Was the non-combatant status of combat medics respected by average soldiers or were medics as often killed as any other enemy?
was the average combat medic generally regarded as being the soldiers best friend, as is sometimes claimed, more negatively or is there no particular pattern?
Hope the questions are clear.
You may want to check Eugene Sledge's book With the Old Guard. It's one of the better known memoirs from the Pacific campaign. Most of the medics who Sledge praises are combat medics, but he tends to focus on their coolness under fire or his personal friendship with them. While he does say that this admiration was true for most of the marines in his outfit, I don't believe this is enough to universally say that the combat medic was always "the soldier's best friend". Perhaps a better way to examine this is to observe how Sledge describes the relationship between frontline troops and rear support forces, a relationship which seems to contain a disconnect between the two groups which can lead to feelings of alienation for the frontline troops. It is interesting that the one medic Sledge does tend to criticise (Doc Arrogant is Sledge's nickname for him, I'm trying to find a page number) never seems to appear in discussion of frontline combat. Again, much of Sledge's dislike of the man appears due to personal reasons, but it is likely that due to the time of writing the account, Sledge may be reflecting some of this distrust of the rear support onto this medic. Sorry to only have the one source, and due to the theatre, not being able to help out with the Geneva question. Hopefully will give you something to compare with the other sources once they. Begin popping up.
Might as well mention in the end here that Sledge mentions several injuries to medics and stretcher carriers during the battles of both Peleliu and Okinawa, so at least outside Geneva convention combatants, medics were not always respected. Please remember that this is a personal account written many years after the fact, so certain events will colour his perspective more than others, deciding what he remembers.
Stephen Ambrose, in Band of Brothers, recounted how, during the Battle of the Bulge, the US paratroopers had a high amount of respect for their medic.
"(If) Any man who struggled in the snow and the cold, in the many attacks through the open and through the woods, ever deserved such a medal, it was our medic, Gene Roe." (page 180).
Ambrose also makes many references to the recklessness of the medics and how they would sprint into enemy fire just to retrieve a wounded soldier. Also read "Flags of Our Fathers" by James Bradley, which gets very in depth with Corpsmen in the Pacific Theater.
One last one; in the book "The Victors", also by Ambrose (I believe the story in question was taken from his other book Citizen Soldiers, but I'm not sure), Ambrose recounts a story where, during the closing stages of the Liberation of France, an Allied Forces Ambulance unwittingly drove into a German roadblock, and was halted by was stopped by a squad of Panzergrenadiers manning a roadblock. Upon noticing it was a medical truck, the Germans let the Americans return to their own lines. (236)
Lots of stories about enemy medics showing great respect and humanity towards even enemy combatants.
Just an FYI, most of the substantive portions of the Geneva Convention were only agreed to in 1949, with the Additional Protocols coming in the 70s. I believe the Geneva Conventions in existence during ww2 pretty much just dealt with the Red Cross and sailors at sea. Issues of noncombatants, proportionality, torture, etc came after ww2.
That doesn't mean belligerents didn't follow customary international law, though.
Just thought I'd clarify.
EDIT: just looked up the 1929 convention. It's in there under Art. 6. http://www.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/ART/300-420011?OpenDocument
This is an interesting topic, there are plenty of stories about how the troops felt about the medics and so many stories about how Japanese and German troops, snipers in particular, were trained to specifically target medics but whenever I try to follow up on those, I come to a dead end or "somebody's grandfather heard from a captured sniper that..."
I can not actually find any sources listing the casualty rates of combat medics or navy corpsmen to see if they're in any way significantly different from those of the units they served with or from those of say a normal rifleman. Anyone have any ideas of where I might find that kind of information?
Only just got around to checking my question now. Thank you all very much for the great answers. Sounds like my next months of reading has been sorted.