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They came out of the fog at half past ten at night. By eleven the American field hospital at the crossroads was gone — six trucks burning, the red crosses on the tents lit by their own wreckage. One hundred and forty-two men were marched east into German lines. Every one of them a surgeon, a technician or an aidman.
Captured doctors did not go behind wire. Under the Geneva Convention they were kept where the wounded were and put to work — and that winter, the wounded in front of them were not always American. In convent cellars and farmhouses on the German side of the line, American surgeons operated on German soldiers while German military doctors stood across the table and watched.
What those German doctors understood, standing there, had nothing to do with technique or supply. One of them said it out loud, to an American's face, in three sentences. The third sentence is why this video exists.
Real names and units, from the official records of the U.S. Army Medical Department.
Subscribe for forgotten WW2 stories ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@ww2dossierr
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They came out of the fog at half past ten at night. By eleven the American field hospital at the crossroads was gone — six trucks burning, the red crosses on the tents lit by their own wreckage. One hundred and forty-two men were marched east into German lines. Every one of them a surgeon, a technician or an aidman.
Captured doctors did not go behind wire. Under the Geneva Convention they were kept where the wounded were and put to work — and that winter, the wounded in front of them were not always American. In convent cellars and farmhouses on the German side of the line, American surgeons operated on German soldiers while German military doctors stood across the table and watched.
What those German doctors understood, standing there, had nothing to do with technique or supply. One of them said it out loud, to an American's face, in three sentences. The third sentence is why this video exists.
Real names and units, from the official records of the U.S. Army Medical Department.
Subscribe for forgotten WW2 stories ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@ww2dossierr
Like if you think th
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LearningTranscript
00:00December 19th, 1944. Half past ten at night. A crossroads in the Bois de Herbemont,
00:07eight miles northwest of Bastogne, Belgium. The shooting has stopped. It lasted about 15 minutes,
00:15and now the only sound is the fire. Six vehicles are burning at the junction,
00:19and the light they throw is bright enough to read by. It falls on rows of canvas tents.
00:25It falls on the red crosses painted across those tents, which nobody could see through the fog an
00:31hour ago, and which every man here can see now. A man is walking toward the German officer standing
00:37in that light. He is not carrying a weapon. Nobody in this field is. He turned 32 years old today.
00:45His name is Charles Van Gorder, a surgeon with the 3rd Auxiliary Surgical Group,
00:51attached to the 101st Airborne Division's clearing station. He grew up around Pennsylvania Dutch-German,
00:58and that accident of childhood is the only tool he has left. So he uses it.
01:05He calls out to the officer, in the officer's own language, what the man is actually looking at.
01:11Medical troops. Unarmed. A hospital. Behind him, tracers have already come through the canvas of
01:19the evacuation tent, and the wounded on the litters were hit a second time where they lay.
01:25Aidmen went down on top of them. That is not a figure of speech. They lowered screaming casualties
01:32onto the ground and covered them with their own bodies. Down at the crossroads, inside the burning
01:38trucks, men are still alive and calling out. A technician named Emil Natal hears it. He runs to
01:46Van Gorder, and Van Gorder, in the middle of an argument with an armed man who holds every advantage,
01:51breaks off long enough to tell him to go and try. A German soldier is sent along with him. The
01:58two of
01:58them run down the slope together, an American and a German, and the heat settles it before they can get
02:04near. They look at each other. They shake their heads. They turn their backs and walk away.
02:12Natali wrote afterward that the voices from those trucks stayed with him the rest of his life.
02:1730 minutes. That is what the German commander allows. 30 minutes to load every doctor,
02:24every technician, and every crate of equipment onto whatever still runs, and drive east into
02:30German lines. If the story of America's medical men in this war is worth your time, a like and a
02:36subscribe help this channel reach the people still searching for it. It takes a second. It matters.
02:4311 officers and 119 enlisted men of the 326th Airborne Medical Company went into captivity that
02:51night. Add the division surgeon's office. Add Van Gorder's team. 142 Americans, and nearly every one of
03:01them trained for nothing in this world except keeping other men alive. Hold on to that number,
03:07because of what it meant 12 hours later. The 101st Airborne was about to be encircled at Bastogne,
03:15and it had just lost the only place inside that ring where a man with a torn open abdomen could
03:21be
03:21put on a table. But the siege has been told a thousand times. What happened to those 142 men
03:29after the trucks turned east has not. Because a captured doctor was not a prisoner in the ordinary
03:35sense, and both armies knew it. Under the Geneva Convention, he was a separate category. Not to be
03:42put behind wire and forgotten, but kept where the wounded were, and made to work. And here is where it
03:50turns strange. The wounded waiting for them were not always American. All that winter, in convents and
03:59school cellars and farmhouses on the German side of the line, American surgeons found themselves
04:04working on German soldiers. Not as a gesture, simply because those were the men bleeding in front of
04:11them, and a surgeon beside a bleeding man does the one thing he knows how to do. And standing across
04:18those tables, close enough to touch, were German military doctors. Watching. That is the question
04:26this film answers, and I want you to carry it for the next hour. What did those German doctors see?
04:33Not technically. What did they understand, standing in that room, about the war they were fighting,
04:40and the country that had sent them? One warning, so you can measure the answer when it comes.
04:46It is not penicillin, and it is not blood, though both come into this. If it were only about supplies,
04:53this would be a shorter story, and a far less disturbing one.
04:57The beginning of it is a few hours earlier, and 12 miles east. The town is Viltz, in northern
05:04Luxembourg. On the morning of that same 19th of December, machine gun fire came up the streets
05:10toward a convent where a platoon of the 42nd Field Hospital had taken its wounded into the cellar.
05:16Shelling of the river bridge the night before had blown out every window in the building.
05:21Major Henry Huber, the hospital commander, tore up a bed sheet, walked outside, and started up the road
05:27toward the German paratroopers coming down it. They shot at him. An American uniform is an American
05:35uniform. When they worked out what he was, they lined his men up in the courtyard and went through their
05:40pockets for cigarettes and knives. Then they stopped in front of one American officer, looked at him a
05:47moment longer than the others, and said one word. They took him out of the line and marched him away.
05:54Every man left standing in that courtyard was certain he knew where that officer was going.
06:00They were wrong. What happened to Captain Harry Fisher over the following week is one of the
06:05strangest things in any of these records, and we will get to it. But first, the convent.
06:12The Germans were not passing through Viltz. They were moving in.
06:17A German medical company, five officers and 50 men, set up its own clearing station in that same building,
06:24and the two of them worked side by side for eight days. And on the second day, the Germans opened
06:32their
06:32instrument cases. Major Charles Serbst, the senior American surgeon in that cellar, looked at what came
06:39out. And one thing did not belong. Everything the Germans carried was worn, improvised, cheap.
06:48Everything except a single instrument, which was clean, sharp, and gleaming, and which they reached for
06:55more often than anything else they owned. When Serbst finally asked why, the answer told him more about how
07:02Germany was fighting this war than any intelligence briefing he had ever sat through.
07:07Here is the thing you need to know about Charles Serbst before you watch him ask that question.
07:12The night before the Germans came, when the trucks arrived to pull the hospital out of Viltz,
07:17there were more than 20 men in that building whose wounds meant that under American regulations,
07:22they could not be moved at all. The rules were clear. You do not put a man with a fresh
07:29abdominal wound
07:30onto a truck bed on a frozen road. Serbst argued to move them anyway. His reasoning, recorded at the time,
07:39tells you what kind of man was about to walk into that cellar. He believed the truck ride would be
07:45dangerous. He believed German captivity would be more dangerous. He lost the argument.
07:53The trucks went out with the walking wounded and the nurses. Serbst stayed, with Major Henry Huber
08:00and one other medical officer, and the men who could not be lifted. And by morning,
08:05the decision had been made for all of them. 20th of December, 1944.
08:12The convent at Viltz. Cellar level. No glass in any window above them. The wounded lying on the stone floor.
08:20Upstairs, the Germans are unpacking. The officers had been friendly enough when they arrived. They had,
08:26also, within the hour, taken possession of every American medical supply in the building.
08:31Sit with that a moment. A German field medical unit had just captured an American hospital,
08:37and the first thing it did was inventory the American drugs. Because it needed them. Then they laid out
08:45their own equipment, and the Americans got their first close look at what the German army was actually
08:50working with in the fifth year of the war. Paper bandages. Not gauze. Paper. A crepe-like material
08:58used as a substitute. Crude instruments. Sterilizers that had been improvised out of whatever was
09:05available. And one instrument that did not match any of it. Clean. Sharp. New. It was an amputation
09:14knife. An amputation knife in a field hospital is not remarkable. Every army had them.
09:21What the Americans could not stop watching was how often the Germans reached for it,
09:26and how fast they used it. The phrase in the record is that German surgeons took off an arm or
09:32a leg
09:33with about as much deliberation as an American surgeon would use to lance a boil.
09:39Serpst finally asked. Not as an accusation. As one professional to another. In a building where they
09:45were both losing patience. The answer came back in three sentences. The third is the one that matters.
09:54We do not have the time or the money for tedious and expensive reconstructive surgery. A man with a
10:01stump can be discharged in a few weeks. A man in a plaster cast uses up a hospital bed for
10:07months.
10:09Read that last line again. A man in a plaster cast uses up a hospital bed for months.
10:17That is not a medical statement. There is no anatomy in it. Nothing about the patient at all.
10:23It is an accounting statement. The German surgeon was not describing a wound.
10:30He was describing a cost. And the cost he was measuring was not the cost to the soldier.
10:36It was the cost to the system that owned him. And notice what he was not doing.
10:41He was not defending himself. He was explaining obvious arithmetic to a foreign colleague who,
10:47in his view, had simply not run the numbers. Hold on to that. Because the whole story turns on it.
10:55The German doctor thought the American was naive. By that measure, he had a point. Because down in
11:02that cellar, the Americans were doing something that made no arithmetic sense whatsoever. They had no heat.
11:09The supplies they had brought were being consumed and not replaced. Wounded kept arriving through the
11:15German lines. Some of them American. And among the men who came in, a number died for one specific
11:21reason that appears again and again in these records. They died from lack of blood. Not from their wounds.
11:29From the absence of the one thing that would have carried them through the wound. And the American
11:34surgeons, who had spent two years in an army that could put blood into a man within an hour of
11:39him
11:39being hit, sat in a Luxembourg basement in the dark and watched that happen. And kept working anyway.
11:47On men they knew they were going to lose. On men whose beds, by the arithmetic upstairs, should have been
11:54cleared. That is the split. Two medical services, one building, eight days. And a difference between
12:03them that has nothing to do with equipment. Keep it in your pocket. We come back to it with evidence
12:09that makes it far darker than a disagreement between two surgeons.
12:13On Christmas Eve, the Germans sent a few bottles of wine down to the cellar. It was, by every account,
12:20a genuine gesture. The Americans decided to give it to the casualties. They were still dividing it up
12:26when four shells came into the courtyard in quick succession. Falling beams and flying glass injured
12:32four Americans. German losses in the same barrage were heavier. Nobody in that building, on either side,
12:39was safe from the same shell. Remember that. It matters later, when we ask whether any of this was
12:46about cruelty. On the 27th of December, with the front collapsing back toward them, the Germans decided
12:53to pull out and take everyone with them. Eighty American casualties were carried up out of the cellar.
12:59At least half of them were men who could not be moved. They went on to open trucks, in the
13:05cold,
13:06for a long drive into Germany, because leaving them was worse. Huber stood in the courtyard supervising
13:13the loading, with a German medical officer watching him do it. And while he stood there, an American
13:19intelligence sergeant named Lester Koritz came up beside him and quietly said he was going to run.
13:25Huber did not talk him out of it. He wished him luck. Minutes later, the trucks pulled out for Germany,
13:32and Koritz went down a steep path into Witz and vanished into the houses of Luxemburgers,
13:38who kept him alive until the Americans came back in January. So that is Witz. One American doctor now
13:46understood the equation the German army was using. But he had only heard it described. Nobody had yet watched
13:53that system run at full speed, from the inside, with a battle going on around it. Except that somebody
14:00had. Three miles from Bastogna, the officer they had marched out of that courtyard was still alive,
14:08and the Germans had just given him a job. They did not take Captain Harry Fisher into the woods.
14:15They took him to a motor pool. 19th of December, 1944. Somewhere behind the German advance west of
14:22Wiltz. A German officer asked him whether he could drive an ambulance. Fisher pointed out that he was a
14:29surgeon. He was told to do as he was told. Sit inside that moment for a second, because it is
14:37one of the
14:37strangest things in this story. An army had just pulled an American officer out of a line of prisoners
14:43for one reason. A reason that, in that army, in that year, usually ended in a ditch. And then the
14:51same
14:51army looked at him, decided it needed him, and put him to work on its own wounded. They gave him
14:58a German
14:58orderly and attached him to a divisional clearing station. The division was Panzerlehr, the formation
15:06whose job that week was to take Bastogne. So Harry Fisher marched out of that courtyard under a sentence
15:14everybody assumed was death. Spent the next several days inside the German army, watching it fight from
15:20a place almost no Allied officer of the war ever saw. Which gives us something the histories almost never
15:26have? An American doctor sitting inside the German medical service at its peak effort in the middle
15:33of Germany's last great offensive. Pay attention to what he saw. It is the second piece of the answer.
15:41The station set up on high ground above a village called Vorden on the road running between Wiltz and
15:46Bastogne. And from there, Fisher could look down and watch a battle begin underneath him. German tanks
15:54and an armored infantry battalion went into Vorden. Waiting for them was one company of the 501st
16:00Parachute Infantry Regiment. Understand what that means. Paratroopers who had come into this fight off
16:08the back of trucks three days earlier, holding a village against armor with essentially nothing to
16:13shoot at a tank with. There was no equipment answer available to those men. There was only the decision to
16:20stay in the village. They lost the village. It cost the company terribly. But look at the German timetable
16:27that evening. Panzerlehr's men were too used up to go on to the next village that night. Bastogne got
16:33another night to dig. And a few miles away, another set of American medics got another night to move
16:40wounded. And it was bought by a rifle company that had no business surviving the afternoon.
16:46Then the price arrived at Fisher's basement. He counted more than a hundred casualties that he
16:51saw with his own hands. And he knew there were more he never saw at all. American paratroopers from
16:58that company, wounded and now prisoners like him. He worked in a small Belgian cellar barely bigger than
17:04a farm kitchen. And here is the detail I need you to hold on to, because it will come back
17:10with force
17:10later. Most of those casualties could not fit inside. They lay outside, in the rain, in December,
17:19waiting. That is not an accusation against any particular German doctor in that building.
17:25There was no room. There was no transport. Every one of those men was inside a system that had already
17:32decided how much it could afford to spend on him. And the answer was written into the shortage itself.
17:39Now put an American aid station beside it. Same month. Same weather. Same shelling.
17:45In an American division that winter, most wounded men reached a clearing station or a field hospital
17:51surgical team within an hour or two of being hit. Because the whole chain from the foxhole backward
17:57had been motorized down to the jeep that came to the man where he lay.
18:01Two systems. Same rain. Fisher's night in that cellar ended the way it had to end.
18:09American artillery began ranging onto the position. The Germans decided to move. Fast. They left most
18:16of the casualties behind. Fisher described it afterward, without drama, and it is one of the most brutal
18:22lines in the record. They left them. He went. He was a prisoner, and prisoners do not decide.
18:30On the 20th of December, the clearing station moved forward into what was left of Warden,
18:35two miles closer to Bastogne. And from there, Fisher watched the German attack go in against the next
18:41village, Marvie. He watched it fail. German half-tracks got into the streets. The village stayed American.
18:49And as long as it stayed American, the road into Bastogne stayed shut.
18:54Then came the 23rd. For a week, the Ardennes had been sealed under fog, which was exactly what the
19:00German plan required. On the morning of the 23rd, the weather over the whole route from England to Belgium
19:06simply opened. Fisher was standing on a hillside inside the German army when it happened. 241 aircraft
19:15came in over Bastogne that day, each one carrying around 1,200 pounds. 160 more came the next day.
19:23Put that into something you can see. Cargo parachutes in the hundreds coming down over a surrounded town
19:30in daylight in full view of the German units supposed to be strangling it. Civilians in Bastogne came up
19:38out of their cellars to stand in the street and stare at the sky. The phrase that survives from the
19:44town is that these Americans seemed like people from another world. And on the German side of the ring,
19:51an American surgeon in captivity looked up at the same parachutes and said it was the most thrilling
19:57thing he had ever seen. He was not the only man on that hillside watching. Every German doctor and
20:05orderly at that clearing station was standing in the open, looking at the same sky, doing the same
20:11arithmetic that Harry Fisher was doing. Because those bundles were not only ammunition. Blankets, litters,
20:19plasma, vaseline gauze, sterilizers, distilled water. The recovery rate on the medical drop of the 24th
20:30of December was 100%. Every man on that hill understood it. An army that could not reach its
20:37encircled division by road had reached it by air, and had spent its aircraft on stretchers and bandages.
20:44Now, inside the ring, the men on the receiving end of that drop kept a ledger of everyone they treated
20:50during the siege. 943 Americans. And one more figure, in the same ledger, in the same handwriting,
20:58that had nothing to do with Americans at all. 125 Germans. That is the other number in the Bastogne
21:05Ledger. 943 Americans. And 125 enemy wounded, treated inside the ring during the siege. By the
21:15same exhausted men, out of the same supply that was running out. Before you decide how you feel about
21:22that, look at what those supplies actually were on the day the ring closed. 21st of December, 1944.
21:31Bastogne. The division has no clearing company. It was taken at the crossroads two nights ago,
21:37along with its surgeons. So Major Martin Wisely, surgeon of the 327th Glider Infantry,
21:45is handed a job that in any normal week would be absurd. Build a hospital. Out of what?
21:53Out of the doctors nobody could spare. The artillery surgeon. The anti-aircraft surgeon.
22:00The medical officers of the engineer battalion and the attached tank destroyer battalion. Men who were
22:06not trauma surgeons and had never claimed to be. They opened in a Belgian army barracks. When the
22:14shelling and the bombing became too heavy, they moved down into a basement garage. One very large
22:19room and one small room off it. About 150 seriously wounded men lay in the big room on litters and
22:27on
22:27straw. There was one light. Everyone else, and there were hundreds, was scattered through the
22:34cellars of the town. Down on the Rue de Neufchateau, a battalion surgeon from the 10th Armored Division,
22:40named Jack Pryor, had his own aid station. He had come out of the fighting at Noville a few days
22:47earlier,
22:48and his description of it explains the state these men were in before the siege even started.
22:54Head wounds, belly wounds, chest wounds, fractures everywhere. Casualties arriving faster than he
23:03could think. His half-track knocked out, no way to send anyone to the rear, and the second story
23:09blown off the building while he crawled along the floor between patients.
23:14Two Belgian women volunteered to work with him. Renée Lemaire, a nurse who had come home to visit her
23:21parents and been caught by the offensive. And Augusta Chiwi, trained in Leuven, who had been treating
23:27civilians with her uncle until she walked into an American aid station and asked what needed doing.
23:33Now the supplies. Plasma, they had. Whole blood, they did not. Most of the containers dropped on the 23rd
23:41had broken on impact. Blankets were being collected off frontline troops. Penicillin, they had none at
23:48all, until half past six on the evening of Christmas Day when a single light aircraft came in under fire
23:54and landed with a supply of it. That is the inventory. One light bulb, straw on a garage floor, a
24:01broken
24:02blood supply, and doctors who mostly were not surgeons. And into that, 125 German soldiers.
24:10Nobody in Bastogne wrote a speech about it. There is no memo.
24:16There is a ledger, kept during a siege, in which enemy wounded are counted in the same column as
24:22everyone else, out of the same shrinking stock of plasma, by people who did not know whether they would
24:28be alive on the 28th. Understand what that means physically, not morally. Plasma is a finite quantity
24:36in a garage. Every unit that went into a German soldier's arm was a unit that was no longer
24:42available for the American on the next litter. The men making that decision were not making it in an
24:47office. They were making it while the building shook. And this was not a local eccentricity.
24:54Across the theater that winter, the American Medical Service applied the same standard of
24:58care to captured enemy wounded as to its own. And it did so as a matter of policy, not mood.
25:05There is a stranger detail attached to it. By late 1944, a typical 400-bed American evacuation
25:13hospital had between 50 and 80 German prisoners or local civilians working on it as attendants and
25:19laborers. Read that again. German prisoners of war, inside American hospitals, on the wards,
25:28every day, carrying litters and watching American doctors work. Remember that. We are going to need it
25:36before this is over. Because it means the observation ran in both directions. And it ran for months.
25:43Back to Bastogne and to Christmas Eve, because the town paid for that night. German bombers came over
25:50twice. One aid station took a direct hit and collapsed on the men inside it. Volunteers dug through the
25:58wreckage for the rest of the night. Renée Lemaire was killed in that building. That morning she had gone
26:04out and recovered a white parachute from one of the supply drops. She had told people what it was for.
26:10When the war was over, and she was married, she meant to make a wedding dress out of it.
26:16Jack Pryor found her remains himself and carried them back to her parents, wrapped in that parachute.
26:23Augusta Chiwi lived. She went on working. She was still working when the corridor opened. And it did
26:30open. On Christmas Day, a surgeon named Howard Serrell was flown in by light aircraft and performed 15
26:37surgical procedures in 36 hours. The next afternoon, a glider came in carrying a full surgical team
26:45under Major Lamar Suter. They started operating at half past six that evening and did not stop until
26:51noon the following day. So now, hold the two ledgers side by side. In a convent cellar in Wilts, a
26:59German
26:59surgeon explained that a man in a plaster cast occupies a bed for months and reached for the amputation
27:06knife. In a garage in Bastogna, men who were not surgeons working under one light bulb with no blood
27:14and no penicillin spent part of what they had on enemy soldiers and wrote the number down. And now I
27:22have to be honest with you, because there is an easy explanation sitting right there. And it is wrong.
27:28The easy explanation is that the Americans could afford it. That this is a story about a rich army
27:33and a poor one. And that any doctor with plasma and aircraft would have done the same.
27:39Here is why that explanation collapses. Five weeks before Bastogna, in a different forest, two American
27:46battalion surgeons were trapped behind German lines, in a hole in a hillside 18 feet long,
27:52with 65 wounded men and no way out at all. The Germans came to them and offered them something.
28:00What those two men said in reply is the reason we can throw the easy explanation away.
28:057th of November 1944. The Gorge of the Kahl River in the Hürtgen Forest inside Germany.
28:13Picture a hole cut into a steep hillside beside a mud track. 18 feet long, 12 feet wide. Cave-like.
28:22That is the entire medical facility. Inside it, about 25 wounded men. Outside it, along the track,
28:30in the cold and the rain and then the snow, about 40 more. Wrapped in whatever blankets could be found,
28:37which was not enough blankets. Standing over them, in the open, are American soldiers holding Red Cross
28:44flags up where the Germans can see them, because that is the only roof those men have.
28:50Two doctors are running this. Captain Michael DiMarco, surgeon of the 3rd Battalion of the 112th Infantry,
28:57and Captain Pascal Linguidi of the 1st Battalion, whose own aid station in a basement forward at
29:03Kommerscheidt, has just been folded into this one. How they got here is quickly told.
29:09Their division pushed two battalions across the gorge to take the villages of Schmidt and Kommerscheidt,
29:15and the counterattacks came in from three sides. The only way back was that track.
29:21Ambulances could not use it. Knocked out tanks blocked it. German shelling closed the loading point
29:27at the top. So the wounded stopped moving, and they piled up where the trail was.
29:34Watch what the two surgeons do, because it is a decision, not a reflex. They are short of men.
29:41American infantry are coming back through the gorge in ones and twos, armed and exhausted,
29:46trying to get out. Linguidi and DiMarco stop them, take their weapons off them, and put them to work
29:52as litter bearers and orderlies. Think about why the weapons had to come off. An aid station with
29:59armed men in it is not an aid station. It is a strong point, and everyone in it can be
30:04legally killed.
30:06Those two doctors were, in the middle of a disaster, carefully keeping their patch of hillside
30:12inside the rules. Because the rules were the only cover they had left.
30:18And then the Germans came. They came several times, infiltrating behind the trapped battalions,
30:25and each time did the same thing. They announced that the medics were now prisoners.
30:31They checked that no armed Americans were present. Then they left the aid station alone.
30:37They let American walking wounded come down the trail from Kommerscheidt and reach the station
30:43unmolested. They took the vehicles which they needed. And at one point, a German unit offered
30:49Linguidi and DiMarco food and medicine. Now stop and count the position those two men were in.
30:5765 wounded, 25 under cover, 40 in the snow, not enough blankets, cut off, no transport,
31:08and an enemy standing in front of them, holding out supplies. They said no. The record does not
31:16give us their words or their reasoning. It gives us the answer. They declined.
31:22I said last time there was an easy explanation for the way American doctors behaved that winter,
31:27that they could afford to be generous. Hold it up against a hole in a hillside,
31:32where two American surgeons with nothing turned down an enemy's food. Whatever was driving these men,
31:38it was not surplus. Here is what makes it certain. When the two battalions finally pulled out of
31:44Kommerscheidt on the night of the 8th of November, Linguidi and DiMarco stayed where they were,
31:50inside German lines, with their patients. And the regimental surgeon, Major Albert Berndt,
31:56went to the local German commander with a proposal. Not a proposal to evacuate American wounded.
32:03A truce to clear the Kal Valley of the casualties of both sides. The German commander agreed. Out of
32:11it came a scratch convoy of trucks and tracked weasels that carried the doctors, their medical
32:16men, the chaplains, and the severely wounded back to American lines. The price was that the lightly
32:23wounded and the non-medical personnel stayed behind and went into captivity. Everybody knew what that
32:31meant when they agreed to it. Now the other half of that valley, which is not what a film like
32:36this
32:36usually shows you. On the German side of the Kal Bridge that same week, a German medical officer was
32:43doing exactly the same thing. His name was Gunter Stuttgen, a captain and a doctor with the 275th
32:51Infantry Division. Between the 7th and the 9th of November, he negotiated a series of short ceasefires
32:58at that bridge so the wounded of both armies could be reached and carried out. The ceasefires held.
33:05American stretcher parties went down into the ravine and were not fired on. German medics did the same.
33:12Wounded Americans who should have died in that gorge were treated by German doctors and lived because
33:19of it. After the war, the governor of Pennsylvania honored him, Pennsylvania, because the division
33:27bleeding in that valley was Pennsylvania's own National Guard. And a few days later, on the 12th of
33:33November, a German lieutenant named Friedrich Lengfeld heard an American calling for help from inside a
33:39minefield the Germans had christened the Wild Sow. He went in after him. He was mortally wounded doing
33:46it and died the same day. Today, there is a plaque to Lengfeld in a German military cemetery in that
33:52forest, and it was put there by American veterans of the 4th Infantry Division. It is the only memorial
33:58anywhere to a German soldier placed by the men he fought. So let us be extremely clear about something,
34:05because everything from here depends on it. The difference this film is chasing is not a difference
34:11in decency. It is not that German doctors were monsters and American doctors were saints. In that
34:17forest, in the same week, both sides produced men who risked their lives to get an enemy's wounded out of
34:25a ravine. Which forces the question into a much harder shape. If the men were the same, and in the
34:32Hurtgen they demonstrably were, then what exactly was it that Charles Serpst watched happening in that
34:38convent cellar? What was Harry Fisher looking at when the casualties were left lying in the rain?
34:45Six months later, a group of American doctors was sent to walk through the wreckage of the German
34:50medical system with notebooks and find out. One of them wrote up what he saw on a single ward round
34:56and gave the report a title. He called it, The Story of a Finger. By the end of that ward
35:03round,
35:03he would not shake the German surgeon's hand. May 1945, Northern Italy, days after the German surrender
35:10there. A group of American medical officers is driving through captured German hospitals with notebooks.
35:16The 5th Army surgeon has sent them. They are not clerks. Among them are Colonel Howard Snyder,
35:23the Army's surgical consultant, Colonel Eldridge Campbell, a neurosurgeon, and Lieutenant Colonel
35:29Paul Sanger, chief of surgery at an evacuation hospital. Their job is to find out how the other
35:35side had been practicing medicine. Before I tell you what they found, here is the warning they gave
35:40themselves because it stands at the front of their own report. They wrote that no honest observer can
35:46judge German medicine in 1939 by what is lying on the floor in 1945. What they were walking through was
35:54a defeated army in collapse. They knew it. Keep that in mind for everything that follows, and then watch what
36:02happens anyway. One of them writes up a single ward round. He gives it a title. The Story of a
36:09Finger.
36:10It begins ordinarily. A German surgeon is making rounds. He looks at charts and films. He examines limbs,
36:19handling the soiled bandages barehanded, adjusting traction frames, opening a few wounds on the ward to
36:25look at them. At one bed, he wants to know whether the patient is dehydrated. So he puts his finger,
36:32the same unwashed finger, into the man's mouth and draws it across his tongue. He looks at the moisture
36:39on it. He wipes the finger on his own coat and remarks that the man is not too dry. The
36:45chief of the
36:45hospital walks onto the ward. There is a military greeting, and then the two men shake hands. Several
36:51cases are taken through to the septic dressing room, and this is where the American stops treating it
36:56as a curiosity. Three tables. A patient on each. Large wounds. All dressings off. Nobody in the room
37:05is wearing a mask. People are talking over the open wounds. The door swings and swings. Just outside,
37:13a staircase is being dry swept, and the dust from it is drifting through the doorway and into the room.
37:18The German surgeon takes down a pus-soaked dressing from a man's limb. Then, without washing his hands
37:25and without putting on gloves, he handles the wound underneath it. When he is finished, he lays the used
37:31instruments down on the tabletop and moves to the next patient. He does not wash his hands in between.
37:37At the end of it, the American walked out of that dressing room without shaking anyone's hand.
37:43I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to turn that into a cheap joke, and it
37:48is not one.
37:49When the Americans asked about it afterward, they got an answer that explained everything they had
37:54just watched, and it was not laziness. It was doctrine. The German medical service assumed that any
38:01penetrating combat wound would become infected. Not might. Would. Pus was expected. It was normal.
38:10It was, in their understanding, simply what happened to a shell fragment wound, and the job was to let
38:17the infection run and let the wound heal afterward. Now think about what that assumption does to a man
38:25in a dressing room. If every wound is going to separate anyway, then a clean pair of gloves is a
38:31courtesy, not a necessity. The finger, the dust, the unwashed hands. Those are not the disease.
38:40They are the symptom of a belief. And the belief came from somewhere.
38:46There is an operation at the center of this. An Allied surgeon receiving a shell fragment wound in 1944
38:54opened it wide, cut away every scrap of dead and dying tissue, and left it open. Not sewn shut. Open.
39:03The wound was closed days later, farther back, when it was clean. It is slow. It is unglamorous.
39:12It is the single reason that a generation of American soldiers kept their arms and legs.
39:18One of the German surgeons interviewed had performed that operation, properly, four or five times.
39:25In as many years of war. Then there is blood. Every German transfusion in that theater was direct,
39:33donor to patient, arm to arm, no bank. The amounts were small. 200, 300, 500 cubic centimeters.
39:42Never more than a liter. Some German surgeons argued against giving more than 300 at a sitting.
39:49Plasma, the Germans could not get. And there was a rule that followed from it.
39:54If the man's pulse had not come back after that, he did not go to surgery.
40:00Read that as the sentence, it actually is. The more blood a man had lost, the less likely he was
40:07to
40:07be operated on at all. The Americans could see the result without asking. They wrote down what the
40:13wards looked like. Ward after ward of extremely pale men. Now set the American system beside it,
40:21as their report does. Plasma held forward in every medical unit of a division.
40:27Banked blood in every army hospital, including the field hospital platoons sitting alongside the
40:33division clearing stations, minutes from the fighting. Same wound. Same hour. One man gets
40:41blood where he lies. The other gets 300 cubic centimeters if there is a donor. And if there is
40:47not, he gets a blanket. And in the heaviest fighting, the system went further. When casualties came in
40:55faster than they could be handled, the men with abdominal wounds and head wounds were set aside and
41:00given no surgery at all, in favor of the lightly wounded, who could be patched up and sent back to
41:06their units. There it is again. The same arithmetic Charles Serpst heard in the cellar at Wiltz,
41:13five months earlier and hundreds of miles away, out of the mouth of a completely different German
41:18officer. A wounded man's value is his return to duty. If he cannot be returned to duty, he is a
41:25cost.
41:26That is not triage as a doctor understands it. Triage decides who to treat first. This decides who is
41:34worth treating at all. So the Americans put the only question left. How did a country that produced
41:41some of the finest medicine on earth end up here? And the German doctors had an answer waiting.
41:47They gave it in five parts. Four of those parts were about the war. The first one was not. It
41:54had nothing
41:54to do with the war at all. It began in Germany in 1933, years before a shot was fired. Here
42:01is the
42:01first of the five reasons, in the words the German doctors gave to the Americans interviewing them
42:06in the spring of 1945. There were not enough doctors. And the reason there were not enough doctors
42:14was that between 1933 and 1939, large numbers of medical men had been driven out of Germany for
42:21reasons that had nothing whatever to do with their practice of medicine. Read the dates again. 1933 to 1939.
42:31Not one of those years is a war year. The consequence they described was not dramatic.
42:37It was slow and arithmetical. The medical schools lost their teachers. With fewer teachers, fewer physicians
42:46graduated, year after year, and the shortfall compounded. Then the war came, and the number of
42:53wounded men assigned to each surviving doctor went up and up until the time available for any one of them
42:59collapsed. That is reason number one. And everything else in this film has been standing on top of it
43:06without knowing. The other four came quickly after. Two. There were simply too many casualties arriving too
43:15fast. One German surgeon gave the Americans a comparison from his own hands. Working in Naples in
43:21September of 1943, he had been able to treat fresh wounds properly, with a complete excision and a clean
43:28closure. And his infection rate was around 4%. As good as his civilian practice had ever been.
43:35On the Russian front, he said, an operation that needed an hour had to be finished in less than a
43:40minute. In one three-day stretch there, a thousand battle casualties came into a field hospital staffed by
43:47two doctors and no nurses. He knew what he was doing to those men. He said so plainly. There was
43:55no other
43:55choice available to him. Three. Distance. During the advance on Stalingrad, the German army was moving
44:0540 to 60 kilometers a day, and wounded men were shipped rearward with no initial treatment at all,
44:11for days, in Russian winter cold, and many of them arrived frozen or too far gone to survive an
44:17anesthetic. In Italy, it was the opposite problem. No movement by daylight at all because of Allied
44:24aircraft. So the wounded traveled at night over mountain passes.
44:294. Supplies. No blood banks. Plasma unobtainable. And a phrase that stops you when you see it written
44:38down by a doctor about his own service. Penicillin was unknown.
44:445. And this is the one they seemed to find hardest to say. The deterioration of the medical
44:51officers themselves. Morale gone. Doctors who had come to believe that all wounds were infected
44:58because all the wounds they saw were infected. No uniform standard of treatment across the service,
45:05and no system for spreading what worked. Young surgeons pushed through training too fast,
45:11whom one of them called graduate wonders, who did not know the basic principles.
45:17Better treatment for the Luftwaffe, the SS, and senior officers than for an infantryman.
45:23And senior medical appointments handed out on political grounds rather than professional ones.
45:28That is the answer. That is what those German doctors understood,
45:33standing a few feet from Americans in a cellar in Luxembourg and on a hillside above Bastogne.
45:39They were not looking at a richer army. They were looking at what their own country had done to them,
45:45arriving on a stretcher. And now go back to the 19th of December, and to a courtyard in Viltz,
45:52and watch it close. A German soldier walks down a line of American prisoners, stops at one officer,
45:59looks at him a moment longer than the others, and identifies him as a Jew. He takes him out of
46:06the line,
46:06and marches him away. And every American standing there believes he is being taken off to be shot.
46:13Then the German army looks at Harry Fisher, discovers that he is a surgeon, and puts him to work.
46:19Because it needs surgeons. Because it does not have enough of them. Because of what it spent the 1930s
46:26doing to men exactly like him. I have gone back over that sequence many times, and still have no
46:33clean word for it. The same policy that pulled him out of the line was the reason he was too
46:38valuable to
46:39shoot. He treated German soldiers that week. Some of them lived because a man that state had defined as an
46:46enemy was standing over them, with his hands inside a wound. Now the numbers, because they close it.
46:54In the four American field armies in Europe, of every hundred battle casualties who reached a medical
46:59installation alive, fewer than three died. At one general hospital at Liège that received 4,000
47:07surgical patients from the first and ninth armies, the deaths numbered two. There was one case of gas
47:14gangrene in those 4,000, and the man recovered. On the other side, a German consultant told the
47:21Americans that wound infection in this war had been about as frequent in the German army as it had been
47:26in the last one. In one German hospital, 60% of shell fragment wounds of the chest had gone on
47:32to
47:33Impaima. In another, half of all chest wounds. 1944, and the German medical service was getting 1918 results.
47:43The Americans put down why, and it was not any single miracle. It was earlier surgery, done properly,
47:50by enough people with blood available forward and antibiotics behind it. A whole chain, and the chain
47:57worked because every link had been built. One of those American observers wrote a line I keep coming
48:03back to. His reaction to walking through those German wards was not condemnation. It was that seeing the
48:10German wounded had given him the contrast he needed to understand what his own medical service had
48:15actually achieved. He had needed to see the other system to recognize his own. Which brings us back to
48:22the men we started with. Because while those reports were being typed up in Italy, the American doctors,
48:28taken at Wilts and at the crossroads outside Bastogne, were still out there, somewhere east,
48:33in a Germany coming apart. Some of them had been marched into Poland. And when the Red Army finally
48:40came through the wire and the gates were open, and no one on earth had any authority over them at
48:45all,
48:45those American surgeons did something that nobody had ordered them to do,
48:50and that nobody would ever have blamed them for refusing. They went back to work.
48:55That is what the American surgeons taken at Wilts did when the Red Army came through and the war
49:00stopped meaning anything where they were standing. They had no orders. They had no unit. There was no
49:07officer within 500 miles with the authority to tell them anything at all. So they treated the people in
49:13front of them. Russian casualties. Polish civilians. Whoever came to the door in a countryside full of
49:21people with nowhere to go. And German prisoners of war. Sit with that for a second. These were men who
49:29had been driven east on foot in the winter, half starved, some of whom had watched their own patients
49:35loaded onto open trucks in the cold, because there was no other choice. Nobody would have said a word
49:41if they had walked west and never looked back. They stayed and worked. And they worked on Germans.
49:49Then they made their way home the long way round. Some of them through Odessa on the Black Sea,
49:54because that was the only road out. There is nothing left to prove after that. It was never
50:01about supplies. It was never about policy. Take the supplies away. Take the army away. Take the war
50:09away. And those men did the same thing they had done in the tent at the crossroads.
50:15So let me tell you what happened to the rest of them. Henry Skoronsky, one of the enlisted medics from
50:21the crossroads, walked into Germany, living on rutabagas and sugar beets, and ended up at a
50:27camp at Mühlberg, on thin soup and bread baked with sawdust, with 5,000 other prisoners. He was still
50:35there when the Russians arrived in May. Most of the men taken with him spent the rest of the war
50:41behind
50:41wire. And most of them went on quietly, doing the only job they knew, on their fellow prisoners,
50:47with whatever they could beg or scrounge. Emil Natale, the technician who ran down
50:53that slope toward the burning trucks, came home as well. What he could not do at that crossroads,
51:00he carried for the rest of his life. And at some point, he sat down and rode it out, which
51:05is the
51:05only reason you heard those men at the start of this film. Willis McKee, the captain who drove into
51:12Bastogne on the afternoon of the 19th and asked permission to move his hospital, and was told to
51:17go on back, came home. Forty years later, he sat down in Kentucky and recorded what he had seen,
51:25which is part of the reason we can tell you any of this at all. The record loses sight of
51:30Harry Fisher
51:30after the parachutes came down over Bastogne. That is the last clear image we have of him.
51:36An American surgeon, standing on a hillside inside the German army, looking up at his own side's
51:43aircraft, calling it the most thrilling thing he had ever seen. Augusta Chiwi went home to a life in
51:50which almost nobody knew what she had done. It took more than 60 years for anyone to come looking.
51:57She was decorated by Belgium and by the United States, and she died in 2015, aged 94.
52:04Gunther Stuttgen, who talked both sides into holding their fire at the Kahl Bridge,
52:09was honored after the war by the governor of Pennsylvania. And the plaque to Friedrich
52:13Lengfeld is still standing in the German cemetery at Hertgen, where American veterans put it.
52:19Which leaves the man we began with. Charles Van Gorder got away. The Germans were moving prisoners,
52:27there was confusion on the road, and he took it. He and John Radha, the surgeon who had been on
52:33the same
52:33team, at the same table, at that crossroads, came out through Poland together, and made it home.
52:40They were both headed for fellowships in New York. Big city medicine, the kind of career that D-Day and
52:46the Bulge, and a German prison camp, entitled a man to. Then Van Gorder went down to visit his family
52:53in
52:53Andrews, North Carolina. A small town in the mountains, sitting in a county that did not have
52:58a doctor worth the name. He never left. He got Radha to come with him. The two of them opened
53:05a tiny
53:05clinic on a corner in town, and for the rest of their working lives, they delivered the babies,
53:10and set the bones, and did the surgery for the whole valley. In time, they built the town its first
53:16hospital. Charles Van Gorder died on the 28th of November, 2002. Now, go back to where we started.
53:24Half past ten at night, the 19th of December, 1944. A crossroads in the woods northwest of Bastogne.
53:32Trucks burning. Red crosses lit up on canvas. An unarmed man walking toward an officer with a gun.
53:40On his 32nd birthday. Explaining in the man's own language that this is a hospital. And that is
53:47the answer to the question we started with. What the German doctors saw, standing next to these men
53:53in cellars and on hillsides, was not a better technique or a richer supply train. It was doctors
54:00who had never once been asked what a wounded man was worth. Their own country had asked them that
54:07question, and had answered it, years before the shooting began, in medical schools, and personnel
54:14files, and lists of people who were no longer welcome to practice. Every man they lost in a dressing
54:21room afterward was the bill for it. Charles Van Gorder was never asked the question, so he never had to
54:28stop being a doctor. Not at a crossroads in Belgium with a gun in his face. And not for the
54:34next 57
54:34years in a small town in the mountains of North Carolina. Thank you for staying to the end of this
54:41one. Stories like this carry no famous names, and they only travel if the algorithm gets a little help.
54:48So if it was worth your time, a like really does put it in front of someone whose father
54:53or grandfather was one of these men. Subscribe and hit the bell for more of them. And tell me in
54:59the
55:00comments where in the world you're watching from. If someone in your own family served, a father,
55:06a grandfather, an uncle, in any allied uniform, tell me his name and what he did. I read them.
55:13That's how these men stay real.
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