M.J. Payne asked E.Michael Helms:

Having finished "All Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque I was musing over a particular part and also thinking of your classic war memoir "Proud Bastards", that I also read. One of the horrors of Remarque's book was the unnecessary surgery done on the German soldiers' feet by the sadistic military doctors. It seemed a strange thing to do on a regular basis, Were the American docs sadistic?

E.Michael Helms Not to my knowledge. At times surgeons could be overwhelmed with casualties resulting in "meatball" surgery. By this I mean the repairs were done quickly and the cosmetics might have been a bit more crude than if there had been time to devote to "tidying" things up. All-in-all, my feeling is the doctors worked diligently to save lives and did a fine job of it given the circumstances they faced.

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