Existing comment:
"A Perfect Inferno"
Lieutenant Joel T. Boone, a surgeon from Pennsylvania with the 6th Marines, saw the carnage of Belleau Wood like few others. The first night of the battle he described as "a perfect inferno." Working twelve hours straight in a dressing station near the fighting, he bandaged wounds and treated shock in preparation for the injured Marines to be driven back to field hospitals. During the fight, Boone helped set up a field dressing station to treat the wounded at the Petit Montgivault farm. They had their hands full, as the fierce resistance from the German infantry that occupied the woods inflicted horrendous casualties on the 4th Marine Brigade. A single day of the battle, June 6, when the Marines suffered 1,087 casualties, was the costliest in Marine Corps history, until the battle for the island of Tarawa during World War II. |