INTERVIEWER:   Good morning.  Dr. Solomon, it’s good to be with you.  Tell me, when did you get into the military, why did you get into the military and what was going on at that time?

SOLOMON:   The war in Europe was on at that time and it was a perfect horror.  While I was in my senior year in medical school in 1941, I applied for a commission in the United States Army.  The application was sitting on my desk where I was serving in the Outpatient Department of Pediatrics at Johns Hopkins Medical School when a little radio over my head on a Sunday let me know that we were at war.  We were attacked at Pearl Harbor.  I immediately dropped what I was doing and ran out to my room in the hospital and filled out my application for a commission.

INTERVIEWER:   What did Uncle Sam do next?

SOLOMON:   I was notified that I could finish my education, which was five or six months and that I should get a residency and then I would be inducted and given a commission in the Army.

INTERVIEWER:   What were you going to do your residency in at that time?

SOLOMON:   I was going to be in the residency in Pediatrics, which was a fine one at Hopkins. 

INTERVIEWER:   Did you complete the residency or what was the sequence of events after that?

SOLOMON:   Well, we were all given until April; usually the residency went until June.  But at the end of April, they brought in a new group and those of us who had commissions went into the military. 

INTERVIEWER:   And you left Johns Hopkins and went…

SOLOMON:   My first stop was Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where doctors were made into medical doctors in the Army, MCAUS, Medical Corps Army United States. 

INTERVIEWER:   How long was the training, sir?

SOLOMON:   The training was six weeks.  It was very intense.  There were many lectures.  We had to take those.  We had to pass examinations.  My mother once wrote, “Son, what would happen if you flunked out?” ( laughter), I said that you couldn’t flunk out.  We went through a great deal of exercises and military knowledge and were shown many movies, many demonstrations and many exercises in the field including one at night where I got lost following a compass course in the dark, I got lost.

INTERVIEWER:   So it was really more military training and military orientation than it had to do with clinical services. 

SOLOMON:   The only relationship to medicine was they gave us the horrors of flies.  I remember particularly, we were shown training films which made us terrified of the common housefly (laughter) and what damage it could do. 

INTERVIEWER:   And what happened after Carlisle barracks?

SOLOMON:   After that I was sent to Memphis, Tennessee, to the University of Tennessee, to take a course in radiology, which was also six weeks and we lived among the people.  We had to find a rooming house.  That was kind of fun.  I was joined later by my wife. I’d been married immediately after completing my residency.

INTERVIEWER:   Now what year was that, Dr. Solomon?

INTERVIEWER:   What was Memphis like?  Hot?

SOLOMON:   Hot, yes, very pleasant.  It really was very pleasant.  At the end of the course in radiology, I was sent to Fort Devens, Massachusetts.  I’m not sure why.  I spent a couple of months there doing very little although I was in the tuberculosis ward where the tubercle bugs were thick in the air and why we all didn't get tuberculosis, I don’t know.

Later on in the war, I was sure I had it.  From Fort Devens, I was sent to the strangest post of all in Paris, Tennessee.  Paris, Tennessee, early in the war was established as a training ground for a regiment in barrage balloon use.  Every morning these poor fellows got up and set barrage balloons into the air.  They went out of the base area and set up these balloons.  When I got there and saw what they were doing, I said this is ridiculous.  Nobody is using barrage balloons.  That’s from World War I.

Sure enough within a couple of weeks of my arrival, they were put in the infantry and they were sent to Europe.  It was a ridiculous situation.  I went from Paris, Tennessee, to California to prepare for shipment to the South Pacific.  What was difficult about being shipped in that fashion is that I was not assigned to a unit.  This entire ship was soldiers, a couple thousand of them I think, in a troop transport, 1500 anyway.  We were all unassigned.  We didn't know where we were going.  We didn't know to what kind of unit we were going.  We had no idea what our future was.  Nineteen days out of San Francisco, we saw land for the first time, 19 days, no land.

For the first 500 miles, there were airplanes protecting us.  After that, there was nothing.  In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, we were in officers’ mess and suddenly there’s a call to general quarters.  We were waited on.  The waiters dropped their trays, ran to their battle stations and we Army people had no idea what was going on.  Later we learned they’d seen a periscope and nothing else happened.

The first land we saw were the Banks Islands off the Solomon Islands.  Then they told us where we were going.  We were going to Goodenough in the Cook Island group and there was some confusion and we did not go there, we went to the Milne Bay in New Guinea, which is the western end of New Guinea. 

That’s when I knew we were going to win the war because as I stood on the deck and looked around me, as far as the eye could see in this great big bay, as big as San Francisco Bay, there were ships, 10,000 ton freighters as far as you could see.  I thought if this is the end of the world, we have this many freighters, nobody could beat this.

INTERVIEWER:   What year was that, Dr. Solomon?

SOLOMON:   This must have been…I don’t remember dates very well, this must have been the fall of ’43, fall or winter of ’43.

INTERVIEWER:   Now let’s see.  You were trained as a pediatrician, then went on for radiology, ended up in a tuberculosis ward, then ended up in a balloon outfit that disappeared (laughter).  You’re put on a ship and sent overseas to New Guinea.  When do you start doctoring, Dr.?

SOLOMON:   Well probably, from Milne Bay, we sailed to Finchaven, New Guinea, which is about a third of the way up the coast of New Guinea.  New Guinea is the largest island in the world.  It is I think 1800 miles long or almost that.  It is enormous.  It has some of the highest mountains in the world.  It is a strange, strange place and half of it at that time was owned by the Netherlands.

Papua New Guinea which is what I’m talking about, the eastern end was affiliated with Australia in some way, but it didn't have any kind of a government.  Port Moresby on the south coast was sort of the capital and the Japanese had made an effort to capture Port Moresby.  They got within 17 miles of Port Moresby, which would have been a disaster for Australia and they were thrown back. 

Most of them had nothing to do with military operations.  Most of them died or incapacitated from disease.  They weren’t prepared for the disease.  Most of them had dysentery, malaria.  They all had malaria I’m sure.

INTERVIEWER:   Our troops or their troops or both?

SOLOMON:   Theirs.  We all took Atabrine .  You had to take it to eat because at the entrance to the mess tent was somebody with Atabrine and he gave you a pill and watched you take it.  We all turned yellow as a consequence because that’s what it did.  It also had another feature, which we didn't know at the time.  We began seeing, as soon as I began practicing medicine, we began seeing a great deal of exfoliate dermatitis. 

The skin fell off.  We had no explanation for it, but we couldn’t keep the soldiers in New Guinea.  They were sent home and we began to get word, it began to filter into our hospitals and clinics in New Guinea that two weeks after they boarded ship, they began to improve.  We tried everything, everything that we knew of.  It became clear, they were not taking Atabrine.  This was Atabrine toxicity.  Nobody told us about it.  We had no idea.  We were seeing a lot of toxicity.

I went to Finchaven, New Guinea, and at first I was unassigned and from there I was assigned to the 119th station hospital as a radiologist.  I was there not very long.  They got a real radiologist (laughter) and I went to the 13th general hospital and I didn't stay there very long because they were forming a unit that needed a doctor.  An engineer construction group headquarters it was called.

This brings up a wonderful story.  A brand new type of unit was made up of some 85 really trained engineers, qualified engineers and they were supervising battalions of engineers, construction engineers mostly and regiments of engineers.  So under this group headquarters, there were a couple of battalions under one regiment and one doctor.  I was given a new table of equipment.

Tables of organization included two sergeants.  My equipment included a truck and a tent.  Nothing else.  Then I had a table of equipment I had to make out orders for all this equipment that I was supposed to have.  My sergeants went down to the base headquarters, base supply, and they came back with the truck filled.  We set up our tent clinic.  One thing was missing, a trunk, I didn't know what was in it, but it was on the table of equipment so that I was upset that it wasn’t there.

They said to me that the sergeant had said he would have one soon.  So a week later, I put in another order.  This is Over, Short and Damaged report.  This is a particular form we learned about at Carlisle, Pennsylvania.  I filled out an Over, Short and Damaged report for this truck.  My sergeants came back to tell me that there was one in the medical supply base, but it was not on their list and therefore the supply sergeant there wasn’t going to give it to them, but he did want a radio.

I said I didn't have a radio to give him.  They said no, but the Seabees have radios and they would like some of our medical whiskey.  So for two bottles of medical whiskey, I got a radio, which I gave to the supply sergeant for the piece of equipment I was supposed to have anyway.  This is no joke (laughter), this actually happened.

INTERVIEWER:   What was the equipment?  Do you remember?

SOLOMON:   I don’t remember anymore.  It wasn’t really terribly important.  I was very amused.

INTERVIEWER:   Do you remember the phrase, the right way, the wrong way and the Army way?

SOLOMON:   This was absolutely ridiculous.  Some of my patients were natives, New Guinea natives.  There were very few patients and I discovered immediately that the battalion and regimental surgeons of these units that were under this headquarters were not sending reports to me.  I had no jurisdiction over them.  So I wondered what in the world I was doing there.

Eighty-five members, they need a doctor? Of course not.  After two months, the commanding officer, who was regular Army, called me in and said, “Solomon, do you like it here”.  I told him I had nothing to do.  He said that was right, what would I like to do.  I said I would like to be at an evacuation hospital.  He said he would arrange it, he was regular Army.  I didn't believe it.

While I was there, I got sick for the first time.  I was attending an outdoor movie, which we did whenever we could and we were not under blackout in New Guinea at that time.  While I was there, I began to feel hot and very hot and I returned to my tent, took my temperature.  It was 103.  I went to sleep and the next morning, I took it again and it was 104.  It was 104 by noon.  I told myself if it reaches 104, I’ll call for help. 

I called my sergeant and asked him to take me to the nearest station hospital, which they did.  There it was 105.  It was in the late afternoon.  I didn't have malaria.  I had a chest x-ray, which showed consolidation.  Of course, I had tuberculosis.  They didn't find tuberculosis, however, I had pneumonia.  I had a dandy case of pneumonia, but I got over it in a month.

INTERVIEWER:   What was the treatment?

SOLOMON:   There wasn’t any (laughter).

INTERVIEWER:   Just get over it and get better.

SOLOMON:   Right and luckily I did.  Before that, God blessed soldiers were sent to Australia to recuperate.  The week that I was ready to go, the order came in from McArthur’s headquarters, no more recuperation leaves in Australia.  So I never got to Australia.  I was returning to my unit a short while later and they were looking for me.  Where’s Lieutenant Solomon?  They had orders for me to join the 119th evacuation hospital.  I was thrilled, where is it?

I went to the base headquarters and showed them my orders, where is the 119th station hospital.  They said it’s part of the 41st division.  That’s fine, where’s the 41st division?  They said well they were last in Biak, which is an island off New Guinea, off Dutch New Guinea.  I said alright, arrange transportation for me to get there.  I had just gotten back to my unit again, about 20 miles or so, and again they had telephoned orders, return to the airport.  They had an airplane flying there.

It flew first to Alandia, then to Biak, but before this I had one really interesting assignment.  I was ship doctor on freighters carrying troops up the coast of New Guinea.  I was the only doctor.  There were 1500 or so troops on a freighter that went up the coast of New Guinea.  They were dropped off temporarily in Hollandia because the fighting was in Biak then. 

When I first went aboard the ship at night, I had my bag.  We always carried gas masks and water bottles and I guess I had a medical kit too.  I asked him where was my cabin and they told me I didn't have a cabin.  I said then they didn't have a doctor (laughter) and I turned on my heels.  He said, “We’ll find a place for you”.  There were only five cabins for all of the officers and they gave me one.  This was really uneventful.  We were not attacked, although there were three 5-inch guns on the freighter manned by Marines.

When I got to Hollandia the first time, the ship was manned by Merchant Marines as freighters would be.  When I got to Hollandia, they ordered me off.  They wanted to get out of there.  This was a battle zone.  I found what were called casual camps for people en route and I found a casual camp and I showed my orders and I said I’m going to the 41st division.  This was later after a couple of these trips.

I now had orders to go to the 168th evacuation hospital.  They said well the airport is down the road a bit so I thumbed a ride on a jeep to the airport, showed my orders.  There’s no airplanes.  There’s no schedule, no American or United Airlines.  So for five days, I went to the airport every day with my thumb out.  There would be one. 

On my second trip back, I was on these enormously high mountains, the Stanley Mountains, and I looked down and we were too close to the tops of these mountains.  That disturbed me a little bit.  I could see the leaves on the trees and the copilot came back and said we’re going down.

Incidentally in these airplanes, there are no seats.  You sit on the floor.  These were DC-2’s I think.  These are places that no white man has ever seen (laughter). 

INTERVIEWER 2:  When was this?

SOLOMON:   Early in ’44 I think.  The pilot was very good or very lucky, cleared the mountains and put us down in a flat place near Leyte, New Guinea and we didn't crash.  I was sure we were going to. 

INTERVIEWER:   This was a military airport that you landed at?

SOLOMON:   Oh yes, there were no others.  I wonder what’s it like…many years later, there was a nostalgia trip it was called.  Somebody had organized this with a cruise company out of Australia, Sydney, to go back to New Guinea and some of these other islands to see what they are like today and I was dying to go.  My wife said no.  So I never returned to New Guinea. 

I did return to Australia and one of the questions that had always bothered me was what happened to the Japanese base north of New Guinea, it was a Naval base or an Army base.  It had a huge number of troops.  We bombed it every day.  It was on our news, so many airplanes bombed.  This is the Bismarck, Archipelago, the war ended, what became of them.  There were at least 100,000 Japanese on this island.

So when I was in Australia years later, I found a man who had been there since the war and he told me they starved to death.  I knew the Japanese had no transportation to bring them home.  I knew we weren’t going to send a troop ship.  Nobody brought them home.  That was a shocking piece of information.

From Hollandia, this was an interesting thing.  I went to Biak with these orders to join the 168th evac hospital and…

INTERVIEWER:   You finally flew into Biak, is that right?

SOLOMON:   Yes, I finally got into Biak.

INTERVIEWER:   And that’s the 41st division, did you say?

SOLOMON:   Yeah and I got on the field telephone at the airport and I said, I’m looking for the 41st division who had 30,000 or 40,000 people and they said they’re not on Biak, the campaign’s over.  I asked where in the damnation are they?  They were somewhere in the Philippines.  I said they should find some transportation to at least get me started.  I was again in a casual officers’ camp.

I came back one day, this was blackout, no lights at all permitted, and I got back into my tent and someone was calling me name.  I looked out and I could see just a silhouette of a truck and the driver of the truck was following…what’s the idea.  He said they have transportation for you.  They had a ship at the dock and he would take me there.  How we drove through the dark, I don’t know.  I couldn’t see a thing.

We got down to the dock and I could see a large freighter tied up at the dock.  There were a few people milling around and I asked, I showed my orders to somebody who seemed to be in authority.  He said, “You’re going on the hospital ship that’s attached to the freighter.  You have to go over the freighter to get down to the Dutch hospital ship”.  It was a Dutch hospital ship.  Pitch dark, raining and my transportation is a rope ladder.  I have never climbed a rope ladder before.  I’m carrying about 40 or 50 pounds including a rifle.

I am going up a rope ladder, a slippery rope ladder in the dark up the side of a freighter.  If I slip and fall, nobody is ever going to know it.  I’m going to be crushed between the ship and the dock and no one will know.  I was yelling and I did it.  I was 26 or 27.  When I crossed the deck, saw another ladder and then I could make out the hospital ship.  Climb down the rope ladder to this Dutch hospital ship.

The first thing the Dutch sailors did was grab my rifle and throw it overboard.  They didn't want to be caught with any rifles.  If they were stopped by the Japanese, they didn't want to have any armament.

INTERVIEWER:   Well what was a medical officer doing carrying a rifle?

SOLOMON:   Every medical officer carries a rifle.  We had no insignia either.  Well I then had the best experience I had overseas.  A five day cruise to Leyte from Biak.  It was very pleasant.  There were now about a dozen of us making the trip.  We didn't have much conversation with the Dutch sailors.  They didn't speak English. 

I got to Leyte, disembarked, where McArthur had gone ashore two or three times in front of cameras to make sure the picture was right.  He never was where there was any fighting, never.  Dugout Doug.  The soldiers hated him.  Again I found a casual officers’ camp and showed my orders and asked where was the 41st division.  They said it is not here.  I said where is it.  The base headquarters on Leyte said the 41st division is in Luzon.  The fighting had just begun in Luzon.

The casual officers’ camp said they thought they were on Mindoro, which is an island between Leyte and Luzon.  So now I had about ten on the same orders including a chaplain.  The chaplain was a fighting chaplain.  He wanted to go to Luzon.  I said, “Nothing doing.  I’m going to Mindoro.  I think it’s peaceful there now”.  We were placed on a ship going to Mindoro, no, we flew, excuse me, that’s right.

There were signs of fighting, but nothing was going on at that time.  There were smashed planes around the airport.  We found a field telephone.  The chaplain got there first and he indicated back to me that the 41st division was on Mindoro and the 135th regimental combat team was on Mindoro and we got information about that. The 168th evac hospital was just across the road.

I found a jeep, which took me to the 168th evac hospital.  I reported to the commanding officer and the next day I’m with the 168th evac hospital.  There was a commanding officer sitting at a card table and spread out on the card table was a map.  He said, “Tomorrow we board ship and Monday morning we land in Palawan.  I said what in the world was that and he showed me this little pencil of land north of Borneo.  I said, “My mother didn't raise me to go to Borneo”.  He said that’s where we were going and that’s exactly what happened. 

They then immediately provided me with a rifle, I had to clean it out.  That was the first thing you did was to prepare the rifle.  Then they gave me other supplies that I would need like a steel helmet for the invasion of Palawan, which the Filipinos pronounced Palawan.  Many years later I was at a medical society meeting and there was a Army recruitment booth manned by Filipinos of all things.  They were trying to get doctors to enter the Reserves.

I went to speak with one of them and I asked her about Palawan and she told me immediately how they pronounced it.  I asked her what she knew about it, what was it like today.  She said she had an uncle there.  I asked if they ever built a road across the island and she said no.  But the leper colony is gone and I think so is the penal colony.

We boarded ship the next day and set sail for this miserable island in the southern Philippines.  This was an assault landing.  I was the first one off my Higgins boat, sank like a stone because we were not on shore.  We were about 100 yards or more from shore.  I was carrying at least 60 pounds of equipment.  I dropped to the bottom, came up sputtering, hating the Navy for cowardice (laughter). 

We landed, had nothing to do on the shore because the fighting was all in the mangrove swamp ahead of us.  The next day we went further ashore and set up a 250-bed hospital.  We set up a laboratory, x-ray, operating rooms, everything needed for taking care of patients and within 24 hours, we were full.  Every bed was occupied.  So we were very busy.

I had some interesting experiences along the way.  One had to do with malaria.  The commanding officer of a base was responsible for what was called malarial discipline.  They had beds covered with mosquito netting at night, having no exposed bare skin during the night.  You wore boots.  Your pants were tucked into the boots and so on.  You were completely covered and you took Atabrin and so on.

One day I was called into the commanding officer’s tent in a station hospital and he said, “Solomon, last month you had 30 cases of malaria on your service”.  I said, “Yes, too bad”.  He said, “That goes on the commanding officer’s record.  He’s responsible for preventing malaria and we can’t have 30 cases showing.  Did you find the Plasmodium in each case”.  I said, “No because as soon as the soldier began feeling hot, he took a handful of Atabrin and by the time we got to him, we couldn’t find the parasite”.  He said then I couldn’t call it malaria.

So the next month or two months later, he called me in and said, “Solomon, you had 15 cases of fever of undetermined origin on your service”.  I said, “Yes, those were the cases you wouldn’t let me call malaria”.  He said, “Well we can’t have that either cause that looks bad for our hospital record.  We can’t determine why somebody had a fever.”  I said, “Yes sir”.  So there was an epidemic of nasal pharyngitis.  I looked through the book to find out what I could call these and the best I could do was nasal pharyngitis so there was an epidemic in New Guinea of that (laughter).

I had many other very interesting experiences.  So much for Army medical statistics too.  I had many other interesting experiences.  On Palawan, my tent mate was a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California Berkeley, an extremely bright fellow.  He’s the one that kept my sanity because I had somebody to talk to.  Alex was the sanitary officer.  He was not an M.D.; he was a Ph.D. 

He got to know some of the people especially at the penal colony on Palawan because he took all the animal refuse from the kitchens and took it to the penal colony and they fed their pigs with it.  They liked it very much.  While he was dealing with it, he saw they made sandals, which he thought were very attractive and he wanted a pair for his wife.  So I went with him when he went back to the penal colony to pick up a pair of sandals he ordered.

He was carrying under his arm three cartons of cigarettes.  We got cigarettes free a couple of times a month.  I didn't smoke them.  I used them for trade.  So did Alex.  He handed the Filipino who made the sandals a carton of cigarettes, some unknown brand, and he shook his head no and pointed to the Chesterfields (laughter).  He knew the difference in this God-awful place.  I thought that was very amusing.

The first time we got out of New Guinea, we had some fresh food or access to it.  We had no fresh food in New Guinea ever.  I wrote about this in one letter and it was censored.  I saw it later, it was censored (laughter).  I also said any calculations about caloric intake were faulty because the soldiers didn't eat all of the stuff that was put in front of them.  I had peanut butter because we had lots of that.

INTERVIEWER:   Well what was the food, K rations, C rations?

SOLOMON:   I guess they were C rations.  I’m not sure.  No fresh meat ever.  No fresh fish.  I don’t know why not.  We could go out and catch fish, but there was no fishing.  We had cereals, dry cereal.  The butter, of course, was something like glue.  It was terrible.

INTERVIEWER:   Did you have bread?

SOLOMON:   Yes, in the places that were settled, where we’d been an established headquarters, there was bread.  It was plain white bread.  We had that in New Guinea and we had it after a while in the Philippines.

INTERVIEWER:   No fresh milk or anything.

SOLOMON:   Oh no, I didn't see fresh milk until I was on the ship going home. 

INTERVIEWER:   Were you in the Philippines when the war ended?

SOLOMON:   Yes.

INTERVIEWER:   What was it like?

SOLOMON:   We were filled with joy.

INTERVIEWER:   Where were you located when VJ Day occurred?

SOLOMON:   I was on Zamboanga.  Zamboanga is a peninsula of the largest island of the Philippines which has 3000 islands.  Zamboanga is a peninsula that became famous in the Spanish American War, famous or notorious.  Our troops were involved in putting on a rebellion.  We had just thrown the Spanish out and now there was a rebellion by a group of _____ in this part of Mindanao.

Our troops had a song there which became well known.  It was The Monkeys Have No Tails in Zamboanga, the monkeys have no tails, they were bitten off by whales, the monkeys have no tails in Zamboanga and a story goes with it.  Two days after we landed on Zamboanga, I was in a jeep going by the air strip and there was already a small operations shack that had been set up.  On the roof of this shack, I have a picture of it somewhere, there’s a billboard size sign.  Huge sign and in big letters, it says They Have no Tails in Zamboanga.

On top of the billboard was the tail assembly of a Japanese airplane, Japanese fighter plane.  They have no tails in Zamboanga.  Only the American Army could do this.  I’m not the only one who took pictures of this.  I saw it in a newspaper not so long ago.  There are more verses to the song I’m sure that I don’t know.  This was the one that was in my memory. 

They’ve also put up a billboard, the 41st division and all of the operations that they engaged in, their losses, their kills, all of the islands they had taken.  It was most impressive and this was a billboard that they put up.

INTERVIEWER:   Was the 41st a National Guard outfit?

SOLOMON:   Yes, Washington National Guard.  The first American division in the South Pacific was the 32nd and this was the second, the 41st.  But this is the bad news.  The war ended.  We were in Zamboanga.  We were attached to the 41st division.  41st division of course is going home right away.  No, we were reassigned to the 24th which was going to occupy Japan.  So they put us in ships and they shipped us to Davao which is also on Mindanao, the southern tip, where we stayed for a few days.  Then we were shipped to Japan.

INTERVIEWER:   As part of the 24th division.

SOLOMON:   As part of the 24th division.  Incidentally the 24th division remained on Japan and at the beginning of the Korean War, it was sent to Korea.  That was the first American soldiers sent to Korea were the 24th division.

INTERVIEWER:   Well where did you serve in Japan?

SOLOMON:   The island of Kyushu which forms the eastern part of the Inland Sea.  This is what forms the Inland Sea.  Kyushu was not very important to the Japanese.  Matsuyamo was the capital city and we bombed the dickens out of it.  This was now in September.

INTERVIEWER:   Of 1945.

SOLOMON:   1945 and we’d been in the tropics for a couple of years and September in Japan was cold to us.  They put us up in an old Japanese barracks, which had no heating of any kind.  My friend and roommate, Alex Kaplan, and I looked around to see what are the enlisted men doing.  They’re not putting up with this.  Well there were bricks everywhere because buildings had been destroyed everywhere.

They were taking the bricks and we had some cement and they were making little furnaces and each room had a furnace in it on the enlisted men’s side.  Oh and they were using drainpipes for the chimneys.  So we built a little furnace.

INTERVIEWER:   What did you use for fuel?

SOLOMON:   Oh there were things, wood everywhere.  We didn't see any Japanese for a week or 10 days and then we began seeing children that wanted to bargain for candy.  We drove in jeeps with the windshield down and two rifles at the ready.  We didn't know what to expect.  When we went in the Inland Sea, there were six minesweepers in front of us sweeping mines.  We didn't know what to expect.

What happened of course was absolutely nothing.  I have a picture of me here somewhere.  I’m at the top of a small mountain at Matsuyamo looking out towards the Inland Sea where our fleet is and I look like the conqueror.  The occupation from our side was very, very quiet. 

My last assignment in the Philippines had been as medical officer, the only one, in a rehab hospital, tent hospital, for men who mostly had had hepatitis.  What kind of hepatitis, we didn't know, all we knew was hepatitis, viral hepatitis, A, B, C, D, E, F and G did not exist.  So I had about 100-120 cases of hepatitis, some dengue fever and a few other things.  These were people who were convalescing. 

I was darn sure I was going to get hepatitis.  So every morning I would look in the mirror and look at the whites of my eyes.  I didn't see anything and then we were on our way to Japan and we were at the end of a typhoon, but we were not disturbed much and it was quite pleasant taking this trip to Japan.  Every day I was there, I was looking in my eyes.  After two weeks, they were yellow.  I had hepatitis.  We weren’t actually doing anything except sitting there.

I thought maybe I’d sit it out and then I decided no.  They couldn’t take care of me in the 168th evac hospital because it didn't exist anymore.  So they sent me across the Inland Sea in a boat to a hospital that had been established in Kure, Japan, which was their naval base.  It was their West Point.  It is 15 miles from Hiroshima so I was within 15 miles of Hiroshima.

But I was in a hospital and after a week, they transferred me to a general hospital, which had been set up on an island in the Inland Sea.  There I was really sick.  Not only was I severely jaundiced, but I had fever and if I moved, I was at complete bed rest, if I moved, the fever went up.  So they evacuated this hospital two or three times a week because they were exploding munitions on this island and they had to move us.  Whenever they picked me up, put me in an ambulance and move me, I would get sicker.

From this, I don’t know the name of the island anymore, they sent me by train up the coast of Japan to Nagoya.  There we had a big hospital and every couple of weeks, I would see a disposition board which would decide whether I would stay or go home.  The third time I saw a doctor from Chicago who I’d known at the University of Chicago and he said they had to decide what to do with me.  They were not going to send hepatitis physicians home, they needed the doctors there.

I said, “You’re going to send me home”, you blankety-blank.  They didn't tell me and one evening, I was laying in bed in a big open ward.  The other members, the other patients were watching a movie elsewhere.  I dozed off and somebody shook my shoulder and awakened me and I looked up and it was a Red Cross girl, the first one I had ever seen while I was overseas.

She had a big basket of things, what did I want.  I knew instantly that I was going home.  She’d seen the list of those going home.  I picked out a sweater that somebody had knitted and sure enough, the next morning, I got the orders.  She had seen them first which is why my children never gave a nickel to the Red Cross.  You can put this in the record too.  I would not permit it.  I despise the Red Cross.  I love the Salvation Army.  I would have nothing to do with the Red Cross (laughter).  There are many more stories about the Red Cross, which I won’t make public.

INTERVIEWER:   How did you get back to the states?

SOLOMON:   Troop transport.  It was a long, long trip.  There’s a story there too.  After this long trip, it was foggy as the dickens as we approached San Francisco Bay and the ship stopped.  They were at a complete stop.  They couldn’t see anything.  We were out on deck.  By this time, I was feeling better.  We were out on deck and all we could see was fog.

Then we could feel the motors begin and we began sailing a little bit very, very slowly and then suddenly the Golden Gate Bridge flashed overhead and there was sunshine in the San Francisco Bay.  We were so happy and there were signs everywhere, “Welcome Home”.  But this was now long after the end of the war. 

INTERVIEWER:   Tell me, all the experiences that you had after medical school, all the moving around that you did in the States, all of the places you saw overseas and all of the dreadful things, what did you learn from all of that?  What do you remember as I will always be grateful for or acknowledging learning?

SOLOMON:   I was most impressed let’s say by the ability of the military to provide so much at such an enormous distance and in such out of the way places.  It was fantastic to me that they were able to maintain an army as they did so very, very far away with everything, absolutely everything.  Absolutely fabulous.  They did it with everything.  No other army in the world has ever approached the logistics of what was accomplished there.  That’s what impressed me most.

About people, I met mostly good people.  The only evil I saw was the enemy.  We went into the, I don’t know whether anybody wants to know this, but we invaded Palawan.  The infantry was given information.  They didn't have to take any prisoners because we had all the information we needed.

So they had just murdered 150 Americans that had been taken from Bataan to Palawan.  They murdered them on Palawan.  We knew this had been verified several times.  I’ve looked for it in publications since.  It is true.  No prisoners.  We took one and they had to protect him during the night at our hospital and then they flew him out the next morning.  That’s something the public, I’m sure, was never told.  So this was pretty rough stuff.

The organization of the military during the war was fantastic.  Of course everybody was of one mind.  We had been attacked.  It’s different today.  Sure we’re attacked, but whom could we face, whom could we blame, the Talaban.