever happened to him, because after a couple weeks a hospital ship took over. When it got safer a hospital ship came in and we transferred all our seriously wounded.
“We had a special staff. We had a specialist in most fields of the medical profession because of us being the flagship, ours was a key. We had an eye specialist. We had an excellent dentist. Whatever they could possibly, I have to say they did a magnificent job of planning, and the spirit was, how could you picture, I have never seen it since, the closest thing I’ve seen was how they handled this explosion in Edison, I thought they did a fantastic, a beautiful job. This is the closest thing, it was like everybody, can you picture a situation where everybody did a hundred and ten percent of what they were supposed to do.”
“Did you have any further contact with the guy who was wounded in the eyes?”
“No, it upset us so much. There was nothing any of us could do for him. And we never, it was one of those things, you saw it and everything and you ran away from it, because you didn’t even want to remember. You’re almost sorry that you knew the situation. I don’t know how else to, you’re a little ashamed to even say this, but you didn’t want anything to make you feel worse than what you felt, because it would, it would hurt, it would hurt the overall picture as far as your performance. And you never knew what the hell would affect your performance, as things went on. That’s something, you had to take it one day at a time, otherwise you couldn’t handle it.”
Does stuff like that ever give you nightmares?
“Oh, you have maybe restlessness and whatnot. It comes and goes. Nothing that, now if I actually saw the bullet, that would be a difference, but the rest was imagination. Different people it would affect different ways. I have to say that, so I couldn’t, all I know is we wanted to get the hell out of there afterwards. We knew he was in good hands. But the fact that we knew we couldn’t do any more for him, we were almost sorry that we got this involved, to know, because after the bandages, and we saw guys tore up with holes, and we were spooning sulfa, the sulfa drug at the time, and putting in by the spoonfuls, small teaspoons, they were putting it in the open wounds, and closing them up, for the initial dressing. Because it just ripped, big gouges, big holes.”