In Awe
Barbara Hesselman Kautz, MSN, RN (Ret), Cpt ANC
(Resigned)
June 12, 1944—June 12, 2019
…It is not the pursuit of material interests
that the mothers in the United States gave
up their sons. It is not in the pursuit of material interest that these boys
accept the risk of death.
If your soldiers had gone to war
in defense of American interests, the propaganda would have emphasized your oil
fields, your plantations, and your threatened commercial markets. Instead it
scarcely touched on such subjects.
And what were they told that could
motivate them to sacrifice their lives? They were told of hostages hanged in
Poland. They were told of prisoners shot in France. They were told that a form
of slavery threatened a part of Humanity. They were told not about themselves,
but of others. That gave them a sense of solidarity with all mankind.
Antoine
de Saint-Exupéry , Spring 1944
During WWII the French adventurer
and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, fought with American, British and Free
French Forces across North Africa. Sensing that the greatest amphibious
invasion in history was about to be set into motion Saint-Exupéry wrote a
letter, part of which is quoted above, to the men who had become his comrades,
and would soon be in battle somewhere in France. I saw this letter carved in
stone in its full, at a museum I visited in Normandy last autumn. We began the
morning walking the sands of Utah Beach and ended it with dinner in Bayeux
during an eleven day tour of World War II battlefields I took with my friend
Liz. Taking this tour was the final big-ticket item for me to kick off my
bucket list.
St-Exupéry’s
letter captured how I have long felt about the men and women of my parents’ era
who went to war. I have long wondered if I had been born a generation earlier,
or in 1840, how I would have responded to the crises of the Civil War and World
War II. That I ultimately went to a war I despised, whose purpose seemed
utterly fruitless, did not answer either question.
I went to war because
the Army paid for my college education in full, even giving me a salary of a
PFC while I was a student. I went to war because I made a pact with a devil before
that war was heating up, and I suspect I would have made the pact anyway. I did
not particularly want a war of my own, nor did I ever think of running away to
Canada, asking for a duty assignment at an unpopular post like Fort “Lost in
the Wood, MO [Ft Leonard Wood] that
would surely keep me in the US while I completed my end of the bargain I’d made
with the Army in return for my education. I didn't try---or for that matter,
wanted to get pregnant to avoid fulfilling my end of that bargain. I hoped the
Army would send me someplace interesting, like Germany. I got interesting, but
it was called Vietnam.
My great
consolation is that in Vietnam I was color-blind. I didn't care if you had blonde
hair, black skin, or slope shaped eyes, were a civilian, or even if you fought
for the other side. My job was to be the best nurse I could be, and I think I
was.
The
hospital where I served in Vietnam was the 24th Evacuation Hospital
(SMBL,) a 350 bed hospital constructed of Quonset huts and concrete floors on
what had once been jungle on Long Binh Post, the biggest US Army Post outside
the United States. The SMBL attached to our name stood for Semi-Mobile, but
there was nothing mobile about us, although once we were within an hour of
evacuating all patients, nurses, and doctors because of unsanitary conditions
caused by an enormous gob of sewage backing up every toilet in the hospital.
After I finished
writing about Vietnam I found myself being increasingly drawn to writing about
Army nurses in World War II. But first I had to do some serious research. It
eventually took me to three priceless books and an amazing website. The first
book, “We Band of Angels” focused solely on the many Army and Navy nurses
captured by the Japanese in the Philippines. Two other books, “And if I
Perish,” and “GI Nightingales” were written by college professors about the
European theater of operation, all of whom had been able to interview many Army
Nurses in the ‘90s. The web-site, www.med-dept.com,
is a compilation of every medical unit to serve in WWII from Graves
Registration to detailed histories of hospitals in every theater of the war.
By then I knew there
was a methodology to the way in which the Army cared for casualties. First,
corpsmen fighting with the unit, then evacuation to a Battalion Aid Station,
then a Field Hospital, followed by an Evacuation Hospital, and then, finally,
if a soldier could not be returned to active duty, he was sent to a General
Hospital in Britain, or by ship to the United States. The hospitals’ names
designated both the size and the closeness to the front.
Specifically, I wanted to find the history of a
hospital that landed on Normandy soon after D Day, and then followed the
fighting until May 8, 1945 (VE Day) and the liberation of POW and Concentration
Camps.
As I perused the
list of hospitals on med-dept.com I was surprised to discover that the 24th
Evac was listed. As far as I knew the hospital had come into being in 1966.
[Its history actually dates to World War I.] I clicked on the link and there it
was: the answer to my quest. The 24th Evac was the first Evacuation
level hospital to land on Normandy on D Day+ 6. June 12, 1944. Exactly 75 years
ago today.
It was preceded
only by the 51st Field Hospital on June 8th with only a
handful of women. Most women had been temporarily assigned to the 24th
Evac, making my hospital the first
hospital in France with a full complement of nurses.
Most of the nurses
from the 51st Field and all of the nurses from the 24th
Evac crossed the English Channel aboard a troop ship called the Sir Frances Drake. Once they got close
enough to shore they were transferred to a variety of amphibious boats. The
nurses from the 51st Evac immediately went to relieve their comrades,
while the 24th Evac nurses began to remove equipment while others
looked for a place for the hospital’s buildings to be erected.
June of 1944 was
unusually cold, wet, and windy. On 15 Jun 1944, the next possible day for the
invasion if Eisenhower had to postpone it, there was a gale so strong it broke
a Mulberry [temporary dock] from its moorings.
I can envision how
difficult it must have been to do anything in that weather because the day I toured
the US Cemetery at Colville sur Mer, directly above Omaha Beach, it was cold, pouring, and windy. Just going
from our bus to the restaurant at Omaha Beach soaked us.
June 6, 1970, when
I was at the 24th Evac was hot and steamy. The only reason I could
sleep between twelve hour shifts is because my hooch had air conditioning. I remember nothing special about that day.
So I wonder a lot
about those nurses. Most are probably dead now, and if they are alive they must
be approaching 100 years old. The pictures on the med-dept website show smiling, young women. Undoubtedly they were making the best of having to wash up in cold water
filled helmets, sending occasional pictures home to the family, showing things
weren't that bad—at least for them.
Would I been able
to have tolerate what they did? Moving frequently, sleeping in tents that did
little to keep them from being pelted by the rain? Would I have been like my
mother, married less than a month when Pearl Harbor was attacked, making her an
Army wife who sent her husband to China-Burma-India,but who never found out
(because he would not tell her) why the man she fell in love with in high
school spent the last 3 months of the war in a coma in a hospital somewhere in
India? There is, of course, no way for me to ever know. I can only write about
a character I create—a character like me who had to face the fate I wish I had.
A Bit More History
Living and working
conditions at the 24th Evac in 1944-46 varied from cold and wet, but
adequate, to absolutely hellacious. The hospital moved 17 times. Sometimes they
were fortunate to be able to take over some captured buildings, including an
abandoned German Hospital.
Because it was an
Evacuation Hospital the 24th Evac arrived at its final destination
after the liberation of POW or Concentration Camps, but still cared for the
very sick, newly liberated men, women, and children of northwestern Germany.
Eventually, as
conditions stabilized, hospitals closed and nurses returned home. The 24th
Evac stayed in Germany and was decommissioned in 1946, exactly 20 years before
its people would again go to war.
Peace is always better
than war.
From “The Armed Man” a
chorale written by the contemporary Welsh Composer
Karl Jenkens.
