By Beverly Ballaro PhD
When Dr. Bill McDermott died at home, surrounded by family, on July 19, 2001 at the age of 84, it marked the end of an exceptional life. A distinguished doctor and teacher as well as a gregarious storyteller admired for his unfailing humor and optimism in the face of life’s adversities, McDermott was a much admired figure in his community. Although Dr. McDermott himself was inclined to offer modest protests to the contrary, his spirit of sacrifice in service to his country and his fellow man forms an enduring part of his legacy. This is the story of how one man followed his conscience:
Alarmed by the prewar spirit of isolationism that pervaded the nation, in the months preceding the outbreak of World War II, the secretaries of the U.S. Army and Navy traveled to Harvard Medical School to make personal appeals to medical students to enlist, emphasizing that the coming battle could not be won without them. Despite these pleas, William V. McDermott, a third-year student, was one of only a handful of interventionists who rushed to join. Because they hadn’t yet earned their MDs, these students had to sign up as medical administrative officers rather than as doctors in the Medical Corps. They requested and received from the dean special permission to accelerate the curriculum and were able to graduate one year sooner than planned. McDermott, newly married and barely out of his first year of accelerated surgical residency training, found himself shipping out overseas even earlier than expected, a 25-year-old surgeon assigned to an anti-aircraft mobile battalion.
McDermott’s family and new wife watched from the lawn of their summer house on Marblehead Neck as his ship glided slowly out of Boston Harbor for an unknown destination. Out in the Atlantic, the ship joined a convoy transporting 40,000 troops. The convoy was guarded by 12 U.S. destroyers, whose purpose was to prowl the perimeter, warding off German U-boat attacks. Also accompanying the convoy was the battleship Texas, a relic salvaged from World War I; in the event of a direct German assault on the convoy, the Texas had orders to carry out a suicide mission by steaming directly at the attacker, guns blazing, thus providing the convoy with an opportunity to turn tail and escape. But just in case the U-boat “Wolf Packs” succeeded in sinking their ship, McDermott and all the others on board remained fully dressed over heavy two-piece woolen underwear, 24 hours a day, to optimize their chances for survival in the icy Atlantic.
Once in England, McDermott and thousands of others trained and waited anxiously; although everybody knew a massive invasion was coming, its precise timing and location were kept in utmost secrecy. “Although we expected D-Day to be difficult, nobody really anticipated just how rough it would turn out to be,” McDermott says, recalling the heavy casualties he treated in the aftermath of the invasion. The 1st division (“Big Red One”), which helped lead the assault, sustained many of these casualties when the first wave of troops ran, unexpectedly, into a German division; Hitler’s troops had arrived in the vicinity of Omaha Beach for routine maneuvers shortly before D-Day, unaware of the massive Allied invasion about to take place.
As McDermott’s ship approached the beach at Normandy six days after the initial invasion, he was astonished to pass the battleship Texas, the same World War I relic that had accompanied his convoy overseas; the Texas was now busily providing heavy fire cover from her 16-inch guns to support the first landing group on Omaha Beach. When the beach had been secured and cleared, McDermott’s unit went in, transported in jeeps whose engines had been heavily greased and whose carburetors and exhaust pipes had been outfitted with extra long pipes jutting out several feet above water; these modifications would permit the vehicles to be driven underwater for a short distance in case the landing ship tank that carried them failed to reach dry ground.
Once on Omaha Beach, McDermott encountered mass confusion: “Somehow or other, we ended up landing on the wrong section of Omaha Beach. But it didn’t matter much, since the whole place was just chaos. The MPs were frantically trying to act as traffic cops as the Germans continued to shell all around us. Finally, we were directed to the nearest village, where we dug a large hole in which we could tend to the wounded.”
McDermott spent the remainder of the war treating casualties of the inexorable, bloody American drive across France and into Germany. While he has fond recollections of local French people cheering their American liberators, with children scampering for candy and elderly Frenchmen clad in ancient military uniforms saluting them as they passed, he retains to this day vivid memories of the tragedies—and miracles—he witnessed.
Once, he recalls, he was directed to Avranches, the site of a German attack on an Allied-held bridge of key strategic importance because it was the one that Patton’s troops used to pass over into central France. When a magnesium flare lit up the sky, to better illuminate the target, followed by heavy shelling, McDermott knew that a summons to action would come shortly: “When I got to the scene, I could feel six to eight bodies fanned out on the ground and figured that, surely, they must all be dead. But, apparently, the shell had exploded exactly into the middle of their circle, and the shrapnel had been projected safely over their heads. They had been knocked unconscious by the sheer force of the explosion but were still alive.”
In many other cases, the casualties McDermott treated did not escape so lightly. He remembers one soldier who had been shot in the groin while crossing a river. The wound was pumping blood at a furious rate. Unable to operate on the scene, McDermott, in desperation, stopped the bleeding by jamming his whole fist in the wound, thus helping the man to survive. At the evacuation hospital where the patient was transported, McDermott bumped into some senior professors from Massachusetts General Hospital, who were instrumental in getting their young surgical colleague a transfer to a mobile surgical hospital unit. Mobile units were a relatively recent invention and McDermott was eager to put his skills to use as close to the front lines as possible.
As Patton’s army, which McDermott’s unit eventually joined, fought its way through France and, eventually, into Germany, the young McDermott gained enormous surgical experience, mostly working on chest, abdomen, and severe extremity wounds. Typically, his unit would find a cellar close to the action and set it up as a makeshift operating room with three tables. There was no shortage of wounded, both American and German, to keep McDermott busy.
Yet all the bloodshed McDermott witnessed, from the D-Day Invasion to the Battle of the Bulge, could not have prepared him for the shock he experienced as one of the first Americans to enter a liberated concentration camp at Ebensee. “Before we went into the camp” he says, “nobody could have imagined the extent of the horrors contained there. I remember one officer who had seen the camp at Belsen; when he recounted the atrocities within, people thought that, surely, this fellow had to be exaggerating. But he wasn’t, as I learned firsthand.”
McDermott and his comrades were in the midst of celebrating word from the German Army of its unconditional surrender when they received an emergency order to join the Third Cavalry in taking over the medical and surgical care of a concentration camp on the Danube river in Austria. McDermott still vividly recalls the cruel contrast between the idyllic natural beauty of Ebensee, a picturesque Austrian lake town, and the terrible human evils that had transpired in its shadow.
The camp at Ebensee held Jews, Russians, and political prisoners. Many of the prisoners had been professional men— doctors, lawyers, professors, and businessmen—before the war. But their brutalization at the hands of their Nazi tormentors had robbed them of any resemblance to their former selves.
“We know that doctors become more or less accustomed to the sight of illness, suffering, and death,” McDermott wrote in his personal recollection, “but we were all physically sick after our first view of the camp. These men were literally walking skeletons with every bone of their skulls and trunks standing out sharply; their bodies were bent, twisted and shrunken by disease and torture. They all had horribly diseased skin, huge running sores, areas of osteomyelitis where wide sections of bone were exposed and discharging pus, and a number of huge, open empyemas draining from their chests. “Medically speaking,” he continued, “we were faced with an impossible situation. We watched men die by the dozens as we walked around. Five men dropped dead while waiting in line for the first meal we served.”
To begin the long process of restoring the wretched survivors to health required a tremendous amount of work carried out with few resources. Allied forces labored steadily to bring water and sanitary facilities to the camp and to set up delousing stations. Faced with a shortage of such basics as clean clothing, blankets, and dressings, they captured German depots to obtain what they needed. The former prisoners’ barracks needed to be emptied, fumigated, and scrubbed, and all of their old blankets and uniforms had to be burned. Only then could the doctors begin to isolate patients with typhus, tuberculosis, and other infectious diseases and attempt to separate cases into a ward system by medical category. “What it boiled down to,” McDermott wrote, “is that three small, specialized surgical units were trying to run a city in which all the inhabitants were in the last stages of starvation, most of whom had one or more horrible diseases, and where there was no elementary sanitation, housing, clothing, or food.”
McDermott and his comrades received help with their enormous job from none other than the Germans and Austrians of the district. U.S. Army commanders specifically ordered that all locals be put to work in the camp, cleaning up the filth and washing the bedridden former prisoners, partly to alleviate a severe labor shortage but especially to make them experience firsthand the hideous truth of the regime with which they had collaborated. The Austrians were pressed into service loading and transporting on carts hundreds of corpses from the camp down the main street to the outskirts of the town. There, they were made to dig individual, marked graves in an area prominently designated “German Atrocity Cemetery.”
When McDermott’s service in the now-secure European theater ended shortly thereafter, he was put in command of a MASH unit and began training for the invasion of Japan everyone assumed would be inevitable. The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki spared him that fate. More than five decades later, McDermott still found himself profoundly affected by the memory of his troop ship gliding into New York harbor on Christmas Day: “There were some pretty tough guys on board that ship—soldiers who had gone through incredibly harrowing experiences—but when the Statue of Liberty came into view, I’ve never seen so many grown men crying. The memory of it still makes me emotional.”
After the war, McDermott, the recipient of two Bronze Stars, finished up five years of residency, made easier by the vast medical and life experience he had gained as a young surgeon in battle. Yet, despite all that he accomplished, he echoed the typical modesty of his generation. “We weren’t heroes,” McDermott insisted. “We weren’t heroes at all. We were just doing what was right and what had to be done.”
Published U.S. Legacies February 2003
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