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thedrifter
04-03-06, 06:40 AM
Article published Apr 3, 2006
Jim Schlosser: Army nurse who sketched battles recalls war
Greensboro News-Record

GREENSBORO -- With sketchbook and pencil, Army nurse Nickie McClure drew an astonishing scene 61 years ago on the Pacific island of Iwo Jima.

Not a tree stood nor a blade of grass grew.

"It had been like a jungle before," she said at the Well Spring retirement community, where she has lived since moving here from Texas in 2003 to be near her son.

It was obvious a ferocious battle had taken place a few months before. Some 110,000 Marines went ashore and conquered the dug-in Japanese.

Even so, post-battle Iwo Jima wasn't safe. Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender hid in caves. The first night after McClure arrived, Japanese planes bombed the island's airstrip.

McClure is a proud female World War II vet, a group often overlooked when male veterans exchange war stories. Her mission wasn't as dangerous. Still, she got shot at and bombed.

She returned home with a sketchbook of drawings from Guam, Saipan and Iwo Jima, all major battle sites in the Allied push to defeat Japan.

She learned to draw in a high school art class in New Jersey. In the Pacific, she bartered a bottle of whiskey for the sketchbook.

As an officer, she was entitled to a bottle a month. A teetotaler, liquor was money to her. She traded a bottle for a bamboo Japanese messenger's box, another for Japanese sneakers with a separate space for the big toe.

On Guam, she remembers seeing the ships docking with wounded from Okinawa and Iwo Jima. Ambulances lined the docks as far as her eye could see. Five wounded men were crowded into each vehicle and taken to the island hospital.

One Marine still wearing the same filthy utilities (called fatigues in the Army) from the battle showed reluctance about being placed on a bed with clean sheets.

"I'm dirty!'' he declared.

"I told him not to worry,'' she said.

When casualty arrivals on Guam slowed, nurses had time to watch movies on an outdoor screen. They were warned to look to their right, left and rear. Japanese, who had refused to surrender and were hiding in the jungle, sneaked in to watch the movie. Others entered the nurses' sleeping quarters and stole food.

After she was sent to Saipan, she was out sketching and a plane kept circling and dipping his wings, she said.

"The pilot was trying to tell us to get the heck out of there." Japanese soldiers lurked.

The Japanese bombed the airstrip at Iwo Jima, 660 miles south of Japan, within hours of her arrival on the island. Later, a Japanese sniper fired a bullet that whizzed by her ear.

The Marines had pretty much ignored the cave-dwelling Japanese as long as they didn't cause trouble. They even left food outside the caves. But when the Japanese fired on nurses, the Marines responded.

"They went after them that night and eliminated them," McClure said.

Even though the wounded from the Iwo Jima battle had been removed and the dead buried in three large temporary cemeteries, Iwo Jima's hospital stayed busy. Japanese bombers and snipers wounded Americans. People were hurt in accidents.

The hospital consisted of a line of tents with patients inside on cots. McClure said she felt bad because nurses had better quarters than patients.

Navy Seabees (construction sailors) built Quonset huts with partitions for privacy and dressers that had been painted blue.

McClure was assigned an American pilot whose plane flipped over and exploded during takeoff at Iwo Jima. His face was completely charred.

With medical supplies limited, McClure treated the man, alternating compresses soaked in mineral oil and saline solution.

"I worked on him for days and days," she said. "Finally, the charred flakes started falling off, and underneath I saw baby-pink skin."

The man recovered and thanked her profusely.

She didn't do any more for him than his mother, wife or girlfriend would have done, she recalled telling him. "I only acted in their behalf."

Because the battle had destroyed the island's vegetation, leaving a volcanic ash surface, McClure had to pull a sheet over her head at night to keep black dust from coating her. She said the military limited time spent on Iwo Jima for fear people might contract silicosis from breathing volcano dust.

McClure was on the island when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, ending the war. She said that she and her comrades approved of President Truman's decision to use the bombs.

"It was the best thing he could have done for us," she said. "It took a lot of courage on his part."

Late in 1945, she sailed back home, docking in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve. From a bus, she marveled at houses aglow with Christmas lights.

"It was a joy to be home," she said.

She returned to civilian life as a nurse. During the Korean War, she went back to the military. There, she met her husband, Dr. Gammon McClure, who became a career Army dentist. She became a housewife, raising three children.

The couple eventually retired to Texas, where her husband died in 1999. Four years later, she moved to Greensboro.

She's proud of her role in saving lives on those faraway Pacific islands, specks on the globe. She's pleased, too, that she helped restore greenery to Iwo Jima. She and others were granted time off to plant trees and grass.

"The grass was starting to grow when we left," she said.

After all these years, Brooke Army Medical Center Hospital calls annually because of her exposure to volcano dust and possibly radiation that drifted from the atomic bomb blasts.

"They only want to know if I'm still alive," she said. "I tell them I'm still kicking. I'll be 85 in September."

Contact Jim Schlosser at 373-7081 or jschlosser@news-record.com

Ellie