It's My Country Too

by Jerri Bell, Tracy Crow

  The hospital averaged about sixty patients. We found the natives good beggars and they seem to think the Americans loaded with money, especially so when we wanted to purchase an article. Easter Sunday, I attended services at the Cathedral, the only church in Cienfuegos, there [were] many altars, one main altar and many on each side of the church less elaborate. The Sixth Ohio Regiment and hospital were in a palm grove and the railroad which goes to Havana went through camp. The water used in camp was brought from Santa Clara. Cuban trains are like everything else there—rather slow. It is said the trains stop when a buzzard is on the track. The best coaches are not as good as American immigrant coaches, the mail service is very poor. February 13, 1899 a cyclone struck camp and all the hospital tents were blown down. Nurses’ tents were a total wreck and we could find very little of our wearing apparel. The officers were very kind and gave up their tents to us and patients were transferred to tents in the Regiment.

  The First Battalion of Sixth Ohio was ordered to Santa Clara and five nurses sent with them. We had ten nurses remaining in camp. We attended the Cuban Jubilee and saw General Gomez. There was great preparation made for his coming, archways in streets, flags, and decorations galore. The lower class of people wear very little clothing and the children wore just a smile. The Cuban ponies are used as pack mules. Millet and sugar cane is tied on their backs until they are covered. All you can see is their nose and feet. They look like walking grass mounds. The pony has a halter on and it is fastened to another pony’s tail. Sometimes there is [sic] four or five in a string. I went to a New York syndicate sugar plantation. It was wonderful. Oranges, palms, lemons, bananas and beautiful flowers. . . . They had a modern sugar mill and made two hundred and fifty thousand pounds a day. The soil is very fertile and everything seemed to grow. Even the fence posts take root and grow into trees. There was a hedge of sword cactus about one and a half miles long by the roadside from camp to Cienfuegos. The ties used on the railroad were of mahogany. On our side of camp was the famous tracks and blockhouses we have heard so much about. Lizards, scorpions, centipedes, tarantulas and snakes were often found in our tents but we became used to this and did not mind them very much.

  The Texas, Detroit, and Indiana Battleships were in the harbor and one day we visited all of them, also Bay State hospital ship which was built to accommodate a hundred patients. The city hospital was more modern than I had expected to find. The superintendent, four physicians and an interpreter showed us through the hospital. They expressed a desire to have Uncle Sam’s nurses in their hospital. We remained in Cienfuegos over four months.

  Esther Voorhees Hasson

  (1867–1942)

  U.S. Navy

  Esther Voorhees Hasson of Baltimore, Maryland, served as a nurse with the Army on the hospital ship Relief, a passenger liner used to evacuate casualties from Cuba. Hasson was one of six nurses charged with caring for 1,485 sick and wounded men. After the war, she served as a nurse in the Canal Zone from 1905 to 1907. When the Navy Nurse Corps was established in 1908, Hasson became its first superintendent, but resigned in 1911 after the surgeon general questioned her leadership abilities and imposed what Hasson believed to be unfair policies for nurses. She then joined the Army’s Reserve Nursing Corps and was called to active duty in 1917 for service as chief nurse of two Army base hospitals in Europe during World War I. This excerpt is from a professional article Hasson published in the American Journal of Nursing in 1909.

  Early in May of 1898 four women graduate nurses left Washington for Key West, Florida, under orders from the Surgeon-General of the Army to report to the medical officer in command of the military hospital at that place for such duty as he might assign to them. Little did the nurses of this country think, at the time, of the far-reaching results of this order and that these women were the nucleus around which would form, first the corps of contract nurses, and later on, in 1901, the permanent organization of the Army Nurse Corps as it exists to-day. Their plunge into this (to the average nurse of that date) unknown field of work was like unto the traditional pebble cast into the sea of military nursing. The tiny ripples set in motion have spread out in gradually increasing circles until the little group of women on the extreme outer edge who at present represent the nurse corps of the Navy are already beginning to wonder upon what shores the last ripples will break.

  Although the Army Nurse Corps was distinctly the product of war, the Navy corps is the indirect outcome of its proven worth and efficiency, not only in time of great national emergency, but of peace as well. . . .

  All applicants will be required to pass a rigid physical and mental examination. . . . The examination is required in all cases irrespective of whether the applicant has had previous Government service, either civil or military. . . . The first few months of service will invariably be spent at the Naval Medical School Hospital in Washington, and after this term of trial, the nurses will be distributed to the various naval hospitals in the United States, Japan, the Philippines and Hawaii where it is deemed advisable to station women nurses. . . .

  During the period spent in the naval hospital in Washington, nurses will be expected to inform themselves in regard to the rules, regulations and etiquette of the service, also of the different degrees of rank with insignia of same, not alone of the commissioned officers, but of the warrant and petty officers as well. Head nurse positions will in all cases be filled by promotions from the grade of nurse. . . . We hope to make the nursing in our eighteen general hospitals somewhat uniform, so that when ordered from one to the other the nurse will know about the conditions she will encounter in regard to scope of work, hours of duty, duration and frequency of night details, personal privileges, etc. . . .

  One of the principal duties of the woman nurse in the Navy will be the bedside instruction of the hospital apprentices in the practical essentials of nursing, and for this reason she must be thoroughly conversant with the head nurse routine of a ward. When treatments, baths, or medication come due it is not expected or desired that she will always give these herself, but it will be her duty to see that the apprentices attached to the ward carry out the orders promptly and intelligently. This arrangement does not, however, absolve the nurse in any way from doing the actual nursing work whenever necessary, but is in a line with the general principle instilled into her from first to last, and which she is expected to always keep uppermost in her mind. . . . The improvement of the apprentices to whom the bulk of the nursing of the Navy afloat will always fall, for it is not the intention of the Surgeon-General to station women nurses on any but hospital ships.

  The first few months of service is . . . a period of probation during which the nurse will be under observation as to her suitability for naval nursing. To be dropped from the corps at the end of this time may not, and in most cases will not, imply anything derogatory to the character or even to the professional ability of the nurse, as it will usually merely mean that she is lacking in the peculiar qualities requisite in work of this nature, namely: the cheerful disposition that accepts the ups and downs incidental to changes of station; that adapts itself easily to new environment; that accepts the undesirable detail without complaint and confidently looks forward to the better luck that will surely come next time. Above all she must possess in the highest degree the quiet dignity of bearing which alone can command respect from the apprentices or male nurses whom she must instruct. Although she possesses all else, and yet lacks this one quality, she had best seek another vocation at once as she would be absolutely useless for the work we wish her to do. The ability to get on with others will also be a very valuable adjunct. Ample authority will be given the nurse in all that pertains to the nursing, but we all know that there are women who can produce good results and maintain discipline without keeping things constantly in a state of turmoil. In a training school when a pupil nurse proves unsatisfactory another can easily be found to take her place, but with the hospital apprentice it is different, for the Navy is always far short of the number
required, from which it will readily be seen that the woman who can inspire the male nurses with a pride in their work and a desire to learn, and who at the same time can reduce to a minimum the friction always incidental to a change in the old order of things, will be the most valuable woman for naval work. . . . In other words, dignity, self-control and courtesy are the keynotes to the situation. . . .

  It is too soon as yet to outline the scope of the work or to make predictions as to the future of the corps, but it is my most earnest hope to make it a dignified, respected body of women, governed largely by that feeling of esprit de corps without which no rules ever devised will be of avail to keep us free from all that approaches scandal or disagreeable comment.

  Undoubtedly the future status of the Navy corps will rest largely in the hands of its members, and especially is this true of the first nurses. If they are content with low standards either professionally, morally, or socially the status of the corps will be fixed for all time. Future women will accept the standard set by us now without question; if it be high they will rise to it, if it be low they will with equal facility drop to its level.

  We nurses who come into the nursing service of the Navy during this first year of its existence are the pioneers, and it rests with us to make the traditions and to set the pace for those who are to follow, and so upon our shoulders rests a great responsibility. I am sure that the nursing profession of the country will extend to us its hearty good wishes for success in our undertaking.

  4

  World War I

  “Because We Knew We Could Be Useful”

  Around 11 a.m. on November 2, 1918, German artillery soldiers retreating up the western bank of the Meuse set up a barrage of indirect fire intended for Allied artillery units emplaced above the bombed-out and abandoned village of Fromeréville-sur-Vallons, five miles west of Verdun. When the first shell landed near the hospital, officers and enlisted men of Evacuation Hospital No. 4 poured out of the ruined mill they had chosen as headquarters and male quarters. The second shell landed on the mill, killing off-duty enlisted men who were sleeping there. Shells began to fall at three-minute intervals in a walking barrage, the impact points leaving craters like the footprints of an invisible giant stomping up the hill toward the hospital tents housing soldiers wounded too severely to be evacuated farther behind the lines. Thirty-year-old chief nurse Cassie White realized that her patients must be moved to safety. She ordered the nurses in charge of each ward to prepare for immediate evacuation.

  With too few officers and enlisted men to carry all the stretchers, White and two other nurses, Minna Meyer and Victoria Robinson, struggled in pouring rain and knee-deep mud to help carry patients to the top of the hill. Exposed to artillery fire, they took the stretchers to the far side of the ridge and ran back for more wounded.

  An officer who had served with the British forces knew the sound of incoming artillery. When he heard the shriek of an approaching shell, he would call “Duck!” After the fragments had fallen, he gave the all-clear: “Go ahead!”

  White and one of the men were carrying a patient when they heard the call to take cover. They ducked. But White stood up too quickly. A piece of shell casing knocked her stiff-brimmed rain hat off her head. She fell to the ground.

  “Oh my God, Miss White, you’re hit!” the enlisted man cried.

  “No I’m not, either,” she said. She stood up. “But catch hold of that stretcher and let’s get out of here.” Still calm, she picked up the fragment of shell casing and pocketed it for a souvenir.

  Victoria Robinson paused to cover a patient with a blanket before moving him. When she bent down he panicked and shoved her under the bed. “Now you stay there until this thing is over,” he told her. “If a shell comes in here it will have to go through me before it can get to you!” Robinson crawled out from under the bed and returned to work.

  Later White said, “It really was remarkable that none of the nurses were struck. I guess it was simply luck. Certainly they were all exposed long enough. It was not a pleasant experience at all and yet, in a way, it was pretty to look at, pretty to watch the little groups scurrying up that long hill and running down.”

  During the bombardment the staff evacuated all the patients to another hospital. By 2 p.m., nothing remained of Evacuation Hospital No. 4 but shrapnel-riddled tents and some equipment. At three the nurses had a cup of coffee for lunch and relocated to Fontaine Routon for the night. The next day they helped patch up the hospital tents, rebuilt the operating room, opened a new headquarters, and once again began receiving patients.

  After the Armistice, White, Meyer, and Robinson returned to their parent unit, Base Hospital No. 31. They carried a citation: The commanding general of the Armed Expeditionary Forces, Gen. John J. Pershing, had commended them for their “heroic conduct.”

  When Congress established the Army Nurse Corps in 1901, nurses had no military rank. They did not receive pay equal to that of men with similar duties or veterans’ benefits. They were outside of the military chain of command: although they had the responsibility to maintain order on the wards, male enlisted corpsmen frequently contested or disregarded their orders. The Army Nursing Corps prohibited nurses from socializing with patients; supervisors continually scrutinized their personal conduct on and off duty. Nevertheless, women continued to enter the Army—and the Navy after the establishment of the Navy Nurse Corps in 1908. In March 1917, 403 professionally trained graduate nurses were on active duty.

  In 1916 the Red Cross and the Department of Military Relief established fifty base hospitals staffed with doctors and nurses from large civilian university hospitals. Each staff trained together under Red Cross auspices in preparation for U.S. entry into the war. Base hospitals transferred to the Department of the Army when mobilized to federal service. Six of these units sailed to Europe in May 1917. The first American troops deployed in the Great War, they initially joined the British Expeditionary Force hospitals. Two nurses, killed on SS Mongolia when a gun misfired, became the first American casualties of the war. In Europe the nurses worked long hours in challenging conditions. Those sent to field and evacuation hospitals on “detached service” served with surgical, trauma, or gas teams. They treated soldiers under artillery fire and aerial bombardment.

  The Army Nursing Corps finally permitted African American nurses to enroll during the influenza epidemic in fall 1918, but restricted them to treating mostly African American soldiers at hospitals on U.S. bases. All were released by summer 1919. Nineteen Roman Catholic nurses from the Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent DePaul and other orders deployed to Vicenza, Italy, for seven months with Base Hospital No. 102. Graduate male nurses could only enlist as corpsmen despite their certification—a discriminatory policy that remained in place for another four decades.

  By the end of the war, nearly 21,500 women served in the Army Nurse Corps and nearly 1,400 in the Navy Nurse Corps. Ten thousand served overseas. Several were wounded during the war; more than two hundred died in service, mostly of influenza or its complications. Three Army nurses were awarded the Distinguished Service Cross; at least one was awarded a Citation Star (later the Silver Star); twenty-five received the Distinguished Service Medal. France awarded twenty-eight American nurses the Croix de Guerre, and Great Britain awarded sixty-nine the British Royal Red Cross and two the British Military Medal. Many stayed on with the Army of Occupation after the Armistice.

  Business schools had begun training women in typing and other administrative skills by the early twentieth century. Secretary of the Navy Charles Bonaparte had suggested replacing yeomen at shore stations with civilian women in 1906, but officer prejudice stymied the initiative. His successor Josephus Daniels foresaw the need to expand the Navy rapidly if the United States entered the war, and he realized that recruiters would struggle to meet the demand for personnel.

  In spring 1916, nineteen-year-old Charlotte Berry, a graduate of a two-year course at the Washington Business High School, called on Daniels. The r
ecord of the visit lacks detail, and Daniels credited no one but himself for the idea, but Berry later told family members that she had suggested during the call that the Navy enlist women typists and stenographers. Later that year, the Bureau of Navigation and the Office of the Judge Advocate General reported to Daniels that a loophole in the Naval Appropriations Act, passed in August, would allow the enlistment of women. On March 21, 1917, Loretta Perfectus Walsh enlisted in Philadelphia and became the first woman to enlist officially in the U.S. armed forces. Berry and her younger sister Sophia soon followed.

  The yeomen (F) could not serve at sea. They worked at shore stations as typists, stenographers, radio and switchboard operators, messengers, chauffeurs and truck drivers, pay and supply clerks, and intelligence analysts. A few with prior training enlisted as electrician’s mates. Yeomen (F) filled primers on torpedoes: men filled an average of 29 primers a week, but the women filled an average of 162. At least fourteen African American women enlisted to serve as yeomen (F) in the Navy Muster Office.

  Twelve thousand yeomen (F) served, at rank and with pay equal to that of their male counterparts. Officers recommended four yeomen (F) for promotion to officer, but the war ended before the paperwork was processed. A small number even served overseas in Guam, Puerto Rico, the Panama Canal Zone, Hawaii, and Europe.

  Pvt. Opha Mae Johnson enlisted on August 13, 1918, as the first of three hundred women Marines. The Corps insisted on calling the women “Marines” just like the men, though the nickname “Marinettes” was also popular. Most served as clerks, typists, and stenographers; others became recruiters or served in public affairs.