Vaccinating thousands of young soldiers at a frantic pace before shipping them overseas, the army screwed up. During March 1942, a batch of contaminated yellow fever vaccine made its way into the system. Initially ignorant of the contamination, medics vaccinated several thousand young men from that batch. Two months later, in May, soldiers all around the world came down with serum hepatitis.
The army had vaccinated most of the men of the 97th with good vaccine long before March. But, in March, getting ready to send the 97th to Alaska, the Army hurriedly expanded the regiment, added new soldiers.
Link to another story “Rafting the Little Tok”
Major Banks (not a rank but the name his mama gave him) entered the army from New Canton, Virginia in January and in March he transferred to the 97th at Eglin Field in Florida. Banks got his vaccination from the contaminated batch.
In Alaska on May 20 Private Banks reported for sick call. The medics sent him to the little hospital in Valdez, Alaska. Word of the contaminated vaccine and the fact that it caused serum hepatitis had got to army doctors, but not to the civilian doctor in Valdez.
He diagnosed Banks with jaundice, progressive, acute atrophy of liver, and the hepatitis went untreated. Banks lingered for several weeks, getting progressively worse, until, on the last day of June he died.
On June 30 Captain Walter Parsons wrote to his wife Abbie from Valdez. “One of the colored boys died early this morning and things are in quite a stir about this little camp.”
Parsons determined that Pvt. Banks deserved the honor of a military funeral and set out to get him one. The citizens of Valdez objected; didn’t want a black man buried in their cemetery. Parsons would have none of that. In the end they designated a piece of ground just across the creek from the cemetery as a ‘negro’ section.
Parsons arranged for “a truck load of boys [to come] down to bury the chap… We fixed him all up in a casket we got off of a boat… Had a firing squad, bugler, military escort and everything plus about ten officers and twenty-five or thirty white soldiers from a nearby camp.”