Alice Darrow, now 106, remembers the acuity of a World War II nurse’s life: dodging enemy fire while hauling medical packs, treating burns and gunshot wounds, and holding the hands of patients so far from home. On California’s Mare Island, she cared for a soldier who arrived with a bullet lodged in his heart. He was not expected to survive the operation, yet he would change the course of her life. “To them, you’re everything because you’re taking care of them,” she says, seated in her home in Danville, a town in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Eighty years on from the war’s end, a coalition of retired military nurses and supporters is campaigning to award the Congressional Gold Medal, one of the United States’ highest civilian honours, to every nurse who served in the Second World War. The effort follows recognition for other pioneering groups of the era, including the Women Airforce Service Pilots and the real-life Rosie the Riveters. “The general public doesn’t often recognise, I think, the contribution that the nurses have made in pretty much every war,” says Patricia Upah, a retired colonel who served as an Army nurse abroad and whose late mother was also an Army nurse in the South Pacific during the conflict.
Only a small number of WWII nurses are still alive today. The coalition is aware of five, among them Elsie Chin Yuen Seetoo, 107, the first Chinese American nurse to join the Army Nurse Corps. Time, they fear, is running out to honour these trailblazers. “It’s high time we honour the nurses who stepped up and did their part to defend our freedom,” U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat, has said. U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican, has co-sponsored the legislation, though it faces steep odds. To advance, each chamber needs a two-thirds majority — 67 sponsors in the Senate and 290 in the House. As of now, there are eight and six respectively.
Before the war, the U.S. Army counted fewer than 600 nurses and the U.S. Navy 1,700. By its conclusion, those figures had expanded to 59,000 Army and 14,000 Navy nurses. The congressional bills cite numerous instances of bravery. Some nurses served on Navy hospital ships, treating casualties as the vessels came under fire. In other operations, nursing teams waded ashore amid enemy sniper fire to establish care in austere environments, ultimately taking shelter in an abandoned civilian hospital. Their work kept survival rates impressively low: fewer than four per cent of WWII soldiers who received medical care in the field or were evacuated died of wounds or disease, the legislation notes.
“Nurses probably saw more infections and more chemical casualties. They had to sterilise everything because they didn’t have disposable products,” says Edward Yackel, a retired colonel and president of the Army Nurse Corps Association. “Without them, we would not have the knowledge base we need now to fight the wars of today.”
Some endured captivity. In 1942, nearly 80 military nurses were captured when the United States surrendered the Philippines to Japan. Held as prisoners of war, they worked on starvation rations and amid disease until liberation three years later. Nurses played outsized roles across 600 U.S. Army hospitals worldwide and 700 prisoner-of-war camps on U.S. military bases, according to Phoebe Pollitt, a retired nurse and professor of nursing at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. Yet their service has largely gone unrecognised. “Within even women’s history and health care history, nurses are kind of at the bottom of the barrel,” she says.
Breaking colour barriers proved a separate struggle. The majority of military nurses were white, and those who were not frequently had to fight for the right to serve. In 1941, only 56 Black nurses were permitted entry into the U.S. Army. Japanese American applicants, whose families were interned during the war, were not accepted into the Army Nurse Corps until 1943.
Elsie Chin Yuen Seetoo, born in Stockton, California, spent her teens in China. After fleeing Japanese forces in Hong Kong, she joined the Chinese Red Cross Medical Relief Corps in unoccupied China. She later applied to the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, but officials said her obligation lay with China. A Chinese American medical officer wrote on her behalf, affirming her U.S. citizenship. She became the first Chinese American nurse to join the Army Nurse Corps, serving in China and India before returning home. She already holds a Congressional Gold Medal awarded to Chinese Americans for their wartime service despite the discrimination they faced. “We answered the call to duty when our country faced threats to our freedom,” she said in recorded remarks at the 2020 ceremony.
Among the patients Darrow tended was a young soldier wounded in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Before surgery to remove the bullet lodged in his heart, he asked if she would go on a date with him, if he survived. “I said, ‘Well sure, you can count on me,’” she recalls, laughing at her inability to refuse. Dean Darrow survived, they went out, kept the 7.7 mm bullet, married, raised four children, and he died in 1991. In September, Alice Darrow took a cruise to Hawaii with her daughter and son-in-law, where she donated the bullet to the Pearl Harbor National Memorial so visitors worldwide could learn its significance and the love story behind it. She says she is looking forward to seeing the bullet on display. A Congressional Gold Medal, she adds, would be another treasure to anticipate. “It would be an honour,” she says.
