Nurses in Opera - 12 Apr 2025

Last in a Series of Ten Blogs offering A Short History of Nursing from antiquity through the
mid-twentieth century. Part 1 – From Sacred to Secular – covers nursing in ancient
times through the Crimean War. Part 2 – From Civilian to Military – continues with
the establishment of the Saint Thomas School of Nursing through World War II.

A Short History of Nursing
Through World War II

Part 2 From Civilian to Military Nurses
World War II

The Treaty of Versailles had crafted a precarious peace. When Adolf Hitler invaded Poland with his rearmed German army in September 1939, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, and World War II began. The United States entered the war in December 1941 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

With their respective entries into the war, the British and United States militaries were understaffed for nurses to treat the sick and wounded soldiers, sailors, and airmen at the diverse battlefronts. Increasing the number of nurses in the military and in civilian life was a major issue facing the governments and nursing leaders of both countries who implemented two strategies to expand the pool of qualified nurses on which the military could draw – admitting more students to nursing schools, and shortening the length of training to produce more nurses in less time. The U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps established in 1943 under the U.S. Public Health Service, offered free nursing education to students who agreed to work in essential military or civilian nursing for the duration of the war after graduation; over 160,000 women took advantage of the opportunity.

Military nurses in World War II differed from their predecessors in World War I in significant ways. Their work took them closer to the front lines of battle, exposing them to increased dangers including enemy attack that for some nurses in Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Philippines, led to capture and imprisonment as prisoners of war. Not only did nurses work on hospital trains and on hospital ships as they had in previous wars, the wide-flung fields of battle necessitated transporting sick and wounded patients by air to medical facilities for further treatment. The U.S. Army Air Forces took the innovative step of training army flight nurses to provide care to patients aboard cargo aircraft reconfigured for air evacuation. 1

Whether in the air, on the ground, or at sea, World War II nurses demonstrated more autonomy in practice than they had in past wars or in civilian settings. In collaboration with medical officers, they applied recent medical advances to patient care, such as use of the miracle drug penicillin, safer blood transfusions, complex wound care, and innovative burn treatments and, when required, performed minor surgical procedures. As Jane Brooks argues in Negotiating Nursing: British Nursing Sisters and Soldiers in the Second World War, “these new skills and technologies became part of the lexicon of nursing work on active service,” requiring not just technical know-how but also critical judgments usually associated with medicine. 2 Nurses on active duty overseas worked to expand traditional nursing work and brokered their place as women in a war zone, “the one impregnable male bastion.” 3 They faced possible conscription when inability of the United States to graduate enough nurses for wartime service led President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to make the unprecedented call for a nurse draft.

Nurses of World War II were among the troops evacuated at Dunkirk, on the beachhead at Anzio, and on the shores of Normandy on or within days of an invasion. Although some physicians still considered the women a burden, the wounded troops were of a different mind. When the Forty-Eighth Surgical Hospital personnel with chief nurse Theresa Archard landed in North Africa with the first invasion in November 1942, “The sick boys were incredulous. ‘Do you mean to say American nurses are here so soon?’ Little did they know that we had come off with them, waded ashore, and dodged bullets just as they had.” 4 It took the intervention of the hospital commander, however, before the medical staff treated the nurses with respect and learned to appreciate their invaluable contribution to patient care.

In her study of World War II British Army nurses’ place at the front and at the bedside, Brooks notes:

The placing of female nurses en masse so close to the front line was a considerable shift in medical policy from previous wars and created a physical space in which to practise that had hitherto eluded them. Furthermore, the acknowledgement of their importance to the war effort that had led to their inclusion in front-line duty raised their confidence. As nurses were posted to ever more hostile places, they started to expect the space to develop their clinical practice and cultivate their position as professional women alongside their male medical colleagues. 5

That position was not without its irony, however. According to Brooks, military authorities considered the presence of women at the front “a powerful tool” and “weapon to encourage the continued participation of men in battle.” 6 Brooks does not specify whether this crucial morale booster was due to the nurses’ clinical skills or to their gender, but one cannot rule out the plausibility of both. If a feminine appearance was what military authorities sought, however, it soon was subdued when the British and later the American military nurses traded their traditional nurse attire for the more practical men’s “battle-dress” duty fatigues. 7 The nurses were well aware that while their gender could block their access to front-line duties for their own protection, “it also was their ticket” into this clearly masculine space; in order to prove their worth as clinicians in a war zone, they first had to get there. 8 But that entrée was not without its danger; in some cases, the front came to the nurses, not the other way around, during attacks on land and at sea.

Just under a hundred U.S. military nurses – most of them army, but some navy – were stationed in the Philippines at the time Pearl Harbor was attacked. Only hours afterward, the Japanese bombed the Philippines, and over the next four months nurses and patients were evacuated for safety first to Manila, then to the Bataan Peninsula where they helped set up two jungle hospitals to treat thousands of sick and wounded soldiers, and finally to the Malinta Tunnel, an underground military fortress that included a thousand-bed hospital, on Corregidor, a small island in Manila Bay. Before the island fell to the enemy in early May 1942, twenty nurses were flown out on two navy seaplanes and another eleven were taken on board a submarine in daring secret rescue missions. Unfortunately, one of the planes encountered structural damage on takeoff after a refueling stop, and its nurse passengers were left behind on enemy-occupied Mindinao Island once the plane was repaired; the stranded nurses eventually surrendered to the Japanese. The other plane and the submarine delivered their nurse passengers safely to Australia.

The remaining nurses on Corregidor were taken as prisoners of war to Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila, where they endured three years of captivity before their liberation in February 1945. Their chief nurse Maude Davison is credited with having instilled in them a sense of purpose vital to their survival by insisting that they dress in uniform and work at the camp hospital as though they still were on army assignment. Although malnourished and suffering from numerous diseases, all survived the ordeal. 9 The dozen navy nurses staffing the hospital at a newly established internment camp at Los Banos about forty-two miles from Manila were liberated the same month. 10

The homecoming of the nurses from the Philippines in the last year of the war was a major media event in the United States, with the “Angels of Bataan,” as they had been christened, featured in newspapers, journals, and books of the time. Army nurse Juanita Redmond, one of the nurses evacuated safely by air, gives a firsthand account of their ordeal in I Served on Bataan. Elizabeth Norman’s We Band of Angels and Evelyn Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee’s All This Hell recount the nurses’ experiences from a historical perspective. According to Norman, military planners “were sincere in their desire to honor the nurses’ sacrifices, but it is equally clear that the government was keen to turn these ‘heroines’ into recruiting icons, well-coifed, smartly uniformed symbols of American womanhood serving their country and supporting the war.” 11

As the war progressed, the increased call for nurses to serve in the U.S. military put strain on the depleted civilian nurse population. The leading nursing journals supported the war effort, including the need for additional nurses for military service, in a litany of editorials and informative articles beginning the month after the Pearl Harbor attack. By January 1945, the nurse shortage experienced throughout the war had become critical, and President Roosevelt called on Congress to craft and pass a bill to draft nurses into the armed forces. Kalisch and Kalisch note, “The U.S. government for the first and only time in its history, was asking for a draft that discriminated in respect to both occupational category and sex.” 12 Such a step was unheard of, said Congressman Daniel Reed, who appealed to the time-honored images of patriotic angels of mercy and of Good Samaritans who certainly were not slackers. 13 It was not sentiment, however, but facts that would persuade American nurses to “meet their wartime obligation,” Mary Roberts, editor of AJN, believed. 14 But perhaps the wide publicity surrounding the bill’s passage by the House would “be the best kind of campaign to secure voluntary nurses” by furnishing incentive as well as information, a congressman told his colleagues, so that the bill would only “be used as a last resort if the voluntary system fails.” 15

At congressional hearings, the army was called to task for miscalculating and cutting back estimated nurse requirements, discharging married nurses, failing to accept an adequate number of black nurse volunteers, and closing the nurse corps to men. 16 Because the military did not recognize registered nurse as a career field for men, the closest that men came to applying their nursing diplomas was as enlisted medical corpsmen. Congressman Edwin Hall argued “that no woman should be drafted until every male nurse has been made available for duty” and commissioned as a registered nurse. 17

Nursing associations and their leaders, some of whom testified at the hearings, backed the President and accepted the proposed bill as a first step but thought that the military draft should extend to all women. 18 The plan to induct cadet nurses ahead of other nurses was especially contentious in debate on the House floor. Some members of Congress noted that although governmental intent was that cadet nurses would serve primarily in the military, promotional literature clearly had given applicants the choice between military and essential civilian service; cadets should not be punished for a governmental error for which they were not responsible. 19

A vocal minority in Congress was of a different mind, however, and thought that since the government had paid for the cadet nurses’ training, it should have some say-so in whether these nurses served in the military or were employed as civilians. 20 In March 1945 the House passed H.R. 2277, amended to delete the provision to draft the cadet nurses first, and to apply the draft to male as well as female nurses, and referred it to the Senate, where it languished until Germany’s surrender in May, when the Secretary of War determined that no further action to draft nurses would be required. 21

The possibility that nurses would be drafted had created much drama in the media, in the halls of Congress, and in nursing. In the House of Representatives, Frances Payne Bolton noted the drama “of applying the American method of social pressures through publicity” in the recruitment campaigns launched in an effort to avoid a nurse draft. 22 The Congressional Record is replete with dramatic moments, as are the pages of AJN, the mouthpiece of the American Nurses Association, in its coverage of the nurse draft dilemma. Nursing was no stranger to drama; it had begun when Florence Nightingale stepped off the boat onto Turkish soil with her band of nurses and encountered military medical men unwilling to recognize nurses’ contribution to the treatment of sick and wounded soldiers, a scenario that was repeated in later wars as well as in civilian hospitals such as Saint Thomas and King’s College when nursing was gaining a foothold in the medical arena. Not until World War II, when nurses for the U.S. military were in short supply, was their value fully recognized.

To learn how the history of nursing was reflected on the opera stage, see Judith Barger, The Nurse in History and Opera: From Servant to Sister (Lexington Books, 2024).

Notes

See Judith Barger, Beyond the Call of Duty: Army Flight Nursing in World War II (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2013).
Jane Brooks, Negotiating Nursing: British Nursing Sisters and Soldiers in the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 15.
John Laffin, Women in Battle (London: Schuman, 1967), 11.
Theresa Archard, I. Nightingale: The Story of an American Army Nurse (New York: Norton, 1945), 48.
Brooks, Negotiating Nursing, 5.
Ibid. , 93.
7. Katharine Jones, “On Active Service with the Army,” Nursing Times (25 September 1943): 719.
Brooks, Negotiating Nursing, 99.
Santo Tomas was a civilian, not a military prison camp; the U.S. military forces from Bataan and Corregidor were interned elsewhere. See Elizabeth M. Norman, We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Women Trapped on Bataan (New York: Pocket Books, 1999), Early in the war after attacking Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Imperial Army attacked Hong Kong and Singapore. British, Australian, and Canadian nurses, civilian and military, were among those captured and interned in prison camps for the duration of the war.
For more about the navy nurses and their chief nurse Laura M. Cobb, see Jessie Fant Evans, “Release from Los Banos,” AJN 45 (6) (June 1945): 462–63.
Juanita Redmond, I Served on Bataan (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1943); Norman, We Band of Angels, 219; Evelyn M. Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee, All This Hell: U.S. Nurses Imprisoned by the Japanese (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000).
Philip A. Kalisch and Beatrice J. Kalisch, “The Women’s Draft: An Analysis of the Controversy over the Nurses’ Selective Service Bill of 1945,” Nursing Research 22 (5) (September-October 1973): 404. See also “The Proposed Draft of Nurses: Events Leading up to the ANA Board Action Supporting Selective Service Legislation for Nurses,” AJN 45 (2) (February 1945): 87 for the excerpt from Roosevelt’s message to Congress urging an amendment to the Selective Service Act.
Congressional Record [U.S.]: Proceedings and Debate of the 79^th Congress First Session, volume 91 – part 2, House of Representatives, Tuesday, March 6 1945, “Nurses’ Selective Service Bill of 1945,” H.R. 2277, “Mr. Reed,” 1805.
[Mary Roberts], “Objective Accomplished,” AJN 45 (7) (July 1945): 506.
Congressional Record [U.S.]: Proceedings and Debate of the 79^th Congress First Session, volume 91 – part 2, House of Representatives, Wednesday, March 7 1945, “Nurses’ Selective Service Bill of 1945,” H.R. 2277, “Mr. Michener,” 1867.
Congressional Record [U.S.]: Proceedings and Debate of the 79^th Congress First Session, volume 91 – part 2, House of Representatives, Monday, March 5, 1945, “Nurses’ Selective Service Bill of 1945,” H.R. 2277, “Mr. Judd,” 1727–28; “Mrs. Bolton,” 1735; and “Mr. Clason,” 1739. For a perspective of how the media was responding to the proposed nurse draft, see Florence M. Seder, “Newspaper Spotlight on Nursing,” AJN 45 (3): 218–19.
Congressional Record, House of Representatives, Tuesday, March 6, 1945, “Mr. Hall,” 1799.
“The Proposed Draft of Nurses,” 87–88; “The Proposed ‘Nurse Draft’ Legislation: Hearings Before the House Military Affairs Committee,” AJN 45 (3) (March 1945): 171.
Congressional Record, House of Representatives, Tuesday, March 6, 1945, “Mr. Judd,” 1817; Congressional Record, Monday, March 5, 1945, “Mr. Bulwinkle,” 1725.
Congressional Record, House, Tuesday, March 6, 1945, “Mr. Thomason,” 1815. See also Congressional Record, House, Monday, March 5, 1945, “Mr. Elston,” 1737 and “Mr. Robsion,” 1742.
“Bill to Draft Nurses,” in CQ Almanac 1945, 1st ed., 06-67–06-69 (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1946); Edith M. Beattie, “Nurse Draft Legislation and the ANA – A Summary,” AJN 45 (7) (July 1945): 546–48.
Congressional Record, House of Representatives, Monday March 5, 1945, “Mrs. Bolton,” 1735.