Honor Flight interviews and profiles

Mary is a refined and dignified lady who is from Bethlehem Pennsylvania, but now calls Dallas home. Her father served in the U.S.Army in London England in WW I. During WWII there were no person a wounded soldier would rather see coming through the door, than an Army nurse. This Mary did many, many times in hospitals from Hawaii to Japan.

She graduated from St. Lukes in Bethlehem in 1941. Mary remembers being in a lecture at the school when the announcement was made that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. The next day, FDR went before congress and described the surprise attack as “dastardly,” and the U.S. was at war. As Admiral Yamato lamented after the attack, “I believe that we have awoken a sleeping giant.” They had.

Mary joined the Army Nurse Corps at Ft. Meade Maryland for basic training as a 2^nd. Lieutenant in February 1945. Soon she became charge nurse at Camp Lee Virginia in the Orthopedic Ward. In May 1945, she was on a ship sailing to Hawaii arriving on Mother’s Day. She worked in the operating room, with many casualties of the horrific Okinawan campaign. Because of the massive American dead and wounded from this battle, as well as the suicidal resistance of the Japanese Army, the American military calculated that possibly a million people would be killed taking the Japanese home islands, and the war would go on until possibly 1948.

Mary treated an unknown amount of men and boys from this campaign. In August 1945, after experiencing an extremely powerful typhoon, she and 305 other nurses set foot on Okinawa. The island was not quite secure, and there were minimum facilities for the nurses to live and work. They were taken to a former prisoner of war camp where the conditions were less than hospitable, with little food or sanitary facilities. In October 1945, while on the island, Mary experienced yet another typhoon, she and the other nurses took shelter and rode it out in an old donut factory. During this storm, they lost most of their personal effects.

She sailed to Japan in November 1945 and took a train to Osaka, where she helped set up the 307^th General Hospital. This was in an old Red Cross hospital with no heat that had to be scrubbed and cleaned to prepare the way for patients to be admitted. Mary was promoted to 1^st Lieutenant in February 1946. She was mustered out of the service in March 1946, and was married just a few days later.

Mary came to Dallas in 1967 and worked at Dallas Presbyterian Hospital for 15 years in critical care.