[Opening title]: NLM Historical Lecture. A Doctor Goes to War: New Guinea and MacArthur in World War II. Roger O. Egeberg, MD.

Opening speaker: Good afternoon. This month, as you know, marks the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor and the entry of the United States into World War Two. So it therefore seems particularly appropriate that we should call on Dr. Roger Egeberg, who is a regular user of the library;

he occupies one of the scholar studies of the reading room and you have probably seen him around, and we have asked him to tell us something about his experiences as a physician in World War Two.

Now these were no ordinary experiences even by wartime standards, because among other things, Dr. Egeberg has the distinction of serving as physician to General Douglas MacArthur.

Dr. Egeberg who is um, Dr. Egeberg is currently a scholar, senior scholar-in-residence at the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences and has had a long and distinguished career in medicine.

It would take me too long, all of his time if I were, uh, to list for you all of his positions, honors, and accomplishments. But let me just mention by way of um, giving you some idea of his career, that he served as dean of the School of Medicine at the University of Southern California from 1964 to 1969.

He served as Assistant Secretary for Health, um, for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from 1969 to 1971, and then he served as a Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare,

and also as consultant on health affairs to the president of the United States until 1977. He also has a well-earned reputation as a storyteller, and I assure you are in for a treat as we hear Dr. Egeberg tell us about A Doctor Goes to War: New Guinea and McArthur in World War II.  Dr. Egeberg...

[Applause]

Dr. Egeberg: Thank you John, I think you have said enough. I appreciate you coming here, if it's from upstairs, I don't have to tell you about the weather outdoors.

But um, I thought maybe without wandering too far afield, I might be able to give you a personal, a more personal picture of General MacArthur. As you know he was born, or you may not even know who the hell he even was, but he was a great general, perhaps one of the greatest in World War II.

He was born an Army brat in one of those western forts and um, made it to West Point. He was the highest graduate they've had since I guess or up to that time, and he was, he led the Rainbow Division during World War One and at one point captured in two days what the other divisions had been trying to get for the past three months.

He was the youngest the division had, but he was the commander of our theater which was called the Southwest Pacific theater. They had a South Pacific but when General McArthur was brought out of the Philippines, they divided that into two and gave him the Southwest Pacific.

And, um, he knew, that to protect Australia, you had to win the battles in New Guinea. If they once got to Australia, he could not see any way of the British stopping them from taking that whole country. So I’d like to tell how I happened to be over there, and uh, if the women present aren't too sensitive, I would like to tell you how I got the job with MacArthur.

I was in Cleveland, my parents had come from Norway, my wife was a Canadian so we felt perhaps a little more strongly about the war, and I volunteered and got in, I think I was about 38, and joined the Fourth General Hospital which went over to Melbourne and I managed to finagle my way from there up to New Guinea,

where I wanted to go after I found where I was. And um, I was asked to come and meet General MacArthur and I um, uh, was told that I was being considered as a possible doctor for General MacArthur after I had a year in New Guinea.

And during that year I had been there long enough to do what they called [?] which I’m sure you know, which means that you begin to lose respect for anyone above you, you begin to speak more frankly, and um, sometimes the color of the people who live there pales.

Anyhow, I may as well start with it, I was responsible, I was called the surgeon of the command and I was responsible for hospitalization, evacuation to Australia, the care of all the sick or wounded, the sanitation, the malarial control, and venereal disease.

Well, I kept getting these, I don’t know, I have never done any of that kind of work in my life so I was learning on the spot and enjoying it very much. But uh, we had 4,000 per thousand rate for malaria in our camp and that was the highest our army had ever had. That meant that every person there would four times a year be sick enough to see a doctor, or that would be the average. So malaria was our great enemy.

For venereal disease I think we had an average of about twelve per year because they had to go on leave or go down to Australia really to get interesting. And every time I would ask for help on malaria I would get a raft of information about venereal disease until I decided that whoever was communicating with me thought malaria was a venereal disease.

[Laughter]

Finally I got a letter saying you will reply my endorsement hereon..and that sort of insults you; that means you haven't paid any attention to them, which I had tried to.

Do you visit your prophylactic stations between midnight and dawn, do they have a blue light, have you made your arrangements with the civilian authorities so that you can get the contacts and so forth. This was jungle! This was jungle, and there wasn't a city within 2,000 miles or 1,800 anyhow.

So finally in exasperation, and partly because I was [?] I wrote back on one of those letters and I said, "Don’t worry, the venereal disease in [?] well in hand. The only females we have here are among the Australian sheep, sent up for eating purposes. By cooperation with the commanding officer, we have limited the visiting hours to the sheep from six to seven, so that the men can choose between eating the fucking sheep or fucking the bleeping sheep.

The reason I tell you that is that's why the general appointed me as doctor, and I didn't know that until two years ago. Somebody had said must have been that awful letter you wrote. It got known, I’d go and meet somebody and say oh you wrote that letter.  [Laughter]

Well anyhow. I had sent it up and I had thought it would stop at the United States Services of Supply, the United States Army Services of Supply; but it didn't and I finally, two years ago, his clerk, who had been his clerk since before the war, knew everything that went through his office, said that my letter had arrived in his office, and had been on MacArthur’s desk and then for a while it would be on Sutherland’s desk, he was his chief of staff.

And then once he saw them holding it in hand and talking about it, and finally he heard, we oughta have a guy like that up here. No, I think that is something for the general; if he wanted ] I was disrespectful, I could continue this and use that particular word 26 times. But um, I was very disrespectful of everybody above me because I had been in [?] and uh, thought that they had forgotten us.

All right, that is why the general wanted me as his doctor. When I was called over to General Wright’s office, he told me about this and I said I don't want to be his doctor, he's the cause of all my troubles. And um, I tell you this because I found a letter. I wrote my wife about three times a week.

And I found a letter in which I said, about three to four months after I joined, you know, I think I love this man. And I loved him because of his concern, his daytime concern and I think nighttime concern about his potential casualties.

He was thinking about it all the time. He didn't just quickly decide how he was going to get up to the Philippines and finish the war. He was thinking about it, and uh, uh, you should know that in our advancing from New Guinea to Tokyo, our casualties were one American and ten enemies; and we were advancing.

Part of that was because he would skip, he'd skip where a lot of the, a lot of the Japanese forward, make a landing and then defend himself there, and the jungle would be his great ally when they tried to get back to lick him at that point.

Well, I’d been with him for about three months when I was told we were going to make a landing, and um, I guess they didn't trust me yet because they didn't tell me where the landing was going to be until we were aboard a plane heading north.

It was to be in the Admiralty Islands and it later turned out that that landing saved us three months of our schedule in our advance to the Philippines; and that meant much more because we had the, the three muddiest months when we were in Leyte and um, I would also like to say, that war was fought in a place that had virtually no roads and no railroads. Very different from what it would be in Europe.

So we, our engineers had to build roads in the mud and so forth. Well, we made the landing at Leyte. I'd never seen so many ships in my life.

They went out of sight that way, and they went out of sight that way. I think there were 600 ships in the convoy that went to the battle of Leyte. We made the landing.

Going ashore was really nothing because they had bombarded that place so that anybody living within ten miles of the shore was now twenty miles behind the shore. And um, after we had been there, the Japanese navy came down with a pincer movement; the Straits of San Bernardino and the straits of Surigao think it was.

And they were going to come up Leyte gulf, and they could have sunk most of our boats. At that point, Admiral Halsey who had the, uh, airplanes, was way up chasing another part of their fleet, which may had been sent out as a red herring for him, I don't know.

But, General, I mean Admiral Kincaid had to come down and kick us off his flagship, and take part in the battle at the mouth of the gulf. MacArthur wanted to go with him but saw the reason why he wouldn't let him, and um, in that first night he was looking down that way, and you could hear the shooting, you could hear those big guns quite a distance and all of a sudden he saw that the Japanese were dropping barium ights, the magnesium flares that make a tremendous light.

They don't have radar, we'll win this, and we'll win it in a night; and that was true. He predicted that we would win that naval battle down there, which was a crucial battle because he saw them shooting barium lights to see what was around them; and we did win.

And the two navies, who probably had two times as much as we did, maybe more, retreated; and I understand they retreated because they got orders from Tokyo to retreat. They couldn't make the decisions themselves. So it isn't only our country that sometimes seems stupid on overall decisions.

Anyhow, after we'd been in Leyte, I tell you, my wife said if I didn't write this down, I’d talk too long, so I think I’ll take a look at this. Well, in making the Admiralty anding I said my gosh I’m going to land on this shore and this is the way I was thinking, where the Japanese are and uh, maybe I’ll see some shooting.

Funny thing, I was eager to do it. So we went up with 500 troops and there were, according to our intelligence, 5,000 Japanese soldiers on that island. And uh, and we had some inclination or some indication that they were perhaps over towards the other shore from Surigao harbor or wherever it was where we landed; and um, we landed.

The coxswain had been killed on the boat before us. We landed second or third wave, overcast day, and um, they were shooting, so I heard the shooting; and I saw that you could see the rear of a shell going until it hit where it was going to go and exploded. I didn't know you could do that, it moved slowly enough you could watch it.

All right, I saw that. We went ashore, and then the airstrip they had there was within, oh fifty or a hundred yards of the place where we had landed, and in walking to the airstrip I was amazed to see I was walking almost over people who were digging a hole, putting up a couple of logs, and putting a machine gun behind them and doing other things to prepare them from an attack.

And um, General MacArthur got on the airstrip and uh, walked on the airstrip; I think there was a slight drizzle.

And while he was walking down this airstrip which wasn't more than about, oh, I would think one hundred yards wide, we were in the middle, I could hear these voices on the other side.

And I didn't dare talk to them at that point, but there were several Japanese dead on the strip, and he went over to look at them to find out what kind of troops they were.

But they were naked except for their drawers, so he couldn't. And uh, we walked up, we walked back, and uh, then he wanted to see how much of a hole the eight-inch shells had made compared with the 25 or 50 pound bomb that a plane from our cruiser had dropped practically out of his arms.

And uh, he found that the shell did not make as big a hole as the bomb. That became important to his thinking about how to conduct that war. So we went back aboard ship. Contrast...here you are with people who are going to be attacked. They are getting ready.

They don't know for how many and as a matter of fact that night, they killed 600 or more Japanese on that strip, who were making a banzai charge across with those machine guns that we had seen them putting in place.

But we were aboard the ship eating with good silver, had a tablecloth, the table had a tablecloth, and it just seemed such a contrast, and in a way so unfair. And uh, I'll tell you later how often the general went forward.

And I think he went forward a lot for the same reason that I wanted to go forward with him. And that was that in a sense you wanted to sort of help your conscience, the contrast between your two lives, and um, take the dangers. Gosh he took an awful lot of them, and feel like it wasn't you sitting back here and telling them what to do over there.

In fact the general once said you know, they did this, I asked him why he went forward so much. He said in the First World War they didn't do this right. They either had deep holes in the ground where the officers and the higher officers were, or they were many miles behind the lines.

And they couldn't see what the front was like. They couldn't see where there was a shell hole that might give shelter either for you or for an enemy with a machine gun; where there was a tree that had been knocked down and so forth. They needed to see that.

But the, I think the officers that really told them to go ahead were at the captain or lieutenant level. So he would go forward and I asked him why and he said, I want my generals to go forward so that their colonels go forward, so that their majors go forward, and so that the people who ask the troops to do something know what they are asking them to do.

Well, I could agree with that and I could understand that but I thought that he went far beyond that times and I’ll mention that in a minute.

Now, I told you the Admiralty landing, the Leyte landing, then after we were in Leyte, Leyte was a muddy place. We had to build airfields there to protect ourselves against the Japanese who had Clark Field and other fields and could fly and could do what they wanted, they had the air.

Well, somehow in three or four months, the engineers were able to increase the roads and improve them and build two airfields. So we felt that, or he felt, that that part was okay and we could now go forward to Lingayen.

Well, the, the uh, convoy going to Lingayen must had been closer to eight or nine hundred ships. It was a tremendous convoy. Battleships, cruisers, aircraft carriers, small aircraft carriers, and troopships. And um, we passed.. there is the Philippines, here is the main island; Luzon and here is Manila, and…

Manila was what we wanted, and here were we down here on Leyte and we had to come up the coast and come in up there passing within about 75 miles of Clark Field were the Japanese had all these kamikazes. So as we passed Clark Field...

I tell you this next because I was amazed. They were shooting. They sank what we call a jeep carrier not from us and they had to push the airplanes off for some reason so that the others could come in and go down the ship, it was horrible to see a whole big ship go down.

Particularly if it was close. And then one aimed for us, well I had wondered, and I had to do this during the war, where is a place that's safe.

So I would figure out and then I would baptize that place as being safe; and I’d pick the anchor chain in the rear, or the bow I guess it was, of our ship and we were on a cruiser, uh, as being a safe place because I could jump on either side of it.

An anchor chain has each part of the chain is about that big and of course that thick. I don’t know why I did, but just sitting there made me feel better. I was near a group of people from the mess that had a machine gun and they could have brought those fellows down with what they called them,

they could swear better than the Australians, and they did and it bucked up their moral and they pulled the trigger and their bullets would go like this while the plane was coming in.

But anyhow, I almost wish that I could have pulled the trigger on something. But they shot him down just about a second before he would have hit us and took his tail off and he went in whirling like this and went into the water between us and the next ship; probably 100 yards, 150 away from us.

And the plume of water that went up was so high that if he had hit the deck, he would have killed an awful lot of our people. Well, I ran up to the bridge thinking he must be there but he wasn't, hadn't seen him for a while. So I looked around, then ran down to the cabin which was right under our, one of our big, very busy aircraft guns, antiaircraft guns.

Well, I got to the door and I looked in and here he was lying in his bed like that. I thought oh my god he's died of shock! And uh, but then I thought he was breathing so I stood at the door and I counted his breaths, and they were about mine after I’d been lying down a while.

So I went in and took his pulse. Well his pulse was around 66, it was below 70, and his breathing was normal so he wasn't faking any sleep and he said what's the matter, Doc? And I said I just wanted to see if you were all right. And he said well I tell ya, I watched all the shooting and I watched everything and I figured there was nothing I could do to help so I’d come down and take a nap.

And in that bombardment he had taken a nap; fallen sound asleep, and um, he could do that. Well, finally we made our Lingayen landing and uh, in spite of the kamikazes, they did sink quite a few of our ships; killed a number of our people.

Well, we were settled in Lingayen which is the, that's the Philippines, it went up there and uh, Lingayen Gulf and uh, no. Oh hell! I can't draw it on my hand for you but Lingayen Gulf we had to go the length of Luzon except at another part of it went further north, and then down into a dip called Lingayen Gulf, which was where the Japanese had landed when they took the Philippines.

And um, we uh, had established ourselves there, I think landed four divisions and they started down.

And um, down the main valley of the, of Luzon, was between fifty and one hundred miles wide, it was a luxurious valley. It had fish farms at both ends and good crops in between and uh, a lot of rice was growing there.

Well, General thought that Krueger, General Krueger who was in charge was moving too slowly. So he would send me forward.

I had an automobile map, and he said well, find out where they're fighting. So I’d go patrol until I was either stopped by our troops or I saw three or four of these round things which are land mines; I’d cross the road and known that I had reached some point and I’d come back and tell him about where it was on several roads.

He felt that Krueger, that the people doing the fighting had to report to the regiment, and they had to report to the division, and that had to report to Krueger, and Krueger had to report to MacArthur. He thought they had lost about a half a day in that or a day and, so I was sort of his spy to find out how far they were.

He was with every front that there was, and once he thought there was a place where there was heavy fighting and we weren't making any headway, so he said we would go there tomorrow, and so we did. The next day, we drove as far as we could and then walked, and um, we could see our side shooting and lying on their bellies and we got to a big tree and a colonel jumped up and MacArthur said, how are things going?

Asked him, has he got somebody going around the end and so forth, and the colonel said he had. In the meantime, they were bringing in dead and wounded soldiers, dragging them across that field and right by me to an aid station which had been set up somewhere behind them.

And I, we were right at the front. And we stood up, he liked to stand, he liked to stand like this and look into something that was very close.

And um, the colonel stood with him; in the meantime, everybody else was lying down on their bellies shooting and then all the leaves started to come down off  that tree and they were being shot off by the Japanese machine gun which maybe couldn't lower itself far enough, but at least hadn't lowered itself far enough to hit us.

So he stood up there and talked the tactics of that situation over and then we started to walk back and we met reinforcements coming up and it was interesting to see the looks on their faces.

Some were surprised, some almost sneered, it must be something funny about this but they were coming up to help with this. Well, later on we took Malacanan Palace.

Malacanan Palace is right on the passing river and the passing river doesn't look wider than this room is long. And um, the, we hadn't crossed it yet. So in other words, we hadn't taken anything on the other side. The um, general wanted to see where things were going on and he said I want to go forward, and [?] by fire and I don't mean sniper fire.

He thought snipers for the most part were frightened people either naval or army left behind to sort of cover a rear guard action but not sharpshooters or anything like that; so he didn't think you had to worry about them.

When their bullets landed on the street not too far away or I could hear them going by me, I thought that the snipers had a better sighting than I had hoped or better aim.

Well, we had gotten up here, and all of a sudden a man jumped out of a hole, he was a corporal and he said, General you can't go in there, we haven't taken it yet; and the general said um, have you been in? No, we haven't taken it yet. So he said uh, Doc, Larry, let’s take it.

And uh, it's the first time he sent me ahead of him. Usually he was leading, but this time he said, Doc, Larry, you go down that hole. This is the business end of the palace, and you'll find about eight doors on either side and they're like saloon doors, they don’t reach so there can be a lot of draft.

Now there may be some Japs in there so you better be ready and then um, when you have cleared this part, come back. Well, I had remembered seeing James Cagney, a couple of other people, and when they were really doing it, well they had their gun and they would kick the door open and go like that; so I did, and with the first room I went like that, no Japanese in it fortunately.

Also I had not taken the safety off of my gun. [Laughter]. And um, we went down, came back, told them that none of those rooms were occupied. So he came in and we started up into the main palace and we met a woman, a Filipino woman.

And MacArthur said, I take it that you're in charge of the housekeeping of the place. She said yes. He said, are there any Japanese here?

She said yes, at the other end of the palace there are Japanese officers and men. So we didn't go that far. We stopped at Quezon’s office. And um, MacArthur had liked Quezon, the former president of the Philippines very much and he sat down and said you know, he used to have Jean's picture here, and Arthur here, and we'd have some very good talks.

Well, he got carried away and I thought here is a window, there's the passing river, and I’d like to see what’s on the other side. And I got over to the window and what did I see but a machine gun, whatever they call it, made of concrete, and it had a wide strip in the middle, and there were two machine guns there, and two Japanese soldiers behind them.

And they were looking, so I pretended like I hadn't seen anything, went back to the general and said we'd better get out of this room, there are two machine guns and so forth, and he said,

Oh, and he got up and he jumped and he put his legs just like that, put his hands in his pockets and looked up the barrels of two machine guns with Japanese soldiers behind them.

All of a sudden he went like this, and we left the room, and then they tore the room apart. Well, that happened and then I’ll tell you one other story.

Um, we were going down Bataan on the death march road, cobblestone road and uh, you could think of our troops having walked out on it when the Japanese took them.

And um, he had had about six, when he moved, people would follow him, but he had about six or eight jeeps in the beginning following him, and that had dropped to six when they saw were we were going, and it dropped to three, and I think it was just us and one other when we reached a place where they begged him to stop.

That is, the generals behind here begged him to stop.  But he said, you got troops ahead of here? And they said yes, we have a detachment up ahead, so we went ahead.

And then, we came to a place, an open place, and here were twenty-six or thirty dead Japanese just killed. And here was our little station, a machine gun, uh, several different troop carriers, whatever you want to call them, but they were burning. They were burning and uh, some tents were burning behind them.

There had been a Japanese banzai attack which they had just repelled. The Japanese had killed two of our men, and um, you began to feel you were getting close to action. This had happened about five minutes before.

So MacArthur got out and talked to his captain and uh, serious talk, and he said what have we got ahead? He said I got two men, two point men going up ahead. So he said well I’ll take my own, what do they call us, I’ll take my own patrol.

So he said Larry, Doc! So we started forward, our jeep and one other, and pretty soon we came across the two men that they had ahead, they were crawling up the ditch on either side, and they said that they thought that there was a lot of Japanese up ahead.

MacArthur had been told by our intelligence that the Japanese probably had twenty or thirty tanks on that side of the road; but as we were going he said you know Doc, if I were caught, if I were caught in the Japanese situation, I’d head for that mountain that I pointed out to you and I would gather enough troops to have a wicked guerilla force.

So, he thought that we should go ahead. Well, we did, and we went probably about five or six miles in front of our far-most lines. Then we got to a place where the bridge had been blown up and I, I was very grateful for that, but as we got out to look around, two of our planes came along and they swooped down to about 8,000 feet and I thought General, those are ours, they may not know that we're there.

And uh, he looked at them, and then they came down lower, and then they came down at strafing level which is just about, I don't know, 40 yards up. And I said, for gosh sake get behind the jeep engine anyhow. In the meantime I couldn't think of doing anything except waving like this.

And uh, they, they apparently recognized what we were because we were in a place where they should have been seeing Japanese. So, we went back, well that evening, here we were back at San Miguel, our headquarters which was a Sugar Central, and we had a white tablecloth and we had nice silverware, and we had a well-cooked meal, and I said

General, I can understand why you go forward under certain circumstances, so that your generals and colonels and so forth will also go forward, but on Bataan today, and at the Malacanan the other day, and when we were standing up in front of that machine gun that was taking the leaves off the tree, you weren't helping anybody, why'd you do it?

Well he said, and I think this is important, and he said, you know Doc, I used to think that I had a mission to accomplish, and that I would be spared to accomplish that mission and my mission was always pretty far ahead.

But he said, I don't believe that anymore. So I said well, why you did that. And he said well Doc, I was testing my timing. You were testing your timing against two fellows with two machine guns pointing at you?

What made you suddenly walk, get out? He said well, one of them said something to the other, and then they lowered their heads and wiggled their shoulders, and I thought it was time to get out. Well, I uh, I don't know how to explain that.

I don’t think he felt suicidal, I think he still felt confident and because he still felt confident, I must have had some confidence because [?].

Well now, let me see, I don’t want to go too far here. Yes, on Luzon we were able to travel in jeep, in a jeep, because it was the dry season, and Luzon had quite a few roads; it didn't have much in a way of a railroad but it did have one going down the main plain.

So he would get out and he would travel to places where there was trouble or just to see what the general feeling was and so forth. Well, on one of these trips, we were just below Tarlac, Tarlac is pretty well in the middle of the Luzon valley.

And he said Doc, have you noticed any difference between the people down here and the people north of Tarlac? Well, I thought they don't look very happy down here, but he didn't wait for more explanation on my part he said look, north of Tarlac is the rice economy, everybody up there has a little piece of land on which he is growing rice.

Did you notice how clean they were on a Sunday, how they were going to church? Did you notice how many churches, how many schools, and how the people seemed much happier? Down here, this is absentee management. All these sugarcane fields have changed the sugarcane below Tarlac.

All these sugarcane fields are owned in Manila or Chicago, or somewhere else.

Absentee management, demand something of the people who are running the place and they don't have much heart! If they did, they'd probably be fired.

So we got talking a little bit more and he, I realized then that we hadn't seen any schools, we'd only seen a few churches and they weren't very good, or very good architecture, and um, the people that we saw looked surly.

And apparently they either might have a little sugarcane of their own, but they had to sell that to the people who had the mill. Otherwise they just worked for the absentee owners. Well, it was very impressive to see all that but on another trip, his generals had said now look, these are Hukbalahap around here and they're gainst the government, and God knows what government they are for, so you ought to get rid of them.

MacArthur said, you mean send an expeditionary force after those people? So he talked to me about that later, and he said you know, those Huks` represent the people south of Tarlac, I'm sure there aren't many of them from the rice-growing country.

But would you blame them for having a revolution? Would you blame them for being, uh, I think at  that time we maybe knew they were beginning to become communist. He said no, I'd certainly not say anything against them. I don't blame them for what they’re doing.

Now, that shows how he was thinking and um, I was going to mention a little bit earlier about the people who said he was arrogant. I think he was proud, but I don’t think he was arrogant.

You might not want to believe it but MacArthur was shy. On one of our cruiser trips going to a landing he said Doc, I’d like to eat with the officers’ mess. So I arranged that very quickly, they were delighted. I came back and said it's all arranged and he said, I don’t think I, I don’t think I’d better do it tonight, I’ll do it tomorrow.

He never did it! He was afraid to sit with a group like that. He didn't mind standing up and talking to a hell of a lot of people. But he did feel very self-conscious and shy about sitting down at a mess like that.

And as far as our headquarters people were concerned, I may have been closer to him than anybody else, closer than anybody perhaps but his wife.

But um, he didn't care where people sat at the table when he had a mess at Leyte; and um you didn't sit according to rank, and if the uh, conversation lagged, he'd pick it back up and see that it went well. And some of those conversations were outstanding, I wish I had chance to tell you about them but it would take quite a while and that's why Meg wanted me to write this.

Now, he would sometimes in the jeep, oh god I’ve talked too long. Well, he would say I want to do this, if I do this the Japanese will do that or they may do that.

Now if they do that we may have to do this or this and he'd play this game back and forth like a game of chess until I was lost.

But that was what he was thinking of often in the jeep. I've told you about Tarlac, I’ve told you about the Huks, then while we were still able to drive in the jeep, he started talking about what we might do when we took, when we took uh, Japan.

And the atomic bombs hadn't been dropped at all so there was none of that in the background. He said Doc, when I get there, I’ve got to meet the emperor in a nice friendly way, but I’m going to ask him, this is after the surrender,

I’m going to ask him to appoint a cabinet and it'll be mostly military people, civilian military people and the highest-ranking army people, navy, and he'd say what would you think the newspapers are going to say about that?

And I nodded my head and before I could answer he said, but how else would you disarm the whole army of six or eight million people, how would you break up their staff corps except by having people that those people respected; and I got the point.

So I’ll go through them. The next was to have the rich industrialists and uh, he had aims with respect to them, and then he went for suffrage, and he had an appropriate cabinet for the emperor for that, and finally he had the land reform for which they are still very grateful to him.

So he had all those things planned long before he got to Japan and he was afraid that the State Department might come in, so I think he kept this under sort of a quasi-army state rather than let the war be all over and the State Department would come in.

Now, I happen to be the first man, two more points here, first man into Tokyo under orders, they had opened up a part of Yokohama for us but we weren't to go in to Tokyo for another two weeks. They were demilitarizing bit by bit.

So, we had no cars so we um, uh, ordered or got a Japanese taxi cab and a man from the foreign office.

I think he was probably a middling officer, perhaps above that from the foreign office, and he took us in. MacArthur wanted to know where he could have his headquarters, which he later picked the Dai-Ichi building, how the Tokyo hotel was, and how the state of the embassy was.

And we did find out all those things for him but on the way in, I picked up two generals when they heard were I was going they said you can't go without us.

Happened to be two friends of mine, Pat Casey and Jack Sverdrup, Jack Sverdrup said, what do you think of Pearl Harbor? Oh, too bad, it was too bad. And uh, then Pat Casey said , what do you mean too bad?

Oh, we should have gone on to California and gone on beyond that. This was at the end of the war, a fellow in the foreign office thought that.

Can you imagine that? Now finally we welcome the emperor. The surrender ceremony had occurred, I was on board the Missouri at that time but then they had wanted him to ask the emperor to call on him and he said no, it's going to take him a while to get adjusted to some of these things. Remember what he means to all the people.

I think if I wait, he'll ask to come and see me, and he did.  I'd forgotten it, it was a fairly long time, two or three weeks. But um, he was preparing to see him.

He had a great hall sort of there and he had a sofa brought in and two chairs and otherwise they had cleared it. And he said well put the sofa here, so I shoved the sofa over a bit and I thought that wasn't quite right. He stood there and said no, I think we ought to be forward this way a little bit.

And then we put a chair here for the Japanese interpreter and a chair here for our interpreter and he was standing there looking at it when we heard the crunch of the emperor’s wheels on the, on the uh, driveway outside.

He said my God, he's here! Oh I didn't have a soldier outside, I got nobody, you go on and walk him in. No, and he said, well you know what to do, and that’s just the way it is, he started to tell me what to do and then he said oh well, you know what to do.

So I went out to the door, opened it, went out, and there you the emperor looked just the way he did in his pictures. Top hat, dress suit, face like that, and mustache, and um, I opened the door.

And uh, the emperor got out, but his Chamberlain stayed in, just the emperor got out. So I knew enough not offer to shake his hand, from his point of view; so I bowed and I smiled and then I looked serious.

Anyhow I had included all the emotions I thought I should express. So I then went this way and MacArthur had come forward and he reached out and shook hands with the emperor; and what do you think I did. Jean MacArthur, oh I forgot, I talked with Jean yesterday on the phone.

She called to thank me for a letter I had written, and I said I’m gonna speak to some people about the general tomorrow and you mind if I give them your greetings and she said oh do, do! So I bring you her greetings, she is 93 years old today or tomorrow and um, very [?].

Can't move around as much as she'd like to. Anyhow, she had suggested that she and I go behind a curtain and watch.

Well, I wouldn't have suggested it myself but I was delighted to do it with her. So probably about twenty feet away, we were behind the curtain, we couldn't hear too well, but we watched the faces.

The emperor never changed his face, just like this, and MacArthur was very [?] and spoke with him, and he told me afterwards I’m sure that the general spoke English very well, he went to college...when he was interested in fish, and um, but it gave him an extra few minutes if he waited for the translation and I thought maybe he wanted that, so I didn't worry about it.

But they had had a pleasant talk. I have been interviewed three times by Tokyo Radio about that talk, and you know what they asked me, the first two times?

They said is it true that the general offered the emperor a cigarette? Well, I didn't notice that, I wasn't conscious of it. And then they said, well who lit that cigarette, did the general light the cigarette for the emperor? And that's about as far as they went in their first questions.

Now later I had a very intelligent woman who asked me a lot of good questions. Anyhow, I think that is a good place to end this. The emperor was welcomed and MacArthur began his series of talks and um, ever since then, Japan in most quarters is very grateful. Thank you very much for being here.  [Applause].

[Opening speaker]: Thank you very much..

[Dr. Egeberg]: Sorry to take so long..

[Opening speaker]: ] and if there are a few questions we can take a few questions.

[Frances H. Howard]: Well, my comment is going to be brief but extremely generous because I think um, we have a rare privilege right here at the Library of Medicine to hear someone who was where the action was, and gives us a real viewpoint of history.

I uh, feel very strongly about this today because one day I went to lunch with this great senior scholar was telling me about the whole beginning of MASH, I had no idea that I was sitting in a car next to a man who invented or came up with, with MASH. And one of the things that you didn't tell us today was uh, this uh,  how this developed.

And I think the audience most of us here, watched that film, would like to have the author, the inventor, the beginning of MASH, tell a little bit about it, I wonder if you could do that, Roger.

[Dr. Egeberg]: If you have time, I could do it in three minutes, I would like to lean on this. Well, in New Guinea they were fighting, and I was still in Melbourne where our hospital was becoming established.

They were fighting um, to keep the Japanese from going over the crest down to Moresby which was the biggest town probably two or three thousand between the tip of New Guinea and five hundred miles the other way.

Well uh, I, our nurses decided to have a party, it may had been the Fourth of July or something like that. But they had a big party and they invited General Carroll who was the chief medical officer of  the Seychelles and later 4GHQ.

And he had come out of the Philippines and they'd also invited Ma Clement, the chief nurse whom I later came to love.

Well, I heard that General Carroll was shy and uh, I figured that maybe when we had the intermission for food, he'd look for Ma Clement, the only person he really knew; sit with her. So just before that I asked her for a dance, and you know it seemed so informal.

Anyhow, I asked her for a dance but she apparently got asthma when she danced so we sat, and we had a good talk, and the intermission came and sure enough General Carroll came over to sit next to her. So after we'd talked for a few minutes about something else, I said General, I understand you're trying to create some small, portable, hospitals to go up and uh, help on the Kokoda Trail.

I got to tell you this, that anybody wounded in New Guinea, if they had to be carried, and it wasn't along the shore, or they might not have any help anyhow; why it took sixteen natives to carry one wounded,

because they had to have two and two on one, they had long handles for the stretcher, and they'd be going up a hill where it was muddy, and like a sand dune they'd slip back a great deal and then go down where they had to worry, and it would take them two days to get that man about five miles there and back, or maybe ten.

And uh, see they had to take turns doing that. So, he had thought of a portable hospital and I had certainly thought of it, too.

And I said, wouldn't you like to establish some portable, surgical, hospitals. Enough to give definitive treatment of a certain type; and he said yes, are you interested?

And I said yes, I certainly am. He said I’ll have you ordered over tomorrow or whatever you do. And I said well, my friend Dave Chambers is also interested, and I think between the two of us, we can do you a lot more good.

Well, Dave and I worked on this. We figured a 25-bed hospital, everybody could carry part of that hospital; we didn't think of wheels, and that meant everybody had to carry about forty pounds and we all made sure we had a carpenter, and we had a plumber,

and we had uh, a logger or somebody who could cut down trees because we figured that with those people we could, with the jungle materials build what might be an operating room or something.

So we established these four, there was one medical man, one surgeon, one anesthesiologist, and uh, I’ve forgotten what the fourth man was. But then there was twenty-one people, including nurses, women nurses who were going to carry the rest of the hospital which we had trimmed down to a load of about forty pounds each and we finally got that done.

And we set one up in New Guinea, and I don't know how much good that did, I never saw it. But I saw a number in the Philippines and they were far enough forward so that ,one that I had visited a fellow named [?] was the head of it, and um, they had some I don't know, some kind of shells, mortar probably, and they dropped on the edges of [?], wounded somebody but didn't kill anybody.

They were right up there, and we found out that the moral of a regiment that was going into action, if they had one of our portable surgical hospitals, and this was portable, surgical hospitals, why they, the morale went way up because you could have a through and through wound to the chest and a surgeon could see that that didn't kill him necessarily;

and you could have many other things where a doctor could make a big difference, including some of the belly wounds. Well, when we got to the Philippines, we could see that we could use a stretcher, I mean that we could use whatever kind of wheeled vehicles we could get. So we changed to wheeled vehicles.

And that got them farther and it got more materiel and so forth for them. And then, that's about where it stopped.

But then when they started fighting in Vietnam I guess. Was it Korea? Yeah, well that is where MASH was but I think they began to use helicopters in Vietnam and um then when they got to Korea they had, what you could see was MASH.

But those grew out of what I just described, and uh, it was funny, I’ll tell you one thing about that. We had to get a lot of stuff that was hard to get.

So Dave and I were both well over six feet, I was six-three then, and um, we'd find somebody else who was tall, and we knew we had to get this general so we burst open his door, rushed in on him, standing there like this, and he'd look and he'd go like this [arms raised]

Well then we knew that we were going to get what we wanted, which wasn't usually very much. But we felt that three tall people, could do a hell of a lot more than an awful lot of [?] and it did, we got them ready in time.

[Applause]

Well, I’d like to sit down for a minute now, was that okay? Well that’s right....You mind if I keep seated?