Beyond the Call of Duty

Army Flight Nursing in World War II

Judith Barger

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781612776767
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

At the height of World War II, five hundred Army flight nurses served with the Army Air Forces as members of thirty-one medical air evacuation squadrons located throughout the world on both the European and Pacific fronts. Their work was not insignificant—over one million patients were evacuated by air between January 1943 and May 1945. These specially trained Army nurses took nursing to new heights. Often decorated for their accomplishments, they exemplify the ability of a group of nurses to cope successfully with the challenges of war.

In her comprehensive book, author Judith Barger brings together information that is becoming less accessible as the former nurses succumb to age, infirmity, and death. Barger interviewed twenty-five of these pioneering women in 1986 when their recall of their service experiences was still vivid and informative. Building on Barger's earlier research, their stories and the numerous complementary photographs included in the volume bring to life this long overdue tribute to Army flight nursing in World War II.

Beyond the Call of Duty offers the only in-depth account of the events leading up to the formation of the military flight nurse program, their training for duty, and the air evacuation missions in which they participated. Readers of military history, women's history, and nursing history will find all three interests represented in this book, which gives new meaning to a phrase in the Flight Nurse Creed of 1943: "I will be faithful to my training, and to the wisdom handed down to me by those who have gone before me."

01

Origin of Flight Nursing

On remote World War II battlefields scattered throughout Europe and the Pacific, thousands of soldiers in the U.S. military were being shot and wounded and experiencing the usual and more exotic illnesses associated with military duty overseas. Staffs of military facilities in the army and navy chains of evacuation worked admirably to treat these casualties of war within their capabilities, but the sheer number of patients as well as the severity of their wounds and the time, supplies, and equipment required could exhaust already limited medical resources. Ground transportation, too, was a problem. Because terrain in many locations, such as Alaska, Burma, and New Guinea, made surface transportation of sick and wounded soldiers to medical facilities impractical, evacuation by air became a military and a medical necessity. And flight nurses, the air surgeon of the army air forces decided, were the most highly trained medical personnel available to provide essential in-flight patient care.¹

The decision to employ nurses for flight duty, however, first had to overcome opposition from high-ranking officials in the army—the branch of service from which the flight nurses would be selected—who, even before America’s entrance into the war, anticipated a resulting shortage of nurses available for other kinds of work. Colonel Bergquist, command surgeon for the 9th and later the 1st Troop Carrier Command, supported the use of female flight nurses for air evacuation: “We felt that if in this country a group of healthy individuals could fly around in commercial airlines having a nurse attend them, our wounded certainly were entitled to the same consideration.”² He was referring to the prewar airline policy to hire only registered nurses as flight attendants. When the need for nurses to work in civilian hospitals and serve in the armed forces became urgent during World War II, the airlines substituted college education for a nursing diploma as a prerequisite for work as a stewardess.³

Military leaders eventually worked out their differences of opinion on the use of nurses, and on 30 November 1942, not quite a year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had thrust the United States into World War II, the office of the air surgeon, United States Army Air Forces, made an urgent appeal for nurses to volunteer for air evacuation duty.⁴ The military flight nurse program met its next challenge not from within its ranks but from a civilian source.

Aerial Nurse Corps of America

As early as 1930, before flight nursing in the U.S. military was a reality, Lauretta M. Schimmoler, a pilot, shown in illustration 1.1, foresaw a need for flight nurses. Born in Fort Jennings, Ohio, in 1900, Schimmoler, who graduated with honors from the Bliss Business College of Columbus, tried her hand at various pursuits—working as a court stenographer, studying law, raising chickens—before settling on the business of aviation. By the age of thirty she had learned to fly, obtained her pilot’s license, and established and managed the Port Bucyrus Municipal Airport in Ohio. As the first female pilot in Crawford County, Ohio, Schimmoler was a “favorite daughter” of the local press. “From Chickens to Flying: Lauretta Schimmoler Quit Poultry Raising to Pilot Planes,” began one account, typical in its admiration of her achievements. After chronicling Schimmoler’s career, the reporter concluded:

It is not hard to understand why Miss Schimmoler has risen so rapidly in the flying world. Her extraordinary capacity for activity, her quick movement, her orderly mind and her keen sense of values are outstanding. She never is too busy to help a student flyer. She isn’t afraid to climb into overalls and to find out what causes an unnatural knock in an engine. She keeps her head when at the controls and so far has not had a crack-up.

Lauretta Schimmoler looks responsibility and hard work straight in the eye.⁵

In 1932 in recognition of her aviation activities, Schimmoler was inducted into the Ninety-Nines, the national organization of licensed women pilots.⁶ But she had even loftier ambitions. While continuing to participate in air shows and aerial exhibitions as part of this prestigious group of flyers, she contemplated the use of aircraft for a more compassionate purpose, one that would involve flying nurses.

The idea of nurses in airplanes was not entirely new. Nurses had first become airborne in 1930, when a group of women selected and organized by Ellen Church, a nurse from Iowa who was working at a San Francisco hospital, formed the initial cadre of registered nurse stewardesses for Boeing Air Transport, the predecessor to United Airlines. Church had never been on a commercial plane when she stopped by the Boeing Air Transport office in February 1930, ostensibly to book a flight home to Iowa. Mr. Stephen Stimson, passenger traffic manager for the Oakland, California, to Cheyenne, Wyoming, route, chatted with her about the new planes capable of transporting eighteen passengers. Church, who had learned to fly and had thirteen solo hours to her credit, wanted to combine her love of flying and her love of nursing in some way to earn a living. Like Schimmoler, she envisioned a need for air ambulances in outlying districts far removed from hospitals. In her conversation, Church mentioned that she had learned to fly, and she and the excited Stimson began to talk about “the boys” Boeing had recently hired for different jobs, at least some obviously involving air travel. “Why couldn’t a girl with nursing do that?” Church asked. As she recalled in 1960, Stimson “got real enthusiastic” about the possibility, promising to pursue the idea and get back with her.⁷

Two or three weeks later Stimson called to arrange an interview with Church and one of the company vice presidents “about this stewardess proposition if you are still interested.” The vice president was “totally unenthusiastic about the whole thing,” but Stimson, sold on the idea, got approval from William E. Boeing himself for a three-month trial with home base at Cheyenne. Church, who had once wanted to be a copilot, found her true calling in the airplane’s cabin, not its cockpit.⁸

Finding the first seven nurses for stewardess duty was not easy for Church because of height and weight requirements, although many women were interested. She eventually found three women in San Francisco and four in Chicago. Concerning their training as stewardesses, Church recalled that they had “nothing to go on” and had to learn initially by trial and error.⁹

Tasked with providing safety and comfort for the traveling public, these eight women, whose number included Church as chief stewardess, did much to boost the image and reputation of the budding commercial airline industry as they attended to the needs of the occasionally apprehensive but for the most part healthy passengers. In the air, the stewardesses served their passengers a cold picnic-type meal with hot coffee or hot tea, supplied reading materials, sent telegrams and dispatched letters, furnished pillows and blankets, pointed out sights of interest below, and spent time talking with them.¹⁰

Church had been a stewardess for only eighteen months when she was grounded following an automobile accident. She returned to school to earn her nursing degree and resumed her nursing career on the ground. Meanwhile, the stewardess program took off, with most of the airlines following Boeing’s lead. The idea of stewardesses had caught on not only with air passengers but also with America’s nurses, who applied by the thousands for the chance to take their nursing into the skies.

Schimmoler, however, had a different idea. Flying her new plane from Akron to Lorain, Ohio, in 1930, she had seen the residual destruction caused by a tornado that had swept through that area about a year before. What if nurses could have been flown to the scene after the storm to render immediate aid to its victims on the ground and accompany them by air to medical treatment elsewhere, she wondered. Later, when she noted the inadequate emergency care provided to a fellow pilot following an accident at an air show, her idea took more definite form.¹¹ By 1932 Schimmoler, who was living in Cleveland, had begun preparations for her civilian flight nurse organization. She gathered together a group of nurses interested in her idea and formed the Emergency Flight Corps, whose initial task was to research and develop the aerial nurse concept further. After her 1933 move to Los Angeles, where she worked in the first of several aviation-related jobs, Schimmoler pressed on with her plan for aerial nurses. For the National Air Races held in that city in 1936 she provided ten registered nurses to staff two field hospitals for the four-day event. The Emergency Flight Corps, renamed the Aerial Nurse Corps of America (ANCOA), was now operational.¹² By 1940, ANCOA structure, objectives, routines, and course of study were spelled out in the sixty-three-page Regulations Manual and other supporting organizational directives.

According to ANCOA literature, no other organization was providing nurses with essential aeronautical education. Whether Schimmoler knew about the American Nurses Aviation Service, Inc., formed in New York City in 1931, is uncertain. Her research, detailed in statements and speeches, identified aerial nurses in France, Chile, and England but not in her own country. With its purposes to foster and promote air-mindedness in its registered nurse and licensed physician members, to give courses and lectures in aeronautics and allied subjects to qualify members as attendants to patients in air ambulances, and to institute chapters throughout the country leading to a national aviation nursing service, the American Nurses Aviation Service, Inc.’s goals were similar to those Schimmoler developed for her own organization.¹³ The Journal of Aviation Medicine, a publication of the Aerospace Medical Association, endorsed the New York organization and welcomed news of its progress within its issues for 1931, 1932, and 1933.¹⁴ News of the American Nurses Aviation Service, Inc. had faded from the pages of the journal by 1934, about the time Schimmoler’s aerial organization was attracting media attention elsewhere.

From when she first launched ANCOA, Schimmoler worked steadily to have the organization endorsed and recognized as the flight nurse unit of various service organizations, both civilian and, ultimately, military. Believing that actions speak louder than words, ANCOA members offered their services at air shows and other aviation activities, gaining some local and national exposure in the press. When the need and opportunity arose, the nurses accompanied patients on flights as well. Media coverage that followed had more impact than advertising in bringing ANCOA’s work to the public’s attention. National ANCOA officers then referred to these activities in their speeches to nursing and aviation organizations.

In the late 1930s, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Aero Squadron recognized ANCOA as a voluntary auxiliary unit for emergency and disaster work.¹⁵ In 1938 the National Aeronautic Association endorsed ANCOA as its official nursing organization, and in April 1940 Gill Robb Wilson, the National Aeronautic Association president, wrote to Mary Beard of the American Red Cross (ARC) asking that society to “take a constructive interest” in ANCOA, a “valued affiliate of the National Aeronautic Association.”¹⁶ One must wonder whether Wilson’s letter was intended to reconcile differences between Schimmoler and Beard since, as shown below, the interest the ARC had shown in ANCOA up to this point had been anything but constructive. Schimmoler recalled Beard telling her, “You have a wonderful idea, but you are ten years ahead of us. If you were only a nurse we could find a place for you.”¹⁷

ANCOA’s association with Relief Wings, Inc., a civilian program begun in 1941 for the humanitarian use of airplanes during war or in peacetime disasters at home and overseas, for which Schimmoler served on the advisory committee for technical aeronautical problems, was strained at best.¹⁸ Relief Wings planned to establish and maintain a voluntary corps of flight nurses, but in 1941 Ruth Nichols, its executive director and a licensed pilot, wrote to Harriet Fleming, a member of the California State Nurses Association, “Although I have felt that Miss Schimmoler has evolved a fine detailed piece of training program for aerial nurses, we have not found any basis upon which she was willing to co-operate with Relief Wings.”¹⁹

Nichols thought they had an agreement that Schimmoler was not honoring. In short, Nichols would help ANCOA obtain more members if those members would be available for disaster service under Relief Wings, but Schimmoler apparently was not encouraging this collaboration.²⁰ At stake was each woman’s control over the limited number of nurses available for civilian aerial work during time of war and her claim to the uniqueness of that work. Their differences may not have been reconciled. Nichols’s 1942 letter to Fleming suggests that Relief Wings did not know the present status of ANCOA; Nichols had heard, however, that it “had died a natural death.”²¹

ANCOA had not died, but the ultimate association Schimmoler sought for it—to form a unit of the U.S. military—was beyond her control. ANCOA had as one of its purposes “to provide technically trained and physically qualified personnel to fulfill the requirements of the Medical Department of the United States Army and Navy Nurse Corps, under their supervision, in national emergencies, for nursing duty in air transports, at airports and air bases of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps in time of national and civic emergencies.”²² Schimmoler, who founded her flight nurse organization independent of the other service organizations such as the United States Army and the ARC, nevertheless intended that ANCOA would become the air unit of the ARC, which in turn provided nurses for the military.

Undaunted in the face of the skepticis...