Estimated reading time: 12 minutes
At 22, Navy medic Johnny Lipes faced an impossible choice aboard the submerged USS Seadragon: improvise an appendectomy with kitchen utensils and raw ether, or watch a crewmate die.
I’ve been churning out these Monday morning GunsAmerica columns for years now. I am sincerely grateful that you keep reading them. You are the reason I get to do this. It is such a privilege.
Across hundreds of these pieces, we have explored feats of battlefield daring adequate to boggle the mind. The capacity of the human animal to do extraordinary things under conditions of mortal peril can both inspire and amaze. Today’s story, however, is a bit different.
The bravery shown here did not involve weapons, tactics, or close combat. The hero of this story was an unassuming 22-year-old Pharmacist’s Mate 1st-class named Wheeler B. Lipes. He went by Johnny for some reason. However, military medics the world over are called simply “Doc.”
Doc Lipes was the sole medical support aboard the US Navy submarine USS Seadragon. His qualifications were that he had served for three years aboard various other Navy ships as a lab technician. That’s it. However, when a crewmate’s life teetered in the balance, this amazing young stud stepped up and did what had to be done.
Table of contents
- Medicine Is Complicated. Doing It Underwater Is Worse.
- USS Seadragon, 120 Feet Down, and a Sailor in Trouble
- Appendicitis at War: The Clock Was Already Running
- No Surgeon, No Operating Room, and No Way Out
- The USS Seadragon Appendectomy Begins
- He Survived the Surgery. Then Came the Fever.
- The Scar Proved Johnny Lipes Had Pulled It Off
- The Story Did Not End Aboard USS Seadragon
- More Extraordinary World War 2 Stories from GunsAmerica
Medicine Is Complicated. Doing It Underwater Is Worse.
I’m nominally on my fifth career. I started med school at 32 and have been a physician for nearly a quarter century now. I suspect I have seen most everything I am going to see in that weird, curious world.
Like most everything else in life, being a doctor is not necessarily hard. You just have to be taught the basics and then do it a lot. The same could be said of bricklaying, earthmoving, carpentry, or electrical work. There are risks and techniques intrinsic to all of those professions. Experience informs the particular pitfalls.
What makes things go off the rails is when somebody is expected to do some of that highly technical stuff without the appropriate training. Jump on a table saw without having had anyone show you how to do it safely, and you can quite easily lose a finger or worse. I have seen that myself many times. Touch the wrong spot on that breaker box, and you’ll immediately wish you hadn’t. In the case of general surgery, it’s really easy to screw that up if you don’t know what you’re doing.
The human body is just breathtakingly complicated, but it is predictable. Most everybody’s heart, liver, pancreas, and spleen are in the same places. When stuff goes wrong, we can generally tease out the details because so many smart people who came before us invested so much time divining the details. However, performing major surgery is not for the faint of heart. The folks who do that for a living have spent at least nine years after college learning how to do it safely. And then there was this guy…
USS Seadragon, 120 Feet Down, and a Sailor in Trouble
On 11 September 1942, the USS Seadragon was on a war patrol in the South China Sea. Our involvement in World War 2 was less than a year old, and nobody knew how things would turn out. This was not yet a one-sided fight. The Japanese Navy was giving as well as it took. Seadragon and her crew could die most expeditiously if the Japanese discovered their location. The nearest friendly military base was a hard week’s cruise away.
Seaman 1st-class Darrel Dean Rector had begun feeling poorly some three days prior. He complained of right lower quadrant abdominal pain and became nauseated, vomiting once. Within the first 24 hours, his temperature rose to 102.4, and his belly became rigid and profoundly tender. On the third day, Pharmacist’s Mate Lipes informed his skipper, Lieutenant Commander W.E. Ferrall, that he suspected Seaman Rector of having appendicitis. This was bad.
Appendicitis at War: The Clock Was Already Running
September 1942, on board a submarine in a combat zone, was a wholly different world from the one we live in today. As an example, at the outset of World War 2 the total national stockpile of penicillin was adequate to treat a mere ten patients. Poor Lipes knew what was happening, but he had very little with which to work.
We have long claimed that we didn’t really know what the appendix was there for. Divining the purpose of the heart, lungs, and liver is easy. The appendix, not so much. We now appreciate that this little finger-sized pouch is the repository for beneficial gut bacteria. However, you still do just fine without it. The issue is what to do if that rascal gets properly agitated.
If the appendix gets a little stool stuck in it, it can become infected. The organ then fills with pus, swells, and dies. If left to its own devices, the appendix will eventually burst like a balloon, spilling vile gut contents into the pristine peritoneum. Without the timely surgical removal of a rotten appendix, appendicitis is typically a death sentence. That thing has to come out right sharpish. All of this was running through the mind of Pharmacist’s Mate Johnny Lipes as he held his confab with the commander of the USS Seadragon.
No Surgeon, No Operating Room, and No Way Out
They didn’t have the stuff they needed to perform an appendectomy, even if they had somebody who knew how to do it, which they didn’t. The medical support facility on board a WW2-vintage submarine was about the size of a small closet. With the boat submerged at 120 feet and the Japanese Navy dominating the seas above, Lipes took stock.
Lipes chose the wardroom mess table as his operating theater. He had a grand total of twelve hemostats, a bottle of ether, some gauze sponges, a little chromic catgut suture material, and a packet of scalpel blades without handles. The cook helped him sterilize the instruments in boiling water. They sourced several sets of rubber gloves and some pajamas and soaked all of that in the alcohol they used as torpedo fuel. Lipes press-ganged an officer named F.P. Hoskins into service as the anesthesiologist. Hoskins improvised a face mask out of a tea strainer and a piece of cloth to administer the raw ether.
The problem with cutting into the human body is that blood is reliably opaque. Surgeons use retractors to hold the flesh clear and a suction device to keep the wound tidy while they work. Seaman Lipes had none of these things. He obtained five tablespoons from the mess, bent them backwards so he could use them as retractors, and sterilized them in boiling water.
The USS Seadragon Appendectomy Begins
The skipper served as the scribe for the procedure, documenting progress every few minutes throughout. LT Hoskins began dripping ether into Seaman Rector’s face at 1046. Lipes improvised a scalpel blade holder out of a hemostat and made his initial incision at 1107. It took him an hour and 23 minutes to locate, isolate, and amputate the diseased appendix. His makeshift retractors worked perfectly.
Lipes treated the appendiceal stump with phenol and alcohol and began closing the wound in layers. He used and accounted for 71 surgical sponges along the way. The intrepid Pharmacist’s Mate sprinkled sulfanilamide powder into the wound atop each layer as he sutured it closed. Seaman Rector regained consciousness after 2 hours and 52 minutes.
71 gauze sponges is a lot. The amount of blood Seaman Rector lost is not documented, but I suspect it was prodigious. That Doc Lipes kept his head and got this thing done…while submerged at 120 feet in a cramped submarine in an active war zone…is pretty darn impressive.
He Survived the Surgery. Then Came the Fever.
Seaman Rector wasn’t out of the woods just yet, not by a long shot. Six hours after surgery, he began to sip a little water. At his 18th hour post-op, Rector spiked a fever of 103.6. His respiration climbed to 50 breaths per minute, and his pulse reached 144 bpm. The unfortunate young man was clearly trying to get septic and die.
Lipes had access to oxygen, but he didn’t have a mask to administer it. When Rector’s condition became grave, Lipes cupped his hands over the sick man’s face and ran the O2 tube into them. This resulted in a significant improvement in the sailor’s condition.
By post-op day 4, Rector was clearly on the mend. Thirteen days after his improvised appendectomy, the kid was back to full duty. Six weeks after the operation, the Seadragon pulled up to a berth at a friendly port.
The Scar Proved Johnny Lipes Had Pulled It Off
The submarine squadron Medical Officer examined Seaman Rector in port and discovered a well-healed surgical scar that was neither tender nor inflamed. The excised appendix had been preserved in alcohol. An Australian pathologist dissected the vile thing and found it to have been both ischemic and blackened. Had Doc Lipes not gotten the diseased organ out of Seaman Rector, the young man most assuredly would have perished.
Military courage comes in many forms. Sometimes that means diving on top of a sputtering hand grenade or charging an enemy machine gun nest. Others involve bending a bunch of spoons into DIY surgical instruments and cutting a friend’s belly open on top of a mess table because you know that he’s going to die if you don’t.
The Story Did Not End Aboard USS Seadragon
Tragically, Seaman Rector was later assigned to the USS Tang. The Tang was the most successful American combat sub of the war. On 24 October 1944, on her fifth combat patrol, the Tang was struck by its own malfunctioning torpedo during a furious combat engagement in the Formosa Strait. Rector was among the 78 crewmembers who perished in the sinking.
Inexplicably, the US Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery initially threatened to court-martial Lipes for performing surgery without the proper credentials. As a physician myself, I think those guys needed to reevaluate their priorities. Lipes prevailed and remained in the Navy, eventually earning a commission and retiring as a Lieutenant Commander in 1962.
After leaving the military, Lipes took a job as a hospital administrator, eventually serving as CEO of a 1,000-bed teaching hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. He later became president of the Memorial Medical Center in Corpus Christi, Texas. In February of 2005, Doc Lipes was finally awarded the Navy Commendation Medal for his heroic actions back in 1942, 63 years after the event. The great man succumbed to pancreatic cancer two months later at age 84. In a world dirty with heroes, Pharmacist’s Mate 1st-class Johnny Lipes was indeed a hero of the highest order.
More Extraordinary World War 2 Stories from GunsAmerica
- The M1 Carbine and The Story of War Hero Jack Lucas
- Browning’s M1911 and the Tale of a U.S. Combat Engineer in Italy
- The Pearl Harbor Ni’ihau Incident and Origins of Ruger’s .22 Pistol
Will is still trying to figure out what he really wants to be when he grows up. However, shooting guns and claiming it was work seemed like a pretty sweet hustle. As a result, Will serendipitously transformed an avocation into a vocation.
Raised in the Mississippi Delta, Will flew UH1H, OH58A/C, CH47D and AH1S helicopters operationally as an Army Aviator. He is SCUBA-qualified and has parachuted out of perfectly good airplanes at 3 o’clock in the morning. Will has summited Mount McKinley, Alaska, six times…always at the controls of an Army helicopter, which is the only way sensible folk climb mountains.
Will has delivered sixty babies and occasionally wrung human blood out of his socks. He is married to his high school sweetheart and has three awesome adult children. Turn-ons include vintage German machineguns, flying his sexy-cool RV6A airplane, Count Chocula cereal and the movie “Aliens.”
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