thedrifter
06-02-07, 02:09 PM
Flight nurses were angels for WWII wounded
By Tom Vogt - The Columbian via AP
Posted : Saturday Jun 2, 2007 9:17:25 EDT
VANCOUVER, Wash. — In the movie, the flight nurse and the wounded G.I. trade smiles as the C-54 transport plane flies two dozen casualties across the Pacific to a stateside hospital.
Ronald Reagan was supposed to play the G.I., by the way, but wasn’t available.
On the screen, the nurse chats with more wounded soldiers and Marines. She looks at photos of their sweethearts. She shares their excitement when the Golden Gate Bridge comes into view as their plane — nicknamed the “Purple Heart Express” — approaches San Francisco.
That’s the Hollywood version of air evacuation during World War II. The 15-minute movie was filmed as part of a Victory Bond sales campaign.
The film, now being shown at Pearson Air Museum, was a nice salute to a breakthrough in military medicine. But it left out a few things, said the Vancouver woman who was the Army Air Corps nurse shown in the film. It was too tidy, too upbeat, too ... well, Hollywood.
“We took a lot of hurting people home,” Helen Smith said. “The movie doesn’t show it. Civilians in those days were not informed about what was going on.”
One of those hurting soldiers was “a young man who’d lost both arms and both legs,” said Smith, who was known as Lt. “Taffy” Logan when she served as an Army flight nurse.
Soldiers who still had their arms and legs offered other indicators of what they’d gone through. Smith saw it in their eyes, she said, the glassy stares of young men haunted by some of the fiercest combat in the Pacific.
That was the war that Smith saw in places that became synonyms for brutal, bloody combat: Okinawa; Tarawa and Guadalcanal.
She was at New Caledonia and Bougainville, Kwajalein and Saipan, Luzon and Manila, as U.S. forces and their allies fought their way toward Japan.
Smith hit all those Pacific milestones as part of an innovative approach to military medicine. Flight nurses helped transport casualties out of combat zones and fly them to hospitals behind the front lines.
Smith was based at Guadalcanal, but flew all over the Pacific to pick up patients. Casualties expected to recover within two months stayed in the Pacific Theater and returned to duty; the most seriously injured were flown back to the mainland.
For some servicemen, that quick access to stateside medical care was the difference between life and death. It meant they were among those saluting their fallen comrades on this Memorial Day weekend, not someone being remembered for making the ultimate sacrifice.
“We evacuated almost everyone from our forward hospitals by air, and it has unquestionably saved hundreds of lives, thousands of lives,” Gen. Dwight Eisenhower said after the war.
It was the death of a flight nurse that got Smith thinking about following that career path. Her role model had been a woman who was a year ahead of Smith in nursing school.
“She became one of the early flight nurses,” the Vancouver woman said. “She was killed in the European Theater.”
Smith decided to step forward and fill the void.
The women in her training program already were nurses, but the flight part of the job description was something else.
“Only two or three of us had ever been in a plane,” she said in recalling their first training flight.
After a meal of spaghetti and meatballs, “There were not enough brown paper bags to go around,” Smith said, describing the bout of airsickness that followed. “We wondered how we would ever be able to take care of patients.”
But they did, and they did it well. According to an online history of the Army Nurse Corps, more than 1.1 million wounded servicemen were evacuated by air during World War II.
“It is a tribute to the 500 Army nurses [in] 31 medical air evacuation transport squadrons ... that only 46 of the 1,176,048 patients air evacuated throughout the war died en route,” according to the U.S. Army Center of Military History site.
It was a nursing specialty with unique challenges, according to the Army’s history center. Flight nurses faced greater risks from enemy fire than their land-based counterparts because the air-evac transports doubled as cargo planes, according to the Web site. That meant they could not display Red Cross markings that would protect them from enemy fire.
Some patients, with broken jaws, were sedated so they would sleep throughout the trip. Remember the nurses’ reaction to their first in-flight spaghetti-and-meatball dinner? A bout of airsickness could be fatal for someone whose jaw was wired shut.
Not all the injuries were physical: “We had a group of psychiatric patients who had to be tied to litters.”
One of them was a member of the Women’s Army Corps who had been an office worker.
“She seemed so with it,” Smith said. “She begged us to let her go for a walk when we stopped for fuel, so we let her take a walk.”
Taffy Logan and her corpsman, the flight’s other health care specialist, went along with the shell-shocked WAC.
“She went berserk. She took off running, with both us chasing after her.”
In addition to monitoring their patients’ medical conditions, the nurses also boosted morale ... even when they felt like crying themselves.
“You had to make yourself positive, always smiling,” she said. “If you could ever see their sad faces, you’d know why we wanted to keep uplifted.”
The success of the air-evac program meant it became worth celebrating cinematically. Smith doesn’t know why they picked her to portray the nurse in “Perishable: Rush.” She just says that “orders were issued and I was sent.”
She actually was reluctant to leave Guadalcanal behind, Smith admitted.
“I was sorry to leave to make the movie. We were still very busy. I kind of hesitated, but you do what you’re told.”
Lt. Logan spent 30 days on the set in Culver City, Calif., and was the only non-Hollywood member of the production. The script was written by John Shelton, the husband of actress Kathryn Grayson. (After their divorce in 1946, Grayson was briefly engaged to Howard Hughes.)
During the filming, Shelton and Grayson invited Smith to spend the night at their home. The actress had to get up early the next morning to work on a movie, so Smith got up, too, and shampooed Grayson’s hair.
Smith almost had a chance to work with another star during filming of “Perishable: Rush.”
“The patient was supposed to be played by Ronald Reagan, but he wound up elsewhere.”
When Smith returned to the United States after her stint in the Pacific, she was a special guest at two of the bond rallies where the film was shown. She helped raise a total of $140,000 at the two rallies.
As far as the film’s overall production went, “It was too clean to be realistic,” she said.
Back in the Pacific, the movies and the realities of war did meet in an improvised theater.
“Usually, we watched movies on open-air benches,” Smith said. “But on Saipan, there were still snipers, so we saw the movie in a cave. It was ‘Black Beauty,’ with Elizabeth Taylor.
“Okinawa was pretty rough,” she added. “There still was shooting.”
And when it came to the nurses, there were other security concerns.
“I was the only woman on the island,” she said. While she was in her tent at night, “There was someone walking back and forth, all night long.”
Nurses and the servicemen weren’t always separated by armed sentries. Before her flights to San Francisco, “I’d get a shopping list from boys on the island: shoes, and clothing to relax in,” she said.
Taffy even became something of a good-luck charm for a B-29 crew based on Saipan. She bought a doll in Honolulu, and during one of her evac missions to Saipan, Smith gave it to the bomber crew. They named it “Taffy” after her and took it with them on bombing missions. After each mission, they logged the target and the date on the doll’s arm or leg. After the war, one of the crew members mailed the doll back to Smith.
In 1949, she met Air Force pilot Jay Smith in Germany, where he flew supplies during the Berlin Airlift. He was part of a 15-month, 276,926-flight effort that delivered more than 2 million tons of supplies to the city blockaded by the Soviets.
The Smiths were married for three months when Jay was transferred to South Korea.
Eventually, they settled in California, where Jay died in 1987. Helen Smith moved three years ago to Vancouver, where her son Kevin and daughter-in-law Karen are raising their family.
As Helen Smith sits in her Cascade Park dining room, looking through decades-old photographs and WWII keepsakes, she takes a low-key approach to her contribution.
“The men who should have gotten credit were the corpsmen” who took the wounded off the battlefield, she said.
And, of course, there were the casualties themselves — like that soldier who’d lost both arms and both legs.
“He wrote me many times,” Smith said. “At home, he’d been a farm boy.”
After being fitted with prosthetics to replace his missing limbs, “that young man was able to help his father on the farm,” Smith said. “He was the most amazing person.”
Ellie
By Tom Vogt - The Columbian via AP
Posted : Saturday Jun 2, 2007 9:17:25 EDT
VANCOUVER, Wash. — In the movie, the flight nurse and the wounded G.I. trade smiles as the C-54 transport plane flies two dozen casualties across the Pacific to a stateside hospital.
Ronald Reagan was supposed to play the G.I., by the way, but wasn’t available.
On the screen, the nurse chats with more wounded soldiers and Marines. She looks at photos of their sweethearts. She shares their excitement when the Golden Gate Bridge comes into view as their plane — nicknamed the “Purple Heart Express” — approaches San Francisco.
That’s the Hollywood version of air evacuation during World War II. The 15-minute movie was filmed as part of a Victory Bond sales campaign.
The film, now being shown at Pearson Air Museum, was a nice salute to a breakthrough in military medicine. But it left out a few things, said the Vancouver woman who was the Army Air Corps nurse shown in the film. It was too tidy, too upbeat, too ... well, Hollywood.
“We took a lot of hurting people home,” Helen Smith said. “The movie doesn’t show it. Civilians in those days were not informed about what was going on.”
One of those hurting soldiers was “a young man who’d lost both arms and both legs,” said Smith, who was known as Lt. “Taffy” Logan when she served as an Army flight nurse.
Soldiers who still had their arms and legs offered other indicators of what they’d gone through. Smith saw it in their eyes, she said, the glassy stares of young men haunted by some of the fiercest combat in the Pacific.
That was the war that Smith saw in places that became synonyms for brutal, bloody combat: Okinawa; Tarawa and Guadalcanal.
She was at New Caledonia and Bougainville, Kwajalein and Saipan, Luzon and Manila, as U.S. forces and their allies fought their way toward Japan.
Smith hit all those Pacific milestones as part of an innovative approach to military medicine. Flight nurses helped transport casualties out of combat zones and fly them to hospitals behind the front lines.
Smith was based at Guadalcanal, but flew all over the Pacific to pick up patients. Casualties expected to recover within two months stayed in the Pacific Theater and returned to duty; the most seriously injured were flown back to the mainland.
For some servicemen, that quick access to stateside medical care was the difference between life and death. It meant they were among those saluting their fallen comrades on this Memorial Day weekend, not someone being remembered for making the ultimate sacrifice.
“We evacuated almost everyone from our forward hospitals by air, and it has unquestionably saved hundreds of lives, thousands of lives,” Gen. Dwight Eisenhower said after the war.
It was the death of a flight nurse that got Smith thinking about following that career path. Her role model had been a woman who was a year ahead of Smith in nursing school.
“She became one of the early flight nurses,” the Vancouver woman said. “She was killed in the European Theater.”
Smith decided to step forward and fill the void.
The women in her training program already were nurses, but the flight part of the job description was something else.
“Only two or three of us had ever been in a plane,” she said in recalling their first training flight.
After a meal of spaghetti and meatballs, “There were not enough brown paper bags to go around,” Smith said, describing the bout of airsickness that followed. “We wondered how we would ever be able to take care of patients.”
But they did, and they did it well. According to an online history of the Army Nurse Corps, more than 1.1 million wounded servicemen were evacuated by air during World War II.
“It is a tribute to the 500 Army nurses [in] 31 medical air evacuation transport squadrons ... that only 46 of the 1,176,048 patients air evacuated throughout the war died en route,” according to the U.S. Army Center of Military History site.
It was a nursing specialty with unique challenges, according to the Army’s history center. Flight nurses faced greater risks from enemy fire than their land-based counterparts because the air-evac transports doubled as cargo planes, according to the Web site. That meant they could not display Red Cross markings that would protect them from enemy fire.
Some patients, with broken jaws, were sedated so they would sleep throughout the trip. Remember the nurses’ reaction to their first in-flight spaghetti-and-meatball dinner? A bout of airsickness could be fatal for someone whose jaw was wired shut.
Not all the injuries were physical: “We had a group of psychiatric patients who had to be tied to litters.”
One of them was a member of the Women’s Army Corps who had been an office worker.
“She seemed so with it,” Smith said. “She begged us to let her go for a walk when we stopped for fuel, so we let her take a walk.”
Taffy Logan and her corpsman, the flight’s other health care specialist, went along with the shell-shocked WAC.
“She went berserk. She took off running, with both us chasing after her.”
In addition to monitoring their patients’ medical conditions, the nurses also boosted morale ... even when they felt like crying themselves.
“You had to make yourself positive, always smiling,” she said. “If you could ever see their sad faces, you’d know why we wanted to keep uplifted.”
The success of the air-evac program meant it became worth celebrating cinematically. Smith doesn’t know why they picked her to portray the nurse in “Perishable: Rush.” She just says that “orders were issued and I was sent.”
She actually was reluctant to leave Guadalcanal behind, Smith admitted.
“I was sorry to leave to make the movie. We were still very busy. I kind of hesitated, but you do what you’re told.”
Lt. Logan spent 30 days on the set in Culver City, Calif., and was the only non-Hollywood member of the production. The script was written by John Shelton, the husband of actress Kathryn Grayson. (After their divorce in 1946, Grayson was briefly engaged to Howard Hughes.)
During the filming, Shelton and Grayson invited Smith to spend the night at their home. The actress had to get up early the next morning to work on a movie, so Smith got up, too, and shampooed Grayson’s hair.
Smith almost had a chance to work with another star during filming of “Perishable: Rush.”
“The patient was supposed to be played by Ronald Reagan, but he wound up elsewhere.”
When Smith returned to the United States after her stint in the Pacific, she was a special guest at two of the bond rallies where the film was shown. She helped raise a total of $140,000 at the two rallies.
As far as the film’s overall production went, “It was too clean to be realistic,” she said.
Back in the Pacific, the movies and the realities of war did meet in an improvised theater.
“Usually, we watched movies on open-air benches,” Smith said. “But on Saipan, there were still snipers, so we saw the movie in a cave. It was ‘Black Beauty,’ with Elizabeth Taylor.
“Okinawa was pretty rough,” she added. “There still was shooting.”
And when it came to the nurses, there were other security concerns.
“I was the only woman on the island,” she said. While she was in her tent at night, “There was someone walking back and forth, all night long.”
Nurses and the servicemen weren’t always separated by armed sentries. Before her flights to San Francisco, “I’d get a shopping list from boys on the island: shoes, and clothing to relax in,” she said.
Taffy even became something of a good-luck charm for a B-29 crew based on Saipan. She bought a doll in Honolulu, and during one of her evac missions to Saipan, Smith gave it to the bomber crew. They named it “Taffy” after her and took it with them on bombing missions. After each mission, they logged the target and the date on the doll’s arm or leg. After the war, one of the crew members mailed the doll back to Smith.
In 1949, she met Air Force pilot Jay Smith in Germany, where he flew supplies during the Berlin Airlift. He was part of a 15-month, 276,926-flight effort that delivered more than 2 million tons of supplies to the city blockaded by the Soviets.
The Smiths were married for three months when Jay was transferred to South Korea.
Eventually, they settled in California, where Jay died in 1987. Helen Smith moved three years ago to Vancouver, where her son Kevin and daughter-in-law Karen are raising their family.
As Helen Smith sits in her Cascade Park dining room, looking through decades-old photographs and WWII keepsakes, she takes a low-key approach to her contribution.
“The men who should have gotten credit were the corpsmen” who took the wounded off the battlefield, she said.
And, of course, there were the casualties themselves — like that soldier who’d lost both arms and both legs.
“He wrote me many times,” Smith said. “At home, he’d been a farm boy.”
After being fitted with prosthetics to replace his missing limbs, “that young man was able to help his father on the farm,” Smith said. “He was the most amazing person.”
Ellie