Jan Herman was the historian for the Navy’s Bureau of Medicine when he met and interviewed Johnny Lipes. He wrote a book, Battleship Sick Bay, which includes Lipes’ story about doing the first appendectomy on a submerged submarine during World War II. In recent years, Mrs. Audrey Lipes attended several Capitol Chapter meetings of the Naval Submarine League, as the guest of her friends, Lorie and Jeanine Allen. Lorie was the Secretary of the chapter at the time. Subsequently, Mrs. Lipes joined the NSL and is a member of the Naval Submarine League Legacy Society. She introduced Mr. Herman to Tim Oliver, who then asked for an interview.
Following is a slightly edited transcript of the interview with Jan Herman about Johnny Lipes, which was conducted on 16 July 2014. Some explanatory notes have been provided by the editor in brackets [].
Interviewer – CAPT Tim Oliver, USN, (Ret)
Wheeler B. “Johnny” Lipes dropped out of high school to enlist in the Navy in 1936. He trained as a corpsman and was a pharmacist’s mate first class when he transferred from hospital duty to submarines. After the war, he got his high school diploma, graduated from George Washington University, and retired from the Navy after 26 years of ser- vice, as a Lieutenant Commander. He continued to work as a hospital administrator for 30 more years. Shortly before he died in 2005, he was awarded the Navy Commendation Medal for the successful appendec- tomy he performed 120 feet down in the South China Sea on 9/11/1942. The USS Seadragon (SS-194) was a Sargo class submarine. Keel laid 4/18/38 in Groton, CT; commissioned 10/23/39 with LT John G.
Johns in command; arrived Cavite, Philippines on 11/30/39.
Jan Herman: The first thing you want to know is: “What prepared him to join the Navy?” Well, his mother, as I recall, was a nurse or an attendant at a hospital down in the Roanoke, Virginia area. He was from a place called New Castle, Virginia, which is right near Roanoke. He used to spend a lot of time with his mother at the hospital, and he would do things. They would give little Johnny chores to do in the hospital. He would run around and do them, and he got into that hospital culture. It was during the Depression era, and when it came time for him to find some way of supporting himself, he thought about the Navy. He thought the Navy might be a good place to start. They’ll train you and they’ll give you a place to stay. They’ll give you a job and they’ll feed you. And, of course, the lore was that the Navy chow was the best around, so he ended up joining the Navy.
Johnny wasn’t in submarines to begin with. He trained as a Corps- man. He went to the Corpsman School at the time. I think it was in Portsmouth, Virginia, if I’m not mistaken. He went through the training, which was probably 8 weeks long. Then after boot camp there was an additional length of time where he learned the basics: first aid, how to give shots, and how to perform first aid types of things.
I recall as a junior Corpsman, his first or second assignment was the Naval Hospital in Philadelphia. He always looked younger than he was. He looked like a kid even into his early adulthood. I remember him tell- ing a story about his very first day at Philadelphia; he had an encounter with a Navy nurse who became legendary later on. Her name was Ann Bernatitus. At the time she was a Lieutenant. She had a reputation as a go-by-the-book kind of nurse, was a bit brusque, and not well liked in the nursing community and certainly the patients were not eager to have her as their nurse. I say this because I knew Ann Bernatitus much later on in her retirement and did her oral history too. She ended up at Corregidor during the war and was one of the few nurses who were evacuated from the Philippines. There were Army nurses there, but she was the only Navy nurse. They were taken out by submarine to Australia.
Anyway, Johnny is walking down the passageway in the hospital and this very starchy nurse comes up and doesn’t recognize him; he looks new. She looks at him and says, “I have not seen you around here, young man. What is your name?” He might have been a third class at the time but he said “My name is Lipes.” She said, “How do you spell that?” He said, “L-I-P-E-S”. “Well, it sounds like Lippys to me. Lippys, that’s the way it should be pronounced.” He said, “Well, Ma’am it’s pronounced Lipes.” He said, “Lieutenant, what is your name?” “My name is Lieu-tenant Ann Bernatitus.” And he said, “Is that your name or a condition?” She was so taken aback that she didn’t punish him. She didn’t have him up on charges or whatever. She could have charged him with insubordi- nation or being smart or whatever. I remember him telling me that story, and I knew her, so it was very true to form.
He became an OR Tech, and you learned on the job. It was OJT (on the job training) at that time. You didn’t go to school necessarily. You went and trained in the operating room, and you saw how they did things. He was very fortunate. He was in the Philippines at the time. It was on the eve of our entry into World War II, so I want to say it was probably 1940, somewhere in there. He was a very quick learner, a very sharp guy. He could learn anything. He was very, very good. He noticed details; he was very observant, and he worked for a Navy surgeon. Carey Smith was his name. He was a Navy surgeon, and he taught this young, eager Corpsman everything he knew. He said, “You never know when this knowledge might come in handy.” He did many appendectomies, and, of course, Johnny was right there. Later on people [would] say, “Oh, he had never seen one. He was going by feel. He was reading a book.” He was doing whatever he needed. He knew how to do it because he’d assisted many, many times in the OR with Dr. Smith. At one point Dr. Smith was demonstrating how you do a closure, once you amputate the infected appendix. Once you amputate it, how best to tie it off, what kind of suture to use, and he always said, “Never use a purse string suture. Never, ever use a purse string suture because it’ll get infected and you’ll run into complications.” So, he knew that in the back of his head.
How did he get into submarines? I don’t actually recall. He volun- teered for the duty, and he was sent for the appropriate training that you had to have. Once you got aboard a submarine, in order to earn your dolphins, you had to know everything about the boat – everything. You had to know, as any other crew member. You may be the Corpsman, but you have to know how to start the diesels. You had to know the plumbing. You had to know the electrical system. You had to know how to run that boat, even though you were just a Corpsman. After this on the job training, you would get the appropriate examination, and if you passed, then you were a full-fledged submariner. That was something he wanted quickly. He wanted to be a true submariner because he was on a submarine.
As I recall, he was originally on the Sealion. The Sealion and Sead- ragon were sister boats, and they were in Cavite [Philippines] for over- haul, for maintenance of some sort. I don’t remember exactly, but they were moored beside each other at the pier, and that’s when the Japanese attacked on December 10, 1941. After Pearl Harbor they attacked the Cavite Navy Yard, and they essentially destroyed the Navy yard. The Sealion was hit, fatally as it turned out. It sank at the pier. The Seadragon took a hit on the conning tower, and the very first fatalities in the war, as far as the submarine service, took place on the Seadragon. An officer was killed on the deck, and one of the sailors was heading down the lad- der at the time. In fact, I just spoke with his son yesterday because he’s ill now. He ended up falling down the ladder. He landed on a bolt on his back and was very badly injured. Many years later Johnny helped me get that man a Purple Heart that he had never gotten during the war. Johnny was that kind of a guy.
Anyway, Johnny got into submarines and he ended up on the Sead- ragon. Earlier in the war he had been in Australia for a period and was looking for another boat. He didn’t like the one he was on. Sealion wasn’t his first boat, there was some other one. He could tell the kind of boat he wanted to be on. He’d interview the people. He saw these submarines rafted up, and he went from one to another. There were a couple of boats he didn’t like the looks of. They just didn’t look right to him. They weren’t clean, like the crew didn’t really care. He didn’t want to be on a boat like that. He was a straight arrow, and he wanted his boat to look right. Turns out, and I can’t remember the name of the boat that he decided not to go aboard, but that boat was lost in the war. It went on patrol and never came back. He always mentioned that. He said, “I could have been on that boat, but it didn’t look right to me, and I didn’t want to be on it.” But he ended up on the Seadragon and that was to his liking; he liked that boat. That was a good one. He liked the commander, he liked the crew, the rest of the story I think you know.
It’s been told many, many times so I don’t need to go back with it except the fact that one of the things that he pointed out to me– and he only told me this later in his life. He didn’t tell me this at the beginning when we got to know each other, because he was always very conscious of people’s reputations and their feelings. The story about [NAME ED- ITED] who came to the Seadragon. He was not trained in submarines. He had come out of college, and he had gotten a reserve commission as a JG or he may have been an Ensign but he may have gone straight to JG, I don’t remember exactly, but [NAME] ended up on the Seadragon, and the captain asked him what his background was, was he an acade- my guy? “No. I went to the University of Washington, and I majored in Physical Education. I wanted to be a coach.” The captain said, “Well how did you end up out here? You’ve never been on a submarine before? You know we don’t have a lot of time to be training you guys. We’re in a war.” [NAME] said he’d learn as quickly as he could, to be a subma- riner.
Anyway, [NAME] was aboard the Seadragon when this operation took place and of course, Johnny Lipes was given the offer of picking anyone in the crew he would like to have as his operating room crew once it was decided that he was going to do the operation. He went around and picked the guys he knew would do a good job. He didn’t know [NAME] that well but he needed an anesthetist, someone to administer the contra- band ether, which was not even supposed to be on board the submarine. But Johnny had thought ahead and said, “You know, you never know, it would be good to have a couple of cans of this stuff on board just in case.” He didn’t tell me this in the original story. It’s not in my book, and you’ll see why he didn’t tell me.
It turns out that [NAME] was given the job of dripping. They used the drip method where Lipes had taken a tea strainer and put gauze over it with a rubber band around it inverted. That was going to be the mask, the anesthesia mask, and he instructed [NAME]. He said, “When I give you the signal, I want a drop at a time to drip into the mask, a drop at a time.” Johnny pointed out to me that it was very critical. He said [that] normally, in an operating room, you have an anesthetist, or an anesthe- siologist who is monitoring the state of the patient, as far as, where are we in this process? You give them a little bit of ether, and you have to feel the muscles in the abdomen to feel when they start to relax and you go just a little bit beyond that. It’s very critical. Of course nowadays we have all the monitoring equipment that tells you this stuff but [then] you had to go by feel. He said if you went beyond that, too far, you’d kill the patient. There would be too much ether and he would die. He said, “So not only am I doing my first operation, but I have to be conscious of the level of anesthesia that the patient is getting. So I very carefully instruct- ed [NAME] to drip it when I told him to. Well we’re in the middle of this thing, and I can smell ether. He’s pouring ether into the mask. I quickly stopped everything. The blowers were going in the boat so everybody in the boat was being anesthetized, essentially, because you could smell the ether all throughout. It’s very volatile, so a little spark will set it off.” So everybody is nervous about this and they’re 100 feet down so if they blow the circuits there is not a lot of fresh air. So he got rather irritated with [NAME]. He said, “You can’t follow my instructions. Get out. I want you out of here. I need somebody else. Send somebody else in here. You’re not doing this anymore.” He threw [NAME] out and got somebody else.
He never told me that story until after NAME had died. I interviewed NAME also. I did his oral history, and he was a pretty remarkable guy because after the war, he went to medical school and became a doctor. He was one of the very few reserve officers, non-academy graduates, who got his own boat. He became the CO of a submarine before the war was over. It was late in the war, probably somewhere around May or June of ‘45, so the war was almost over. But he got his own boat. But Johnny would not tell me that story until after NAME had died. Then he felt free to tell me. Anyway, he never wanted to say anything. That’s the kind of guy he was.
He was a very sweet man, very giving, would never brag. Humility is the word I always think of when I think about him. He was treated so badly by the Medical Department, not the Navy, but the Medical Depart- ment treated him so poorly for the fact that he had done this operation. He had stepped over the line. He had gone into an area that only phy- sicians were supposed to tread. He had gone on their ground, and they would never forgive him for that. It didn’t matter. This is the part I could never understand. It didn’t matter that he saved a human life. Because you’d think that would be what physicians would be most concerned about. But in that case, in those days, and even today, I’ve seen it today also, it was this idea that we are in a special club and nobody else is allowed in. If you come in without the appropriate credentials, you’re terrible, you’re awful, and that’s how they treated him in the Medical Department.
He retired from the Navy in ‘69 as a Lieutenant Commander, but his running mates were Captains. There was this black mark next to his name all through his career. He was very hurt by that. He was very hurt. He wasn’t bitter. There’s a fine line between bitterness and being hurt. I never got the feeling that he was bitter, but he was hurt that the Navy had treated him that way.
Interviewer: When did he leave submarines, as far as service on sub- marines?
Jan Herman: Right after the war. I want to say maybe ‘46. He was out of submarines. I think the Seadragon was his last assignment. Then he made chief. He heard about the new Medical Service Corps that was being created, which was really an outgrowth of the Hospital Corps. The Hospital Corps not only included Corpsmen at that time, it also included administrators and they were officers. They had commissions. So being as bright as he was, he decided to try out. He was commissioned, and that would have been ‘46 so he was in on the ground floor of the Medical Service Corps. Then he had a lot of other assignments, mostly admin- istrative assignments after that, hospital administration kinds of things.
He had this reputation, and he used to tell me all these stories about how he would go to a new base and then someone would say, “Did you hear that story about the Corpsman who did the appendectomy? Well he didn’t really take out the appendix. He was faking it. He didn’t really take it out.” Johnny would say, “Oh, that’s interesting.” He told me a story later on: He was on an airplane in his later life, and the man sitting next to him was reading a magazine and it had “Ripley’s Believe it or Not.” Remember that thing they used to have, “Ripley’s Believe it or Not,” in the magazine? It was a story of the Corpsman in World War II who took out someone’s appendix on a submarine. This guy is reading this and he turns to Johnny and he says, “Read this. Can you believe this?” Johnny said, “I wouldn’t believe a word of it.” His grandson was in school one day and I guess they were doing show and tell and his grandson was telling the teacher, “My grandfather did an appendectomy and took out someone’s appendix on a submarine during the war.” The teacher said, “Don’t tell such stories.” He had to go to the school because the little kid was humiliated in front of his classmates. Johnny had to go and set the teacher straight that yeah, this really did happen. Here’s the documents.
Interviewer: [What] other stories would talk about his character and the kind of things that you were most impressed by?
Jan Herman: I don’t think there was anything about the man that didn’t impress me. He was what we used to call a self-made man. He was in every sense. He used his intelligence, his personality. He used them as benefits in moving up. He could have been, without any doubt in my mind, he could have been a surgeon. The knowledge he had of medicine, he could have gone to medical school and done very, very well in med- ical school. I think we talked about it at one time. He decided he didn’t want to do that. His talents he felt were best in medical administration. He was a good leader. He was an excellent leader. He engendered the kind of loyalty that a good leader does. People wanted to work for him. He was the kind of guy you just wanted to be around. You wanted to just absorb his wisdom and his knowledge.
Interviewer: Two other things I wanted to cover in particular just because I remember you talking about it before. One was how he and Audrey got together over the years. And the other is his experience in Memphis.
Jan Herman: We never really covered much of his experience in Memphis. There were a lot of things going on in Memphis at the time. It was during the Civil Rights Era, and in the hospital there were a lot of racial issues going on at the time. I think he was there when Martin Luther King was assassinated. So it was a highly charged place to be and there were a lot of employees who were black who were upset with the way they were being treated by the management. He had to walk a fine line between how do I keep the hospital running? How do I address the issues here? And how do I keep this place from blowing up? I think he did a pretty good job from what I understand because he’s that kind of
a person. He knows how to bring people into a room and listen to what they have to say and then at some point render a judgment, as any good leader has to do. So there was the garbage strike; there were all these things that were going on at that time. I think at some point he got tired of that. He wanted to see a hospital practicing medicine, not be involved in all these other issues. I think it got to the point where he just decided it was time to move on. He ended up going to Corpus Christi and when I met him he was President of Memorial Medical Center.
I think I told you the story [that] when I finally got a name, I realized that Wheeler B. Lipes was the guy who did this [appendectomy] and I wanted to interview him. I was able, through the National Personal Records Center in St. Louis, to find out where he was living because he was collecting a pension and so there was an address and since it was official business they gave me his phone number. I called the number, and a woman answers and I identify myself. Again I think she must have thought I was from the IRS, because she wouldn’t even tell me that her husband was Wheeler Lipes until I convinced her that no, I’m not from the IRS. I’m from the Navy Surgeon General’s Office and I’m trying to find your husband. So she gave me his number at his office at the hospital and I called him and his secretary put me right on and that was it. It was love at first sight.
We chatted for probably half an hour on the phone and I told him I was interested in doing an interview with him and I couldn’t come to Corpus right then but could we do it on the phone? “Oh, absolutely.” He was as nice and accommodating as he could be. Then our friendship de- veloped. I would go down to see him, and on one of those visits, Dr. Bob Bornmann [MC, USN, (Ret)] asked if it would be okay if he went with me, because he had heard about him all these years, he had never actual- ly met him and he, being a submariner himself, would just love to meet this legend. In the submarine community he was a legend, if he wasn’t in the medical department. They [the medical department] had treated him shabbily. It wasn’t the submariners who treated him bad. They thought he was a hero for what he did and so did the rest of the Navy. The rest of the Navy recognizes a hero for who he is.
So we went down and visited with him. As I recall, Johnny’s wife had already passed away. She had a rare blood disease where she was constantly making red cells. She had been bedridden for years, and he took care of her. Besides his work at the hospital, he would go home a couple of times a day and take care of her.
We got into this conversation with Bornmann asking all kinds of questions like, “When were you at the Bureau, in the early 60’s?” and he said, “Yeah, they decided to send me to college. I needed more training so they sent me to GW [George Washington University] right up the street and I had to take a medical legal course because that’s what I was working on at the time. You had to know all the legalities of medicine and how we practice it.” Bob says, “Well, you know, my family lawyer, she took that course.” He said, “What was her name?” Bornmann said, “Her name was Audrey.” Johnny just said, “Audrey. I think I know who you’re talking about. We were in the same study group together. I would tutor her, and we would study with a bunch of other folks and that’s how we got through the course. Where is she now?” Bob said, “Well, she lives in Delaware.” He said, “She was such a wonderful lady, I remem- ber her. We studied; she was a wonderful person.” So, Bob said, “Well, would you like her phone number?” Johnny hesitated, and he says, “No, I don’t think so. That’s another time, that’s okay.” So, Bob said, “I’ll leave it with you anyway. You want to follow up with it that’s fine.” And that was it. That was the end of the conversation.
Then, it was about a year later, Bob was in my office at the Bureau. We’re sitting there and I said, “Why don’t we call Johnny. You’re here, and you can talk with him. I’ll put it on speaker.” So I dial the number and a woman answers. I’m thinking maybe it’s the housekeeper or some- thing. So we said, “We want to speak to Johnny Lipes. Is he home?” “Yeah, just a moment. Johnny, Johnny…” He comes to the phone. Bob says, “Is that your housekeeper?” He says, “No, that’s my wife. That’s Audrey.” Oh my God. We’re just going crazy after that. Bob was Mr. Cupid. You start thinking about how one thing leads to another and if this didn’t happen that wouldn’t happen. If Bob hadn’t asked me if he could go with me on that trip, we wouldn’t be here today, sitting in this room. It wouldn’t have happened. Just those connections that you make, that you never understand where they’re going to go, and you make them and life becomes real interesting.
