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 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.

             

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 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 women. Most women had been temporarily assigned to the 24^th Evac, making my hospital the first hospital in France with a full complement of nurses.

Most of the nurses from the 51^st Field and all of 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 boats. The nurses from the 51^st Evac immediately went to relieve their comrades, while the 24^th 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 24^th 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 24^th 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 24^th 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 24^th 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.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

THE BIG BUCKET LIST TRIP--PART I

From September 22-October 2 my good friend Liz Higgins and I were on  a "Beyond the Band of Brothers" tour of World War II battle sites. Taking this tour was the last big ticket items on my bucket list. My hope was to publish a post, with pictures, just I like I did almost every day on the cross country bike trip. It didn't happen. Although I took lots of pictures--at least for me--and filled my heads with thoughts to write down, our days were very long: leave the hotel before 0900 and not getting back until eight. So instead, I offer you four rather long posts: this one, plus one each for the three main locations we visited. I promise a few pictures if you hang with me to the end.

When I was a kid my father worked swing shifts (7-3 or 3-11)  as a mechanic for The Monongahela Connecting Railroad, a subsidiary of Jones and Laughlin Steel in Pittsburgh. I was the family night owl, and sometimes, when Daddy was at work, I would sneak downstairs to watch TV with my mother. I don't remember how often I went downstairs, but I do remember one program in particular. It was a documentary about the liberation of German concentration camps in World War II.

The program did not frighten me. On the contrary, I was fascinated. How could the Germans--and I knew I had plenty of German blood flowing through my veins--have done this to their fellow citizens? Because they were different, or because they were Jewish? I was too young or too innocent to know how many wars over the centuries had been fought in the name of religion. Seeing the pictures of bodies, many of them naked, stacked up like wood struck a deep cord within me. I knew America had not started the war. Japan had. So why were we in Germany? And thus began my life-long interest in World War II, and in particular the European Theater of Operation.

Fast forward ten years. I wanted to be a nurse. My Dad wanted me to go to college. I was the oldest of four girls. If all four of us went to college he and Mom would have at least one child in college for 14 years. In 1965 most young women became nurses through three year hospital based schools of nursing. I wanted to go to Presbyterian Hospital School of Nursing in Pittsburgh because I liked their caps. But Daddy insisted on college. Because young women and men went to schools of nursing rather than four year colleges there were no scholarships available for me. Not even from his VA benefits. I saw only one way to help pay for my education, and that was to join the Army.

Fast forward some more years. I went to college on a fabulous scholarship, entirely paid for by the Army. I did my clinical internships mostly at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC. I cared for lots of men who had been wounded or sickened in Vietnam. My interest in WWII remained, even after I went to Vietnam in February 1970.

Fast forward again to what one might call older adulthood. My kids were grown, my husband and I had the financial ability to travel, but he was only interested in seeing more of New England ("If you live in Vacationland", and we do, "why leave?")

So while Jim's bucket list was small, short, or fulfilled (take a look at the Porche in our garage) I made a list with three big trips on it:
:
1. Cross the US by bike. Did that in 2013.
2. Sing in Denmark. Did that in 2017.
3. Visit WWII battle sites. Have done that now in 2018.

Next year is the 75th Anniversary of the Normandy Invasion, the liberation of France, and the Battle of the Bulge. Many tours are already filled, or over-priced. Why not go now? So I did, inviting my friend Liz Higgins to accompany me.

For both Liz and me it was a kind of pilgrimage. Her father was in the First Army (the Big Red One), and had been part of the invasions of North Africa and Sicily, and was in the third wave of men landing on Omaha Beach. He was wounded in the Ardennes forest.  My hospital in Vietnam, the 24th Evac, was the first evacuation level hospital to land in Normandy on D Day +6. I didn't know that when I visited Normandy in 2011. I wanted to see if again.

We chose to go on an 11 day tour: three in Normandy, three in Belgium, three in Munich, and the rest in travel with a company called Procom, which markets its tours as "Beyond the Band of Brothers." It was a good choice. Although there was little time for shopping the 30 or so people on our tour were given every opportunity to learn, in depth,  about each of the three main sites we visited.

If you have managed to stick with this to the end, here are three pictures, one from each of the places we visited.

beer beautifully served in a small Belgium restaurant 

A pizza house in St Mer Eglise. Laura, Larry, Jim and I ate pizza there in 2011.

No choice on beverage. Beer at the restaurant at Berchesgadan, Bavaria