falling fragment of shell cut off his left arm at the shoulder, with fatal results. Miraculously, the woman and child were not hurt.
All ambulant patients were moved from the wards to hospital tents set up behind the building. A number of men decided for themselves, and without benefit of medical advice, that they were well enough to get back to their ships and into the fight. They didn't stop for uniforms. Some of these men were killed. A few were injured and ultimately turned up at the hospital again. One lanky gunner's mate, who had been under treatment for a fractured rib, got out to his ship in time to help fire his gun before a bursting torpedo shattered both his legs. They brought him back to the same ward and the same bed he had crawled out of an hour before. Through grimly set lips he muttered: "It's just a damned merry-go-round!"
There was constant danger that the hospital itself would be hit. Ten minutes after the raid began, a blazing enemy plane came down on a glide toward the center of the main building. For a minute it looked as if it would make a direct hit. Then it veered off slightly, carrying away a corner of the laboratory roof and half the animal house, to crash on the tennis courts. The pilot had been shot in the head and killed before the crash. The plane had evidently come down out of control.
About eight-thirty came a lull in the raid, when the raiding planes went back to their carrier to reload. During that respite, the first casualties began to turn up at the hospital. For the next three hours, while the enemy came back and renewed the assault, and later, the victims continued to come at an average of three a minute. They were brought to the hospital in every sort of vehicle — ambulances, military and civilian trucks, private cars, and delivery wagons. Civilians co-operated with the Navy in bringing the wounded in under fire. A pool of all vehicles was formed at the navy yard garage and moved up, two by two, to the dock to take on wounded for conveyance to the hospital and to the emergency field hospitals set up in various places.
