Jaundice, or Serum Hepatitis, whatever you called it Chester and his buddies in the 35th got sick on top of everything else. Interviewer Brown, “Of course, you guys were fighting in the bush, but a whole bunch of you come down with Yellow Jaundice.” Chester, “When we had the yellow jaundice, that was caused from vaccinations…”
The fate of Private Major Banks–Hepatitis in another regiment.
At Fort Ord, the Army had hurriedly vaccinated everybody in the regiment to protect them from Yellow Fever. Somebody must have thought that disease prevalent in British Columbia. Or somebody just blindly followed a procedure. Either way they used contaminated vaccine and in May the soldiers of the 35th began coming down with serum hepatitis.
As the number of cases mushroomed, the Army hurriedly constructed Ft. St. John hospital from two prefabricated frame buildings and brought a medical platoon from the 58th medical battalion down from Whitehorse to staff it. Doctors planned to evacuate sick men to the new facility by air. But the Army had far too few airplanes and pilots. After the first 100 evacuees, only the most gravely ill went out to Fort St. John. The rest, as many as 500 men, suffered yellow jaundice, severe weakness and debilitating nausea—in their tents.
“We just had to sweat it out… You was just as sick on the tractors as you was sitting around.”
As often happened, Chester’s memory lurched. “The only thing we did while we was sick, we did chase a bear up the tree, with the rope on him.”
A buddy crawled up into an adjacent tree and snapped a photo, then the bear escaped. It jumped down and took off down through the camp. Scrambled right through one of the tents.
Brown, “…there was two guys in the tent?”
“There was two of them in there laying on the cot.”
More on the hepatitis and the Army in 1942