Friday, April 28, 2017

The sickest man in World War II

From The Burma Road by Donovan Webster. From page 216. Conditions in the Burma campaign in WWII.
In the intervening two days, Myitkyina's thousands of Japanese defenders dug in, creating World War I-style earthwork trenches across the city and on the river's far shore. When the Marauders finally began their attack, they carried with them little artillery, no armor, and pitifully weak air support due to the cloudy monsoon skies. By now, 80 percent of the Marauders were diagnosed by Colonel Seagrave as having dysentery, and one man, Lt. Samuel Wilson, was sent to India as purportedly "the sickest man in World War II." He was diagnosed with - and eventually recovered from - simultaneous cases of mite typhus, amoebic dysentery, malaria, infected jungle sores, nervous exhaustion, and starvation-related wasting.

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