John Voorhees Wounded During Artillery Attack

The circumstances surrounding Voorhees’s injury and subsequent surgery aren’t entirely clear, and there are some differences in the accounts available:

1. In later accounts, the Courant would report that Voorhees hadn’t left his hut until after a shell, exploding about 20 feet away from the hut, had destroyed it. This would remain consistent in reporting especially after Voorhees returned to the United States.
2. In the letter that Hesselgrave would write the next day to Juliana Voorhees, after he successfully visited John Voorhees, he described Voorhees as having first been taken to the Red Cross first aid station and then to “Evacuation No. 1” hospital. According to Hesselgrave, it was at the hospital, not the first aid station, that Voorhees had his operation and that then Hesselgrave had visited him.

The differences are relatively minor, but they are worth noting.

Voorhees’s position had been shelled on June 16, 1918.

Voorhees will be visited in the hospital by Charles Hesselgrave tomorrow.

1. From the AP dispatch, 6/22/1918: “Dr. Voorhees was a great favorite with the soldiers with whom he worked and who familiarly called him ‘Doc.’”
2. From Joseph Odell’s article, reprinted in part by the Courant on 8/16/1918: “Only the most skillful surgery saved his leg which was held in a perpendicular position by a mechanical arrangement; only a generous transfusion of blood from an Irish soldier saved his life while on the operating table.”

1. William Earl Dellew, also in the Toul sector with the YMCA, was injured during this attack as he helped a wounded soldier to the first aid station.
2. According to Hesselgrave, the hospital was called “Evacuation No. 1.”

Unattributed, “How Dr. Voorhees Got His Wound,” Hartford Courant, July 15, 1918, page 3.

Unattributed, “Rev. Dr. Voorhees Critically Ill in New York Hospital,” Hartford Courant, January 6, 1919, page 1.

Unattributed, “Rev. Dr. Voorhees Dies in New York,” Hartford Courant, January 9, 1919, page 4.

Unattributed, “Rev. Dr. Voorhees is now patient at N. Y. City hospital,” Hartford Courant, December 26, 1918, page 1.

Unattributed, “Rev. Dr. Voorhees Wounded in France,” Hartford Courant, June 23, 1918, page 17