RSS'They needed nurses'
Service took her from Kansas to Africa to FranceYakima Herald-Republic
E-mail
Print
The War Years – Special SectionWar Years Photo Gallery
More 'Special Project'
- War Stories: Norma Baird
- War Stories: Reva Blomé-Bunnell
- Letting it out
- Aboard the Superfortress
- 'They needed nurses'
- Grim and grimy
- Before Pearl Harbor
Naida Hurlburt hadn't considered military service as she embarked on a nursing career.
Then along came World War II.
Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the military called for volunteer nurses to help provide medical care in the field and in hospitals.
Hurlburt, who was living in Portland, offered to serve in the 46th General Hospital unit, associated with the University of Oregon's medical school.
"It looked like the thing to do. They needed nurses," Hurlburt said in an interview from her Yakima apartment.
Military nurses at the time were required to belong to the American Red Cross, so she joined and was soon sent off for a year of training at Fort Riley, Kan.
She was treated as a second lieutenant, even though she and other members did not receive full commissions until after the war.
The general hospital units were designed to provide the full range of services available at a regular hospital, including X-ray, laundry and a kitchen. Slightly more than 100 nurses were assigned along with doctors and other staff.
They shipped out July 15, 1942. They went first to a tent hospital in North Africa. Then, after the Normandy invasion, they were reposted to a former military compound in southern France.
Many of their patients came from Sicily and Italy.
Hurlburt worked in the orthopedic ward, missing some of the grisly surgical duty.
Although surgeons and their staff worked long days during peak periods -- following the Battle of the Bulge in particular -- unit members were given breaks.
In Africa, they were able to take short trips. Hurlburt received a three-day pass to England and was there on the day in April 1945 when President Franklin Roosevelt died.
When she returned to the United States and was discharged, she returned to Portland to work at the veterans hospital there.
One of her patients turned out to be her future husband.
He was a B-17 navigator who lost his lower leg from being shot down over Germany while serving in the Army Air Forces.
They started their relationship with a mutual understanding of the war experience, "and it proved to be a love," said Hurlburt, now 92.
In 1951, the couple settled on a farm near Granger after winning the third spot in the land lottery tied to the Roza irrigation project. There they raised three children.
Hurlburt now lives in a Yakima apartment by herself. Her husband died in 1992.
She laments that the current generation seems to lack an appreciation for the sacrifice of combat.
"They don't want to listen to what somebody else has to say about what they had to go through for our country to get where it is today," she said.
