242nd General Hospital, WW II

Most of the information in this account I wrote down with my father (AMR) in 1984, when he was 78 years old. I am in the process of revising it as I read his letters from the time he was in Europe, and look at the photographs he brought back with him.

The 242nd General Hospital was organized at Camp Barkeley, near Abilene TX, in the summer of 1944. Lt Col Albert M. Richmond had been at Camp Barkeley for several months, with the 11th Medical Training Regiment, and he may have organized the 242nd out of that unit. (This logo, with its Latin motto reading "swiftly to conserve [fighting strength]", belonged to another medical training unit at Camp Barkeley.) He assumed command, and took the unit to New York Port of Embarkation, where it shipped out to Europe on the Queen Mary on December 10th, 1944, landing in Scotland on the 16th, at Greenock (or nearby Gourock, various spellings), on the Firth of Clyde west of Glasgow. They moved by train to Oxford, and on D-Day were in Southhampton.

A month after V-E day he wrote to my mother: I never have told you [because of wartime censorship] about my trip over. We took the 'Queen Mary' out of New York, went north of Ireland and landed in Greenock Scotland, commonly called there 'Gurrock'. From there we took a troop train to Eynsham Park England, near Oxford where we chased all over England getting vehicles, supplies etc. We stayed there two weeks, then again took a crowded troop train to Southhampton. We waited there several days for a very rough sea to calm, were very fortunate to get wooden barracks. We then rode trucks to a pier where we boarded a Polish ship, the 'Sobieski'. The crossing was a little rough - took about 26 hours. The ship couldn't get in the harbor at Le Havre and we had one dickens of a time getting personnel into barges as said barges did undesirable shifting about. It was dark, snowing and cold and we had to wade to shore as the docks were scarcely in condition to receive anything. The trip from Oxford on was uncomfortable and we ate irregularly, but so what - c'est la guerre!

He continued: Again we piled into trucks and rode five hours to a staging area near Rouen. That camp was really something - it was not supposed to be opened until 45 days later! No wood - nothing - except rows of tents, most of them down due to a heavy snowfall. Still it was better than pup tents. I put the nurses in a wrecked building in Rouen, a building which became affectionately known as the 'Fubar'. Ten days there, then the famous train ride to St. Erme - the unit stood in a cold rain 10 hours waiting for that damned train. But actually it could have been a lot worse.

They lived in tents for three weeks in the cold, before moving on to the village of Sissonne (sometimes Sissone, not Sissons, not Soissons) in (or west of) the Ardennes Forest, north of Reims and east of Paris, in the Département de l'Aisne. Here they were stationed with the 82nd Airborne Division base camp. The hospital came to Sissonne by French trains, in 40 train car loads. The unit consisted of 605 people, including 100 women, most of them nurses. They were housed in a cavalry camp, in a large barn. Within two weeks they received 305 casualties, and they had several more episodes where they received casualties by the trainload. They received casualties after the battle of the Ardennes Forest (the Battle of the Bulge) had ended.

There were about twenty similar general hospitals in France.They were positioned 30 to 40 km back from evacuation hospitals and clearing stations. They could hold a patient for up to thirty days. General hospitals performed much of the surgery, since little surgery was done in the more forward medical units.

As the senior medical officer AMR did triage, rather than hands-on surgery, with every trainload of casualties. He would not say much about these terrible experiences of deciding who would receive lifesaving medical care and who would be treated expectantly. He remembered particularly Leo Madsen, a hand surgeon, who was much concerned with exercising patients.

They received casualties and prisoners of war for four months, until several days after V-E Day (May 8th). Afterward the unit remained at Sissonne. They then received 500 German prisoners, 100 Polish guards, and an Italian sanitary unit. A 67 acre garden was ploughed by French "reverse Lend-Lease".

AMR and the staff of the 242nd GH reviewed the 82nd Airborne Division at Sissone just after VE Day. AMR gave up the equipment of the 242nd to a reserve COL at Sissonne,but he still had the command.He took the unit to Arlons in Luxembourg, where they were quartered at a spacious French girls' school. The mayor [of which city?] said that AMR received the Croix de Guerre, but he never received it. My father spoke some French, and there may have been a miscommunication here.

The 82nd Airborne was under the command of Major General James Gavin. If my father had a hero in World War II, it was his friend Jim Gavin. My father found the war very hard to talk about, and one of his few pleasant memories was being ranked out of a date with Marlene Dietrich by the general. When General Gavin, then long retired, made a public statement opposing the war in Viet Nam, that was all my father wanted to know. After that he was against it. I regret that my father and the general never met again after the war.

In late May 1945 the 242nd moved to Marseilles, and waited there. They were ordered out suddenly, and a number of people who were away on a pilgrimage to Lourdes were left behind when the unit shipped out toward the Pacific. They were ordered to a small island near Japan, code named Nitrogen. (AMR never did find out the actual name of the island.) They sailed out of the Straits of Gibraltar on a winding course (to evade submarines) toward Panama.(His letters do not confirm this statement, rather suggesting that they were still in harbor in Marseilles on V-J Day.) On V-J day they were diverted to New York City, where AMR left the unit, which was disbanded in Alabama shortly after. AMR went on to enter the Harvard School of Public Health in September 1945, and received his Master of Public Health the next year.

AMR recalled that when the ship's radio operator emerged from his shack to announce that Japan had surrendered "I had no idea how many bottles of whiskey could be hidden aboard a troop ship."

I have all but the last page of the roster of the 242nd General Hospital (often spelled 242d General Hospital), some other documents, and some photographs from near the end of the war. I would like to hear from anyone who remembers this unit.

The 241st General Hospital apparently was right "next door" to the 242nd at Sissonne. Albert V. Lawson was the chaplain, and his daughter Betty Walters maintains a Web site for it.

The 130th General Hospital has a Web site maintained by John H. Sweet, the son of the commanding officer Lt. Col. Howard E. Sweet MC.

John Sweet offers a bibliography:
1. United States Army in World War II: The Technical Services: Medical Service in the European Theater of Operations by Graham A. Cosmas and Albert E. Cowdrey
2. Neuropsychiatry In World War II (two volumes) Published by the Office of the Surgeon General: Dept of the Army Washington, DC 1966 (Out of Print) Volume II has a lot of information about the different hospitals.
3. The Ardennes: Battle of the Bulge by Hugh M. Cole; Center of Military History, US Army, Washington, DC; Available from the Sup of Documents.
4. A Time for Trumpets by Charles B. MacDonald: ISBN 0-688-15157-4

Another general hospital, the 201st General Hospital, was commanded by my father's colleague Ellis M. Altfather. I am in contact with members of his family, and would like more information about this unit. I now have a contact with some nurses in the 201st.

An informative history of the Army Nurse Corps in WW II does not mention the 242nd GH specifically.

I invite correction of any errors of military history in this account. Like my father, I am a better physician than I was a soldier.

Robert S. Richmond
Knoxville, Tennessee, USA
January 10th, 2000

Photographs of the 24nd General Hospital.

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Please contact me at Robert S. Richmond