“I’d just served breakfast to the patients who couldn’t go to the mess hall when I heard a horrific explosion. I looked across the water at the hangar on Ford Island. It looked like it was picked up into the air and dropped down–PLUNK! There was nothing but smoke where there had been that great big airplane hangar with all the planes sitting in a row. A plane with a huge red circle came close enough to tell it was Japanese. It dived over the hospital, and if I’d had a gun I could have killed him.” Valera Vaubel Wiskerson, U.S. Navy, at Navy Hospital.
“Hearing the explosions, I ran outside and saw the red sun on a plane that was coming in so close that I could see the faces of the pilots. One of them looked at us and smiled. I rushed to the hospital. Casualties were coming in fast and furious because the barracks were right along the runway and that’s where the bombs hit first.” Sara Entriken, U.S. Army, at Hickam Field.
“I was asleep that Sunday morning on the hospital ship Solace out in the middle of Pearl Harbor, “in the stream,” as we say. ‘COMMAND BATTLE STATIONS!’ was the first thing I heard. Our sailors were in their dress whites waiting to go ashore on liberty, but when the explosions started, they went around in the liberty boats, picking up injured and wounded out of the water. We worked all through the day without stopping. Late at night, I was sitting at the dinner table with other nurses when the executive officer came and talked to us for a while. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we don’t know what’s going to happen next. But we’re all still here, kind of like rats in a trap.’ It began to dawn on me that we were really in a precarious and dangerous position in the harbor.” Agnes Shurr , U.S. Navy on the USS Solace.
“I went to my duty station and saw all these litters in the hallway. ‘Where does one start?’ I thought. But I guess God gives nurses strength to do what has to be done. Nurses and corpsmen in teams gave tetanus and morphine to the patients, marking T and M on foreheads because there wasn’t time for paperwork. We evaluated those who needed surgery, sending them to the operating room, and those with no recovery possibility, or DOA, to the makeshift morgue. There was a constant stream of injured being brought in, and we were still working next morning. About 5:00 A.M. we all sat on the floor and cried.” Gelane Matthews Barron, U.S. Army, at Tripler Hospital.
“Ambulatory patients immediately left the hospital to get back to their ships. One patient, whose eyes were both bandaged, got out of bed, crawled underneath, and pulled a blanket down to lie on, so we could use the bed for the wounded. Everyone was worrying about the others and not themselves.” Lenore Terrell Rickert, U.S. Navy at Navy Hospital.
“Casualties were arriving on stretchers as I reported to the operating room, with ambulance sirens wailing in the background. In a short time the nine operating rooms were extremely busy, while patients waited for care in the corridor. I kept hearing planes overhead, but we were too busy to be afraid or to ask what was happening. All day and into the evening I went from one patient to the next without sitting down or having a cup of coffee. Someone brought fried chicken in but few of us felt hungry, as we had seen too much death and were involved with the most serious wounds and bravest of men. Many wanted to go out and fight back. Some wanted a prayer said, or to hear the 23rd Psalm, and we obliged them along with the surgical procedures.” Mildred Irene Clark Woodman, U.S. Army, at Schofield Barracks.
These excerpts are from No Time For Fear, Voices of American Military Nurses in World War II.
More books by and about WWII military nurses can be found on this website:
https://ww2nurses.wordpress.com/world-war-ii-nurse-books/
No Time for Fear: Nurses of World War II 