And If I Perish: Frontline U.S. Army Nurses in World War II - Hardcover

Monahan, Evelyn; Neidel-Greenlee, Rosemary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375415149 ISBN 13: 9780375415142

Publisher: Knopf, 2003

Synopsis

A galvanizing narrative of the wartime role played by U.S. Army nurses—from the invasion of North Africa to the bloody Italian campaign to the decisive battles in France and the Rhineland.

More than 59,000 nurses volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps alone: 217 lost their lives (16 by enemy action), and more than 1,600 were decorated for meritorious service and bravery under fire. But their stories have rarely been heard. Now, drawing on never-before-published eyewitness accounts—many heroic, some mundane and comic—Monahan and Neidel-Greenlee take us to the front lines, to the withering fire on the beaches of Anzio and Normandy, and to the field and evacuation hospitals, as well as bombed and burned hospital ships. We witness the nurses—and the doctors with whom they served—coping with the physical and psychological damage done to the soldiers in combat. We see them working—often with only meager supplies and overwhelmed by the sheer number of casualties—to save the lives and limbs of thousands of wounded troops. With them we experience the almost constant packing up and moving on to keep up with advancing troops, foxholes dug under camp beds, endless mud, and treacherous minefields. The vividness and immediacy of their recollections provide us with a powerfully visceral, deeply affecting sense of their experiences—terrifying and triumphant, exhausting and exhilarating.

A revelatory work that at last gives voice to the nurses who played such an essential role in World War II.

About this title

About the Author

Evelyn M. Monahan, a retired psychologist, served in the Women’s Army Corps from 1961 until 1967 as a corpsman and psychiatric technician. She subsequently took her M.Ed. and Ph.D. at Georgia State University and her M.Div. in theology and ethics at Emory University. She worked at the Department of Veterans Affairs from 1980 to 1996.

Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee served in the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps on active duty from 1962 until 1965, and on reserve duty between 1989 and 1991. She has a master’s degree in nursing from Emory University, and worked at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Atlanta from 1981 to 2002.

Monahan and Neidel-Greenlee are co-authors (with Agnes Jensen Mangerich) of Albanian Escape: The True Story of U.S. Army Nurses Behind Enemy Lines and co-authors of All This Hell: U.S. Nurses Imprisoned by the Japanese.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1
Operation Torch--U.S. Army Nurses in the Invasion Force

D-Day North Africa
8 November 1942
I spotted Lt. Vilma Vogler descending a ladder at my side. Our eyes met for a moment in mutual shock, and then we quickly descended into a waiting barge. At that moment she and the other nurses had ceased to be "the women." We were all comrades in equally dangerous footing, trying to survive the insanity of combat.
-Edward E. Rosenbaum, MD, former captain, U.S. Army Medical Corps, "Wartime Nurses: A Tribute to the Unsung Veterans," New Choices (July 1989)

An artillery shell exploded sixty yards off the starboard side of HMS Orbita. Lieutenant Helen Molony, seated on board in the officers' mess hall, felt her hand shake as she raised her coffee mug to her mouth. It was early morning, 8 November 1942. A convoy of Allied war- and transport ships, including the Orbita, the Santa Paula, and the Monarch of Bermuda, lay two miles off the coast of Algeria. On board these British ships were not only combat troops but the men and women of the 48th Surgical Hospital, including Lieutenant Molony. She was one of 57 U.S. Army nurses who, along with the hospital's 48 officers and 273 enlisted men, were waiting to land, side by side with the combat troops, on the beachheads of Arzew and Oran in Algeria.

The sun had not risen yet and the ships were still under cover of darkness. Molony glanced around the officers' mess. The thunder of artillery had begun an hour earlier, and now, at 0515, she saw that the tables in the mess were crowded with officers, male and female, dressed in combat gear. Aside from the clanking of silverware and an occasional word or two spoken in hushed tones, the large wardroom was strangely quiet. In less than an hour, Molony knew that her part in Operation Torch-the invasion of North Africa-would begin. What she could not know was that her participation in the D-Day invasion would become a landmark in U.S. military history.

Only a few months earlier, in midsummer, the 48th Surgical Hospital had crossed the Atlantic on the USS Wakefield as part of what was, at that time, the largest convoy ever to sail from the United States. On 6 August, the 48th Surgical had disembarked at Greenock, Scotland, and taken a one-day train ride to Tidworth Barracks in the area of Shipton-Ballanger and Kangaroo Corners in southern England. The unit remained there for two and a half months, and Molony underwent the closest thing to military training the army nurses would receive, a regimen of hardening exercises of five- and ten-mile hikes, complete with field packs.

For the nurses of the 48th Surgical Hospital, as for all the army nurses sent overseas before July 1943, uniforms presented a definite problem. Before America entered World War II, the sole uniform the U.S. Army nurses had was a white duty nurse's uniform and white nurse's shoes. The only thing military about the uniform was the second lieutenant's gold bar, worn on the right lapel, and the caduceus with an "N" superimposed upon it on the left lapel. The caduceus had been a symbol of the Army Medical Department for decades. Doctors wore the caduceus plain, while nurses had a superimposed "N" for nursing, the dentists a superimposed "D," and veterinarians a superimposed "V."

As for the clothing itself, the army provided blue seersucker dresses for the nurses in combat theaters, but it was obvious that this would not be appropriate for climbing over patients, or for working in cold climates, mud, rain, or mosquito-infested areas. Long pants would at least solve some of the problems presented by cold weather, rain, and mud, but the national consensus at that time held that women did not wear slacks. Hence it would be some time before the army produced pants for women nurses; in the meanwhile, army nurses simply wore men's GI field uniforms or coveralls. Many of them could sew, and those who could helped those who could not in making alterations to male army fatigues so they would more adequately fit the smaller, shorter frames of American women. Shoes presented a separate set of problems. For the smaller army nurses who could not get GI shoes to fit their feet, blisters were a frequent and painful result of marching through the English countryside.

During the weeks of training in England, the women of the 48th Surgical Hospital got to know each other. There was Helen Molony, the tall redhead from upstate New York, who, in the words of friends and family, was "pretty enough to be a movie star." Pretty or not, Molony never had Hollywood in mind for herself and her future. Instead, she trained to become a nurse, and joined the U.S. Army Nurse Corps the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. After a few months training at Fort Slocum on Long Island Sound, Molony was moved out to the New York port of embarkation. There she was assigned, along with fifty-six other nurses, to the 48th Surgical Hospital.

There was Ruth Haskell, a thirty-three-year-old divorced mother from Maine, who had left her ten-year-old son, Carl, in the care of his grandparents fourteen months earlier before setting off for Camp Forrest near Tullahoma, Tennessee, for duty as an army nurse. A heavyset woman of medium height with brown hair and intelligent brown eyes, Haskell was determined, self-initiating, and confident.

Quite the opposite of Haskell was the nurse who would become her best friend, Lieutenant Louise Miller. Miller was a fair, petite blond from Selma, Alabama, who lacked something of the assurance that Haskell had in abundance. Unlike Haskell and most of the nurses with the 48th Surgical Hospital, Miller had not volunteered for overseas duty, but had been chosen for the assignment by the chief nurse at Camp Wheeler, Georgia. Miller and Haskell had met on the train to New York. The two were a study in contrasts: the one a slight blonde, the other a sturdy brunette; one a southerner, the other a northerner; one hesitant, the other bold. Miller's soft southern accent stood out in stark contrast to the "down east" Maine accent that shaped Haskell's speech. From the moment the two women met on the train ride to New York, Haskell took the more frightened Miller under her wing, and Miller quickly began calling Haskell "Yankee." Becoming friends with Haskell and other nurses in the unit helped calm the apprehension Miller felt during the two-week trip from Georgia to England.

The 48th Surgical Hospital to which these women were attached was a field hospital, and, as such, designed to be among the "forward" hospitals-those hospitals closest to the fighting troops, including battalion aid stations, division collecting and clearing stations, field hospitals, and evacuation hospitals-rather than to the rear where station and general hospitals would be located. Each type of hospital was designed to perform a different function in an evacuation chain that would be set up to get the wounded off the battlefields and into medical care as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The first link in the chain was the battalion aid station. Battalion aid stations would be located close to frontline combat but far enough away to avoid small-arms fire. They were to be manned by battalion surgeons, medics, and corpsmen who were attached to all army divisions. Battalion aid stations were the first places surgeons would be available to wounded soldiers. Only absolutely lifesaving surgery would be performed here, since the main objective of the battalion aid stations was to stabilize and evacuate casualties brought to them by battlefield medics and litter bearers to hospitals farther back from the front.

Next in the chain of evacuation came the collecting stations, located near the command posts of the regiment they supported. Here, collecting companies would change bandages on incoming wounded, adjust splints, administer plasma, and combat shock while preparing the patient for the next step in the chain. Collecting companies would be units indigenous to infantry divisions; each collecting company would consist of a battalion surgeon or assistant battalion surgeon, medics, litter bearers, and vehicles such as jeeps to evacuate the wounded to field hospitals or evacuation hospitals farther behind the front lines.

Clearing stations would be farther back from the front, usually four to six miles behind the collecting companies. Here, medical personnel would triage the wounded, maintain wards for the care of shock and minor sickness and injuries, and transfer men needing immediate emergency surgery to adjacent field hospital platoons.

Field hospitals would be located close to the clearing stations. Personnel would consist of surgeons, nurses, medics, and litter bearers. Regular personnel were to be augmented with auxiliary surgical teams such as the 2nd Auxiliary Surgical Group, who would bring their special skills to the frontline area. Patients were to remain at field hospitals until they were stabilized, a recovery period that could take anywhere from one to two weeks, after which they would be transported to evacuation hospitals farther behind the frontline area. If necessary, field hospitals could be broken into three platoons in order to serve more battle casualties at three different locations near the front. When field hospitals were split, each of the three platoons would then have only six regularly assigned nurses.

Evacuation hospitals were 400-bed semimobile facilities that were to be located approximately ten to fifteen miles behind the front lines. They were to be staffed by, on average, about 40 army nurses and 38 officers, including doctors; 218 medics; and auxiliary surgical teams. Patients could be kept longer at evacuation hospitals than at field hospitals: those soldiers who recovered within several weeks would be sent back to the front, while patients who needed more recovery time were to be sent farther to the rear, to station or general hospitals. A 750-bed evacuation hospital was a larger version of the 400-bed ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0375415149
• ISBN 13: 9780375415142
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 528