Enemies in Love

by Alexis Clark

  Eventually others began to notice, and at some point rumors began to spread. On one occasion when Frederick was assigned to farm work, to his surprise one of the agricultural captains tried to dissuade him from pursuing Elinor, not because she was an army officer but because she was black.

  The arguments and warnings about race mixing had no impact on Frederick whatsoever. He and Elinor continued their after-hours dates. But their luck ran out when one of the guards caught Frederick sneaking around one night. Whatever made-up excuse he tried to give didn’t work, and he was severely beaten by the officers, who also shaved his head as an additional act of humiliation.1 When prisoners were caught sneaking around where they were not supposed to be their punishment could mean solitary confinement and a diet of water and bread that lasted for days to physically weaken their bodies and fill their heads with paranoid thoughts.2 Frederick may have endured this along with his beating.

  Elinor never got caught, and if the American guards suspected her, they didn’t bring her up on charges. She, unlike Frederick, never mentioned receiving a reprimand about her forbidden relationship, nor did Gwyneth ever recall Elinor getting into trouble. In all likelihood Frederick lied to protect her by giving some alternative reason as to why he was roaming around.

  Not surprisingly, Frederick’s beating wasn’t enough to deter him, and he never stopped his romance with Elinor. Their decision to stay together represented a deep sense of courage, passion, and defiance.

  Although Elinor had found a lover to soften the edges of her segregated wartime service, black nurses were still very much isolated and bitter about their experience at the POW camp. The U.S. government shamelessly asked more nurses to volunteer for the war effort even while the Army Nurse Corps continued to keep its enlistment numbers of black RNs very low. It was a clear message that the military would rather remain short-staffed than incorporate black nurses into the medical units that treated all Allied soldiers, white and black, regardless of race.

  Toward the last year of the war, after D-Day and the bloody Battle of the Bulge, the number of wounded American men reached dangerous levels. With lives at stake, the relegation of black nurses to POW camps while they were needed elsewhere finally began to get the attention of more than just Negro newspapers and Mabel Staupers.

  Albert Deutsch, a reporter for P.M., a New York–based daily paper, wrote a damning piece on December 26, 1944, in which he slammed the military for its treatment of eager black nurses. “Nine thousand bewildered and bitter graduate nurses watch with wonder the Army’s frantic call for nurses which excludes brown-skinned Angels of Mercy,” wrote Deutsch.3

  On January 4, 1945, an emergency meeting about army nurses took place at the Pierre Hotel in New York City. About three hundred citizens and nurses attended to hear Major General Norman T. Kirk, the U.S. Army surgeon general at the time, make a highly anticipated announcement that a conscription of nurses was under serious consideration given the large number of American soldiers returning home wounded. In the month of December alone, thirty thousand injured Americans came back from war, and he expected another thirty thousand soon after. He calculated that the United States Nurse Corps, which had forty thousand nurses, needed an additional ten thousand nurses immediately, and a draft would be required if volunteer nurses didn’t step forward.4

  Mabel Staupers, who attended the meeting, was outraged by General Kirk’s blatant disregard for the talented and willing black nurses who wanted to serve but were passed over. If nurses were in such demand, she asked him, then why did the United States Army Nurse Corps have only three hundred black nurses in its ranks although nine thousand had signed up? And even more volunteers would have stepped forward had word not begun to spread about the poor treatment of black nurses in the army. Kirk responded that the number of black nurses was in proportion to the number of black troops serving in the army, which wasn’t true. The fact was black nurses were not called to serve in the same proportion as white nurses. The military was discriminating against black nurses and everyone knew it.5

  Kirk also reportedly said that the army didn’t mix black nurses with white ones. That was another false statement. In 1944 Staupers visited Camp Livingston in Louisiana, where white and black nurses were treating patients of all races because the demand for medical care was so great. The lines of segregation were secondary to the needs of wounded men, as Staupers noted, and there was no reason that practice couldn’t be implemented at other military posts throughout the United States.

  His erroneous statement makes clear that either General Kirk did not have a grasp on the working lives of black nurses in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps or he didn’t know what to do about it or didn’t want to do anything about it. His dismissive tone confirmed the obvious—no one in the military wanted black nurses to serve or had thoughtfully considered how they were being utilized.

  After the meeting, in a joint statement, Staupers and the National Nursing Council for War Service pointed out that General Kirk was wrong about numerous facts: the 330 black nurses in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps accounted for far less than one-tenth the number of Negro soldiers in the army, which was the accepted ratio of nurses to soldiers.

  Staupers also addressed another sinister reason the military used to justify the low numbers of black nurses—their qualification. Black and white nurses were required to take the same state board examination, and Staupers provided evidence from the United States Public Health Service that stated, “The standards of the Negro schools do not differ from those of all schools of nursing.” She went on to dispel the fallacy that black nurses graduated from schools that did not meet the minimum standards required for all nursing schools. The truth was that more than two-thirds of the thirty schools for black nursing students had a bed capacity of more than fifty, the minimum requirement for military eligibility. About 89 percent of black nurses graduated from schools connected to hospitals that had daily averages of fifty or more patients. Staupers refuted all of the military’s excuses for denying black nurses the opportunity to serve in substantial numbers.6 The real possibility of a nursing draft only reinforced the deliberate shutting out of African American nurses in the war effort.

  On January 6, 1945, President Franklin Roosevelt, in his State of the Union Address, called for an amendment to the Selective Service and Training Act that would allow for the conscription of American nurses into the armed forces. With 40,000 nurses in service, FDR called for 18,000 more.

  The public’s reaction to a possible draft of women was one of shock and confusion, and the finger-pointing came from all directions. A major reason given to explain the nursing shortage was the haphazard recruiting process, which the army had delegated to the American Red Cross since 1942. Others thought the glamorization of the Women’s Army Corps, known as the WACs and nicknamed “Those Wonderful G.I. Janes,” was more appealing to women because they got to perform all kinds of military jobs compared to nurses. But more troubling were the mixed signals coming from the War Department itself, which in 1943–1944 first raised its enlistment goals for nurses, then lowered them, and then raised them again. There was never a clear-cut number of how many nurses were needed. As a result, misinformation spread quickly. From June to September 1944, the Army Nurse Corps had its lowest numbers of volunteers come forward since the war started. Some attributed this not only to the unclear message about nursing shortages but also to the public belief that the war was almost over.

  Representative Andrew J. May of Kentucky, chair of the House Military Affairs Committee, responded to FDR’s call with a proposed amendment known as the May Bill. Under his legislation, all unmarried nurses between twenty and forty-five would be eligible for a draft and would enter the army at the rank of private; nurses who volunteered would enter as second lieutenants as incentive for coming forward. The bill also included an anti-discrimination provision to allow black nurses to be eligible as well.7

  During the period in which the bill was debated, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell
Jr., the esteemed African American minister from Harlem, was vocal about discrimination against black nurses by the U.S. military. “It is absolutely unbelievable that in times like these, when the world is going forward, that there are leaders in our American life who are going backward. It is further unbelievable that these leaders have become so blindly and unreasonably un-American that they have forced our wounded men to face the tragedy of death rather than allow trained nurses to aid because these nurses’ skins happen to be of a different color.”8 The amendment passed the House almost unanimously. But it stalled in the Senate without any explanation given and was eventually shelved.

  The conscription of nurses never occurred—enough of them volunteered to care for the high numbers of wounded men returning from war. But the disregard of black nurses continued.

  Undeterred, Mabel Staupers carried on and continued to lobby for an amendment that prohibited the discrimination of black nurses in the military. But the morale of African American nurses who were currently serving in the army was reaching a record low. Staupers visited First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt at her New York apartment to discuss her plight. Although Mrs. Roosevelt made no promises, black nurses started to see some improvement in their experiences beginning in early 1945. In some instances black nurses were finally transferred out of POW camps.9 In an anonymous letter to Mabel Staupers dated February 14, 1945, a chief nurse wrote, “I have heard very good news about the new assignments of colored nurses. They are no longer assigned only to P.W. camps. As you no doubt know those nurses who serve six months at these camps are rotated now to non P.W. camps.”10

  When they rotated after a six-month stint at a POW camp, the nurses usually ended up at a segregated base where they encountered whites-only and colored facilities, or at hospitals that had both POWs and Allied soldiers and which frequently expected black nurses to tend to German POWs whenever possible. Even the contingent of black nurses who traveled overseas that previous fall had been misled about their duties. Captain Mary L. Petty, a high-ranking African American officer, led a group of sixty-three black nurses to England in September 1944. Petty reportedly told the nurses that they had “come to foreign soil to render the greatest possible service in this theater and to do everything within its power to improve race relations.”11 Unbeknownst to them, however, the nurses had been sent to England to relieve a unit of white nurses as the hospital turned into one exclusively for prisoners of war. With ongoing shortages and wounded Allied men in desperate condition, it was agonizing for black nurses to be the military’s go-to choice for POW care. Fortunately, after a few months, the army converted that particular hospital in England from a POW ward to a facility for Allied soldiers, which made the service of the black nurses who remained there into 1945 much more fulfilling.12

  This minor improvement did nothing, however, to address the overall treatment of black nurses in the military. They still weren’t utilized in large numbers and the army refused to give an adequate explanation.

  In the spring of 1945, it was evident that Germany was losing badly, and Elinor and Frederick feared imminent separation. She knew that she could be transferred to another post at any moment. It was unheard of for a black nurse to want to stay in an isolating place like Florence, but Elinor remained there, so she must have assured her commanding officer that continuity of care was the most important thing and that she was fine continuing on in her post.

  As the war approached its end, Frederick’s status as a prisoner of war also hung in the balance. When Hitler committed suicide in April 1945, it was clear that Frederick had only so much time left in the United States. There was no way he would be allowed to stay in America as a German prisoner, and the possibility of his being allowed to walk out of the barbed-wire-enclosed camp and start fresh as an immigrant was particularly remote. His return to Germany was inevitable, but the idea of going back to an obliterated country where homes and businesses had been reduced to dust was incomprehensible to him and the other prisoners. Additionally, Frederick hadn’t seen his family in years, and the thought of a reunion was complicated. He had no idea what his father would think of him as a returning POW—it’s quite possible Karl Albert could have considered his son to be a coward for getting captured in the first place instead of fighting until the bitter end.

  Elinor and Frederick remained at Florence through May 7, 1945, when Germany unconditionally surrendered to the Allied forces in Rheims, France. World War II was over and May 8, commonly known as VE Day for “Victory in Europe,” became a public holiday marking the end of the Third Reich. Celebrations erupted around the world, and masses of people gathered in major cities, from Los Angeles to London, singing, crying, dancing, and celebrating in the streets.

  It was a bittersweet time for Elinor and Frederick. Their future as a couple was in question, and they weren’t prepared to live apart. In desperation, the two decided to seal their bond with an act that would unite them forever. As the months passed and the POWs were in the process of being transferred to temporary transitional camps before embarking on the transatlantic journey back to Europe, in April 1946, Frederick and Elinor made love in the hope of conceiving a child. As a nurse, Elinor knew about birth control and had access to it presumably from the moment she and Frederick began an intimate relationship. But whatever precaution they had been taking to prevent a pregnancy was intentionally discarded.

  They pledged their love to each other by attempting to bring a baby into the world to symbolize their union and commitment. They wanted to have a life together and decided that it would be easier for Frederick to get back into the United States if he were reuniting with his child.13 It was a planned act of rebellion between two lovers, seen as soul mates by some, as silly fools by others.

  Elinor was making the ultimate sacrifice to hold on to Frederick. She was putting her own future at serious risk. For one, she could not be pregnant and remain in the army. Further, once it became known that the father of her child was a “Nazi,” which is how Frederick would be perceived regardless of what was in his heart, Elinor would face scorn, ridicule, possible unemployment, spinsterhood, and poverty. Also, although the war with Hitler was over, Jim Crow was not, and for a black woman to raise a mixed-race child would be challenging at best. She would endure prejudice and hatred from both sides, black and white.

  Their unimaginable plan worked, and before Frederick left the United States Elinor was pregnant with his child. If there were tears, or cries of sadness and fear during their final moments together when they had to say good-bye at Camp Florence, the two kept those emotional details to themselves. But it would have been inconceivable for them if they hadn’t felt a flood of heartache as they left each other’s arms for the unknown. No one left war the same person. And Elinor and Frederick found a surreal love surrounded by millions of soldiers dying or returning home broken and maimed. Years later, in a rare admission, Elinor briefly spoke about the moment when the baby was conceived. Although she never revealed the location or date, or any specifics bordering on salacious, she did share with her son Chris when he was an adult that the passion between her and Frederick on that particular occasion—when they knew they had that one chance to bond themselves together for life—had been so intense that she was certain they had made a child, and in fact they had.

  Elinor’s final post in the United States Army Nurse Corps was at the Station Hospital in Fort Ord, near Monterey Bay, in California. She was placed on leave on September 12, 1946, and returned to Milton; with her army term officially ending on October 25, 1946. If Elinor was showing by the time she went on leave, there weren’t any photos to prove it, and it’s possible she concealed her pregnancy from the army. While in her second trimester, she could have fooled disinterested senior officers at Fort Ord about her condition by camouflaging a protruding stomach with oversized nurses’ jackets and blaming her bulge on pure weight gain. But there would be no fooling Gladys Powell.

  Elinor had no choice but to return home to Milton in what she knew t
o be the worst-case scenario in her mother’s eyes: unmarried and pregnant with a German prisoner of war’s baby. And Elinor would be living alone with her mother since her younger sister, Ruth, had moved to New York and her older sister, Gladys, had moved away years ago. Her pregnancy would be considered an embarrassment; it represented behavior not befitting a member of the Powell family, and she knew her mother would be furious. Gladys had grown up in Louisville, Kentucky, around the turn of the century, when the roots of Jim Crow were just taking hold, and she managed to earn a college degree and have a teaching career, followed by marriage to an upstanding army veteran from an admired family in Milton. Having a daughter return home from the war with a “baby out of wedlock,” a phrase she would have used, would be enough to make her sick.

  Elinor had no choice but to face her mother, along with any shaming that came her way. Deep down she knew she was strong enough to endure the admonishment. Frederick had promised to return to her, and that would get her through.

  8.

  An Uncertain Future

  WHEN ELINOR AND FREDERICK WERE FORCED TO separate, with an ocean between them and nothing but a promise to reunite, the war had been over for more than a year and the United States was still in the muddled process of shipping thousands of German POWs back to Europe. Just as the prisoners had no idea what to expect when they first arrived in America as captured soldiers, they returned home with the same degree of uncertainty.

  Hardly anyone was shocked when Germany surrendered. Even before Hitler killed himself on April 30, 1945, many had long since realized the war was lost. A poem written by a German POW at Camp Florence and translated into English represented the thoughts of despair shared by soldiers in the Wehrmacht in the final months of the war.

  Christmas 1944

  I hear not the bells of our Homeland ringing,