The most dramatic and demanding duty an army medic or navy hospital corpsman could have was with army infantry or Marine Corps units in the field. This put enormous pressure on medical personnel closest to the front and forced new approaches to primary care and evacuation. In all theaters of war, but particularly in the Pacific, both army and navy medicine faced their greatest challenge dealing with the aftermath of intense, bloody warfare fought far from fixed hospitals. The systems developed by the army and navy worked similarly. The military's top priority organized its medical services to care for battlefield casualties, make them well, and return them to duty. ![]() Only when malaria and other tropical diseases were controlled could the Pacific war be won. Some units suffered 100 percent casualty rates, with personnel sometimes being hospitalized more than once. Following the initial landings on Guadalcanal, the number of patients hospitalized with malaria exceeded all other diseases. For example, during the early Pacific campaign to subdue the Solomon Islands, malaria caused more casualties than Japanese bullets. battle deaths in World War II numbered 292,131 with 671,801 reported wounded or missing.Ĭonserving fighting strength and enabling armies and navies to defeat the enemy also meant recognizing that disease, more than enemy action, often threatened this goal. Strafing aircraft, exploding ordnance, and burning ships caused penetrating injuries, simple and compound fractures, traumatic amputations, blast injuries, and horrific burns, to name just a few. In America's first major encounter at Pearl Harbor, the survivors of the Japanese attack could describe what modern warfare really meant. ![]() In every theater of war, small arms, land-and sea-based artillery, torpedoes, and armor-piercing and antipersonnel bombs took a terrible toll in human life. ![]() The use of machine guns, submarines, airplanes, and tanks was widespread in World War I but in World War II these weapons reached unimagined perfection as killing machines. What transpired between 19 was a cataclysmic event made worse by the nature of the weapons the combatants used. The purpose of military medicine during World War II was the same as in previous wars: to conserve the strength and efficiency of the fighting forces so as to keep as many men at as many guns for as many days as possible.
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