To Nurse In WWII

To Nurse in WWII

Seventy-one years ago, the whole world was focused on the Axis and the Allies in the second world war… But no one paid attention to what was behind the scenes. Imagine, you are in the middle of operating on someone, and a bomb goes off. To be a nurse in that situation may be extremely different from what you would expect. Being an American Military nurse was very dangerous for multiple reasons. The American Military Nurse Corps was an extremely important part of World War Two. To begin with, WWII nurses were not your average doctor, as 201 died during the war (“FOCUS ON: WOMEN AT WAR”). In WWII, the nurses were closer to combat than any war before (Bellafaire). From The Army Nurse Corps website, during a hospital bombing, “The sergeant pulled me under the desk, but the desk was blown into the air, and he and I with it. Then I fell back to the floor, and the desk landed on top of me. I dragged myself to my feet”. These things happened while they were working in dangerous field hospitals and evacuation hospitals (Bellafaire). Quite a few nurses became Prisoners of War as a
To start off, if you wished to be a nurse in the military, you had to go through an orderly 4-week training course and become a registered nurse (RN)(“United States Army Nurse Corps”). Also, you had to be unmarried, white, female, and not pregnant (“United States Army Nurse Corps”). If you failed to meet these requirements while on the job, you were automatically discharged (“United States Army Nurse Corps”). Because of a lot of women being not eligible, there were only about 1,700 nurses in the whole military during the beginning of WWII; but right after the US entered the war, around 11,000 more women that, were able, stepped up (Bellafaire). Despite needing a lot of nurses, the United States Military was reluctant to let someone in who did not fit