June 12, 1944- June 12, 2019: Still in Awe

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, in its full,  on display 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.

            By the time I was eleven I knew quite a lot about this great war that had sent my father to Burma. (C-B-I: the China-Burma-India theater of operation.)  When we went to the drive-in, our family’s most frequent form of entertainment, I—already a confirmed night owl—watched WWII movies sandwiched between my parents on the front seat of our car. On Sundays Daddy always tuned in to view the documentary “Victory at Sea.”  I can still hum a few bars of its theme song.

             A diesel mechanic, Daddy often worked “middle trick”—the 3-11 PM shift--for a railroad that carried raw material for Jones and Laughlin Steel in Pittsburgh. So, while my three sisters slumbered upstairs, Mom often invited me downstairs to watch TV with her. Neither she nor I gave a second thought to her inviting me downstairs to watch a documentary about the final days of the war in Europe. 

            This documentary turned out to be about the liberation of the concentration camps, which I knew nothing about. In my mind’s eye I can still see my horrified self, looking at film of stacks of emaciated, dead bodies piled rudely one a top the other. It took me awhile and more than a few answers from my Mom before I understood what I was seeing was one of the worst examples ever of man’s inhumanity to man.    

            So Saint 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 or World War II

I, too went to war, albeit a different war—and one I despised-- in return for my college education as a nurse, paid for by the Department of the Army. I was even given 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 had I known what was about to happen in Vietnam. 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 Leonard Wood, MO, which my fellow students and I nicknamed “Fort Lost in the Wood,  that would surely have kept me in the US while I completed the three years of service I owed the Army in return for my education. I didn’t try---or for that matter, want to get pregnant to avoid fulfilling my end of that bargain, nor did I claim that the bunions I was developing would absolve me of my responsibility to repay the Army. 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. Still, I wondered if I could have withstood the challenges of being in World War II.

            The hospital where I served in Vietnam was the 24^th 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.

           

When I retired I began writing about Vietnam and self-published a book about my experiences. When I finished I found myself being increasingly drawn to writing fiction 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 the authors had been able to interview many Army Nurses in the ‘90s. My third resource was a wonderful web-site, www.med-dept.com, a compilation of the histories of every medical unit to serve in WWII from hospitals to Graves Registration.

By then I had read enough to know there was a methodology to the way in which the Army cared for casualties. In general, the first treatment a wounded man received was from a corpsmen with his unit. After that came 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, to write about Army Nursing from June 1945-May 1946 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 24^th 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 24^th 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 51^st Field Hospital on June 8^th with only a handful of its nurses deployed. The remaining women had been temporarily assigned to the 24^th Evac, making my hospital the first hospital to land in France with a full complement of nurses.

Most of the nurses from the 51^st Field and all the nurses from the 24^th 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 vehicles. The nurses from the 51^st Evac and some from the 24th Evac immediately went to relieve their comrades. But most of the 24^th Evac nurses stayed on board overnight while the enlisted men searched for an appropriate place for them to bivouac. They chose a field in Le Cambe. I don't know it if is the same place, but a field in La Cambe became the final resting place for German soldiers whose families could not pay to repatriate their sons' bodies to buried on German soil.  

June of 1944 was unusually cold, wet, and windy. On 15 Jun 1944, the next possible day for the invasion if Eisenhower had decided to postpone it, there was a gale so strong it broke a Mulberry [temporary harbor] from its moorings. Parts of it still stand at Utah beach today.

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 it was cold, pouring, and windy. Just going from our bus to the restaurant at Omaha Beach soaked us.

When I was at the 24^th Evac June 6^th was hot and steamy. We were still taking in a heavy number of wounded from the Cambodian Incursion. I never noticed the date. 

So I wonder a lot about those nurses who went ashore on June 12, 1944. Most are probably dead now, and if they are alive must be approaching 100 years old. The pictures on the med-dept website show smiling young women, making the best of having to wash up in cold water filled helmets, tramp through muddy fields, or survive the winter of 1944-45, the second coldest in Europe during the 20^th century. It is difficult for me to think of them as frail and elderly. Even in the worst conditions they seemed full of life. 

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 Burma, but who never found out  why the man she fell in love with in high school spent the last  three months of the war in a coma in a hospital somewhere in India? My Dad died before he was willing to tell my mother the details of what happened to him, and she passed away nearly six years ago. There is no way for me to ever know their history. I can only write about a character I create—a character like me who had to face the fate I wish I had.