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- Description:
- In an oral history interview, Jessie Melis talks about her service as a teacher in occupied Germany from August 1950 to July 1953. She recalls the devastation in German cities, socializing with German citizens, German customs, her living quarters in Munich, taking meals in the officer's mess, her experiences with the black market and the depressed German economy. Melis also talks about meeting former Nazis, the differences between teaching in Germany and the U.S., the differences between American and German students and traveling to Berlin through the Russian Zone. Melis says that she traveled to Palestine and Jerusalem before finally returning to the U.S. to help her family and re-establish her career in East Lansing, MI. Melis is interviewed by Elsie Hornbacher.
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project
- Description:
- Grace Van Wert talks about her service as a school teacher in post-war Germany from September 1946 to August 1947. Van Wert says that she decided to take a leave absence from her teaching job in the Lansing, MI school district, was assigned to a one room school in the resort town of Bad Wildungen in Germany. Van Wert talks about the town, the post-war devastation, the children of U.S. dependents who were her students, the limited food supplies, and the poverty and destitution which the German people were experiencing. Van Wert says that she gave away soap to German civilians, exchanged coffee for original artwork, paid the man teaching her children German in cigarettes and that she could smell decaying corpses even a year after the war had ended. Van Wert is interviewed by Elsie Hornbacher.
- Date Issued:
- 1984-08-06T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project
- Description:
- Margaret Goodrich talks about her twenty-four year civil service career in the U.S. Army Library Service and running libraries for military personnel around the world. Goodrich talks about her employment prior to joining the Library Service and says that in July 1945 she became the first Army librarian assigned to a post in Germany. Goodrich says that she left the Army after six years but rejoined during the Korean conflict and took a position as a librarian at the Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Denver. She discusses her U.S. and overseas assignments, a librarian's duties, and a particularly hazardous episode in Vietnam when the car she was riding in was fired upon, forcing her to duck for cover with fellow passenger, actor James Franciscus. Goodrich is interviewed by Marjorie Brown.
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project
- Description:
- Dorothy Early and Sarah Leach talk about their experiences in the Army Nurse Corps assigned to the 77th Evac Hospital in Germany. They describe how they came to join the Nurse Corps, their training, where they were stationed, the rigors of life near the front, and their eventual change to full military rank in the Women's Army Corp and the pay increase that came with it. Both discuss treating American and German soldiers, the differences between German civilian physicians and military physicians, the food in North Africa and Sicily, and making friends wherever they went. They also answer a call-in question from a listener. Recorded for the KCMO radio program "40 Years After World War Two" hosted by Jamie McFarrin.
- Date Issued:
- 1985-01-01T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project
- Description:
- Dorothy McDonald says that she joined the U.S. Army Nurse Corps at the age of 36 because of the attack on Pearl Harbor and then goes on to discuss her war experiences in a wide-ranging oral history interview. She talks about her duty stations in France and Germany, sleeping four nurses to a tent, and her uniforms. McDonald says that wading ashore at the Normandy beach made an impression upon that she will never forget. McDonald also says that she did not use the G.I. Bill after war, that her war experiences and training did not help further her career and that she hated Army drilling and calisthenics because she joined "to be a nurse and not a soldier."
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project
- Description:
- Jean Timms Campbell talks about her service in the U.S Army Nurse Corps during World War Two. Campbell describes her youth and education in Ohio, working in the college infirmary before joining the Army, arriving in Scotland on VE Day, being very afraid that she would be sent to the Pacific, but ending up being assigned to the 114th General Hospital in Nuremberg, Germany. Campbell talks about her duties in the hospital, the 12 hour shifts, the patients, her living conditions, attending the Nuremberg War Crimes trials, traveling around Bavaria, being threatened with courts martial for not wearing her uniform cap in public, and finally being shipped back to States in early 1946. After the war, Campbell says that she married and started a family, returned to the nursing profession and retired in 1981. Campbell is interviewed by Dorothy M. Harrison.
- Date Issued:
- 1983-03-01T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project