The United States Navy Nurse Corps was officially established by Congress in 1908; however, unofficially, women had been working as nurses aboard Navy ships and in Navy hospitals for nearly 100 years.
In 1811, Dr. William P.C. Barton became the first to officially recommend that female nurses be added to naval hospital staff.[1] However, it wasn't until 19 June 1861 that a Navy Department circular order finally established the designation of Nurse, to be filled by junior enlisted men. Fifteen years later, the duties were transferred to the designation Bayman (US Navy Regulations, 1876). Although enlisted personnel were referred to as Nurses, their duties and responsibilities were more related to those of a Hospital Corpsman than to a nurse.
During the American Civil War, several African American women are noted to have served as paid crew aboard the hospital ship Red Rover in the Mississippi River area in the position of nurse. The known names of four nurses are: Alice Kennedy, Sarah Kinno, Ellen Campbell and Betsy Young (Fowler). In addition volunteer nuns from the Catholic Sisters of the Holy Cross also served aboard as nurses.[2]
During the 1898 Spanish-American War, the Navy employed a modest number of female contract nurses in its hospitals ashore and sent trained male nurses to sea on the hospital ship Solace.
After the establishment of the Nurse Corps in 1908 by an Act of Congress, twenty women were selected as the first members and assigned to the Naval Medical School Hospital in Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, the navy did not provide room or board for them, and so the nurses - being a determined lot - rented their own house and provided their own meals. This would be just the first of many obstacles they would overcome on their compassionate march for service equality.[3]
In time, the nurses would come to be known as "The Sacred Twenty" because they were the first women to serve formally as members of the Navy. The "Sacred Twenty", as shown in the photo at the top of this page, were Mary H. Du Bose; Adah M. Pendleton; Elizabeth M. Hewitt; Della V. Knight; Josephine Beatrice Bowman, the third Superintendent of the Navy Nurse Corps, 1922–1935; Lenah H. Sutcliffe Higbee, the second Superintendent of the Navy Nurse Corps, 1911–1922; Esther Voorhees Hasson, the first Superintendent of the Navy Nurse Corps, 1908–1911 ; Martha E. Pringle; Elizabeth J. Wells; Clare L. De Ceu.; Elizabeth Leonhardt; Estelle Hine; Ethel R. Parsons; Florence T. Milburn; Boniface T. Small; Victoria White; Isabelle Rose Roy; Margaret D. Murray; Sara B. Myer; and Sara M. Cox. They would include three Nurse Corps Superintendents and twelve chief nurses.
The Nurse Corps gradually expanded to 160 on the eve of World War I. In addition to normal hospital and clinic duties, the nurses were active in training natives in U.S. overseas possessions as well as the Navy's male enlisted medical personnel. For a few months in 1913, Navy Nurses saw their first shipboard service, aboard Mayflower and Dolphin. The first permanent shipboard positions came in late 1920, when Relief went into commission with a medical staff that included Navy Nurses.
The April 1917 entry of the United States into the First World War brought a great expansion of the Nurse Corps, both Regular and Reserve.
In 1917-18, the Navy deployed five Base Hospital units to operational areas in France, Scotland and Ireland, with the first in place by late 1917. Also serving overseas were special Navy Operating Teams, including nurses, established for detached duty near the combat frontlines. Some of these teams were loaned to the Army during 1918's intense ground offensives and worked in difficult field conditions far removed from regular hospitals.
During the war, 19 Navy Nurses died on active duty, over half of them from influenza. Three of the four Navy Crosses awarded to wartime Navy Nurses went to victims of the fight against the deadly 'flu. The surviving fourth nurse was Lenah H. Sutcliffe Higbee, the second superintendent of the corps, and the first living woman to receive the medal. In 1945, the USS Higbee became the first fighting ship to be named after a woman in the service.[4]
By the time of the Armistice on 11 November 1918, over 1550 nurses had served in Naval hospitals and other facilities at home and abroad. Shortly after the fighting's end, several Navy Nurses were assigned to duty aboard transports bringing troops home from Europe. Some Navy Nurses even ventured on ground patrols and aided Army Soldiers during this time.
With the close of World War I, many turned away from all things war-related and by 1935 the Nurse Corps' numbers had reduced to 332. However, this reduction did not stop the corps from making advances; new courses of study in the areas of diet therapy, neuropsychiatry, physiotherapy, and anesthesia were introduced and it was these educational advances which were key to the steady rise in the corps' professional status within the service. Though generally treated as officers socially and professionally, and wearing uniform stripes similar to those for the officer ranks of Ensign through Lieutenant Commander, formal recognition as Commissioned officers, achieved by U.S. Army nurses in 1920, did not come until World War II.[5]
It was also during this interwar period that paid retirement for longevity and disability was authorized as well as the extension of regular service to include Navy hospital ships. In addition to caring for Naval personnel at home and abroad, the corps responded to a number of civil disasters and assisted in the evacuation of dependents from war-torn China in 1937.
Preparation for the conflict again saw the Nurse Corps grow, with nearly eight hundred members serving on active duty by November 1941, plus over nine hundred inactive reserves. By war's end there would be 1,799 active component nurses and 9,222 reserves scattered across six continents.
Navy nurses were on duty during the initial Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Kāneʻohe Bay, the Philippines, Guam, and aboard the Solace; they were vital in preventing further loss of life and limb. In fact, the nursing profession's vital role was quickly recognized and it became the only women's profession that was deemed so essential as to be placed under the War Manpower Commission. Despite shortages of qualified nurses during the war, the navy was able to hold to its standards and enroll nurses of outstanding qualifications and experience. These outstanding nurses received advanced training in surgery, orthopedics, anesthesia, contagion, dietetics, physiotherapy, and psychiatry, the latter helping men understand and manage Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (then know as shell-shock) and battlefield fatigue. But the navy nurses' duties did not only include the tending to the injured and sick but also to the equally serious task of training Hospital Corpsmen. Many of these young men had never seen the inside of a hospital unless they themselves had been admitted, and as such it was training from the ground up. Once trained, the men were sent to work aboard fighting ships and on invasion beaches, where nurses were not yet officially assigned. Additionally, nurses trained WAVES for the Hospital Corps.[6]
In the Pacific, Navy Nurses were the first American women to be sent to the islands north of New Caledonia, and the first group to Efate, in the New Hebrides. At Efate they cared for the wounded from the long Guadalcanal Campaign, Army as well as Navy and Marine personnel. Others were stationed in New Caledonia, the Solomons, New Zealand, Australia, New Guinea, Coral Sea, Savo, Samoa, Tarawa, Attu, Adak, Dutch Harbor, Kwajalein, Guam, Saipan, Tinian, Leyte, Samar, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. The purpose of these forward operating areas was stabilization. Only when patients were fully stabilized were they sent on to Pearl Harbor, and then eventually to the contiguous United States.
In Europe, navy nurses served in both England and Italy and in North and South America at Trinidad, Panama, Puerto Rico, Bermuda, Brazil, and Newfoundland. Navy nurses were even stationed in Africa.[7]
In the contiguous United States, navy nurses were stationed at 263 locations, consisting of both large naval hospital complexes such as USN Hospital San Diego, California and Bethesda, Maryland as well as at a multitude of smaller naval convalescent hospitals and training station facilities. One of the more colorful convalescent hospitals was the USN Convalescent Hospital located at the Sun Valley Lodge in Idaho. After the lodge - built by the Union Pacific Railroad and its chairman W. Averell Harriman - opened in 1936, it quickly became a hotspot for the rich and famous. Notables included Ernest Hemingway who worked on For Whom the Bell Tolls in room #206, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Claudette Colbert, Bing Crosby and Gary Cooper.[8] However, as supporting the war became a top priority and recreation secondary, the lodge was converted into a hospital, opening its doors in July 1943. In 1946 it reverted back to its intended use. The story of the USN Convalescent Hospital is not unlike a host of other facilities which were converted, including the Averell Harriman estate in the Bear Mountains of the Catskills and the Ahwahnee Hotel at Yosemite National Park.
Aboard hospital ships, navy nurses followed the fleet in their assaults, and were eventually permitted to go to the beaches with the fighting men to pick up the wounded. Early in the war only the USS Solace and USS Relief brought comfort to the wounded fighting men via all-navy medical personnel. Later the Bountiful, Samaritan, Refuge, Haven, Benevolence, Tranquility, Consolation, Repose, Sanctuary, and Rescue were added.[9]
Two groups of Navy nurses were held prisoner by the Japanese in World War II. Chief Nurse Marion Olds and nurses Leona Jackson, Lorraine Christiansen, Virginia Fogerty and Doris Yetter were taken prisoner on Guam shortly after Pearl Harbor and transported to Japan. They were repatriated in August 1942, although the newspaper did not identify them as Navy nurses.
Chief Nurse Laura Cobb and her nurses, Mary Chapman, Bertha Evans, Helen Gorzelanski, Mary Harrington, Margaret Nash, Goldie O'Haver, Eldene Paige, Susie Pitcher, Dorothy Still and C. Edwina Todd (some of the "Angels of Bataan") were captured in 1942 and imprisoned in the Los Baños internment camp, where they continued to function as a nursing unit, until they were rescued by American forces in 1945. Other Los Baños prisoners later said: "We are absolutely certain that had it not been for these nurses many of us who are alive and well would have died."[10] The nurses were awarded the Bronze Star Medal by the Army, a second award by the Navy and the Army's Distinguished Unit Badge.
Ann Agnes Bernatitus, one of the Angels of Bataan, nearly became a POW; she was one of the last to escape Corregidor Island, via the USS Spearfish. Upon her return to the United States she became the first American to receive the Legion of Merit.
The first group of 24 navy flight nurses graduated from the Navy Flight Nurse School at the Alameda Naval Air Station on 22 January 1945.[11] In addition to flight nurse procedures, they were trained to swim one mile, tow or push a victim for 220 yards, and swim 440 yards in 10 minutes.[12] The newly minted flight nurses soon began active flying service on 24 flying teams, consisting of a nurse and a pharmacist's mate. Each 12-plane squadron operated with the following medical personnel: 24 flight nurses, 24 pharmacists' mates, one flight surgeon, and one Hospital Corps officer. After a certain number of transcontinental trips with wounded servicemen, the teams were sent to the Pacific to serve in the Naval Air Evacuation Service, the first arriving in Guam in early February 1945.[13] There were three main flights of air evacuation planes to which flight nurses were assigned. First, from target areas to forward hospitals, such as Guam: second, from those forward hospitals to Pearl Harbor; and third, from Pearl Harbor to the contiguous United States. Nurses were rotated so that flight hours did not exceed 100 per month and they were also rotated between combat and noncombat flights.[14]
An efficient procedure for aerial evacuation from target areas was quickly developed. The squadron flight surgeon and several pharmacists' mates were on the first hospital plane to land on the captured airfield. The surgeon established an evacuation clearing station adjacent to the airstrip, where with the help of his corpsmen, he collected patients from the first-aid and holding stations and screened them for air transport, giving necessary treatment prior to flight. As soon as the second hospital plane landed, the flight nurse aboard received her orders. The plane was loaded and usually departed in approximately 45 minutes, the flight nurse being responsible for all patients aboard. With the corpsman's aid, she dressed wounds, administered whole blood or plasma, gave medications, and fed the patients. Using this procedure, within 30 days, approximately 4,500 injured men were flown out of Okinawa alone.[15]
Flight nurse Jane "Candy" Kendeigh was among the first flight nurses to fly to and from an active battlefield in the Pacific when, on March 3, 1945, she flew round-trip from Guam to Iwo Jima to aid in the evacuation of wounded U.S. Marines.[16] As luck would have it, Ensign Kendeigh was also aboard the Navy's first medical evacuation flight bound for Okinawa, making her the first Navy flight nurse on both Iwo Jima and Okinawa. After her heroic work in Iwo Jima, she was sent back to the U.S. to participate in a War Bond drive. Soon after she started that assignment, she requested to be sent back into the Pacific combat zone. She flew her missions with Agana, Guam based Air Evacuation Transport Squadron One (VRE-1), which was an elite unit of the Naval Air Transport Service (NATS).
The need for naval medical facilities in Asia grew when the war began. A small naval dispensary at Yokosuka, staffed by only six nurses, evolved into a full-fledged hospital staffed by 200 nurses. The Navy Nurse Corps expanded its ranks by recalling Reserve nurses with World War II experience. It temporarily reduced staffs at continental hospitals to staff the forward area. The Navy also commissioned civilian nurses. These nurses served in hospitals as well as aboard the USS Haven and two other Haven-class ships, where almost 35 percent of battle casualties were admitted through September 1952. These hospital ships were a new type of mobile hospital, moving from place to place, sometimes supporting the Inchon invasion or aiding the Hungnam evacuation, or simply shifting about the Korean coast as needed. Two senior Navy nurses, Commander Estelle Kalnoske Lange and Lieutenant Ruth Cohen, received the Bronze Star for their work on the Navy hospital ships.[17]
Lt. Sarah Griffin Chapman, who had lost her lower left leg in an accident and retired prior to Korea, fought to be recalled to active duty so that she could teach other young amputees how to walk again.[18]
Though outside the Korean theater, one aviation accident claimed the lives of 11 Navy nurses. The mishap occurred on the South Pacific island of Kwajalein on Sept. 19, 1950. These women were en route to hospitals in Japan to care for war casualties when their plane crashed into the Pacific shortly after take off.[17]
In 1963 Lt. Bobbi Hovis volunteered to go to Vietnam, where she and four other nurses were tasked with converting a run-down Saigon apartment into the first US Navy Station Hospital—in four days.[19]
The first four Navy Nurse Corps Officers to be injured in combat support occurred in Vietnam [Saigon] when LT Ruth Mason, LT Frances Crumpton, LT Barbara Wooster and LTJG Ann Darby Reynolds were wounded and later received the Purple Heart Medal. Navy nurses went on to serve: in the Provincial Health Assistance Program at Rach Gia from 1965 to 1968; on the USS Repose from January 1966 to May 1970 (reaching a full complement of 29 nurses by March 1966 and serving as many as 200 helicopter admissions during a 24 hour period of intense fighting); on the USS Sanctuary from April 1967 to November 1972 (also with a complement of 29 nurses); and at the station hospital at DaNang from August 1967 to May 1970 (which became the largest combat casualty treatment facility in the world, with 600 beds and admissions of 63,000 patients).[20]
Navy Nurses are deployed all over the world; participating in humanitarian and combat support missions with Fleet Surgical Teams, as flight nurses, aboard hospital ships and aircraft carriers, and boots on ground with the Marine Corps and Army.
The Nurse Corps continues as a prominent part of the Navy Medicine establishment. As of 2010[update], the Director of the Navy Nurse Corps is Rear Admiral (upper half) Elizabeth S. Niemyer, the 23rd Director of the Navy Nurse Corps. Currently, it consists of officers of the rank of Ensign and to Rear Admiral (upper half). Navy Nurse Corps officers are commissioned through ROTC, STA-21, MECP, Nurse Candidate Program, or by direct commission.
The Nurse Corps has a distinctive insignia of a single Oak Leaf, on one collar point, or in place of a line officer's star on shoulder boards.
Navy Nurse Corps Officers are eligible to earn and wear the Fleet Marine Force, Surface, and Flight Nurse warfare badges. Navy Nurse Corps Officers can also earn the Army combat badge but are not currently authorized to wear it.
From its founding in 1908 until after World War II in 1947, the Navy Nurse Corps was led by a superintendent. Its nurses had no permanent commissioned rank. The Army-Navy Nurses Act took effect on 16 April 1947, establishing the Navy Nurse Corps as a staff corps, with officers holding permanent commissioned rank from ensign to commander. The corps was to be led by a director holding the rank of captain while in that position.
| • | Esther Voorhees Hasson | ( August 1908 | – January 1911) | |
| • | Lenah Sutcliffe Higbee | ( January 1911 | – November 1922) | |
| • | LCDR Josephine Beatrice Bowman | ( November 1922 | – January 1935) | |
| • | LCDR Myn M. Hoffman | ( January 1935 | – October 1938) | |
| • | Virginia Rau (acting) | ( October 1938 | – February 1939) | |
| • | CAPT Sue S. Dauser | ( February 1939 | – November 1945) | |
| • | CAPT Nellie Jane DeWitt | ( November 1945 | – April 1947) |
| • | CAPT Nellie Jane DeWitt | ( April 1947 | – May 1950) | |
| • | CAPT Winnie Gibson | ( May 1950 | – May 1954) | |
| • | CAPT Wilma Leona Jackson | ( May 1954 | – May 1958) | |
| • | CAPT Ruth Agatha Houghton | ( May 1958 | – April 1962) | |
| • | CAPT Ruth Alice Erickson | ( April 1962 | – April 1966) | |
| • | Captain Veronica Bulshefski | ( April 1966 | – May 1970) | |
| • | Rear Admiral Alene B. Duerk | ( May 1970 | – July 1975) | |
| • | Rear Admiral Maxine Conder | ( July 1975 | – July 1979) | |
| • | Rear Admiral Frances Shea-Buckley | ( July 1979 | – October 1983) | |
| • | Rear Admiral Mary Joan Nielubowicz | ( October 1983 | – September 1987) | |
| • | Rear Admiral Mary Fields Hall | ( September 1987 | – September 1991) | |
| • | Rear Admiral Mariann Stratton | ( September 1991 | – September 1994) | |
| • | Rear Admiral Joan Marie Engel | ( September 1994 | – 1998) | |
| • | Rear Admiral Kathleen L. Martin | ( 1998 | – 2001) | |
| • | Rear Admiral (upper half) Nancy J. Lescavage | ( 2001 | – 2005) | |
| • | Rear Admiral (upper half) Christine Bruzek-Kohler | ( 2005 | – 2009) | |
| • | Rear Admiral (upper half) Karen Flaherty | ( 2009 | – 2010) | |
| • | Rear Admiral (upper half) Elizabeth S. Niemyer | ( 2010 | – current) |
In and Out of Harm's Way: A history of the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps. by Doris M. Sterner
This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the Naval History & Heritage Command.
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