thusiastic response to the surgeon general's request for funds to provide for an increase in hospital facilities.
The hospital at Pearl Harbor grew. One by one, here and there new corridors, outbuildings, and pavilions were provided. Medical stores were built up. In Hawaii, there are no firms manufacturing drugs or medical supplies. All these must come from the United States, and it takes time to get them there.
The value of this foresight is proved by the fact, announced by the surgeon general of the Navy, Rear Admiral Ross T. McIntire, that "at midnight of December seventh there were 960 patients in a hospital whose official rating was 506 patients. And next day nearly 100 more were received who had been temporarily cared for at emergency dressing stations."
A mobile hospital with a capacity of 600 beds had been transported to Pearl Harbor and was practically set up and was functioning on that fateful day, December 7, 1941.
Whatever criticism may be made of our defense program at Pearl Harbor, it must necessarily stop short of the matter of medical preparedness. When it came to taking care of those injured in the raid, we were right on the spot; we were well staffed and well equipped.
Thank God for that!
By the time Captain Hayden got to the hospital, the officer of the day had ordered all hands to their stations. The hospital's three ambulances and all the fire-fighting apparatus were distributed about the grounds, so that in case a bomb were dropped, all the apparatus would not be destroyed at once. The immediate demand was for as many beds as possible for the casualties of the battle then going on. There was no possible way of estimating how many these would be. As ship after ship was hit or set afire, it was all too evident that everything the hospital had wasn't going to be too much. If only it were enough!
The first casualty brought in was a man who had been walking along the road by the hospital with his wife and small child. A
