The Greatest Generation
An American Doctor Saves Lives On The Front Lines And Then In Rural North Carolina
By Tom Brokaw
A new generation of Americans has a greater appreciation of what was involved on D-Day as a result of Steven Spielberg's stunning film Saving Private Ryan. For most younger Americans, D-Day has been a page or two in their history books, or some anniversary ceremony on television with a lot of white-haired men leaning into the winds coming off the English Channel as President Reagan or President Clinton praised their contributions. Saving Private Ryan, although a work of fiction, is true to the sound, the fury, the death, the terrible wounds of that day.
Charles O. Van Gorder was a special part of D-Day. He was a 31-year-old captain in the U.S. Army Medical Corps in June 1944, a graduate of the University of Tennessee Medical School. He'd already served in North Africa when he volunteered to be part of a two-man surgical team that would try something new for D-Day: it would be part of the 101st Airborne assault force setting up medical facilities in the middle of the fighting instead of safely behind the Allied lines. They knew that casualties would be high and that saving lives would require immediate attention.
So Captain Van Gorder and his colleagues were loaded onto gliders for the flight across the English Channel and into Normandy. That was at 4 a.m. By nine that same day, June 6, 1944, Van Gorder and his fellow doctors had setup an operating facility, a precursor to the MASH units, the Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals that saved so many lives.
They were located in a French chateau; they converted the milk storage room to an operating room, and by late that afternoon the chateau grounds were covered with hundreds of wounded young Americans. Van Gorder and the other surgeons operated around the clock for 36 hours, always wearing their helmets because the chateau was often in the line of fire.
Altogether, it was a frantic and grisly scene that even now, more than 50 years later, Dr. Van Gorder cannot remove from his memory. "I have flashbacks every day," he says. "All those boys being slaughtered, sometimes 200 boys and only 10 surgeons."
Dr. Van Gorder's D-Day initiation wasn't the end of his frontline experience; it was only the beginning. His unit stayed with the 101st over the next six months as it fought its way across Europe, headed for the heart of Germany. They were in the thick of the fighting during the long siege in Belgium, and during the Battle of the Bulge.
In December 1944, Dr. Van Gorder and his colleague and friend, Dr. John Rodda, were in the middle of surgery when their makeshift operating room came under heavy fire from the German forces. "I was practically lying on my stomach operating on patients," Van Gorder remembers, "because of the shooting coming right into the tent.
"I was the only one who spoke German, so I went to the end of the tent and waved a towel through the flap. I told the German commander we had more than 50 wounded, including German POWs." They were taken prisoner on December 19, 1944.
Van Gorder had suffered shrapnel wounds in his knees while the operating tent was under fire, so his friend Dr. Rodda supported him as they trekked through the snow under the watchful German guns. Van Gorder is convinced that without Rodda's help the Germans would have shot him as a straggler. Two young American doctors, who had seen more death and suffering than most graduating classes of doctors were likely to see in a lifetime, were now trying just to keep each other alive. Finally they made their way back to American lines in the spring of 1945.
When the war was over, Dr. Van Gorder visited his parents, who had relocated to the North Carolina mountain hamlet of Andrews. It was a logging community, the very essence of backwoods. After the war, however, it looked like a little piece of heaven to Dr. Van Gorder. The people were plain and friendly, the village was scenic and tranquil - and there were no doctors. He decided to stay and open a practice.
He called his wartime buddy and fellow surgeon, John Rodda, and invited him to become a partner. They opened a small clinic and mini-hospital above a department store. Today the hospital has 60 beds and a full range of medical services, from X-ray to surgery. It is being expanded to accommodate 16 more doctors, in a community that had none when the war ended.
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The Greatest Generation is published by Random House and available at booksellers. (ISBN: 0-375-50202-5; hardbound, 420 pages; $24.95.) A videotape of the NBC television production is available from the New Video Group, Inc. for $19.95. Call toll-free to 1-800-420-2626.
Use of this excerpt is by special permission of Random House.
Published June 1999, Alabama Prime Times
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