"I liked the comment about if medical personnel were not needed that would be returned. An American nurse in WW 2 that was on an air evac flight that ran into flak was taken prisoner. She worked in a POW hospital camp where wounded Americans were treated while the commandant made the arrangements to send her back. Once the plans were in place she was given a traveling suit, donated by the camp commandant's wife, currency, a rail ticket and travel documents so she could go to Switzerland."
"My mother was a U.S. Navy nurse and officer, initially commissioned an ensign, and later promoted to lieutenant (junior grade). She had attended nursing school at the Medical College of Virginia, hoping to become an airline stewardess (an RN certification was required at the time). Instead, she was invited to join the Navy's nursing corps after graduation in May 1941, and upon completion of her officer training, she was assigned to the naval hospital at Norfolk Naval Station. She would spend virtually the entire American portion of the war working in the burn ward of the Norfolk naval hospital, treating severely burned U.S. Marines, sailors, Allied sailors, merchant mariners, and the occasional German prisoner. Most had horrific burns received in the war. My mother was a chatty woman, but she never really talked about her wartime work; it hurt too much to remember the young men she served. Like so many of the men of her generation, she could never really open up about her experiences -- too much loss, too much sorrow, too much trauma; it was easier to bury it and do their best to move on with their lives after a 10-year depression and a 4-year war in which almost every family suffered some form of loss or trauma.
"These German women may have served the enemy regime in Europe, but I have nothing but admiration for the POW nurses who continued to nurse German and Allied wounded while they were prisoners. At the end of their lives, I hope they all found peace and some semblance of happiness."
Captured German Nurses Didn't Know Where the Americans Were Taking Them. It Was the Front Line. "On Sunday, July 2, 1944, American ambulances drove eight captured German nurses out of Cherbourg. Nobody had told them what the Americans meant to do with them. By evening they were riding in two ambulances with sealed windows, past the last American outposts near Caumont, toward the German lines. For thirty minutes the guns on that stretch of the front went silent.
"The fall of Cherbourg and the German naval hospital; the 1929 Geneva Convention rule on medical personnel; nurse Herta Wist of Karlsruhe; the radio messages to the German side; Captain Quentin Roosevelt and Captain Fred Ghercke on the road between the lines; the second handover of July 9 and Lieutenant Kenneth Calligan; and the night Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr. died."
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