No Time for Fear: Voices of American Military Nurses in World War II (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: No Time for Fear: Voices of American Military Nurses in World War II Ada Romaine Davis Diane Burke Fessler. No Time for Fear: Voices of American Military Nurses in World War II. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1996. xv + 280 pp. Ill. $34.95. In this fascinating book, nurses who served in the Navy, Army, and Army Air Force during World War II describe their experiences through oral histories elicited by the author (who interviewed 130 military nurses). About 60,000 Army nurses and 14,000 Navy nurses served in all areas; more than 400 were stationed at Pearl Harbor at the time of the Japanese attack, and thousands more served in Europe, North Africa, Italy, Asia, and the Pacific. Early in 1942, 88 nurses on Bataan and Corregidor were interned in Japanese prison camps in the Philippines for almost three years; 74 survived. Nurses served in all types of transport on land, at sea, and in the air. In January 1943, Medical Air Evacuation Squadrons (MAESs) were established in North Africa, Europe, and the Pacific: C-47s flew to battle fronts with equipment and ammunition, and with flight nurses riding on top of the supplies. On landing, the seriously wounded were carried on board for the return flights. With no physician aboard, nurses were responsible for starting intravenous fluids, giving injections of tetanus toxoid and morphine, watching for hemorrhage and shock, splinting fractured limbs, and attending to physical and emotional needs. One nurse with the 825th MAES flew twelve million miles in fifteen months in C-54s between Casablanca or Karachi and the United States, often with 75 severely wounded aboard. Hospital ships were fitted for 600 but often carried 800 wounded. [End Page 743] Hospital trains were used where planes and ships could not go. Mobile hospitals followed the troops as they advanced, often staying only a few days in one place. Surgical teams worked steadily to repair battle wounds, then dismantled, moved on, set up the tents again, and began operating within hours. Surgery went on day and night, with nurses administering anesthesia. Personnel lived in tents that often had rivers of water running through them, no heat, and little fresh drinking water. They received only basic Army rations for food. Personal supplies were always short; toilets were trenches outside, sometimes covered by canvas. But no matter how primitive the conditions, nurses used available materials to make their units brighter and more comfortable, spent time with the dying, and soothed the frightened wounded, for whom they could not do enough. Photographs of hospital ships, planes, physicians, and the nurses themselves give life to the accounts in this volume. Senator Daniel Inouye, wounded in Italy, was cared for by an Army nurse in Leghorn, of whom he said: “I wish I could remember her name—I’ll never forget her face—but . . . as far as I was concerned she was the best damn nurse in the United States Army. In a single moment she had made me see the job that lay ahead of me, and in all the weeks that followed she found a thousand subtle ways to help me master it. . . . Nurses persevered and provided the highest quality of care under the most adverse conditions, often against the greatest odds” (pp. x–xi). All nurses imprisoned by the Japanese, and many others, were awarded the Bronze Star and promoted. Other medals presented to nurses were the Distinguished Flying Cross, Presidential Citation, the Air Medal, and the Purple Heart. This book, one of two published in 1996, 1 shows perhaps a renewed interest in the work of nurses in this and other wars, and highlights their outstanding bravery, dedication to duty, and tireless work in the face of enemy fire, under the most deplorable conditions. Through it all, they remained cheerful, optimistic, and calm; they instilled hope in every wounded serviceman, along with the will to endure pain and to face death with courage. Ada Romaine Davis Johns Hopkins University Footnotes 1. The other is Barbara Brooks Tomblin, G.I. Nightingales: The Army Nurse Corps in World War II (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996). Copyright © 1997 The Johns Hopkins University Press