Hell Hath No Fury (33 page)

By May 1942, there were 12,000 nurses in the corps, although it was not until over a year later that a formal month's training course was introduced for new recruits. In the next two years, some 27,500 newly inducted nurses graduated from fifteen army training centers. A three-month program was introduced to train nurses in the treatment of shock and battle stress, a condition that by the end of the war led to the discharge of many thousands of soldiers.

In World War II, the US Army was racially segregated, and by 1945 it had accepted fewer than five hundred black nurses in a corps of approximately fifty thousand. Nevertheless, adverse public reaction to the reluctant recruiting of black nurses led in 1944 to the enrollment of two thousand black students in the Cadet Nursing Program. The first black medical unit to serve overseas was the Twenty-fifth Station Hospital Unit, which deployed to Liberia in 1943.

In November 1942, sixty nurses of the Forty-eighth Surgical Hospital came ashore under fire in North Africa in Operation Torch, the landings in Morocco and Algeria. The North African theater was the test bed for the US Army's evolving “chain of evacuation,” which was to become standard practice in every theater for the rest of the war. The first links in the chain were field and evacuation hospitals, which remained in close contact with combat formations. Each field hospital was staffed by 18 nurses, who were responsible for up to 150 patients. A field hospital could perform about 80 operations a day, and over 85 percent of the troops who underwent operations in field hospitals survived.

Patients at the field hospital who were strong enough to travel went by ambulance to an evacuation hospital, which was usually staffed by 53 nurses and could handle up to 750 patients. Hospital trains, ships, and aircraft then carried patients to station and general hospitals housed in semipermanent locations with running water and electricity. These facilities, although not exposed to direct enemy fire, were frequently subjected to air attacks. The white hospital ship with red crosses prominently displayed operated under the terms of the Hague Convention but on occasion was attacked by enemy aircraft. In the Pacific theater in April 1945 the US hospital ship
Comfort
came under repeated bomber attacks off the island of Leyte; six nurses died.

The evacuation of wounded troops by aircraft, which began early in 1943, was another innovation of the North African campaign and was subsequently to feature in every theater in World War II. Flight nurses received special training, including crash procedures and survival in hostile environments, before assignment to the Air Force Surgeon General's Office. They were at greater risk than their counterparts on the ground, as the aircraft in which they flew doubled as military transports and could not display red crosses. Of some five hundred Army nurses who served as members of thirty-one medical air-evacuation transport squadrons operating across the world, seventeen lost their lives. As a testament to their skill and dedication, of the 1.2 million patients who underwent air evacuation, only forty-six died en route.

In the campaigns in Sicily and southern Italy, army nurses worked through enemy artillery bombardment and dive-bomber attacks and battled first with extreme heat and malaria and then with drenching winter rain. On November 8, 1943, a Douglas C-54 Skymaster ferrying thirteen flight nurses and thirteen medical technicians (corpsmen) of the 807th Medical Air Evacuation Transport Squadron from Sicily to Bari, on Italy's east coast, flew into a heavy storm, which blew it off course. Icing forced the Skymaster down in the mountains of Albania, miles behind German lines.

From there, the Americans were rescued by Albanian partisans, who, in an epic journey of eight hundred miles in severe weather, escorted all but three of the party to safety. The three nurses left behind were suffering from frostbite and dysentery, and had been hidden from the Germans in the homes of partisans in the town of Berat. In March 1944 they left Berat disguised as Albanians and traveled by donkey across the mountains to make a rendezvous on the coast with an Allied torpedo boat. They arrived in Otranto, on the heel of Italy, on March 21.

The return of the “Balkan Nurses” coincided with fierce fighting in the congested Anzio beachhead, where Allied forces had been bottled up after the failure to exploit an amphibious landing behind the German Gustav defensive line. The Thirty-third, the Ninety-fifth, and the Ninety-sixth field hospitals, with approximately two hundred nurses, had arrived at the beachhead on January 22, 1944, and came under heavy artillery and aerial bombardment. On February 10, the battered Ninety-fifth was replaced by the Fifteenth Evacuation Hospital; on that day, the Thirty-third was hit by long-range artillery fire, which killed a number of medical staff, including two nurses. For their bravery under fire, four nurses received the Silver Star, the first such award to women in the US Army.

The first nurses to arrive in Normandy after the launching of Operation Overlord in June 1944 were members of the Twelfth Evacuation Hospital, which deployed to France at the beginning of August. During the drive into Germany, the US Army sustained heavy casualties. In one fifty-six-hour period in mid-April 1945, the Forty-fourth Evacuation Hospital admitted 1,348 patients from the Third Armored Division. Simultaneously, the Seventy-seventh Evacuation Hospital was receiving released American and British prisoners of war, many of whom were weak and malnourished. In a far more terrible condition were the concentration camp survivors cared for by nurses of 116th and 127th Evacuation Hospitals. By June 1945, the number of army nurses in the European theater had peaked at 17,400.

In the Pacific theater, where the climate and terrain were less forgiving than in Europe and behind-the-lines Japanese operations posed a constant threat, the US high command limited the nurses' combat-support role to the rear areas. The sheer size of the theater was also a significant factor in keeping nurses in the rear echelon, and until the closing months of the war in the Pacific, they worked far from the combat zone, in which medical corpsmen performed the role of nurses. New Caledonia, in the South Pacific, with its benign, malaria-free climate, became home to seven station and two general hospitals.

The nature of the “island-hopping strategy” employed in the Pacific, and the small size of many of the islands seized as stepping-stones to the Japanese home islands, ensured that nurses arrived only when an island had been cleared and secured. Guadalcanal, in the Solomons chain, had been secured by US forces in February 1943, but nurses of the Twentieth Station Hospital did not arrive there until June 1944, sixteen months after the deployment of male medical members of the unit.

One reason for the long delay was the unhealthy Guadalcanal climate, hot, humid, and rainy, which encouraged malaria, dysentery, and dengue fever. Victims of these diseases outnumbered battle casualties by four to one. Conditions were similar in New Guinea, where in 1943 malaria disabled nearly 8,600 of the occupying 14,700 troops. Blanket spraying with DDT brought the problem under control, eventually reducing the incidence of malaria from 172 per thousand to less than 5 per thousand. Dengue fever, however, remained a constant problem, and in the late summer of 1944 an outbreak on Saipan invalided half of the nurses posted there.

In 1944, as the American advance closed on Japan, the military hospitals set up at the start of the Pacific campaign in New Zealand, the Fiji Islands, and the New Hebrides were closed down and nurses followed US forces to the Solomons, the Marshalls, and the Marianas. Nurses stationed in secured islands lived in fenced quarters guarded around the clock by armed sentries who also escorted them to the hospitals and always accompanied them when they were off post, an oppressive regime that led to a dip in morale.

The invasion of the Philippines, launched on October 20, 1944, gave army nurses in the Pacific their first opportunity to tend battle casualties in the field, a radical change in their responsibilities that led to a rapid raising of morale. However, this was tempered by a soaring casualty ratio in the land fighting of one killed to every three wounded. Naval losses to kamikaze attacks were also heavy, and approximately three thousand naval wounded were evacuated to New Guinea between October and December.

In World War II, army nurses won 1,619 medals, citations, and commendations. Sixteen medals were awarded to nurses who died in battle. Between 1941 and 1945, 20 nurses died while serving in the US Army.

Reference: Edith A. Aynes,
From Nightingale to Eagle: An Army Nurse's History,
1973.

BARTON, CLARA

US Nurse and Founder of the American Red Cross, b. 1821, d. 1912

In a long career of public service, Barton was a teacher, a trailblazer for female civil servants, a battlefield nurse and organizer, and president of the American Red Cross.

She was born on December 25, 1821, in North Oxford, Massachusetts, the last of five children, and as a child she loved to play nurse while tending sick pets. At the age of eleven she nursed one of her brothers after he had fallen from a roof. After teaching in local schools she attended the Liberal Institute at Clinton, New York, before founding one of New Jersey's first “free” or public schools. She resigned when a man was appointed over her head. She then took a clerkship in the Patent Office, becoming possibly the first regularly appointed woman civil servant, and from 1854 she was based in Washington, D.C.

When the Civil War began in 1861, Barton advertised for provisions and medical supplies for the wounded and traveled to the front line by mule team to distribute them, earning the title “the Angel of the Battlefield.” She remained independent of the US Sanitary Commission and
Dorothea Dix
's Army Nursing Corps (see Chapter 8), often paying her own way. In the latter part of the war, Barton was appointed head nurse of the Army of the James and a network of hospitals in Virginia. She spent the greater part of 1865 amassing information on missing soldiers and marking graves. After the war she became a persuasive public speaker and was acknowledged as a war heroine.

In 1868 she suffered a nervous collapse and traveled to Europe to recuperate. In Switzerland she was introduced to the work of the Red Cross, which had been formed in 1863 to provide relief for the wounded on the battlefield. In France in 1870, she worked with the organization to establish military hospitals in the Franco-Prussian War. When she returned to the United States, she agitated for American alignment with the movement to bring a measure of humanity to the battlefield, and in 1881 she presided over the formation of the American Association Red Cross, remaining its autocratic president until 1904. In 1881 the United States signed the Geneva Treaty, including the provisions Barton had made for the association's role in dealing with peacetime disasters. In the Spanish-American War of 1898, Barton, at the ripe old age of seventy-seven, worked again as a nurse in a mule train.

Reference: Stephen B. Oates,
A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War,
n.d.

BICKERDYKE, MARY ANN

US Civil War Hospital Administrator, 1817–1901

The formidable “Mother” Bickerdyke, chief of nursing for the Union army, was so beloved by its men that soldiers would cheer her when she appeared, just as they would a general. The Union generals treated her with wary deference. When the commander-in-chief, General Ulysses S. Grant, was asked what he was going to do about the outspoken and often insubordinate Bickerdyke, he replied, “She outranks me. I can't do a thing in the world.”

Born in Ohio, she later moved to Illinois. She was widowed in 1859 and supported herself and her two young sons by practicing as a “botanic physician” in Galesburg, Illinois. After the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, a young volunteer doctor from Galesburg wrote home about the squalid conditions in the military hospital in Cairo, Illinois, prompting the citizens of his hometown to raise five hundred dollars' worth of supplies, which they entrusted to Bickerdyke to deliver.

Bickerdyke remained in Cairo as an unofficial nurse and set about establishing order out of chaos. She received backing from Grant, who placed her in charge of the establishment of new medical facilities as the Union army moved south. It was said that Grant was so impressed by her that she was the only woman he allowed in his camp. If challenged, she could be imperious and was known to outplay the military men at their own hierarchical game. When a surgeon questioned her authority, Bickerdyke replied that she was acting “on the authority of God Almighty, have you anything that outranks that?”

By the end of the Civil War, and with the cooperation of the US Sanitary Commission, Bickerdyke had built three hundred hospitals and had organized medical care for the wounded on nineteen battlefields. When the war ended, at the request of General William T. Sherman, she rode at the head of the XV Corps in the Grand Review held in Washington. Bickerdyke went on to work for the Salvation Army in San Francisco and became a lawyer, assisting Union veterans with their legal problems. In 1886 she was awarded a special pension by Congress.

Reference: Adele de Leeun,
Civil War Nurse Mary Ann Bickerdyke,
1973.

BULLWINKEL, VIVIAN

Australian World War II Nurse, b. 1915, d. 2000

On February 12, 1942, three days before the British capitulation to the Japanese, the SS
Vyner Brook,
a small tramp steamer, set sail from Singapore. On board were some three hundred civilian evacuees and sixty-four nurses of the Australian Army Nursing Service, one of whom was the twenty-six-year-old Bullwinkel.

The
Vyner Brook
's destination was Batavia, in Java, but the voyage ended in the Banka Straits, four hundred miles southeast of Singapore, when the freighter was attacked and sunk by six Japanese warplanes. Bullwinkel, with twenty-one of the nurses on the ship and a large number of men, women, and children, came ashore at Radji Beach on Banka Island. The following day they were joined by twenty British soldiers who had survived the sinking of another vessel.