Wheeler Lipes, 84; performed historic operation aboard sub in war zone

WASHINGTON -- Wheeler ''Johnny" Lipes, 84, a Navy pharmacist's mate who performed a remarkable, improvised appendectomy during a World War II submarine run 120 feet under the ocean's surface in the Pacific, died Sunday at a hospital in New Bern, N.C. He had pancreatic cancer.

Mr. Lipes, who retired as a lieutenant commander, was a 22-year-old high school dropout at the time of his surgical feat in 1942. The Lipes legend was chronicled in a Pulitzer Prize-winning news account, provided a surge of morale during a period of desperately bad news from the Pacific, and helped inspire a wartime action film starring Cary Grant.

Doctors were not assigned to submarines at the time. Despite the success of the operation, Mr. Lipes was ostracized by Navy Medical Corps physicians. They were angered by his actions, even though he had been obeying his captain's orders. There was talk of a court-martial by the outraged US surgeon general.

Mr. Lipes was the only medical professional aboard the submarine Seadragon on Sept. 11, 1942, when seaman Darrell Rector complained about a pain in his belly. Mr. Lipes examined Rector and determined his appendix was about to burst, but he was reluctant to work on the 19-year-old Kansan.

The Seadragon's captain, knowing they were in the hostile South China Sea and days from home port in Fremantle, Australia, ordered Mr. Lipes to collect a team and use whatever supplies he could find.

He converted a dining table into an operating table. Bent tablespoon handles became retractors to hold open the incision and abdominal muscles.

The late Franz P. Hoskins, who anesthetized Rector -- and made the sub's whole crew woozy -- by pouring ether through gauze and a tea strainer, attended medical school after the war. He learned, he said in 1987, that ''you can do an appendectomy with three ounces of ether. I used three pints on the Seadragon."

The crew sterilized instruments with boiling water. They used ''torpedo juice," alcohol that usually fueled the Seadragon's torpedoes, to kill germs. Pajamas substituted for surgical clothing.

Mr. Lipes used the McBurney's point, the most tender area of the abdomen of patients in the early stage of appendicitis, to locate the inflamed appendix. He made his incision, but the appendix did not pop up as expected. Looking around, he found it a massive 5-inches long and stuck to three places on the lining of the intestine, which, if it broke, would pour pus into the abdomen and kill the patient. Part of the appendix was gangrenous.

Wielding a scalpel blade -- he lacked the full scalpel -- he gently removed the appendix while wafts of ether filled the cabin.

The operation lasted 2½ hours. News spread through the prize-winning story in the Chicago Daily News. The film ''Destination Tokyo" (1943), starring Cary Grant as the skipper, featured a submarine appendectomy.

Rector returned to duty but died two years later when the submarine Tang was destroyed by its own torpedo.

Wheeler Bryson Lipes was born in New Castle, Va. He joined the Navy at age 16, later receiving a high school diploma through a GED program and attending George Washington University.

In 1951, Mr. Lipes was commissioned an ensign in the Navy's Medical Service Corps. Later, he was a finance officer at the naval hospital in Memphis and did hospital administration work before retiring in 1991 as president of Memorial Medical Center in Corpus Christi, Texas.

His military decorations included the Purple Heart. Lobbying by Navy historians led to his receiving the Navy Commendation Medal at a February ceremony at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

His first wife, Myrtle Peterson Lipes, died in 1997.

Mr. Lipes leaves his wife, Audrey; a stepson, Bruce of Corpus Christi; four grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

Once at a meeting of the American Hospital Association, Mr. Lipes sat next to a man looking incredulously at a ''Ripley's Believe It or Not!" sketch, which showed the submarine appendectomy.

''He looked at me with a strange look on his face," Mr. Lipes recalled, ''and said, 'Do you believe that?' And I said to him, 'I wouldn't believe a word of it.' "

Material from the Los Angeles Times was used in this obituary.