Accomplishing Something Important
Esther Edwards, U.S. Army

The invasion of Southern France began, and the Tenth landed right behind the troops, who were moving very fast. The rains really came down in October 1944, and the whole countryside was a sea of mud. We sank to our ankles every time we stepped outside, but the engineers made wooden floors for our tents. We had many patients, including French soldiers and civilians. We traveled by convoy, and once our truck picked up a hitchhiker carrying a gunny sack over his shoulder. We asked what was in the sack, and he explained that he was part of the French underground and was taking the remains of his buddy back home. He departed near Lyon with his burden.

In Strasbourg we were housed in university buildings. The Germans left behind patients who could not be moved, so we had to care for them. A few German doctors and nurses were taken captive, and I was startled once to hear a nurse reporting, "Heil Hitler," before she left the building.

The local people in Strasbourg were French citizens but spoke German, and there were many German sympathizers who were barely civil to us Americans. The Americans took over the home of a German couple who had refused to return to Germany, and one night I went there with some other officers before the couple moved out. They served us in their living room, and we listened to their radio. A few days later, when they moved out, the people threatened them, and they hanged themselves. Refugees were everywhere in France, as in Italy and Sicily. They walked for miles, taking whatever they could carry or load on a cart. Food and medicine were scarce.

We eventually were able to rest, and I went to Paris on a three-day pass with another nurse. We were stopped several times by the M.P.s and asked to give the password of the day. If we didn't know it, we were asked about baseball teams until we could come up with some answers. A Jewish doctor with our unit had relatives in Paris and asked us to deliver food to them while we were there. They hid out during the war, and we had to be very "hush hush." We found the address he gave us, a man opened the door, and we gave him the food. He was reluctant to talk, but we felt we had accomplished something important.

In France, the Tenth Field Hospital moved constantly, following the troops fighting the Battle of the Bulge. We moved from buildings to tents, and back to buildings, depending on where we were. Sometimes the patients had to be moved from one floor to another for surgery, which was a hard job for the corpsmen. A few French nurses were attached to our unit for a while. Near Saint-Avold, the Allies fired artillery shells over our building, then the German artillery landed close to us, but luckily we were never hit. One nurse was using her helmet to bathe when the firing came too close, so she dumped out the water, put the helmet on her head, and sat there naked until the firing stopped.

Patients came by ambulance and helicopter all day and night. It was overwhelming. When I tried to rest, I couldn't sleep, thinking of all those wounded patients and all that needed to be done for them. There were some I cannot forget to this day, like one whose leg was amputated, and when he was told, he was so furious he wanted to die. There was little we could to do comfort him. Another man's jaw was nearly blown off and he needed more care than was available in our field hospital, so we hurriedly evacuated him to a larger one. Some developed kidney failure from shock and injuries, and died because there was nothing we could do for them there.

Excerpt from Diane Burke Fessler, No Time For Fear: Voices of American Military Nurses in World War II. East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 1996.

previous | return to index