"Sometimes I think maybe it's a good thing their mothers can't see them when they die" -- Mary Ferrell
Nurses, of course, are among these veterans. Serving on
battlefronts from North Africa to Italy to Normandy to Corregidor and Bataan, the nurses of World War II contributed much to the care of the wounded, the morale of the fighting men, and the development of nursing as a profession. In all, approximately 57,000 nurses served in the Army Nurse Corps and 16,000 in the Navy Nurse Corps by V-J Day. 4,644 nurses were stationed along the European front in 1944; 4000 were serving on the Pacific front in 1945. By the war's end, 201 American military nurses had died, 16 from enemy fire.The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, caught most Americans by surprise, including the nurses who were stationed at Pearl Harbor at the time. One nurse recalled seeing bleeding men carried from the shore and thinking it was a joke or a drill. However, the director of the Army Nurse Corps understood the extent of the crisis. "I have no words to tell you," she told a group of Red Cross and other healthcare agency representatives, "how serious I believe this is going to be." Immediately, plans were implemented to expand the Army Nurse Corps and recruit more student nurses as cadets, including African Americans (who had previously been banned from joining). Male nurses, however, were still overlooked; the majority were drafted through the Selective Service Act of 1940 and used in nonmedical roles. In fact, only 40% of qualified male nurses served in medical units. To qualify for commission as an Army nurse, one had to be graduated from an approved nursing school, under 40 years of age, unmarried, and (presumably) female.
For the new nurse recruits, the actual experience of military life was very different from the recruiting posters. One young nurse, Ruth Parks, describes:
"I can paint no pretty picture of life in the Army...in the loneliness and confusion of a chaotic world, one finds much hard work and sacrifice and little peace...(However) our individual integrity and sense of responsibility is the essence of success and survival of democracy" (Tomblin, 1996, p. 8). For nurses arriving at the 25th Station Hospital in Liberia, their first Army assignment proved to be something of a shock to the system. The nurses found themselves sharing their thatched-roof communal bathroom with lizards, snakes, monkeys, and rats so large that they sounded like a "herd of animals" as they scampered through camp. Nurses reporting for duty in Papua, New Guinea, found accomodations more suitable but were plagued with insects, scorpions, and the diseases they carried. One New Guinea nurse was bitten on the bottom by a scorpion as she used the latrine and nearly died from the resulting fever. On the European front, nurses arriving for service in France shortly after the D-Day operations received baptism by fire. Between July 3-18, 1944, the 91st Evac. Hospital cared for 2, 549 patients under constant enemy artillery fire.
In the field hospitals and on hospital ships, the younger nurses quickly received a harsh initiation into combat medicine. Writes one nurse veteran: "I wish I could forget those endless harrowing hours. Hours of giving injections, anesthetizing, ripping off clothes, stitching gaping wounds, of amputations, sterilizing instruments, settling the treated patients into their beds, covering the wounded we could not save. I had still not grown accustomed to seeing people torn and bleeding and dying in numbers like these" (Tomblin, p. 29). Another nurse relates: "Nurses had to assume a lot of responsibility...as there were not enough doctors to supervise every case at every stage" (Tomblin, p. 167). Medical corpsmen received crash courses in bedside care, passing medications, and starting IVs to relieve some of the burden placed on the nurses.
Working in the field hospitals proved a lesson in improvisation. One nurse stationed in France recalls pinning sterile sheets to canvas tent walls and bracing instruments with boards wrapped in sterile sheets, to keep sterile fields uncontaminated. In some cases, nurses were forced to use helmets as washbasins and bedpans, rainwater for bathing and drinking, and local herbs for healing ointments. At one evac hospital in North Africa, the nurses joked that the water was so polluted that they were forced to brush their teeth with champagne.
The most memorable nursing vignettes of World War II, of course, dealt with the patients and everyday situations encountered in the field hospitals and on hospital ships. One nurse states she still laughs as she remembers her patients humming the pop tune "Pistol Packin' Mama" whenever the nurses walked past. Another nurse recalled how a young Southern soldier was mauled by a tiger in the South Pacific; as the doctor was suturing his wounds, the young man commented in a slow drawl, "That tiger sho thought he was gettin' some good meat" (Fessler, p. 108). Other stories are truly heartbreaking. One patient proved too debilitated to withstand anesthesia, forcing the doctor to operate without. To cope with the pain, the young soldier, accompanied by nurse Mary Ferrell and his surgeon, sang "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year" all through the surgery. One nurse recalled a patient brought into her evac hospital directly from the battlefield, missing both arms and both legs; undaunted, the soldier looked her in the eye and said, "Hey nurse, how about going out with me when I get outta here?" (Fessler, p. 125). To Nurse Ferrell,
Caring for German and Japanese prisoners of war proved a special challenge to American nurses. The German POWs were often quite young, many under 18 years of age, and seriously lacking in medical care; explains one nurse,
Perhaps the most incredible nursing stories to come out of World War II are related by those nurses who were taken prisoner of war. The experiences of the nurse POWs on Corregidor are captured in Elizabeth Norman's latest book, We Band of Angels; a link is provided at the bottom of this page. For purposes of brevity, only the experiences of the nurse POWs on Santo Tomas and Los Banos will be discussed here.
In January 1942, 10 Navy nurses and 68 Army nurses were captured by the Japanese in the Phillippines. The Navy nurses were taken to Los Banos; the Army nurses to Santo Tomas. One Navy nurse describes her first few weeks as a POW:
The victories in Europe and the Pacific were cause for celebration among the nurses; one describes the experience as "wild, wild, wild!!!" In Paris, nurses were caught and kissed by "innumerable, exuberant people", mostly Allied servicemen and French soldiers. Hospitals put red, white, and blue caps on their floodlights; local townspeople donated barrels of wine and whiskey to hospital parties. One nurse describes watching patients throw crutches aside, get up, and dance around when they learned of the Allied victory. Some nurses used their leave to go to resort towns such as Nice and celebrate the victory in style. Others had simpler requests; all one young nurse wanted was a red dress and a manicure. However, the thrill of an Allied victory was second to the thrill of returning home at last. In the words of one returning nurse veteran, "No more blackouts! No more war! I was home!" (Tomblin, p. 152).