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- Description:
- In a poignant oral history interview, American Red Cross worker Ruth Wysor talks about her adventures while serving in the Philippines during World War II and in American occupied Japan after the war, including being held prisoner in a Japanese prison camp and adopting and raising a war orphan. Returning to the Philippines with General Douglas MacArthur and the American Army, Wysor says that she was separated from U.S. forces, driven into the countryside and wounded and captured by the Japanese. She describes being held in the infamous Santo Tomas Internment Camp, subsisting on a diet of rice alone and receiving no medical attention. The camp was finally liberated after three months and she says that her untreated knee wound continues to trouble her forty years later. After the war, Wysor says that she was sent to Kamakura to help set up the first Red Cross club in Japan and that her unit befriended a group of destitute missionary sisters who lived nearby and gave them food, supplies and medical care. Wysor says that the nuns also cared for orphans and that she became godmother to a little girl, cared for her when she became ill and finally applied to adopt her. With the help of General MacArthur himself, Wysor says that she was finally able to return to the United States with her new daughter and became the first single woman in the state of Ohio to be allowed to legally adopt a child. Wysor says that her adopted daughter thrived in the U.S. and has gone on to be a successful adult. Recorded at the AOA Convention held in San Antonio, TX. Wysor is interviewed by Alf Thompson and Betty Thompson.
- Date Issued:
- 1985-01-01T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project
- Description:
- Margaret Pauline Stenson talks about serving with her husband as a teacher in the American Indian Native Service in the Alaskan territory beginning in 1933 and later at a Navajo reservation in the southwest. Stenson talks about how the couple was first assigned to teach at an Eskimo village on an island off the Seward Peninsula, returned to the University of Michigan in 1937 to complete their graduate degrees and then went back to Alaska to work in 1938. She recalls learning about the start of World War Two and the Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands over the radio, describes the native school where she taught, war security measures, receiving supplies via freighter once per year, the severe cold, cooking reindeer meat, her class sizes, and her fellow teachers. Stenson says that the only real adjustment she had to make when she and her husband finally returned to the lower 48 was remembering how to drive a car. Stenson is interviewed by Elsie Hornbacher.
- Date Issued:
- 1984-02-10T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project
- Description:
- In an oral history interview, Betty Van Kirk discusses her eleven months of service in the American Red Cross in the Pacific Theater during World War II. She talks about her training at American University, shipping overseas to New Guinea, how women were treated, dating, the climate, dispensing cigarettes, toothpaste and other personal items to soldiers in the hospital wards where she worked, sleeping under mosquito netting, being "sacred to death" of malaria, and meeting former American POWs and seeing their deplorable condition. Van Kirk says that she now finds it hard to remember the faces of the people she served with so long ago. Ends abruptly.
- Date Issued:
- 1982-04-01T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project
- Description:
- Irene Cully discusses her twenty-two year career in the United States Army Nurse Corps. Cully says that she was working as a nurse in a hospital in Omaha, Nebraska when she joined the Army in August 1939 and that one of her primary reasons for enlisting was the great benefits the service offered. Cully says that she worked as a nurse anesthetist at many different Army medical facilities before being sent overseas when the World War II started. She recalls being scared to death shortly after D-Day while "passing gas" in a surgical tent in France while being strafed by German fighter planes. She says that she adjusted easily to military life and decided to make the Army a career after the war. Cully is interviewed by Marjorie Brown.
- Date Issued:
- 1986-03-04T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project
- Description:
- Retired U.S. Army Colonel Helen P. Onyett, the first Chinese American woman ever promoted to Colonel in the United States Army, talks about her youth and education in Connecticut and her service in the Army Nurse Corps during World War II. Oynett says she was encouraged by her teachers to become a nurse and talks about her training at the Waterbury Hospital School of Nursing and her later decision to join the Army. Onyett also talks about serving in a tent hospital in North Africa, caring for the wounded, using commandeered German wool blankets to keep warm, living on Army rations, and working long and brutal shifts. After leaving the Army at end of the war, Onyett says that she later joined the reserves and finally retired from the Army in 1978. Onyett is interviewed by Ruth Stewart F.
- Date Issued:
- 2004-04-08T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project
- Description:
- Jane Piatt, chair of the Women's Overseas Service League's National Oral History Project, talks about her service in the Women's Army Corps during World War Two and in the Korean War. Piatt speaks at length about her time as a mess hall chief at Fort Des Moines and her time working with both Colonel Oveta Culp Hobby, the first director of the Women's Army Corps and Lieutenant Colonel Charity Adams, the first African-American woman to become a commissioned officer in the WACs. Piatt also talks about her jobs as an air inspector and the head of an officer's club in the United States near the end of the war and leaving active duty in 1947, only to be recalled during the Korean conflict. During the Korean War, she says that she served in England at both Burtonwood Air Force Base as an air inspector and at Brize Norton Air Force Base as an administrative assistant. Piatt is interviewed by Elsie Hornbacher.
- Date Issued:
- 1983-04-21T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project
- Description:
- Gertrude Neff Gay talks about completing nurse's training at Jewish Hospital in Louisville, KY, joining the American Red Cross, and after completing certification requirements, joining the Army Nurse Corps in May 1944. Gay says she was eager to get overseas and signed up to be shipped out immediately after basic training. Gay talks about being sent to Omaha Beach in Normandy with the 196th General Hospital, describes setting up a field hospital near Carentan, France, enduring harsh living conditions there, her food rations, her daily routine, and the camaraderie in her unit. Gay says that the hospital cared for German POWS and French citizens right along with U.S. soldiers, and comments on how much help they received from the Army chaplains. She also talks about the rush of casualties after the Battle of the Bulge, fraternization with offices, taking leave in Paris, feeling that she wanted to get on with her life after the war ended and using the G.I. Bill back home to return to school. Ends abruptly. Gay is interviewed by Virginia Emrick.
- Date Issued:
- 1985-02-12T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project
- Description:
- Retired Army Colonel Mary Ruth Pullig talks about growing up in Arkansas and Louisiana, her education and her long career as a U.S. Army nurse. After nursing school and working at various hospitals in the south, Pullig says that she joined the Army Nurse Corps in 1943, did her basic training at Fort Sam Houston in Texas and was first assigned to Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Denver. She also talks about other Stateside assignments and says that she was finally sent overseas to New Guinea and and then to the Philippines and describes the living conditions at both posts, the poor diet, working under enemy fire, some of the patients she treated and nursing civilians suffering from collateral damage wounds. After the war, Pullig says that she was stationed in occupied Germany for a time and finally came back to the States and earned bachelors and masters degrees. She says she is thankful for being given the opportunity to travel and see the world and that the young men who fought were good men overall and that she enjoyed her experience with them and helping people as a nurse. Ruth Stewart interviews Pullig.
- Date Issued:
- 2003-01-01T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project
- Description:
- Retired Army Colonel Erna H. "Tommy" Thompson (nee Schmidt) talks about her youth in Ada, Minnesota, her education and her long career in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps. After nursing school at St. Johns Hospital in St. Paul, MN and additional course work at the University of Chicago, and after receiving advice directly from Eleanor Roosevelt, Thompson enlisted in the Army Nurse Corps. While her husband, who was also in the Army, was sent to Europe, Thompson says that in 1942 she was sent to Guadalcanal in the South Pacific. Thompson talks about working at front line aid stations on Guam in the Mariana Islands, Enewetak Atoll, and Iwo Jima and says that she did not like being required to give transfusions from scarce blood supplies to Japanese casualties and was upset that her personal mail was censored. Thompson says she was discharged from the Army in December 1945, went back to active duty in 1948 and worked in hospitals at Fort Sam Houston and in Chicago and then in 1955, resigned from active duty and went into teaching. She says that in 1957 she went back into active duty and served in Hawaii, Fort Bragg, Puerto Rico, New Mexico, and Berlin and finally retired from the Army in September 1969. Thompson also talks about the tension between practicing nursing and teaching nursing and describes her retirement activities. Thompson is interviewed by Wilda Smith.
- Date Issued:
- 2004-01-13T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project
- Description:
- Lilah Cameron Ramsey talks about her service in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps from January 1940 to January 1950, including duty in the Pacific theater of Operations from June 1942 October 1945. Ramsey recalls being shipped out with the 166th Station Unit to Melbourne, Australia, then being sent to Ballarat and finally to a hospital in Adelaide, Australia where the temperature was 104 degrees on Christmas day of 1942. She says that the 166th was later split in two and that she took a group to New Guinea as chief nurse and worked at a hospital base 17 miles inland from Port Moresby. After a year of being billeted in tents with wooden floors she was next sent to Biak Island in 1944 and was stationed there when the war finally ended. Her hospital unit was sent to the Philippines after the war, she says and then finally back to San Francisco. She says she was originally motivated to enlist in the Army when she saw an advertisement in a nursing journal promising education and adventure and even though she never found adventure she considers herself fortunate to have been able to see and do the things she did. Ramsey is interviewed by Betty Thompson.
- Date Issued:
- 1984-05-01T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project