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- Description:
- Lucile Pauline Matignon Crane talks about her service as a surgical nurse in the U.S. Navy during World War One, between April 1917 and February 1919. Crane says that she graduated from nursing school in 1914 and first worked at Stanford Hospital in San Francisco and that she enlisted in the Navy for good pay, and a chance for more education and equal opportunity. She talks about shipping out to Scotland, working in a surgical unit in a hospital which was a former resort hotel, the types of injuries she treated and socializing with enlisted men because the doctors were off limits. She also says that she was one of the first nurses to be sent home as the war wound down, spent her leave in Paris and was shipped home from Brest with ten women and thousands of men. Crane talks about her career after leaving the Navy, marrying and settling in Modesto, CA and notes that she received no special recognition for her service until the state of California paid a veterans bonus. The interviewer is unidentified.
- Date Issued:
- 1984-12-27T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project
- Date Issued:
- 1984-12-27T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project
- Description:
- Laura Smith talks about her service as an Army nurse during the First World War. Smith says she graduated from nursing school in the spring of 1917, was inducted into the Army in February 1918 and was sent with her unit to Liverpool, England that same year. Smith says that she was later assigned to a mobile tent hospital near Chateau-Thierry and recalls the surgeries, the daily hospital routine, her quarters, wood stoves for heat, blackout conditions, and meals. Her unit, Smith says, moved with the troops to the Meuse-Argonne front and she describes the horrors of the battle, treating gas attack victims and the onslaught of the flu epidemic which killed so many. She remembers the feelings she had when the guns fell silent on November 11th and taking a cruise up the Rhine near Koblenz in March 1919, visiting Monaco, and the Alps and finally being sent back to the U.S. in early June 1919.
- Date Issued:
- 1983-01-01T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project