This story of doing what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, because it needs to be done won a Pulitzer Prize for distinguished reporting in 1942:
“It” was an acute appendix inside Dean Rector of Chautauqua, Kansas. The stabling pains had become unendurable the day before, which was Rector’s first birthday at sea. He was nineteen years old.The big depth gauge that looks like a factory clock and stands beside the “Christmas tree” of red and green gauges regulating the flooding chambers showed where they were. They were below the surface. And above them were enemy waters crossed and recrossed by whirring propellers of Japanese destroyers and transports.
The nearest naval surgeon competent to operate on the nineteen-year-old seaman was thousands of miles and many days away. There was just one way to prevent the appendix from bursting, and that was for the crew to operate upon their shipmate themselves.
[...]
The chief surgeon was a twenty-three-year-old pharmacist’s mate wearing a blue blouse with white-taped collar and squashy white duck cap. His name was Wheeler B. Lipes. He came from Newcastle near Roanoke, Virginia, and had taken the Navy hospital course in San Diego, thereafter serving three years in the naval hospital at Philadelphia, where his wife lives.Lipes’ specialty as laboratory technician was in operating a machine that registers heartbeats. He was classified as an electrocardiographer. But he had seen Navy doctors take out one or two appendixes and thought he could do it. Under the sea, he was given his first chance to operate.