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Photographer: Mike Wintermantel
Taken: May 14, 2014
Caption: Nurses Who Served
Additional Description: Women assigned to the Army and Navy Nurse Corps served in every theater of operations. Some were taken as POWs by the Japanese; others were killed during the landings at Anzio Beach. Nurses landed at Normandy on the fourth day of the invasion, where they immediately established field hospitals and began treating casualties.

A huge and still untallied number of women from Southwestern Pennsylvania volunteered and served as nurses during the War. They cared for service members, POWs and civilians on every continent. Colonel Florence Blanchard, a graduate of Pittsburgh's Southside Hospital Training School for Nurses, headed the Army Nurse Corps. During a two-year period of War, she supervised the expansion of the Corps from 1,000 to 57,000 and was credited by the War Department as being "largely instrumental in securing full military rank for nurses."

During the Battle of Okinawa, a nurse from Pittsburgh paid the ultimate sacrifice for her service. With five other nurses and six doctors, Catherine Eckerd was killed when a Japanese kamikaze pilot crashed his explosive-laden plane into the operating room of the USS Comfort hospital ship.
Submitted: May 14, 2014, by Mike Wintermantel of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Database Locator Identification Number: p273324
File Size: 1.884 Megabytes

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