American Nurses during WW2

11-05-25 SPin09a Linda Tysk Female nurses during
WWII
A study about the American female nurses in Europe
during the Second World War http://www.history.army.mil/photos/WWII/ww2-kw/Sc132367.jpg By: Linda Tysk Class: SPin09a
Teacher: Trevor Fisher 1
11-05-25 SPin09a Linda Tysk Abstract The Army Nurse Corps sent approximately 60,000 nurses across the Atlantic to serve in Europe
during the second World War, mostly young women who became homesick in a completely new
and foreign country.
The aim of this research was to investigate what role the American nurses had in World War II,
what conditions they lived under, and how the Army Nurse Corps developed during the war.
To find information I used primary and secondary sources in the forms of databases, diaries,
interviews and brochures.
Results showed that nurses had a big role in the low post-injury rate, and that they had a huge
responsibility that caused the nurses a lot of stress. It also showed that the Army Nurse Corps
developed in many areas, where becoming a part of the Army was one of them.
Conclusions that were drawn were that the second World War II changed the future for women in
both nursing in the military and nursing at home in the US.
2
11-05-25 SPin09a Linda Tysk Table of Contents Abstract .................................................................................................................................. 2
Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 4
Background ............................................................................................................................ 5
Aim and Inquiries ................................................................................................................... 8
Method ................................................................................................................................... 8
Results .................................................................................................................................... 9
Role of the Army Nurses in WWII: .................................................................................... 9
The development of the Army Nurse Corps: ..................................................................... 9
Living conditions: ............................................................................................................ 11
Analysis ................................................................................................................................ 13
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 15
Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 16
http://med-dept.com/anc.php
3
11-05-25 SPin09a Linda Tysk Introduction Female nurses in the army ha d existed since the middle of the 19
th century, had been there to help
the wounded soldiers, but they had never worked as close to the enemy-lines as they did during the
second World War. Even though the corporation called the Army Nurse Corps was established
before the first World War, it took a long time before women officially became a part of the Army.
The Army Nurse Corps had nurses serving in Europe during the first World War too, but the
corporation did not have that many serving nurses at that time, but by the end of the second World
War, that changed.
The nurses serving during the second World War worked closer to the front-lines than they had
ever done, and they risked their lives daily both in hospitals, on land, at sea and in the air. They
treated various types of injuries, from large gaping wounds, to severe burns or amputations. One
more part of their job was to help the soldiers with the psychological damages they got from the
brutal combats at the front lines.
Apart from the Army Nurse Corps, there were several other women-corporations, such as the
WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services) which was a part of the navy, the
Navy Nurse Corps which were nurses in the Navy and not on land like the Army Nurse Corps, and
the Air Force Nurse Corps.
1
The biggest one of them, the one that grew most during the second
World War was the Army Nurse Corps.
1 Women's Roles in the World Wars . Wikipedia.com. Wikipedia.com: Unknown.
9
th of April 2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_roles_in_the_World_Wars#World_War_II
4
11-05-25 SPin09a Linda Tysk Background http://med-dept.com/anc.php
Author(s): Alain S. Batens, a Belgian citizen who is a World War II historian, researcher and
militaria collector. Started researching at the age of 13 and is now retired. After reading several
books, treaties and manuals etc. he fell for the medical part of the war and together with the second
author, Ben C. Major, started the website so others could use what they had found. In the beginning,
the database was only used between the two authors, but soon developed when they realized others
were interested.
2
Ben C. Major is a British collector and researcher of WW2, and he has focused on the medical
equipment. Just like Batens, he started collecting at an early age, approximately 10-11 years, so
already then he had a very big interest in the medical branch of the US Army.
3
Source: This database provided me with everything I wanted to know about the Army Nurse
Corps, from the early beginning of the corporation to the development of it.
Source Criticism: I consider this page reliable, since it feels very genuine and not biased, because
even though I know both the authors have a big interest in the Army Nurse Corps, it shows very
clear that they have not tried to add their own opinions in the Database, they only provide a lot of
information.
I can not find any more information about the two authors, as to what they work with or what
education they have, it does not mean they are not good at what they do or that the authors are not
credible, but it is not possible to say the opposite either, since there are no merits that can support it.
They show the testimonies they have used, but it is still very hard to understand were they have
found the information. By looking at their FAQ page, it says that the archive is not currently open
for public use yet, and is only for research use only. They do have a “contact us” page, so it is very
easy to get in contact with them if that is the case, and that adds to the authors' credibility, since it
allows me to either trust or question their work and ask about the information I do not agree with or
understand.
I have also read other sites, and by comparing the information in this site I can see that the
information in it is accurate, since the same information has also been found by other historians. I
have tried to find the date of when the information was published, and they have a tag for “recent
updates”, and it goes all the way back to when the site was founded in December 2006, that adds to
the accuracy when it comes to time, since all of the information that is added to the page can be
found under that tag. The page was not meant to be for public in the beginning, meaning that the
information in the beginning was only a research between the two authors, so I can see no reason
for them to want to write things that they are not certain about. Then the page was released, and is
now in good use for all WW II collectors and re-enactors. The fact that it was not meant for public in
the beginning is according to me positive when it comes to accuracy.
The information is mostly facts, but the page is always reasonable. I have never found anything
that is not objective, their aim is not to make propaganda, only to show information. The page is
also very consistent, and never contradicts itself.
The part where this site is worst, is when it comes to support, it is not possible to find a list of
2 The Army Nurse Corps. Med-dept.com. Alain S. Batens, Ben C. Major: 29
th of October 2007
30
th of April 2011. http://med-dept.com/about.php
3 I bid.
5
11-05-25 SPin09a Linda Tysk sources, or anything that can back up the information. To back this information up, I used a similar
source from a female author who wrote a brochure about the Army Nurse Corps, and all the
information I found there corroborates what I found on this site.
I also used the official site of the United States Army to try to corroborate the facts on this site, and
just like with the brochure, none of the information said anything differently.
http://www.army.mil/women/wac.html
Author(s): Does not say the name of the Author, but it is the official homepage of the United States
Army.
Source: This source provided me with the history of the Women's Army Corps, although since I
focused on the Army Nurse Corps, I did not use that much of the information on this page.
Source Criticism: The homepage is written by an authoritative source (US Army), and it shows
that the page has quality, but apart from that the page does not have a named author, meaning that it
lacks credibility. It has no contact page, so I can not ask about the information.
Neither does it show a time-line of when the information was published nor a list of sources, so it
is hard to check the accuracy of the page. On the other hand, I compared this site to the brochure
and the Medical Research center database, and the information I found was corroborated by the
two. So, instead of supporting it with sources, I supported it by corroborating with other sites.
There is always a chance that a site made by an organization is slanted or biased, but none of the
information I found was biased, so I consider it objective. This homepage is also consistent, just
like the Research Center's, and does not contradict itself.
http://www.army.mil/women/nurses.html#nurses5
Author(s): This is pretty much the same link as the one presented above, but about the Army
Nurses instead. So it has the same author: the US Army.
Source: This site only provided me with some brief information about the Army Nurse Corps
during the WW2, but it also had a lot of information about the earlier wars.
Source Criticism: The same source criticism as above.
http://www.history.army.mil/brochures/wac/wac.htm
Author(s): Judith Bellafaire is the writer, and she is the chief historian at the Women in Military
Service For America Memorial, and she also served for seven years as a Historian in Washington
D.C. for the US Army Center for Military History.
4
She also wrote a brochure about the Women's Army Corps, and several other war-books
5
.
Source: This was the brochure I used to compare to other sites on the Internet. It provided me with
information about the Army Nurse Corps, like basic facts and how it was like in Europe.
Source Criticism: The author is very credible, since she has worked for the US Army, and her
brochure was also published on the Internet by Gordon R. Sullivan, who is a General in the United
States Army, and the chief of staff, so she is a very authoritative author.
The book was written in 1993, so it is not that new, but the information I found is still accurate,
since I compared to the other two sites listed above. It does not have a list of sources, but it is these
4 The Army Nurse Corps. Army.mil. Judith A. Bellafaire: 1993
25
th of April 2011. http://www.history.army.mil/books/wwii/72-14/72-14.HTM
5 Judith A. Bellafaire. Goodreads.com. Goodreads.com: Unknown 25
th of May 2011. http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2001830.Judith_A_Bellafaire
6
11-05-25 SPin09a Linda Tysk sources that other people use as sources. Still there is no referring to where she got her information
from, that can support the facts.
This brochure is also objective and consistent.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geKaqgpknQU&feature=related
Author(s): Toledobladedotcom is the uploader of this video about an 88-year old woman who was
a nurse during the second World War, today she is 90 years old. Does not say more than that the
owner of the profile is 48 years old.
6
Source: This source did not provide me with that much facts, but it showed a little bit of how it
was like to be a nurse in the war.
Source Criticism: This source is a primary source, but we can not tell if she is right or wrong in
what she is saying. What I can look at is that there are many other sources that has also written
about her, and that she says she served in Anzio, which was a site for war during that time. So the
information is true, the rest is just experiences, and those we can not tell if they are right or wrong.
Otherwise, I think it is a reliable source, and she had direct contact with how it was like to be a
nurse, what she is talking about is not biased. The information she mentions is accurate, and it doe s
not matter what time it was posted, since her experiences will not change with the years.
http://www.enotes.com/world-war-ii-primary-sources/world-war-ii-nurses
Author(s): Diane Burke Fessler is the writer of this book, and she was a graduate of the Walter
Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University, Tempe. The page contains an excerpt of
her book called No Time For Fear: Voices of American Military Nurses, and was published in
1996.
7
Source: Provided me with one text written by a nurse called Evangeline Bakke Fairall, who was
stationed in England during World War 2, so mostly I got to see how it was like to be a nurse.
Source Criticism: Just like with the source above, it is hard to say that experiences are wrong or
right, and the short information that she mentioned is accurate, since I used other sources to
corroborate it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_roles_in_the_World_Wars#World_War_II
Author(s): This page does not show authors.
Source: This page I only used to see what other women-organizations there were during the second
World War.
Source Criticism: This page is the least reliable source I used, but since I could not find any other
sites that displayed them all, I needed it. I consider it my worst source since it is not possible to find
an author, since the page can be updated by anyone who really wants to, which makes it less
credible compared to other sources.
It does show references, that can support the information, but since I only used the names of the
WW2 organizations, I corroborated by checking that they did exist during the war.
6 Toledobladedotcom. Youtube.com. Toledobladedotcom: Uknown 25
th of May 2011. http://www.youtube.com/user/toledobladedotcom 7 Authorbio. Msuspress.msu.edu. Msuspress.msu.edu: Unknown 25
th of May 2011. http://msupress.msu.edu/authorbio.php?authorID=338
7
11-05-25 SPin09a Linda Tysk Aim and Inquiries The aim of this paper is to investigate what role the American nurses/Army Nurse Corps had in
Europe during the second World War, and the conditions they lived under during combat.
- What role did the American nurses have during the Second World War?
- I n what ways did the Army Nurse Corps develop during the war?
- What were the living standards for the American nurses in Europe during the war?
Method To get information to be able to write this research I have used Internet to try to find sources there,
since there are no books available about the Army Nurse Corps, and I found a brochure about the
corporation among some sites that I have used. I have mainly used secondary sources, in the form
of internet databases and the brochure, and I believe that the drawbacks of using secondary sources
is that it is very hard to be certain that the information in it is accurate, or that the author have not
filled out the text with his/her own assumptions. Secondary sources are on the other hand very good
since they give you a good overview of the subject by displaying lots of facts about it.
I also used primary sources in the form of an interview of a nurse, and one diary made by a nurse.
These sources are positive in the way that they give a good picture of how it was like in the war.
But you can never say that a primary source is wrong, since they only tell their own experiences,
and no one can say that someone's experiences are wrong. There is always a chance that some of the
facts about the experiences has been forgotten, but we ca n not compare her experiences 60 years
ago to the experiences she remembers today.
I would have wanted to find more primary sources, and I found some books on Google Books that I
would have wanted to read, but they were previews and did not show the parts I wanted.
8
11-05-25 SPin09a Linda Tysk Results Role of the Army Nurses in WWII: The women who went across the Atlantic to Europe in order to serve their country, the US, had a
very important role in the war: simply to help the wounded soldiers.
The nurses working for the Army Nurse Corps took care of all sorts of wounds and injuries, and
that could be anything from large wounds to amputations or hemorrhages, and all that was needed
for that was that they had to have been a registered nurse that had had two years of hospital-
training, but they had very little military training, since the actual patient-care was considered most
important 8
.
Even though they had only undergone minor military-training the army nurses worked closer to
the front-lines than they had ever done before the second World War. The nurses worked in the
“chain of evacuation” which were mobile hospitals in the form of tents, and these tents were moved
with the front-line and in them, they treated wounded soldiers. In these tents the nurses had to
evaluate whether or not the soldiers were strong enough to be transported to an evacuation hospital
further away from the dangerous front-lines. If they were not strong enough, they were either
stabilized with more blood or immediately taken to surgery. One miscalculation on whether they
were strong enough or not could lead to the death of a patient. So the importance of the nurses in
these field hospitals were very high.
9
The nurses did not only treat the physical wounds, the almost most important thing they did were
treating the psychological damages that were caused by the brutal combats. One out of twelve
patients needed psychological care, due to the combats, and one of the Generals developed a
twelve-week program to train the nurses in the medication of these patients.
10
There were a lack of nurses in Europe, and that was registered by Franklin D. Roosevelt who
called for more nurses, and the nurses who worked in the hospitals were over-strained, just like the
hospitals they were working in. One of the nurses who experienced this was a woman called Elsie
Perch who served in a Field Hospital in Anzio, Italy. She said that she had approximately 250
patients there before they continued with the front-line. And one day, they received 30 patients, of
which 6 died in one day. She took it very hard, but the commanding officer told her that without the
nurses, none of them would have made it to the evacuation hospitals.
11
The development of the Army Nurse Corps:
The Army Nurse Corps is a corporation, and is composed by registered nurses, who have
undergone hospital-training. Even though t he Army Nurse Corps (ANC) was established in 1901,
the female nurses serving during war did not officially become a part of the Army before 1943. In
1943, the American president Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a law legislation that made the Women's
8 The Army Nurse Corps. Army.mil. Judith A. Bellafaire: 1993
25
th of April 2011. http://www.history.army.mil/books/wwii/72-14/72-14.HTM
9 I bid.
10 I bid.
11 Army Nurse Elsie Perch's memories of World War II. Youtube.com. Toledobladedotcom: 10
th of November 2008
9
th of May 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geKaqgpknQU&feature=related
9
11-05-25 SPin09a Linda Tysk Army Corps a part of the United States Army.
12
In 1947, the 80
th Congress passed Law 36, which
made the Army Nurse Corps a part of the Army.
The Army Nurse Corps had nurses serving in Europe during the first World War too, but by the
end of the war, they were less than 500 nurses. In 1917 there were 403 nurses in the ANC.
During the second World War approximately 60,000 women nurses signed up as army nurses in
the Army Nurse Corps, that is more than 100 times the number of nurses that had signed up by the
beginning of the second World War. The American nurses were spread all over the world serving in
theaters in both Europe, the Pacific and at Pearl Harbor, and of the 60,000 nurses, about one third of
them were stationed in Europe.
13

But even though the corporation had existed for approximately 40 years it wa s not until 1943 that
the Army started providing the nurses with some basic military training, and that training only
consisted of a 144-hour program where they were taught administration, organization, sanitation,
ward and clinic nursing, meaning that the nurses had very little military training.
14
In 1942, the army nurses finally received pay adjustments and they were for the first time entitled
to equal pay and allowances compared to men. They also received relative ranks, such as first and
second lieutenant, major and lieutenant colonels. So in a short time-period, a lot happened with the
army nurses. Later in 1943, the government also started providing free education to the nursing
students.
15
This free education was for the nurses who promised that they in the future would
engage in military nursing during war. This was mainly to increase the low amount of nurses at that
point, by making it possible for more women to apply.
16
After the passing of Law 36, nurses were
granted permanent ranks and commissions that were equal to those of men.
17
In the beginning of the second World War, the training for nurses was mainly focused on taking
care of the patients, and the nurses lacked real military-training, or any training at all that would
prepare them for what it was like on the front-line. It was not until 1944 that nurses actually were
prepared for the war through more outdoor-training and aids that were provided to create more
realism in the training.
18

The number of black nurses in the Army Corps was always limited, and by the end of the war,
there were less than 500 nurses. At one point, they were limited to only 160 nurses, since the army
thought that their assignments were too few, when they were only allowed to work in all-black
units.
But due to complaints, they withdrew that limitation.
After that, 2,000 black women signed up for the nursing programs, and later in the war, more than
60 black nurses were sent to England to serve in a prisoners of war-camp for German soldiers.
19
12 Women's Army Corps. Army.mil. Army.mil: Unknown 1
st May 2011. http://www.army.mil/women/wac.html
13 The Army Nurse Corps. Army.mil. Judith A. Bellafaire: 1993
25
th of April 2011. http://www.history.army.mil/books/wwii/72-14/72-14.HTM
14 The Army Nurse Corps. Med-dept.com. Alain S. Batens, Ben C. Major: 29
th of October 2007
30
th of April 2011. http://med-dept.com/anc.php
15 I bid.
16 The Army Nurse Corps. Army.mil. Judith A. Bellafaire: 1993
25
th of April 2011. http://www.history.army.mil/books/wwii/72-14/72-14.HTM
17 The Army Nurse Corps. Army.mil. Army.mil: Unknown 1
st May 2011. http://www.army.mil/women/nurses.html
18 The Army Nurse Corps. Med-dept.com. Alain S. Batens, Ben C. Major: 29
th of October 2007
30
th of April 2011. http://med-dept.com/anc.php
19 The Army Nurse Corps. Army.mil. Judith A. Bellafaire: 1993
25
th of April 2011. http://www.history.army.mil/books/wwii/72-14/72-14.HTM
10
11-05-25 SPin09a Linda Tysk Living conditions: The nurses' experiences varied a lot depending on where in Europe they were stationed. The nurses
who worked in the field hospitals in France had limited transportation institutions that were strained
because of all the casualties, so the nurses were often forced to sleep outside without the safety
brought by tents in order to try to find the delayed equipment. Then the Allied-troops met German
troops, and the number of patients almost reached 1,300 in one month. Besides many patients, they
also had to clean the evacuation hospitals and prepare a sanitary, so their work was constantly
shifting between being bored when they were searching for their equipment, to exhausting work in
the hospitals. The work in the field hospitals were pretty much the same all over Europe.
20

The nurses stationed in Europe mainly worked in Allied countries, but some few nurses were taken
behind enemy lines and had to work for the enemy like prisoners of war. Even though they were
behind enemy-lines, working for the enemy, they had to set aside their prejudices in order to treat
their enemies, otherwise, they would have gotten killed.
Some hospitals that were situated in German territories had to be guarded all the time, when
civilians became more and more aggressive towards Americans. The further into Germany they got,
the more aggressive people got, and some civilians threw rocks at the ambulances and spit on the
jeeps.
21
So the nurses lived in very dangerous environments.
Apart from that the nurses actually worked on the front-lines, neither their clothes were adapted to
the weather nor the shelters/houses they slept and worked in. One nurse who experienced this was
Evangeline Bakke Fairall from the US Army who went to England in 1944. She said that she
thought she would never know how it was like to be warm after the war, since the tents they slept in
were very cold, and all the raining kept the clothes damp. They had to store their clothes under their
pillows at night to keep them dry and warm. To get to the latrines and the showers, they had to walk
out in the open both day and night, and since the country was constantly under threat, they were
always in danger.
They had to work in complete blackouts, where all sorts of lights needed to be turned of when
enemies were flying over them, in order not to make the hospital an easy target. She described
working in the blackouts as hard, since they were not even allowed to use flashlights. And walking
in complete darkness also led to lots of black and blue marks, since they walked in to signs, tables
or whatever was in the way. So it was very hard. During air alerts, when enemies were above them,
they sometimes had to move the patients and seek protection under the hospital-beds. Sometimes it
could take hours, and when the nurses got back to their tents, they were cold and hungry.
She also said that they worked really hard, and some of the nurses had responsibility for almost
two hundred patients that were spread in an area equal to two city-blocks.
22

Many of the nurses were very young, only about 20 years, and many of them were homesick,
especially when they were strained. They found themselves lost and lonely in a foreign country.
This was not made better when their clothes were ill-adapted to the different climates, the buildings
20 The Army Nurse Corps. Med-dept.com. Alain S. Batens, Ben C. Major: 29
th of October 2007
30
th of April 2011. http://med-dept.com/anc.php
21 The Army Nurse Corps. Army.mil. Judith A. Bellafaire: 1993
25
th of April 2011. http://www.history.army.mil/books/wwii/72-14/72-14.HTM
22World War II Nurses. Enotes.com. Diane Burke Fessler: 1996
10
th of May 2011. http://www.enotes.com/world-war-ii-primary-sources/world-war-ii-nurses
11
11-05-25 SPin09a Linda Tysk they slept and worked in were old and shabby and the houses had poor heating.
23
More than 50 % never received the olive-drab uniform that was introduced in 1943, many of those
nurses still wore the same clothes that they wore when they got to Europe, even though all the
nurses should have received the uniform. That uniform was better adapted to the climate they were
in.
One of the inevitable problems they stumbled upon was that since they were often treating sick
patients, and they were living in the same bad environments as the soldiers, the nurses also became
sick sometimes. They did not have the immune-system for the new tropical diseases that existed in
Europe.
Due to sickness or enemy attacks, in total 201 army nurses died while serving in the second World
War.
24
25
23The Army Nurse Corps. Med-dept.com. Alain S. Batens, Ben C. Major: 29
th of October 2007
30
th of April 2011. http://med-dept.com/anc.php
24 The Army Nurse Corps. Med-dept.com. Alain S. Batens, Ben C. Major: 29
th of October 2007
30
th of April 2011. http://med-dept.com/anc.php
25Photo Gallery. Med-dept.com. Alain S. Batens, Ben C. Major: 29
th of October 2007
30
th of April 2011. http://med-dept.com/anc.php
12
11-05-25 SPin09a Linda Tysk Analysis The Army nurses were a very important part of the war, and they were women who went through a
lot and fought many wars besides the official war.
The nurses went across the Atlantic, to a completely foreign country and left their families and
lives back at home in the US. Some of the nurses were even as young as 20 years, and left home to
risk their lives in order to save others'. I think that should have been considered more heroic than
the actual soldiers. The nurses risked their own lives, selflessly, only to save the soldiers. They
needed to keep their problems to themselves, since worrying the patients or the other nurses would
not make the problem better, and yet, they managed to stay cheerful. The never ending smiles meant
a lot for the soldiers too, just to see some positive spirit among the losses of their friends.
In relation to all the work they did, they received very little appreciation. Even though they have
received about 1,500 medals, commandments and citations, they have got very little attention after
the war. I had never heard of the nurses before I began researching, I could only assume that there
must have been sort of medical department in the war too, and none of our history-books have
mentioned them.
But I believe that none of the nurses who went to serve in the war were actually aiming towards
becoming famous or well-known, especially since they did not even have ranks in the beginning,
meaning that none of the nurses went to the war just to get a higher rank, everyone worked for the
soldiers.
I also believe that the ranks were a very important step for the nurses, if not just because it made
them more equal to men, it also meant respect. It actually happened that male orderlies refused
taking orders from a woman. The ranks gave the nurses an official symbol saying that they did have
knowledge and power to give men orders.
Still today, women are struggling toward equality, even though the world is a lot more equal now
than it was during WWII. There are feminist movements here in Sweden today, that wants women
to gain more power, and to have the same income as men for example. This is the case also in the
US, where women still today are fighting toward equality. Many girls and women in Sweden has
sometime heard or experienced that there are men who refuses to take orders from women, since
they believe that women belong in the kitchen and that they have less knowledge than men, and
therefore should not have the power to give orders. And I think that women should not need ranks
in every part of their lives only because men do not trust them. The women who do get respect are
most likely the women who also has a rank, like a Principal or Chief. I do not have the knowledge
or experience to say that men do not listen to women if they have the same rank either, but I can say
that in our class, the men are the ones with power.
So, I believe that apart from the official war, women also fought a social war toward gender-
equality and for respect, a war that is still ongoing today.
The nurses also had a huge responsibility, they were taking care of someone else's life. If a soldier
made a mistake he might have gotten wounded or killed, if a nurse made a mistake, she could have
killed someone else. Even though they tried to comfort each other with that they did all they could,
many of the nurses took it very hard if one of their patients died. It did not even need to be their
fault. In the Youtube-video of the 90-year-old nurse who served in Anzio, she said that she got very
depressed when 6 of the unit's 30 patients died in one day. Even in the video, about 60 years after
the war, she got emotional just by retelling her experiences, a nd I think that shows both the nurses'
commitments and how hard they worked for their patients.
I think that nurses like Elsie Perch show how dedicated they were, and that their nursing skills
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11-05-25 SPin09a Linda Tysk made a difference. The post-injury rate among the American soldiers, and maybe even among the
enemies (those who nursed in prisoners of war camps), was kept low because of people like her.
During the second World War, the number of nurses increased drastically compared to before. And
I believe that the greatest reason why women started signing up for the Army Nurse Corps was
because they felt like there was not much they could do to help their men in the war, so by signing
up as a nurse, they at least offered their help to their men. They were not allowed to become
soldiers, so they could not help in that way, and nursing were something they were good at.
In some way I feel like the reason why it took so long for women to become a part of the Army
was not because men thought women could not do the work, but that it was about chivalry, that
women should be protected from these hazards that comes with war, and not be on the front-lines,
even though women went there by free will.
African-American women also fought a second war besides the official war: the war against
racism. At one moment, there were as few as 160 black nurses in the war, and because of political
pressure and reactions from groups that were against the limitation, the Army was forced to drop it.
The black nurses fought for equality, and for the segregation to disappear. But we still have
segregation today, and we can see that even here in Sundsvall, where some areas and some people
are still looked at like they are worth less than others. But when it comes to health care, I think it
has gotten better, and that I say since many nurses and female doctors in our hospital are not
Swedish. But when it comes to black people, I do not know if this world's old thoughts of seeing
them as a group with less value than other groups, is ever going to change. So in one way, the social
war these black nurses started may never have an ending. In another way, the short term effects of
what they fought for resulted in that more black nurses were able to apply to the Cadet Nurse Corps
program, and that the limitation disappeared. In the beginning they were only allowed to work in
all-black units, where there only were black soldiers, but the nurses that were sent to England, after
the limitation was dropped, worked in a prisoners of war area for Germans. But the equality was far
from complete, and the Army was still segregated, although black nurses were gradually accepted in
the Army.
I do believe that there were positive affects of the war for the nurses, even though the main effects
were still negative, since they would always have the memories and the experiences from the war.
They lost about 200 nurses, so many of them lost friends, and some of the nurses even got injured.
But at home, womens' role in the society had changed a lot, and that was because women at home
had also been fighting for equality, working in areas that were seen as mens'. When the army nurses
returned home, they found that their profession as a nurse was more valued than ever, and that many
other jobs that had previously been preserved for men was now accepted for women too. What the
nurses went through made them grow professionally, since they achieved experiences and skills that
ordinary nurses could never obtain. The nurses who worked in the field-hospitals had to learn how
to take initiatives and make quick decisions, and they had to solve all sorts of medical problems. By
moving and setting up field and evacuation hospitals they learned many organizational skills, and
they learned to deal with complicated administrative paperwork.
So I believe that there were positive effects, that they were taking one step forward toward gender-
equality and that women received more respect after the second World War.
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11-05-25 SPin09a Linda Tysk Conclusion About 60,000 American women went across the Atlantic to serve in a completely foreign country,
in hazardous combat-areas. And these nurses had a very important role in the war: to help the
wounded soldiers.
The nurses took care of all sorts of wounds and diseases, and worked close to the front-lines in
field-hospitals that were the first place the wounded soldiers got to. In these field-hospitals, that
were mobile tents so they could move them along the front-line, the nurses made the important
work of evaluating the treatment needed for the patient, and if they miscalculated it could lead to
the death of a patient.
The nurses also treated the psychological damages caused by the brutal combats, and therefore
played an important role in the treatment of the patients.
These nurses' dedication and commitments for their patients had a very ...