Wallace H. Graham

Wallace Harry Graham spent the majority of his youth in Kansas City,  Missouri. At an early age he decided to pursue a degree in medicine. While completing his degree, Wallace Graham married his childhood sweetheart, Velma Hill, and began his military involvement while in ROTC. When called to active duty, he served as a field surgeon until the end of the war, when he was requisitioned to become Truman’s physician. His military career took him to Washington D.C. and he advanced to the rank of Major General before he returned to Kansas City to practice medicine and raise his family.

As told by Von V. Pittman in the book's introduction, In late 1942, fifteen thousand American soldiers crammed together on the Queen Mary, headed for England to train and assemble for the D-Day attack on the Normandy coast. Near the end of their voyage, General George S. Patton came aboard to deliver an assertive discourse about the German army they would soon face. Captain Wallace H. Graham, a doctor assigned to the 24th Evacuation Hospital, found Patton’s speech valuable, particularly his emphasis on relentless pursuit. Most of the American troops were skeptical, however, when Patton recounted stories about atrocities the Wehrmacht had visited upon opponents and civilians. But Graham says he knew them not only to be true, but an inevitability, part of the Hell he and his comrades would soon face.

Before leaving Europe at the end of World War II, Wallace Graham would somehow catch the eye of President Harry Truman, who asked him to become his personal physician. He would become a sort of medical diplomat, attending to the ailments of several world leaders or members of their families. And he would serve as Harry and Bess Truman’s personal physician until both of their deaths.

This volume is an extraordinary account of a doctor’s first–hand observation of the build–up to history’s largest war, then his participation in its resolution.