Scotch and Spam
The photographer’s task is to take a picture of a newly graduated squadron of the Army Air Corps’ Medical Air Evacuation service posed under the wings of a twin prop plane. The women standing are flight nurses, a new field of nursing created for the care of the wounded who are evacuated by air to hospitals beyond the battle front. The men crouched in front are medical techs, young, enlisted men whom the nurses will direct to load wounded men into the plane. Posing the team is taking longer than expected. Some in the group, squinting into the sun, are looking annoyed. My mother is one of the few still smiling.
I’d seen the picture often. My sister and I knew she had been stationed in Casablanca and travelled across North Africa to exotic places like Algiers, Tunis and Cairo. We had seen her thin metal dog tags on a delicate silver chain stamped with her name and serial number. We had found her cadeusa, the traditional symbol of medicine, with a gold “N” for “nurse” and we often played with the heavy wool uniforms she had saved. Later, my mother made them into skirts and coats for us.
We knew she met our father, a young diplomat stationed in Tunisia, in the Cairo airport when a flight was delayed. A bottle of Scotch and a can of Spam fueled a relationship that led to a proposal of marriage. We knew they were married in Dakar (now Senegal.) Their silver-framed wedding picture showed a magical moment. She is laughing and he is smiling at her.
As a child, I never questioned why my mother told no stories about that chapter of her life. Unravelling the mystery came years after her death, when my sister and I discovered the documents she had saved. They chronicled her military service as a flight nurse. Among her certificates of service, health and flight records, was a commendation signed by Secretary of War General George C. Marshall. My mother was commended for the twelve million miles she flew as one of the 30th Medical Air Evacuation Squadron. There were no diary or letters.
My mother’s papers did not fit with my memories of her. She was devoted to our family and deferential to my father, who always had the last word and told the best jokes. She was pretty, kind, and loving, with a streak of efficiency. As the wife of a diplomat in Haiti, Japan, Ethiopia, or Morocco, her duty was to transform every new embassy house into an elegant and well-appointed home. I appreciated my mother, but like my father, I took all she did for granted. Like him, I never really respected or admired her until after her death and the trove of papers revealed more of her.
In the collection of purple-inked mimeograph pages and flimsy sepia-toned orders, my sister and I deciphered acronyms and paperwork. I consulted military archives, books, films and the oral histories of other flight nurses. I learned about the intense recruitment campaigns, the grueling basic training, and the specialized courses in the new field of nursing referred to as aeromedicine. Slowly, a clearer understanding of my mother emerged, and I was able to add context to her journey. She came from a tiny town in Canada, became a naturalized American, and a flight nurse in the Army Air Corps’ North Africa Command.
The December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor that shocked America would have weighed heavily on my thirty-year-old mother. A registered nurse in Chicago, awaiting her naturalization papers, she was captivated by the urgency for medical professionals to care for the troops. The magazines of the time described flight nurses who served overseas as “plucky” girls with professional skills. To recruit them, and to assure the families of men heading to war, they were deemed the glamour girls of the service. The flight nurses would deliver the best care that well-trained and modern technology could provide. Most of all, they stirred a sense of duty. My mother had told us that she enlisted in the Army to repay the United States of America for the privilege of her citizenship.
Amongst her carefully preserved papers was her framed certificate of naturalization, dated February 1943. Orders carefully typed on onion skin paper dated August 2, 1943, directed my mother to report to the Army Air Forces Western Technical Training Command at Kearns Air Base in Utah. Since President Roosevelt had signed a law giving women serving in the armed forces full military status in July 1941, hastily built camps were created to give civilian nurses four weeks of training before heading overseas.
The enormity of her commitment is evident on the form she signed allocating monies to her mother and each of her female relatives. She had assigned the grim responsibility of handling her affairs, in case of an emergency, to her eldest brother. For the family, a gold star would then be placed in the window honoring her service.
The rigorous entrance exam for the Army Air Corps’ new field of aeromedicine nursing, was described as:
mental stability is paramount, for the flight nurse must maintain a wholesome mental attitude toward her work which by its very nature is more dangerous than service on the ground. She is subject to flying fatigue, the result of the strain due to such factors as air turbulence, hypoxia, physical fatigue, and heavy responsibility
Though she had never flown in an airplane and never learned to swim, it seemed that the basic training at Camp Kearns was enough to overcome her fears. A further motivation, revealed in her papers, showed the Army Air Corps offered bonus flight pay.
My mother passed the flight nurse exam and it is recorded on a flimsy onionskin letter dated February 1944. She also kept her travel orders authorizing Pullman train tickets and seven dollars a day to cover the costs of her journey from Utah to the Army Air Forces School of Air Evacuation at Bowman Field, Kentucky.
By the time my mother began her training as a flight nurse, two issues involving women in the military were resolved. One concerned a women’s role in air evacuation. Women serving as flight nurses were opposed by many in the military’s top echelons. They believed soldiers evacuated by air should be cared for by men who were seen as better equipped to handle the loading of wounded soldiers into the aircraft, and the dangers of flying. The nurses pushed back, pointing out that since the 1930s, commercial airlines only hired women with nursing credentials to serve as flight attendants. The military relented, but assigned each flight nurse a male medical technician to handle the loading and unloading of patients and the storing of gear.
The other concerned women’s uniforms. Women wanted comfortable, stylish clothes. The uniforms would command the respect of male colleagues, be well tailored and establish them as professional members of the service.
Next, my mother underwent an eight-week course in aeromedicine. She studied the effects of oxygen at high altitudes, the transport of mentally disturbed patients, and various convalescent and rehabilitation programs. The nurses were also trained in procedures in case of gas attacks. In the event of a crash landing at sea, they learned how to use life vests and lifeboat equipment. Should there be a patient in a full body cast, the nurses were instructed to inject a maximum amount of morphine and let the patient drown.
The training nurses who wanted to drop out were allowed to return to land-based nursing duties. But my mother’s papers show that she continued on to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. She participated in take-offs and landings during which patients were loaded into planes and secured with oxygen and gas masks. She directed young medical technicians on how to properly handle patients. Amputees in body casts, patients recovering from pulmonary injuries, and those suffering from diseases such as typhus, dengue fever, and malaria, each required special attention. She learned to read the air evacuation tags written by flight surgeons and tied onto each patient.
Finally, the reality of flying in cargo planes was handled by the Air Transport Command’s fleet of unpressurized cargo planes because of the scarcity of planes and pilots. I can only imagine how my mother handled the hazards of flying in cargo planes which could not have the Geneva Convention’s Red Cross markings. Because they delivered arms and ammunition, the planes could be targets of enemy fire. Nor could she have been prepared for the lack of comfort or cleanliness. Photos show soldiers stacked on tiered litters while a flight nurse navigates through the narrow aisle littered with cigarette butts, bandages, and empty paper cups. Pilots nicknamed the planes the “flying coffins” because heater problems sometimes caused them to explode during flight. Therefore, the pilots refused to turn on the heaters. The flight nurses had to keep critically ill patients and themselves warm with blankets, hot water bottles, and hot drinks.
When my mother’s training was completed in July, 1944, she boarded a troop ship in Newport News, Virginia to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Her ultimate destination would, for security reasons, remain unknown.
Through her individual flight records, we were we able to establish destinations and a timeline of her flights. We learned that she was initially stationed with the 1264th Army Air Force unit of the Air Transport Command at Payne Field in Cairo, Egypt. Four months later, she was transferred to the 1252nd AAF at Cazes Airbase, Casablanca in French Morocco. Then to the 1200th AAF in Caserta, Italy and finally back to Casablanca.
To understand and appreciate what my mother encountered, I relied on research at the National Archives. I learned that flight nurses served evacuation routes across North Africa, transporting evacuees from Italy who were recovering from abdominal and thoracic surgeries and head wounds. They also transported casualties from the Burma/China front who could not be evacuated via the Pacific.
Nurses had to improvise with whatever was in the medicine chest: basic medicines, bandages, sulfa powder, plasma and morphine. During WWII, morphine was often used on the battlefield to calm and sedate those in pain. On long distance air evacuation flights, morphine served to reduce the anxiety of those who had never flown before and to sedate those prone to airsickness.
The remaining papers in the file document my mother’s most important milestones. In April 1945, she was promoted to first lieutenant, joining the small percentage of nurses advancing to that rank. A request to marry the young American diplomat she had met in the Cairo airport and to resign from the service involved many layers of permission. There was a letter from my father, addressed to her commanding officer, affirming his pledge to marry her. There was also a letter from her commanding officer authorizing the marriage.
The wedding took place in June 1945 in Dakar, where my father was serving at the U.S. Consulate. Wedding pictures show my mother in a floor-length, gauzy white dress and veil and my father in a trim dark suit. Clearly, my fashion-conscious mother couldn’t bear the idea of being married in her Army dress uniform, and finding a fashionable wedding gown in Dakar was not an option. From her individual flight records, we found that a month before the wedding she was on an evacuation flight to Miami with authorization for several days leave. We can imagine that she found her wedding gown there.
In November 1945 at Mitchel Field, New York, my mother, pregnant with me, officially ended her Army career. Using her new married name, she signed the discharge papers and received her certificate of “honorable service” as a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps.
There are few stories of the sacrifices women made during World War II, when they were asked, for the first time, to serve in far-flung places around the world. Through the discovery of her papers, my sister and I developed a new appreciation for my mother, her service and her contribution to a significant moment in history.
© Donna Woolf
Donna Woolf is a retired Foreign Service officer and former documentary film producer now living in Easton, Maryland. This is her first published work of non-fiction.
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