United States Navy Nurse Corps

United States Navy Nurse Corps
Seal of the United States Navy Nurse Corps[1]
Founded	1908; 116 years ago (1908)
Country	United States of America
Branch	United States Navy

The United States Navy Nurse Corps was officially established by Congress in 1908; however, unofficially, women had been working as nurses aboard Navy ships and in Navy hospitals for nearly 100 years. The Corps was all-female until 1965.^[2]

Pre-1908

In 1811,

During the 1898 Spanish–American War, the Navy employed a modest number of female contract nurses in its hospitals ashore and sent trained male nurses to sea on the hospital ship Solace.

1908–1917

After the establishment of the Nurse Corps in 1908 by an Act of Congress, twenty women were selected as the first members and assigned to the Naval Medical School Hospital in Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, the navy did not provide room or board for them, and so the nurses—being a determined lot—rented their own house and provided their own meals.^[5]

In time, the nurses would come to be known as "

The Nurse Corps gradually expanded to 160 on the eve of World War I. In addition to normal hospital and clinic duties, the nurses were active in training natives in U.S. overseas possessions as well as the Navy's male enlisted medical personnel. For a few months in 1913, Navy nurses saw their first shipboard service, aboard Mayflower and Dolphin. The first permanent shipboard positions came in late 1920, when Relief went into commission with a medical staff that included Navy nurses.

World War I

The entry of the United States into the

In 1917–18, the Navy deployed five base hospital units to operational areas in France, Scotland and Ireland, with the first in place by late 1917. Also serving overseas were Navy operating teams, including nurses, established for detached duty near the combat frontlines. Some of these teams were loaned to the United States Army during the intense ground offensives of 1918 and worked in difficult field conditions far removed from regular hospitals.^[6]

During the war, 19 Navy nurses died on active duty, over half of them from

By the time of the armistice on 11 November 1918, over 1550 nurses had served in Naval hospitals and other facilities at home and abroad. Shortly after the fighting's end, several Navy nurses were assigned to duty aboard transports bringing troops home from Europe. Some Navy nurses even ventured on ground patrols and aided Army soldiers during this time.

Interwar period

With the close of World War I, many turned away from all things war-related and by 1935 the Nurse Corps' numbers had been reduced to 332. However, this reduction did not stop the corps from making advances; new courses of study in the areas of diet therapy, neuropsychiatry, physiotherapy, and anesthesia were introduced and it was these educational advances which were key to the steady rise in the corps' professional status within the service. Though generally treated as officers socially and professionally, and wearing uniform stripes similar to those for the officer ranks of Ensign through Lieutenant Commander, formal recognition as

It was also during this interwar period that paid retirement for longevity and disability was authorized as well as the extension of regular service to include Navy hospital ships. In addition to caring for Naval personnel at home and abroad, the corps responded to a number of civil disasters and assisted in the evacuation of dependents from war-torn China in 1937.

World War II

Preparation for the conflict again saw the Nurse Corps grow, with nearly eight hundred members serving on active duty by November 1941, plus over nine hundred inactive reserves. By war's end there would be 1,799 active component nurses and 9,222 reserves (with the overwhelming number of reserves on active duty) scattered across six continents.

Though black nurses applied, until 1945, African-American nurses were rejected by the Navy. Phyllis Mae Dailey became the first black nurse accepted in the Navy Nurse Corps on March 8, 1945. Edith DeVoe, the only black navy nurse to be transferred at the end of the war to the regular service, took her oath on April 18, 1945,^[9] and Eula L. Stimley entered service on May 8, 1945.^[10] Along with Helen Fredericka Turner, these four nurses were the first African-American women to serve in the Navy during World War II.^[11]

Navy nurses were on duty during the initial Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Kāneʻohe Bay, the Philippines, Guam, and aboard the Solace; they were vital in preventing further loss of life and limb. In fact, the nursing profession's vital role was quickly recognized and it became the only women's profession that was deemed so essential as to be placed under the War Manpower Commission. Despite shortages of qualified nurses during the war, the navy was able to hold to its standards and enroll nurses of outstanding qualifications and experience. These outstanding nurses received advanced training in surgery, orthopedics, anesthesia, contagion, dietetics, physiotherapy, and psychiatry, the latter helping men understand and manage Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (then known as shell-shock) and battlefield fatigue. But the navy nurses' duties not only included the tending to the injured and sick but also to the equally serious task of training Hospital Corpsmen. Many of these young men had never seen the inside of a hospital unless they themselves had been admitted, and as such it was training from the ground up. Once trained, the men were sent to work aboard fighting ships and on invasion beaches, where nurses were not yet officially assigned. Additionally, nurses trained WAVES for the Hospital Corps.^[12]

In the Pacific, Navy Nurses were the first American women to be sent to the islands north of

In Europe, navy nurses served in both England and Italy and in North and South America at Trinidad, Panama, Puerto Rico, Bermuda, Brazil, and Newfoundland. Navy nurses were even stationed in Africa.^[13]

In the

• 
  Purple Heart Award, Sun Valley Lodge 1943
• 
  Navy Nurse Corps, Sun Valley Lodge 1944
• 
  Navy Nurses Aboard USS Solace 1945

Prisoners of War

Two groups of Navy nurses were held prisoner by the Japanese in World War II. Chief Nurse Marion Olds and nurses Leona Jackson, Lorraine Christiansen, Virginia Fogerty and Doris Yetter were taken prisoner on Guam shortly after Pearl Harbor and transported to Japan. They were repatriated in August 1942, although the newspaper did not identify them as Navy nurses.

Chief Nurse

Flight Nurses graduated from the Navy Flight Nurse School at the Naval Air Station Alameda, California on 22 January 1945.^[16] In addition to flight nurse procedures, they were trained to swim one mile, tow or push a victim for 220 yards, and swim 440 yards in 10 minutes.^[17] The newly minted flight nurses soon began active flying service on 24 flying teams, consisting of a nurse and a pharmacist's mate. Each 12-plane squadron operated with the following medical personnel: 24 flight nurses, 24 pharmacists' mates, one flight surgeon, and one Hospital Corps officer. After a certain number of transcontinental trips with wounded servicemen, the teams were sent to the Pacific to serve in the Naval Air Evacuation Service, the first arriving in Guam in early February 1945.^[18] There were three main flights of air evacuation planes to which flight nurses were assigned. First, from target areas to forward hospitals, such as Guam: second, from those forward hospitals to Pearl Harbor; and third, from Pearl Harbor to the contiguous United States. Nurses were rotated so that flight hours did not exceed 100 per month and they were also rotated between combat and noncombat flights.^[18]

An efficient procedure for aerial evacuation from target areas was quickly developed. The squadron flight surgeon and several pharmacists' mates were on the first hospital plane to land on the captured airfield. The surgeon established an evacuation clearing station adjacent to the airstrip, where with the help of his corpsmen, he collected patients from the first-aid and holding stations and screened them for air transport, giving necessary treatment prior to flight. As soon as the second hospital plane landed, the flight nurse aboard received her orders. The plane was loaded and usually departed in approximately 45 minutes, the flight nurse being responsible for all patients aboard. With the corpsman's aid, she dressed wounds, administered whole blood or plasma, gave medications, and fed the patients. Using this procedure, within 30 days, approximately 4,500 injured men were flown out of Okinawa alone.[18]

Flight nurse

Agana, Guam based Air Evacuation Transport Squadron One (VRE-1), which was an elite unit of the Naval Air Transport Service

(NATS).

Korea

Bronze Star for their work on the Navy hospital ships.^[20]

Lt. Sarah Griffin Chapman, who had lost her lower left leg in an accident and retired prior to Korea, fought to be recalled to active duty so that she could teach other young amputees how to walk again.[21] Though outside the Korean theater, one aviation accident claimed the lives of 11 Navy nurses. The mishap occurred on the South Pacific island of Kwajalein on 19 September 1950. These women were en route to hospitals in Japan to care for war casualties when their plane crashed into the Pacific shortly after take off.^[20]

Vietnam

Saigon, 1966

In 1963, LT Bobbi Hovis volunteered to go to Vietnam, where she and four other nurses were tasked with converting a run-down Saigon apartment into the first US Navy Station Hospital—in four days.^[22]