| The history of Mobile Hospital No. 1, formerly Red Cross Hospital Unit K of Council Bluffs, Iowa, demonstrates that the prototypical mobile hospitals of the First World War provided valuable services to the thinly stretched U.S. Army Medical Department. Modeled after the French medical unit, the automobile-chirurgical, the U.S. mobile hospital used equipment designed, built, and purchased from the French Government. Mobile Hospital No. 1 treated severely wounded soldiers from the battles of Belleau Wood, Château-Thierry, St. Mihiel, and the Meuse-Argonne offensive. This hospital proved the value of recent army reform, the expediency of a motorized army, and the necessity of frontline surgery on modern battlefields. Mobile hospitals such as this one, lead the way for the emergence of Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals in the Second World War. |
