Danville, California — At 106 years old, Alice Darrow can vividly recall her days as a nurse during World War II, part of a pioneering group that dodged bullets as they transported packages filled with medical supplies and treated burns and gunshot wounds to troops.
Some nurses were killed by enemy fire. Others spent years as prisoners of war. Most returned home to live a quiet life, receiving little appreciation.
Darrow sat with patients, even after work hours. One of them arrived at your hospital in Mare Island, California, with a bullet lodged in his heart. She was not expected to survive the surgery, but it would change her life.
“To them, you are everything because you take care of them,” she said, sitting in her home in the San Francisco Bay Area town of Danville.
Eighty years after the war ended, a coalition of retired military nurses and others are campaigning to award one of the nation’s highest civilian honors, the Congressional Gold Medal, to all nurses who served in World War II. Other groups, such as Women’s Air Force Service Pilots of World War II and the real-life Rosie the Riveters, have already received this honor.
“I think the general public often doesn’t realize the contribution that nurses have made in almost every war,” said Patricia Ubah, a retired colonel who served as an Army nurse in conflicts overseas, and whose late mother was also an Army nurse in the South Pacific in World War II.
Only a few, like Darrow, are still alive. The coalition knows that five nurses from World War II are still alive, including Elsie Chen Yuen Seeto, 107, who became the first Chinese-American nurse to join the Army Nurse Corps. They fear they are running out of time to honor the pioneers.
“It is time to honor the nurses who took action and did their part to defend our freedom,” U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat from Wisconsin, said in a statement.
Baldwin and U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York, have sponsored legislation to award the medal, but it faces significant difficulties. It requires two-thirds of each chamber — 67 cosponsors in the Senate and 290 in the House — and so far, the bills have eight and six cosponsors, respectively.
Before the war, there were fewer than 600 nurses in the US Army and 1,700 in the US Navy. By the end of the war, these numbers had swelled to 59,000 in the army and 14,000 in the navy.
Bills introduced by Congress cite horrific examples of courage. Some nurses served aboard Navy hospital ships treating patients when the ships came under fire. Sixty nurses landed off the coast of North Africa on November 8, 1942, to set up shop and take care of the invading forces.
“Without weapons, they waded ashore through enemy sniper fire and eventually took refuge in an abandoned civilian hospital,” the legislation states.
Nurses save lives. The legislation stipulates that less than 4% of American soldiers in World War II who received medical care in the field or underwent evacuation died from their wounds or illnesses.
“They probably saw more casualties. They probably saw more chemical casualties,” says Edward Yakel, a retired colonel and president of the World War II Nurses Association. “Remember, they didn’t have disposable products, so they had to sterilize everything.”
“Without them, we wouldn’t have the knowledge base we need now to fight today’s wars,” he says.
Some nurses suffered from harsh captivity. In 1942, approximately 80 military nurses were captured when the United States handed over the Philippines to Japan. The women, who were held as prisoners of war, endured rations of starvation and disease, but continued to work until their liberation three years later.
Nurses played major roles in 600 U.S. Army hospitals around the world and 700 prisoner-of-war camps on military bases in the United States, said Phoebe Pollitt, a retired nurse and nursing professor at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. But their role has gone largely unrecognized.
“Even in women’s history and health care history, nurses are kind of at the bottom of the barrel,” she said.
The majority of military nurses were white, and those who were not often had to fight for the right to serve.
In 1941, only 56 black nurses were allowed to join the US Army. Japanese American applicants, whose families were imprisoned during the war, were not accepted into the Army Nurse Corps until 1943.
Elsie Chen Yuen Situ was born in Stockton, California, but spent her adolescence in China. She joined the Chinese Red Cross Medical Relief Corps in non-occupied China after escaping Japanese forces in Hong Kong.
She later applied to join the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, but they said she had a commitment to serving her country, meaning China.
An angry Chinese-American medical officer fired off a letter on Situ’s behalf, stating that she was an American citizen. She became the first Chinese-American nurse to join the Army Nurse Corps, where she served in China and India before returning to the United States.
She already has a Congressional Gold Medal Awarded to Chinese Americans For their service in the war despite the discrimination they faced.
“We answered the call of duty when our country faced threats to our freedom,” she said in video-recorded remarks at the 2020 ceremony.
Among the patients Darrow cared for was a young soldier wounded in Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Before having surgery to remove the bullet in his heart, he asked her if she would go on a date with him if he made it through.
“I said, ‘Well sure, you can count on me,’” she says with a laugh. “I couldn’t say, ‘No, I don’t think you’re going to make it.’”
Din Darrow survived and they got out. The couple kept the 7.7mm bullet. They married and had four children. 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 from around the world could learn about its significance and the love story behind it.
Darrow said she was looking forward to seeing the bullet on display. The Congressional Gold Medal will be another treasure to look forward to.
“It would be an honor,” she said.
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Terry Tang of the AP Race and Ethnicity team contributed from Phoenix, Arizona.