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

08 Flight Nurse Prisoner of War

131 The flight nurses of the 807 MAES were not the only ones to wind up on the ground behind enemy lines. Not quite a year after their unexpected crash landing in Albania, a flight nurse on duty with the 813 MAES in England was aboard a plane traveling to pick up patients on the Continent for air evacuation when it was forced down in Germany after encountering enemy flak. Flight Nurse Captured by Germans When on 26 November 1943 Brigadier General Grant challenged the graduating class of flight nurses, “And so you must go beyond your training—beyond the line of duty when called upon—cheerfully, willingly , gloriously,” he could not have anticipated that one of the nurses in his audience would put his words to the test as a prisoner of war.1 Surely, this was furthermost from her mind when Lieutenant Reba Whittle heard the air surgeon deliver the inspiring speech that launched her class into their work as air evacuation nurses. After receiving her diploma from the Medical and Surgical Memorial Hospital School of Nursing in San Antonio, Texas, in 1941, Whittle entered the United States Army, with assignments at Kirkland Air Base, New Mexico, and Mather Field, California, before arriving at Bowman Field for flight nurse training. The day of her graduation, she became Flight Nurse Prisoner of War ★ ★ ★ 08 132 Beyond the Call of Duty among the first nurses assigned to the 813 MAES. The squadron, activated the previous month, was one of several destined for duty in Europe in preparation for D Day and the invasion of Normandy. In January 1944, the 813 MAES arrived overseas, where it participated in air evacuation missions within the United Kingdom as well as in flights returning sick and wounded soldiers from Prestwick, Scotland, to the United States. After the invasion of Normandy, the 813 MAES evacuated patients from the battlefronts on the Continent back to the United Kingdom. When Whittle had been flying less than nine months but had forty missions to her credit, one of these trips became her worst nightmare. On 27 September 1944, Whittle and enlisted technician Jonathan L. Hill were traveling on a C-47 to an airstrip in France where they would pick up twenty-four litter patients for evacuation back to England. Also on board were the pilot, copilot, crew chief, and a passenger. Once over the Continent, the pilot strayed off course, likely a result of his own navigational error, and entered enemy airspace over Germany. Up to this point, the flight had been routine, and Whittle had been making plans for a trip to London on her day off, starting the next day. Her diary, which she kept from that day until the end of November, describes her experience.2 Whittle was sleeping soundly in the back of the plane when she was “suddenly awakened by terrific sounds of guns and cracklings of the plane as if it had gone into bits.” She had no idea what was happening but noticed that Hill was wounded in the leg and was bleeding. The noise had gotten worse, and Whittle saw the plane’s left engine “blazing away.” She did not expect to land in one piece: “My prayers were used and quick.” According to accident reports, the plane had been hit by German antiaircraft fire near Aachen, Germany, where it was seen feathered and smoking at treetop level before, in attempting to land, it crashed and burst into flames.3 Whittle began to scream and cry; Hill consoled her. Hours seemed to pass before the plane suddenly hit the ground, still blazing, and Whittle landed head first in the navigator’s compartment. When she noticed other crewmembers crawling out the top hatch, she Flight Nurse Prisoner of War 133 8.1 Reba Whittle of 813 MAES after plane crash (USAF photo) 134 Beyond the Call of Duty followed them. The pilot, who appeared badly wounded, was the last one to leave the plane; the passenger never made it out. Soldiers appeared immediately. Whittle thought they might be British, but they were German, and she thought, “We’ve had it chum.” Whittle thought first of her fiancé, Lieutenant Colonel Stanley W. Tobiason, a pilot stationed in England, who would be waiting for her to return that evening. Her next thought was how “thankful and grateful” she was to be alive. She eventually got word to Tobiason that she...