Search Constraints
Search Results
- Description:
- Winifred Anne Jacobs Walker talks about her service in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps from February 1943 to October 1945. She discusses her Army training, shipping overseas to a base in Leominster in England, preparations for D-Day in the spring of 1944, treating invasion casualties, landing in Normandy at Utah Beach in July, and bivouacking near Carentan. Walker says her unit followed the advancing forces into Paris by train and later set up a tent hospital near Liege, Belgium. She remembers being on edge during the Battle of the Bulge and preparing to withdraw if necessary and the gory scene she witnessed when her base was hit by a German bomb which killed 25 soldiers. Walker says that she was sent home on a C-47 transport plane after the war, "hitch-hiked" across the U.S. by plane to see her fiance in Washington state and married him soon after her discharge from the Army.
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project
- Description:
- Ninety-eight year old Elizabeth Phillips talks about her service in the Army Nurse Corps in Europe during World War I. She recalls being assigned to a hospital five miles behind the front near Avignon, France, German planes flying over on their way to bomb Paris, surgeries performed as wounded were brought in from the front, her general duties, the large number of casualties, the catastrophic flu epidemic in 1918 and the many funerals, the regimentation and twelve hour shifts, and that when her unit was first deployed to France in May of 1917, the nurses did not receive rations and were expected to find their own food. Phillips explains that nurses had no rank in World War I and were not treated as equals and says that she lobbied vigorously in World War II to correct that inequality. She also says she tried to volunteer for service during World War II, but was refused and spent the war preparing Red Cross packages for shipment to American POWs in German camps.
- Date Issued:
- 1982-04-28T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project
- Description:
- Rita Geis talks about her thirty year career in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps beginning just before the U.S. entry into World War Two and continuing through the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Geis recalls deploying with the 106th General Hospital to Japan in 1965 to treat casualties coming in from the battlefields in Vietnam. She says that the hospital was full of injured U.S. soldiers during the brutal Tet Offensive of 1968. Geis also talks about some of her retirement activities including being Commander of Women's Metropolitan Post 206 in Denver, the only women's post in Colorado, as well as being active in the Women's Overseas Service League. Geis is interviewed by Marjorie Brown.
- Date Issued:
- 1983-06-17T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project