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DANVILLE, Calif. — At age 106, Alice Darrow can clearly recall her days as a nurse during World War II, part of a pioneering group that dodged bullets as they hauled packs full of medical supplies and treated the burns and gunshot wounds of troops.
Some nurses were killed by enemy fire. Others spent years as prisoners of war. Most returned home to quiet lives, receiving little recognition.
Darrow sat with patients, even after-hours. One of them had arrived at her hospital on California’s Mare Island with a bullet lodged in his heart. He was not expected to survive surgery, yet he would change her life.
“To them, you’re everything because you’re taking care of them,” she said, sitting at her home in the San Francisco Bay Area town of Danville.
A bullet struck his heart at Pearl Harbor. His widow just returned it.
Eighty years after the war ended, a coalition of retired military nurses and others is campaigning to award one of the nation’s highest civilian honors, the Congressional Gold Medal, to all nurses who served in WWII. Other groups, such as the Women Airforce Service Pilots of WWII and the real-life Rosie the Riveters, have already received the honor.
“The general public doesn’t often recognize, I think, the contribution that the nurses have made in pretty much every war,” said Patricia Upah, a retired colonel who served as an Army nurse in conflicts abroad, and whose late mother was also a Army nurse in the South Pacific in World War II.
Only a handful, like Darrow, are still alive. The coalition knows of five World War II nurses who are still living — including Elsie Chin Yuen Seetoo, 107, who became the first Chinese American nurse to join the Army Nurse Corps. They fear time is running out to honor the trailblazers.
“It’s high time we honor the nurses who stepped up 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 New York Republican, have sponsored legislation to award the medal, but it faces steep odds. It needs 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.
Saving lives in the face of danger
Before the war, there were fewer than 600 nurses with the U.S. Army and 1,700 with the U.S. Navy. By the end of the war, those numbers had ballooned to 59,000 in the Army and 14,000 in the Navy.
The Congressional bills cite harrowing examples of bravery. Some nurses served on Navy hospital ships treating patients as the vessels came under fire. Sixty nurses landed off the coast of North Africa on Nov. 8, 1942, to set up shop and care for invading troops.
“Without weapons, they waded ashore amid enemy sniper fire and ultimately took shelter in an abandoned civilian hospital,” the legislation states.
The nurses saved lives. Fewer than 4% of U.S. soldiers in WWII who received medical care in the field or underwent evacuation died from wounds or disease, the legislation states.
“They probably saw more infections. They probably saw more chemical casualties. Remember, they didn’t have disposable products, so they had to sterilize everything,” says Edward Yackel, a retired colonel and president of the Army Nurse Corps Association, of World War II nurses.
“Without them,” he says, “we would not have the knowledge base we need now to fight the wars of today.”
Some nurses endured harsh captivity. In 1942, nearly 80 military nurses were captured when the U.S. surrendered the Philippines to Japan. Held as prisoners of war, the women endured starvation rations and disease but continued to work until their liberation three years later.
Nurses played outsized roles in 600 U.S. Army hospitals worldwide and 700 prisoner-of-war camps at military bases in the U.S., said Phoebe Pollitt, a retired nurse and professor of nursing at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. But their role has largely gone unrecognized.
“Within even women’s history and health care history, nurses are kind of at the bottom of the barrel,” she said.
Breaking color barriers
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 into the U.S. Army. Japanese American applicants, whose families were incarcerated during the war, were not accepted into the Army Nurse Corps until 1943.
Elsie Chin Yuen Seetoo was born in Stockton, California, but spent her teens China. She joined the Chinese Red Cross Medical Relief Corps in unoccupied China after fleeing Japanese forces in Hong Kong.
She later applied to the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, but they said she had an obligation to serve her country — and that meant China.
An indignant Chinese American medical officer fired off a letter on Seetoo’s behalf, stating that she was a U.S. citizen. She became the first Chinese American nurse to join the Army Nurse Corps, working in China and India before returning to the U.S.
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 to duty when our country faced threats to our freedom,” she said in video recorded remarks at the 2020 ceremony.
A love story
Among the patients Darrow cared for was a young soldier wounded in Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Before surgery to remove the bullet in his heart, he asked 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, and laughs. “I couldn’t say, ‘No, I don’t think you’re going to make it.’”
Dean Darrow did survive and they did go out. The couple kept the 7.7 mm bullet. They married and raised 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 of its significance and the love story behind it.
Darrow said she’s looking forward to seeing the bullet on display. The Congressional Gold Medal would be another treasure to look forward to.
“It would be an honor,” she said.
Terry Tang of AP’s race and ethnicity team contributed from Phoenix, Arizona.
