So last month I was attending the Conneaut D-Day reenactment. If you haven’t been before it’s this incredible WW2 reenactment full of very knowledgeable people discussing the history of that period. There are people covering everything from gardening to document forgery and everything in between.
As I was wandering around I ran into Theresa who was hosting a tent with a bunch of information about Army flight nurses. Which as it turns out, is an incredible story. I’ll give you the highlights.
So back in the early 40’s there was this thing, it was called World War 2, and during this war the US Army was making extensive use of air transportation for shipping supplies. This rapid expansion of their air transportation network made it possible for wounded soldiers to be flown from the front lines back to fully equipped hospitals. But in order to keep the soldiers alive during transport they needed doctors and nurses to fly with them.
So the Army started a rush training program for surgeons, med techs, and flight nurses – but rush training wasn’t fast enough. Christmas 1942 they were on their way to North Africa.
Now because they were using the same planes that were transporting military supplies, the planes could not display the red cross – which meant they were vulnerable to enemy attacks (a plane flying a red cross would designate it as a non-combat flight). Because of this all these flight nurses and techs were volunteers. Another fun fact I learned was that because these nurses were all female officers when one of them was captured after her plane was shot down the Germans, not really knowing how to deal with a female officer eventually just released her.
But the part of this story that really stunned me was the impact these women had. 500 nurses helped evacuate 1,174,048 wounded – losing only 46 in transport. They were so successful this eventually led to medevac helicopters, air ambulances, flight for life choppers… Quite an impact that those 500 volunteers had.
