CHAPTER II
Blood on the Coral Sea
AT PEARL HARBOR there was no lack of medical supplies or even of beds for the injured. That is a story of preparedness.
But what happens in war at sea when the medical supplies run out, or simply aren't there? What can a doctor do for his patients without a hospital or even hammocks to put them in, when the ship is rapidly blowing up under his sick bay? How can he bind up wounds or prevent infection in men who are being swept down a mountainside in Java or New Guinea in a last-minute retreat to the sea away from the enemy whose helmets can be seen rising in a wave of gray steel over the rim of the hill? With the best intentions in the world, and with all the skill a good education in medicine and surgery can bestow, what can he do to preserve life and relieve suffering when he and several hundred injured are drifting on hastily contrived rafts or clinging to bamboos and bits of wreckage in a wide, pitiless, shark-infested sea?
In the very hour that the first wave of Jap bombers came winging over Diamond Head, in the harbor of San Francisco the liner President Polk was making ready to sail for the Orient. She carried the rich Christmas trade, Waikiki-bound, as well as a number of wealthy Americans escaping winter by a long Pacific cruise. Also aboard her, though not one of either of these groups, was an unassuming, middle-aged American doctor, Corydon M. Wassell,
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