Women in Combat
Grace G. Patterson, U.S. Army

After working in England for several months, right after D-Day in June 1944, we were sent to France and landed on Utah Beach. When people argue about women being in combat, I think how silly they are, because we already were. In France we had 88mm artillery shells flying right over our heads. It was unsettling to hear the 88's, but we figured this was what war was like.

When the ships unloaded, everything was piled up for each unit in an area called the "dump." Every day our officers went out to look for our equipment, going from one "dump" to another. About the fifth day they spotted a pile of boxes with an ironing board on top of it, and said, "That's ours!"

Our first destination wasn't really captured by the Americans for a month after we landed, so we moved several times. Today, we take so much for granted about running water, electricity, and bathrooms, for instance. Living and working in tents was a different story. I can remember getting up in the night during heavy rains and having a river of water running through the middle of the floor. The men who put the tents up forgot to dig a ditch around them. When it rained, the tent ropes had to be tightened up, and when they dried, we had to loosen them, or the tent would be down on top of us.

Our field hospital was designed to have three one-hundred-bed sections. Patients were brought from hospitals at the front, and we cared for them until planes came in to take them to England. There was a small landing area for C-47s. One day an evacuation plane didn't have any nurses to accompany patients, so two of us were ordered to rush and get on board. It was my first plane ride. When the plane landed in England, we were taken to quarters, but then we didn't know what to do or where to go, and the flight nurses absolutely ignored us. The only money we had was French francs. The next morning we found a plane headed back to France, and landed at a small airstrip some distance from ours. Again we were ignored. We hadn't eaten anything since the day before, but finally found a D ration chocolate bar. By afternoon we found a place to eat and then decided to hitchhike back to our camp.

The P-38s were small, fast fighters, and they were hedgehopping very low to the ground all around us. In the evening we had pilots coming over to meet nurses, and they told us how they hunted for the tents with red crosses on top.

About five days after Paris was liberated, the Eighth Field Hospital moved to Le Bourget Airfield. Finally, we were in buildings. Our patients usually came to us three to five days after being injured, and we prepared them for air evacuation. The hospital was an old school building with litter patients on the first floor and ambulatory patients on the second. The enlisted personnel were quartered on the third floor. Officers were quartered about a block away, at an inn, and we walked back and forth.

Stationed there was a platoon of about one hundred men and officers who handled litters for us and did various other jobs. The officers were white, but the enlisted men were black. They were great, and we worked well with them. There was also an ambulance company that worked around the clock, picking up patients coming in from the front at the train station. During the Battle of the Bulge, we shipped out close to seventeen hundred patients, and received about eight hundred more in one day. Approximately seventy-five thousand patients went through our hospital during the six months we were there, so we had to work well with everyone under those circumstances.

Our medical work was interesting. We had orders to exteriorate the gut when a patient had any gut surgery. With so many patients having abdominal surgery, some of the intestinal holes might be missed, so when patients finally reached the hospitals in England, their intestines were put back in. We did a lot of cast splitting, because of the chance of swelling. It could happen in a plane because of the pressure, and the cast might need to be pried loose. One poor patient I remember had fractures on arms, shoulders, and leg. He was in plaster basically from his neck to his feet. They had not made a hole for his stomach, and he couldn't eat much because of bloating. He was so relieved when we split his casts and opened the cast over his abdomen and buttocks and taped it so it didn't rub his skin.

Paris had a lot of excitement for us to enjoy, and we often went downtown to the opera house in our free time. It was fantastic. Before the last act though, we all tried to rush out because they played the national anthems of France, United States, and Great Britain, and we had to stand at attention through all three.

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.