Fighting for Life

Fought on almost every continent, World War II confronted American GIs with the unprecedented threats to life and health posed by combat on Arctic ice floes and African deserts, in steamy jungles and remote mountain villages, in the stratosphere and the depths of the sea. This book is a history of military medicine in that war. Penicillin brought the anti-biotic revolution to the battlefield, air evacuation plucked the wounded from jungles and deserts, and a unique system brought blood, still fresh, from America to soldiers all over the world. It chronicles the skill, courage, and dedication or a formidable force of surgeons, physicians, enlisted medics, psychiatrists, and nurses, who achieved a spectacular victory.