Nurse rose through ranks of US Navy to become its first female admiral
When Alene Duerk, who has died aged 98, enlisted in the Navy Nurse Corps at the height of World War II, she envisaged a few months’ service to her country followed by a swift return to civilian life.
Yet after treating scores of wounded sailors and prisoners of war, working alongside other smart, ambitious women, she found that the United States Navy provided a sense of mission and camaraderie that she felt was missing from her workaday life back home, where she worked as a nurse in a department store in Toledo, Ohio.
She went on to a nearly three-decade military career, serving in the early 1970s as the navy’s top nurse and first female admiral. In the latter role, she oversaw a broad expansion of the nurse corps and came to represent the dawning of a new, more equitable era for women in the navy.
Duerk (pronounced ‘‘Dirk’’) was promoted from captain to rear admiral on June 1, 1972, at a ceremony that culminated with Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, the reform-minded chief of naval operations, offering her a congratulatory kiss on the lips.
She would have been legally barred from the rank just five years earlier, under rules that blocked women from becoming generals or flag officers in the armed forces. But those restrictions were removed under president Lyndon Johnson, and in 1970, Anna Mae Hays, chief of the Army Nurse Corps, became America’s first female general.
With her promotion, Duerk became the de facto media spokeswoman for women in the navy, including the 2300 nurses in her charge, as well as women in the Supply Corps and female enlistees known by their World War IIera acronym, Waves.
‘‘Being the first of anything has its responsibilities,’’ she told the New York Post in 1972. ‘‘I’m more than an officer. I’m a symbol, for women in the navy and the military. Women thinking of careers like mine can know that . . . the ultimate is possible.’’
Alene Bertha Duerk was born in Defiance, Ohio. When she was very young, the family home was frequented by nurses tending to her father, who had faced a mustard gas attack while serving in World War I. He died when Alene was 4, and her mother struggled to care for her and a younger sister.
‘‘She raised us to be independent and have a career so that the same thing wouldn’t happen to us that happened to her when my father died,’’ Duerk said. ‘‘She felt too dependent and helpless.’’
Duerk graduated from the Toledo Hospital School of Nursing in Ohio in 1941. Two years later, she enlisted in the Navy Nurse Corps at the suggestion of recruiters with the Red Cross. (Her sister, by then also a nurse, joined the Army Nurse Corps instead.) Her first posting was at the naval hospital in Portsmouth, Virginia.
She recalled in a later interview that antibiotics were rare and penicillin was still a novel treatment. When she administered the drug for the first time, she and her colleagues ‘‘sat there and counted the drops’’ in an IV, slowly delivering 5000 units to a patient because they ‘‘really didn’t know what was going to happen’’.
At Portsmouth, she also received a lesson in the workings of military bureaucracy. ‘‘The most important thing, as far as the navy was concerned, was that I learn how to fill out all the right forms,’’ she said. ‘‘That hasn’t changed. I was a quick learner.’’
In 1945, Duerk was assigned to the Benevolence, a hospital ship that travelled to the Marshall Islands in preparation for an Allied assault on Japan. It was sailing towards Tokyo when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the war and leading Japan to turn over prisoners of war to ships like the Benevolence.
Working 36 hours straight, she and her fellow nurses took in about 750 newly freed prisoners, checking them for lice and diseases and taking requests for icecream, scrambled eggs and ham. ‘‘That was probably the most exciting experience of my whole career.’’
She returned to civilian life briefly, receiving a bachelor’s degree in advanced nursing. She was called up to active duty with the onset of the Korean War. She later developed education programmes in Philadelphia, served as a navy recruiter in Chicago and held top nursing positions at hospitals in the Philippines, Japan and San Diego. She worked at the Pentagon, helping recruit military nurses for Vietnam, before being named head of the Navy Nurse Corps.
‘‘I travelled a lot and made extensive trips,’’ she said. ‘‘And whenever I visited naval hospitals and naval facilities, I tried to speak with the women serving in the navy, and not just the nurses.
‘‘It was a nice distinction to have, and to be recognised as the first, but I wanted to make certain that I used that notoriety to do as much positive as I could,’’ including inspiring others to attain senior positions in the Navy.
After retiring from the navy in 1975, she taught English to Vietnamese immigrants and volunteered with groups including Meals on Wheels. She leaves no immediate survivors.
‘‘I never mapped it out like this,’’ she said in 2016. ‘‘I didn’t go into the navy for a lifetime – I went in for six months. But I had an amazing career and have a lot of good memories. I hope I did my duty.’’ –
‘‘I never mapped it out like this ... But I had an amazing career and have a lot of good memories. I hope I did my duty.’’