Beyond the Call of Duty: Army Flight Nursing in World War II

05 Flight Nursing on the European Front: North Africa, Sicily, Italy

82 The growing importance of air evacuation, improvised during the early months of the war, led the War Department to charge the army air forces officially with developing a comprehensive medical air evacuation system that incorporated intra-theater, inter-theater, and theater–to–United States movements and, in the last months of the war, movement of patients within the United States.1 MAES provided organization and personnel for all four types of air evacuation. The 802 MAES, which arrived in North Africa a month after Elsie Ott’s historic flight from Karachi to the United States, was the first squadron to use flight nurses in day-to-day operations within a theater of war. Flight Nurses in North Africa The 802 MAES sailed to North Africa to support the Allies, who were fighting the Italians and the Germans to prevent Axis domination of the Mediterranean. The Operation Torch landings in French North Africa in November 1942 marked the first planned offensive of the war for American troops, and military planners anticipated casualties would need air evacuation in that vast country marked by mountains and desert. Although air evacuation of patients was already under way, with enlisted medics serving as attendants on the planes, flight nurses brought better training and sound, often lifesaving medical decisions, as well as a psychological boost to patients.2 Flight Nursing on the European Front: North Africa, Sicily, Italy ★ ★ ★ 05 Flight Nursing on the European Front 83 Simultaneous amphibious Allied landings on 8 November 1942 in Morocco and Algeria targeted the key ports of Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers. Allied troops then pressed their way into Tunisia, through the Kasserine Pass, on their way to Tunis and Bizerte. In the series of Tunisian campaign offensives and counteroffensives over the next several months, the Allies eventually prevailed, leading to complete surrender of Axis forces in North Africa in May 1943 and setting the stage for the Italian campaign and the invasion of Sicily, which began on 10 July of that year. When the 802 MAES flight nurses disembarked from the USS Lyons at a harbor in Oran on 21 February 1943 after a two-week journey by sea, they scrambled down their ship’s debarkation ladder to the dock in full combat gear, because the Algiers docks were still prime targets for air attacks.3 After a night in a villa in Oran, the flight nurses traveled by truck to a bivouac area where the next night, while dozing warm and dry in their sleeping bags, “they listened to what was then identified as rifle shots in the distance, but which proved, less dramatically in the morning to be the crack of dropping latrine seats.” Cold showers every third day in a facility with no roof, chow lines for meals eaten without convenience of a table, and long hikes introduced the newcomers to life in a war zone. Watching outdoor movies and taking photographs of Arabs provided brief respites from the primitive living conditions.4 Ten days later, on 3 March 1943, the squadron arrived by plane at its first permanent duty location at Maison Blanche a few miles from Algiers. Clara Morrey laughed as she recalled how the airport personnel reacted to what the flight nurses thought was their arrival at the front lines of battle. The flight nurses had considered themselves “going forward,” so had donned all the fleece-lined clothes they had been issued. “And we put our gas masks on. And we noticed everybody out on the deck looking at us, and we found out later that they really got a lot of enjoyment out of seeing us in all that gear.”5 The soldiers were pleased to have the flight nurses at their base and treated them royally. They had cleaned out the cement French barracks where the flight nurses would stay, Morrey remembered. “And right about ten paces out the back door, they had built us a beautiful private air raid shelter. So we all got down in there and looked around, and that air raid 84 Beyond the Call of Duty shelter collapsed before we had our first air raid.”6 Air raids were frequent on the docks and harbors nearby. Personnel bombs left for unsuspecting Allied soldiers to discover were another threat to safety, and the flight nurses heeded the warning against picking up stray fountain pens, pencils , cigarette lighters, and other small devices on the ground.7...