US Nurses

Kyt · Nov 12, 2007

Women who served as nurses remember WWII

http://www.news-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071111/NEWS01/71110025

From autumn 1943 until summer 1945, Lakeland native Lt. LaRetta “Matty” Matthews was “over the Hump,” a nurse with the 95th Station Hospital in Kungming, China.

Five thousand miles to the east, Lt. Bobby Stern of Jeanette, Pa., was patching up soldiers from Gen. George Patton’s 3rd Army at the 164th Field Hospital.

Today, on Veterans Day, in addition to the nation’s male veterans, we honor these two women as well as the 500,000 women who served in World War II and 2 million female veterans of all U.S. wars.

Over the Hump

Matty Matthews, now LaRetta Garland, 87, of Cape Coral, enlisted in late 1942.
“It was the thing to do at the time,” she said. “It was a time for patriotism to come to the fore. I was always a little adventurous. I’m so glad I went. I never I never regretted a thing. But I did get homesick a time or two.”

Her first assignment was Fort Barrancas in North Florida.

“They asked for volunteers for the West Coast,” Garland said. “That seemed like the end of the Earth to a little girl. I got to be a big girl quickly.”

Assigned to the 95th Station Hospital, Garland was sent to India, after stops in New Zealand, Australia, and finally over the Hump (the Himalayas) to Kunming.

“There was another girl, Arlie Collins, who was the same size as me and had the same interests,” Garland said. “They called us the ‘gold-dust twins.’ We went over together.”

The 95th was the only large army hospital unit in China; it treated battle casualties from various fronts in China and served as an evacuation hospital.

Air raids and handshakes

“When there was an air raid, everyone went out and got into slit trenches,” Garland said. “But if a patient couldn’t be moved, somebody had to stay with him. I felt it was a gift to be able to stay with patients. I’d talk to them, sing, tell funny jokes.

“They’d tell me about their families, and almost all of them would say, ‘You won’t leave me, will you?’ ”

While in India and China, Garland developed a daily routine.

“When I was first on duty every day, I’d check the information on everybody’s chart on the foot of their bed,” she said. “Then I’d check the seriously ill patients, and then I’d visit all the others and shake everybody’s hand. They never saw a woman, and I thought shaking everybody’s hand was important.”

Supply lines

In any theater of any war, supply lines are critical and can be logistically difficult. The only way to get supplies to the 95th and other outfits in China was for the Air Transport Command (ATC) to fly them over the Hump, a dangerous job that cost about 1,000 lives.

“Our bandages, cots, gowns, dressings all came by air, the ATC,” Garland said. “We didn’t have proper refrigeration, and we rarely had ice — we used to bury the penicillin a foot deep in the ground to keep it cold.

“Sometimes we had what we needed, depending on the shipments. Same way with food — you’d yearn for things like strawberry preserves. When the ATC pilots would start back over the Hump, we’d run out and say, ‘Don’t forget the whole-wheat bread and strawberry preserves.’”

After the war — after air raids and monsoons, after caring for wounded, sick and dying men and shaking hundreds of hands — Garland returned to the States.

“When I came back, I thought, ‘Gosh, the war hasn’t changed things a bit,’” she said.
Garland went on to become a psychology professor at Emery University in Atlanta and to found the LaRetta Matthews Garland Scholarship for nursing majors.

Into Normandy

Bobby Stern, now Bobby Alexander, 85, of Fort Myers, enlisted in 1944.

“I guess we all wanted to enlist when we graduated from nursing school,” she said. “It was the thing to do.

“We were pretty young, and I don’t know that we thought too much about winning or losing the war. We just knew we were nurses, and we had to do what we could do.”

With a shortage of nurses in Europe, Stern was sent overseas in the summer of 1944 after the Allies invaded Normandy on June 6.

“We were the first nurses to go to France without training in England first,” Alexander said. “I mostly remember the good times. I don’t talk much about the bad times. The patients were wonderful regardless, whether they were amputees or whatever.”

Living conditions, Alexander said, were “horrendous.”

“They got us off the ship and dumped us into the middle of a cow pasture in the middle of the night,” she said. “We set up pup tents and lived that way for maybe two weeks.

“We walked four or five miles for meals because we had nothing set up for us until we got the hospital set up and got our own mess. When we didn’t want to walk, we ate K-rations.”

The Bulge

In December 1944, the war was going well for the Allies, and everybody from privates to the top brass was talking about being home for Christmas.

But on Dec. 16, the Germans launched a massive counter-offensive that became known as the Battle of the Bulge.

“We got patients directly from the Bulge,” Alexander said. “It was sad for me. I had a very good friend from home who was killed in the Bulge — he was a major. I knew his outfit, and we kept getting patients from it, and I kept asking about him. Finally, one of the boys told me he’d been killed.”

Adding to the horror of the battle, which cost more than 80,000 American casualties, including 19,000 dead, was the fact it was fought during the coldest winter of the century.

“The thing I remember about the Bulge was how bitter cold it was,” Alexander said.

“We lived in tents, and the wind would come in through the flaps. We had one Army blanket and used overcoats for cover.

“On Christmas, somebody found a scrawny little branch, and we hung junk on it, anything we could find, for a Christmas tree.”

Wartime romance

On a brighter side of the war, Lt. Bobby Stern met X-ray technician Sgt. Bob Alexander at the 164th Field Hospital — the couple were married after the war and were together 54 years.

“We were four nurses in a tent, and one of the other nurses came back and said, ‘You should see this guy in X-ray,’” Alexander said. “So I had to go see the guy in X-ray.

“We started seeing each other, which was illegal — I outranked him. We had to sneak around about it, but it all worked out.”
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Lisa B · May 21, 2012

I am Arlie Collins Daughter. I have pictures of Mattie and my Mom in her scrapbook!

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