EVAC Ambulance Svc history

By July 1917 Norton-Harjes units had over six hundred

General Pershing insisted on extensive training of the divisions prior to their commitment to battle, and the first committed did not go into combat until the latter part of April 1918, a year after the United States had entered the war.23

Ernest Hemingway convalescing at a hospital in Italy, April 1919; below, Inspector General Andrew

127; American Field Service, History of the American Field Service in France, 3 vols. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), 1: 16, 23, hereafter cited as AFS, AFS in France; Edgar E. Hume, The Medical Department Book of Merit (Washington, D.C.: Association of Military Surgeons of the United

While not air ambulance journeys per se, these flights helped demonstrate the utility of aircraft in a medical context.5 By 1928, Australian authorities had organized a formal full-time Royal Flying Doctor Service to assist people in isolated communities.4

United States physicians: "Medical Service in the World War," Medical Bulletin (31 May 1932): 2.

203; James S. Simmons, "The Division of Preventive Medicine, Office of the Surgeon General," Medical Bulletin (July 1941): 63-68; Military Medical Manual, 6th ed., rev.

15Quoted words: George C. Brown, ed., "With the Ambulance Service in France: The Wartime Letters of William Gorham Rice, Jr.," Wisconsin Magazine of History (Summer 1981): 279.