units attached to the British and French armies. Navy, several hundred worked for the Red Cross and some worked in U.S. Army between 1917-1919, according to the PBS article “American Nurses in World War I,” and more than 10,000 served near the Western Front. More than 22,000 American nurses were recruited by the Red Cross to serve in the U.S. The disease would spread around the world and in 11 months kill more people than the war itself. Hundreds of fevered soldiers and Marines - and the nurses who cared for them - succumbed to Spanish influenza. In the second half of the Great War’s final year, these nurses had to deal with a new scourge. In every field hospital, evacuation station or clearinghouse (such as churches turned into hospitals), American nurses faithfully discharged their duties as they dealt with the stench of gangrene, the heart-wrenching shell-shock cases and shelling from enemy lines. Resupplying the nurses there was a major challenge. Pershing, fought to capture rail lines that were essential to the enemy.Ĭonditions were even worse in the forest west of Chemin des Dames, some 80 miles northeast of Paris, where three major WWI battles took place. ![]() It was there that the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), under the command of Army Gen. Mihiel salient south of Verdun, in northeast France. Female yeomen, or “yeomenettes,” served stateside in such Navy jobs as clerks, mechanics, truck drivers and telephone operators.Conditions were no better at the evacuation station near the old St. Victor Blue (left center) inspects female yeomen in 1918 on the grounds of the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. “The packed, twisted bodies, the screams and groans, made me think of Dante’s Inferno.” Trench warfare and the impact of the machine gun on infantry operations created an avalanche of casualties that turned field hospitals into hospices of horror.ĭuring the Battle of Belleau Wood in June 1918, for instance, “hundreds and hundreds of wounded poured in like a rushing torrent,” Army Nurse Eula Crow wrote in her diary. nurses served admirably during the Great War of 1914-18, but there was nothing romantic about their experience. ![]() Such art was, of course, a fantasy, and by war’s end it was an affront to truth. One of the requisite World War I recruitment posters showed a beautiful and composed nurse bending over a young soldier gazing up at her in gratitude and admiration.
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