Carteret County’s WW II stories just keep on coming!

Effects of the World War II battles at sea off the Carteret County, N.C., coastline certainly rippled ashore. These stories also strengthen the case why Carteret County should be designated as a “World War II Heritage Community.”

We’re writing the formal resolution as we go.

Whereas No. 11: If the Florsheim shoe fits, wear it!

A book by author James T. Cheatham of Chapel Hill, N.C., published in 1990 titled “The Atlantic Turkey Shoot: U-boats off the Outer Banks in World War II,” contains some local color.

 

Cheatham interviewed James Paul Tyndall, Principal of Harkers Island School during the early 1940s.

One day during the war years, Principal Tyndall “noticed that many of the Harkers Island boys who usually came to school barefoot were wearing new Florsheim shoes,” Cheatham wrote. “Investigation revealed the shoes had washed up from a merchant ship that was sunk by a German U-boat.

“Fishermen had quickly commandeered the shoes, and their children wore them proudly.”

 

Florsheim & Co. was a respected company that was founded in Chicago in 1892 by father-and-son duo of Sigmund and Milton Florsheim. (Milton is shown below.)

The company was known for its “high-quality workmanship and a strong distribution network, which made Florsheim shoes readily available to consumers in small towns across the nation.”

Floating shoes into Harkers Island was a novel approach.

 

Whereas No. 12: Dr. Benjamin Franklin Royal had been practicing medicine in Morehead City for more than 30 years when World War II broke out.

What had sealed the deal for him to establish a physician’s office in his hometown in 1910 was a lucrative contract with the U.S. Public Health Service.

Dr. Royal (shown below) agreed to visit and care for the personnel who “manned the lonely” U.S. Life-Saving Stations along the Southern Outer Banks of North Carolina, including those at Fort Macon, Cape Lookout and Portsmouth. The government paid him $11 a month to make his rounds.

Dr. Royal founded a community hospital in Morehead City in 1912 and hired nurse Edith Broadway of Swansboro as hospital superintendent. As a medical duo, Dr. Royal and Nurse Broadway would earn their place on a pedestal in the history of health care for treating World War II victims.

 

“Some 3,500 men off sunken ships were landed in Morehead City during the Battle of the Atlantic,” according to journalist Chester S. Davis of the Winston-Salem Journal.

“At any one time, hundreds of injured men were stuffed into the 26-bed hospital in Morehead City,” Davis wrote.

Author Carlton Harrell noted that Dr. Royal had a factory-style steam whistle installed outside the hospital. When survivors were on the way, someone would sound the whistle as a call for volunteers, physicians and nurses to report for duty.

Carteret County historian Rodney Kemp (shown below) added: “During the World War II years, Dr. Ben Royal never lost a patient who had suffered burn injuries. I find that incredible.”

 

Dr. Royal knew the key to burn treatment was to avoid infection of the wound, and he swore by an ointment known as Foille, a type of salve, Kemp said. It worked. By 1944, the U.S. Merchant Marine Council mandated that Foille be standard equipment in all “abandon-ship kits.”

 

During the war years, Dr. Royal enlisted the support of U.S. Rep. Graham Arthur “Hap” Barden of New Bern (shown below) to gain $200,000 in federal funding for a 32-bed annex to the Morehead City Hospital on land donated by businessman Earle W. Webb.

 

One source said the Navy sent in building materials and a work crew and completed the project in 30 days.