Dear Reader,
Far from his days at Harvard Medical School and his family and patients in Philadelphia, William McConahey, M.D., was thrust into the hellfire of World War II. At risk to his own life, he cared for friends and foes, combatants and civilians. After all, he wrote: “I am a doctor.”
Battalion Surgeon is his first-person account as a physician in combat with the 90th Infantry Division. It covers landing on the beach of Normandy, France, just two days after D-Day, fighting across occupied Europe, the Battle of the Bulge, liberating the Flossenbürg concentration camp and the surrender of Nazi Germany.
As a battalion surgeon, he stabilized wounded men near the front line before sending them to the rear for more intensive treatment. Besides attending to the physically wounded, McConahey treated men suffering from combat stress, assessing their mental state and sending them to the rear if necessary. The men operated as close to the front as possible, often within sight of German forces, hoping the Germans would follow the Geneva Convention and not fire at them.
Written in the summer of 1945, soon after the war ended, Battalion Surgeon conveys the immediacy of “mud and discomfort and suffering and death and terror and destruction.” Through it all—and in his distinguished postwar career at Mayo Clinic—Dr. McConahey served the suffering with compassion and care.
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