Navy honors sailor who performed lifesaving World War II surgery

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February 20. 2005

By STEVE HARTSOE
Associated Press Writer

The Navy on Sunday honored a former pharmacists' mate with a commendation medal, more than 60 years after he saved a young sailor's life by performing an emergency appendectomy aboard a submarine during World War II.

Wheeler Lipes performed the surgery in 1942, with his patient stretched out on a dining table as their submarine lay submerged 120 feet beneath the Pacific Ocean. A news report on Lipes' feat won a Pulitzer Prize, and the Navy later made a movie about it.

Lipes, 84, said past efforts to award him the Navy Commendation Medal failed because government officials believed a statute of limitations had passed.

"Personally, I'm not overwhelmed with awards, but I think it was important they present the medal because it helps to bring about some closure of things that fall through the cracks," he said.

Lipes was 23 when he performed the surgery on sailor Darrel Dean Rector aboard the USS Seadragon.

Rector was too tall to lay on the table, so a nearby cabinet was opened and Lipes put the patient's feet in the drawer. The table was bolted to the floor, so Lipes had to stand with his knees bent throughout the operation.

He used makeshift instruments - bent spoons for retractors, alcohol from torpedoes for sterilization and hemostats for knife handles to hold the blades. Lipes and an assistant wore sterilized pajamas for operating room gowns.

After nearly two hours, Lipes removed a swollen 5-inch appendix that had several inches of blackened tissue.

Arthur Killam, 84, who served aboard the Seadragon with Lipes and attended Sunday's ceremony, said the young Lipes never wavered during the surgery.

"(Lipes) said he'd seen an appendectomy one time so he told the skipper that he could do it," said Killam, who lives in Roanoke, Va. "He went right after it."

Lipes said he wasn't the brave one.

"I always thought he was the guy who had the courage," Lipes said of Rector. "I've asked myself, 'Would I have gotten up on that table and let someone do the same thing to me?' He was one of the most courageous people I've ever met."

Rector was back on duty in 13 days. He died two years later aboard a different submarine, the USS Tang, when the Tang fired a torpedo that circled back and struck the vessel.

Reporter George Weller of the now-defunct Chicago Daily News wrote about Lipes' undersea surgery and won a Pulitzer Prize. Several motion pictures also portrayed the feat, including one titled "The Pharmacist's Mate," produced by the Navy.

Lipes said about 100 people attended Sunday's medal ceremony.

"It was spectacular," he said, describing the ceremony in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "The Navy certainly made up for the 63 years of delay in the medal."

Lipes received the award after Jan Herman, historian of the Navy Medical Department, began looking into his case.

"I found that he had never gotten any kind of recognition from the Navy," Herman told The Daily News of Jacksonville, N.C. Herman interviewed and videotaped Lipes several times for the Navy.

"He had been in the newspapers, and when the war wasn't going very well for us in the Pacific, here was this 23-year-old kid who did this great thing, saved a guy's life under these very harrowing circumstances," Herman said.

The surgery wasn't Lipes' only harrowing experience. He escaped death early in the war when the submarine USS Sealion was hit by two Japanese bombs. He still has scars from that attack.

Lipes, who is battling pancreatic cancer, retired to North Carolina in 2002 after a long career as a hospital administrator. He said he was cheered by Sunday's ceremony. "I certainly was privileged and honored to be the subject of that presentation," he said.