With the Army Nurse Corps in World War II

Nurse Corps Lt. June Fleming (Eskew) during World War II on duty. (Courtesy photo)

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, there were fewer than 1,000 nurses in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps. Eighty-two of these nurses were on Oahu, Hawaii, serving three Army medical facilities on the island.

They were swamped by the early casualties of the bombing, and joined with Navy and civilian doctors and nurses to care for the wounded, as casualties quickly mounted.

Clearly, as in most other areas of preparedness, the Army's medical personnel, at the beginning of the war, was sorely inadequate. Through bureaucratic mix-ups, medical supplies were locked up and unavailable for use by the nurses for days following the attack.

But all this changed in short order. By the end of the war, in 1945, there were more than 59,000 nurses who had served in the Army Nurse Corps, serving our fighting men in all parts of the world.

During World War II, the nurses practiced their healing arts closer to the actual fighting than had ever been done before in America's previous wars. They served under fire in field hospitals, evacuation hospitals, on hospital trains and ships, and as flight nurses on medical transport planes. They did a good job. Their skill and dedication led to an extremely low post-injury rate for American military forces in every theater of the war. Overall, fewer than 4 percent of the American soldiers who received medical care in the field or underwent evacuation died from wounds or disease.

At the beginning of the war, soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the Philippines, where the United States had a strong presence, were especially hard hit by the Japanese. The Army Nurses stayed with the troops in Manila, caring for early casualties until Gen. MacArthur ordered their evacuation to the island of Corregidor, and then to a field hospital on the rocky Bataan Peninsula, north of Manila on the Island of Luzon. In that first month they received over 1,200 major battle casualties.

Those Army Nurses who served in the Pacific in the early days of World War II suffered great casualties, even as the American service men, who were overrun by the Japanese. The powers in Washington were shocked at the losses and quickly decided that further losses of Army Nurses in that manner would be unacceptable. Quickly, policies concerning the Army Nurses in the Pacific Theater of War were revised and for the duration of the War it was decreed that Army Nurses would be restricted to Army Hospitals in rear areas, removed from fighting, and only male Army Medical Corpsmen would be close to the actual fighting front.

The island of New Caledonia, formerly a French Colony in Melanesia, in the Southwest Pacific, was one of the first islands wrested from the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. It was seen as a vital link in the defense of Australia and New Zealand. This island became an important medical center during the war. It was considered a safe place, easily accessible by sea and air, and it was malaria free, unlike most of the other islands.

Two Army Nurses with McCook ties, June Eskew, and Carol Borgman, were stationed at Army Hospitals in New Caledonia during the war. Carol Borgman went to the South Pacific as a part of 29th General Hospital unit (55 doctors and 155 nurses) out of Denver, CO, and spent two years at an Army Hospital in New Caledonia. June Eskew was serving with the 31st General Hospital unit at Camp Carson, in Colorado when that unit was ordered to duty in the South Pacific, to New Caledonia.

At the beginning of the war, few of the nurses who enlisted were familiar with military methods and protocol. A four-week basic introductory course was hurriedly put in place for incoming nurses. This program stressed Army organization, military customs and courtesies; field sanitation; defense against air mechanized and chemical attack; personnel administration; military requisitions and correspondence; and property responsibility -- all this in addition to their normal nursing duties.

June Eskew remembers her group donning gas masks and crawling on their bellies under barbed wire, with live ammunition shooting above their heads. "...quite an experience, but we made it -- happy to reach the other side. We really needed a shower!"

June sailed on a Dutch ocean liner to New Caledonia. As an officer, she enjoyed first-class accommodations on the top deck. But she could not help but feel sorry for the thousands of troops who traveled on the lower decks. For them, there were not enough bunks to accommodate all the men, so they had to take turns sleeping in a bunk.

June Eskew has had a life-long passion for travel, and she enjoyed her time in New Caledonia, with its abundance of flowers, lush grasses, and fragrant scents from the frangipani trees. She enjoyed meeting the natives, the Melanesians, and too, the French planters and their families, who made up about one third of the population of New Caledonia.

As the war moved north, so too did June, with the 31st General Hospital. First to the New Hebrides Islands, where she was assigned to orthopedic surgery and received patients with a variety of crippling injuries -- the heart-breaking tragedies of war.

Conditions in the New Hebrides were not as good as they had been in New Caledonia. Nurses' quarters here were wood barracks, open on all sides to catch cooling breezes. Their cots were made of bamboo poles, covered with netting of keep out the bugs and rats. It was unnerving to feel a jolt at night when a rat bumped into one's cot. And there were gecko lizards -- and not at all the loveable creatures we see on television promoting the merits of a certain insurance company. Each morning June would see little piles of bamboo dust, left by termites, gnawing on the legs of her cot.

When the rains came, it poured for the proverbial 40 days and 40 nights. Though it turned their skin yellow, daily atabrine tablets protected the nurses from malaria. The humidity was so high it felt as if they were crawling into bed with sheets sprinkled, as for ironing. Many of the soldiers came to them with fungus infection from constantly wet feet, with no chance to change socks. Everyone's shoes were constantly wet.

But the work went on. The nurses took great pains to smile with their patients. So many were very sick, and the nurses did all they could to ease their discomfort. They took care of those they could. Those needing more care were evacuated to the States.

June and the other members of the 31st General Hospital unit close followed behind the troops as they advanced toward Japan in General MacArthur's island-hopping Pacific Campaign -- to Hollandia, New Guinea, and then to the Philippines, in the Lingayen Gulf Area, helping MacArthur to fulfill his "I Shall Return" promise.

At last, in August 1945, the war came to a sudden end, with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. June was asked (urged) to extend her enlistment. The Army would need surgical nurses in Japan and Okinawa, and there was the promise of more time for relaxing and seeing new country.

But June declined. She felt that she had done her duty, for two years in the Pacific. It was a difficult time. Her fiancé had been killed on Okinawa in the last days of the war. June was tired and wanted to return home.

As World War II irrevocably changed American life, so too did it change the status and the opportunities of the professional nurse. Long remembered are these women who served their country with bravery, compassion, diligence and distinction in time of war.

Source:

The Army Nurse Corps, June's Story (an unpublished manuscript), by June Eskew