Nurses in Europe remembered December 1944 through January 1945 as a time of great amounts of wounded patients coming through the hospitals. It was a cold winter and the Battle of the Bulge was the last offensive by Germany; a time of many thousands of casualties on both sides of the war.
Virginia Grabowski Shannon tells of the 21st GH being in Mirecourt, France, “ten miles behind the lines”. “On Christmas Eve I was in my bunk when we were bombed. My heart was pounding, and of course I had no idea what was hit or how much damage was done. We were near a railroad depot, which was what they were aiming at.” She continues, “Wounded and injured were brought in from the Rhine, and as fast as we could evacuate them, more were brought in. It was nothing for us to evacuate two hundred to three hundred patients, and get three hundred to four hundred right on top of that. Being young and having a purpose, we could work twenty-four hours a day.”
Esther Edwards relates that the 10th FH moved constantly. “We moved from buildings to tents and back to buildings, and sometimes the patients had to be moved from one floor to another for surgery, which was a hard job for the corpsmen. Near Saint Avold, the Allies fired artillery shells over our building, then the Germans answered back, over the hospital again. One nurse was using her helmet to bathe when the firing came too close, so she dumped out the water, put the helmet on her head, and sat there naked until the firing stopped.”
Dr. Austin Grant, surgeon with the 100th EH, tells of volunteering to assist another hospital during the Battle of the Bulge and “got as far as Malmedy, Belgium. We checked in and found everyone was retreating because the Germans were coming up the hill, so we left too. I later heard the doctors who were still operating were captured, but the nurses had been evacuated. At one time, we all had to jump into ditches because of the German advance.”
These excerpts are from No Time For Fear, Voices of American Military Nurses in World War II, written by this blog’s author. Posts to the blog are not as frequent as earlier, but will continue as time permits. Books by and about WWII nurses contain many references to the Battle of the Bulge, and the list is online at:
No Time for Fear: Nurses of World War II 