"Jolly Good Sports!"
Florence Heermance Wiechman, U.S. Army

Crossing the English Channel in August 1944 was an experience I'll never forget. One hundred five nurses waited and waited on the dock, finally being told that all the cabins on the British ship were given out and we would sleep in the crews' mess hall, in the very bottom of the ship. With the cheery words, "We know what jolly good sports the American nurses are," they hustled us aboard and down several wall-mounted ladders to E deck. We slept in three layers, "Upper" was hammock, "Middle" was on the crude wooden mess tables, and "Lower" was on the floor. I drew a spot on the floor by an open pipe which dripped water and smelled like sewer. We ate in this dungeon also, being served the same food the crew ate. Another nurse and I made friends with some American officers on A deck, who snitched food for us from the officers' mess.

It took three days to cross a distance of twenty miles. The commanding officers of the various units on board were said to be squabbling over who would get to be the first to land on Utah Beach in Normandy, even though the famous invasion was long over. When we did land, it was about midnight, in a cold rain. Then we waited several hours for transportation, without either raincoats or bedrolls, resting in the wet sand.

Our next stop was a cow pasture, literally. Being a city girl, it seemed wherever I turned there were cows in my way, even in the creek where we had to bathe and wash clothes. We had nothing to do for weeks, and the boredom magnified all the primitive details of our camp.

The latrine was unforgettable. At first we had a slit trench dug in the ground, about twelve inches wide. The idea was to straddle it and squat. It was raining everyday and water filled the trench, with mud all around. Surrounded by a wall of canvas, the latrine was open to the sky, and the Army Air Corps pilots loved to fly overhead and dip their wings at us or swoop low. One memorable day, our chief nurse made a visit to the trench, assumed the position, slipped in the mud, and fell "kerplunk" right into all that excreta. I have to tell you a bit about her before I go on. Absolutely no one got along with this woman, except the commanding officer, who was equally unpopular. Everyone called her Aunt Fanny, the traditional nickname for Frances, and it was synonymous with calling her an ass.

As news spread around the camp about Aunt Fanny's predicament, there were many cheers and, in the evening, several glasses were raised in celebration. Soon after her adventure a set of wooden privy seats was delivered to us nurses. What a sight: a twelve-holer, surrounded by canvas!

Our drinking water was from a lister bag, and purification tablets were dissolved in it, which made it taste strongly of chlorine. We were allowed one canteen of water each day and added lemon crystals from our K rations, which were small cardboard boxes filled with hardtack crackers, a tin of either cheese spread or potted meat, a fruit bar made usually of ground raisins (on rare occasions ground dates), an envelope of lemon crystals, and envelopes of powdered coffee and sugar. Sometimes we had the dreaded D rations, which made K rations seem like a feast. D rations were only thick, heavy, sweet and strong chocolate bars, loaded with vitamins. If you gagged just trying to eat them, you could always dissolve them in hot water and have hot chocolate.

My pal, Aggie Flynn, and I walked along a country road one day in search of some normal food, and since we both spoke French, made a deal with a farmer's wife for tomatoes, potatoes, onions, and two pork chops. We hustled them back to our tent, made a small fire on the ground between our two cots, and cooked a sort of stew. All went well until the smoke seeped out through the tent seams. Naturally, Aunt Fanny came charging across the pasture and caught us enjoying a feast. "You can't eat food from the local farms," she shrieked. "It could be contaminated." We ate it.

Besides cows, we had apple trees. The apples were sour and not good for eating, but were grown for making Calvados and cider. Calvados is a bad-tasting alcoholic beverage, but the old lemon crystals helped the flavor when, on a few occasions we sat on the grass, at eventide, trying to create an officers-club atmosphere and chatting with the medical officers.

The army way of getting somewhere just to wait created an almost unbearable boredom among our camp. Singing was one of the few diversions, and having had voice training, I was often called upon to sing requests as we sat in front of our tents at twilight. We didn't just sing songs that were popular, either. Some clever nurse or G.I. would use the tunes everyone knew and make up words to show our feelings about the situations we were in or to express something about our jobs. The men made up words about women, and the nurses made up songs about men. Parodies of songs I remember singing over and over were to the tunes of "Bless Them All," "Mademoiselle from Armentiers," and "Roll Me Over in the Clover." The length of the song "Alouette" became so tiresome, but there was one doctor who would start it and, naturally, we couldn't drop it until all made-up verses covering the entire human anatomy were sung.

We were waiting to move into Paris after it was liberated from the Nazis, and in early September, we received orders to proceed in a truck convoy. Our unit was the first hospital to enter Paris, and our executive officer, Colonel Wiechman, asked my friend Aggie and me to ride in the lead jeep. I rode in the passenger seat, thus was the first American nurse to enter the "City of Light." We took over the old hospital from the Nazis. I was later transferred to a hospital train unit and made many trips from the front to Cherbourg.

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.

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