People way cooler than me
One of the characters in the story I'm writing right now was a nurse during WWII, so I'm doing a little research. In the course of said research I ran into this, from http://www.army.mil/cmh/books/wwii/72-14/72-14.htm :
"Flight nurses accepted that there would always be unexpected dangers. A transport plane en route to Guadalcanal with twenty-four litter patients and one flight nurse ran out of fuel over the Pacific. The pilot spotted an island on which there was a 150-foot-square clearing ringed with coconut palms and decided to crash land there rather than risk plunging into the ocean. During the landing, one passenger's windpipe was severed, although his jugular vein remained intact. The attending nurse quickly devised a suction tube from a syringe, a colonic tube, and the inflation tubes from a life jacket. With these tools, she was able to keep the man's windpipe clear of blood until help arrived nineteen hours later."
Damn.
"Flight nurses accepted that there would always be unexpected dangers. A transport plane en route to Guadalcanal with twenty-four litter patients and one flight nurse ran out of fuel over the Pacific. The pilot spotted an island on which there was a 150-foot-square clearing ringed with coconut palms and decided to crash land there rather than risk plunging into the ocean. During the landing, one passenger's windpipe was severed, although his jugular vein remained intact. The attending nurse quickly devised a suction tube from a syringe, a colonic tube, and the inflation tubes from a life jacket. With these tools, she was able to keep the man's windpipe clear of blood until help arrived nineteen hours later."
Damn.