Stories of flight nurses come alive
Researchers and family members team up to honor World War II-era Army veterans
Every Memorial Day, Pam Ready reads a wartime letter from a woman she’s never met.
Her Aunt Margaret, an Army flight nurse during World War II, typed the two-page message to her family while flying 8,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean with 20 wounded troops.
“It makes a lump swell in my throat to see this group before me,” Margaret Reeve wrote on Sept. 17, 1944. “One fellow is minus an arm; one a leg; another an eye. … Yet the amazing part of it all is that they can still smile and crack jokes.”
Ready, who lives in Spring, has spent years digging through old family letters and newspaper clippings that offered tantalizing snippets about the life of her Aunt Margaret. Reeve died before Ready had a chance to meet her, and she wished she knew more about the smiling nurse in the pictures she found.
Then Ready received a curious email from Roi Mandel, the head researcher at the genealogy site, MyHeritage.com.
Mandel and his team of researchers had been reading archival records about the doctors and nurses of World War II. They came across news articles about women who underwent rigorous military training and risked their lives as flight nurses.
Reeve was one of the nurses in the news stories.
Mandel, who lives in Israel, located one of Reeve’s relatives in the U.S. and emailed her last week. The message wound up in the inbox of Ready, the unofficial historian of the family. Now Ready knows a little more about the aunt she never met, and MyHeritage.com is publishing a tribute to Reeve and her fellow flight nurses for Memorial Day.
The women were pioneers of military air evacuations who saved thousands of lives — but Mandel said many of their stories have never been told.
“I read a lot about the war of the Pacific, but I never had a chance to learn about the women in the Army who were in really dangerous situations,” Mandel said.
During World War II, Reeve enlisted in the Army and reported to Fort Benning as a second lieutenant on Jan. 2, 1943, according to a brief news article in her hometown newspaper in Calhoun, Georgia.
Later that year, the U.S. launched a massive military campaign in the Pacific to capture strategic islands held by Japanese forces. Articles began appearing in U.S. newspapers about Reeve and other flight nurses who took care of wounded troops as they were flown thousands of miles across the Pacific to hospitals in Hawaii and California.
A full-page newspaper feature published in January 1944 called the flight nurses “Angels of Mercy.”
The photographs in the newspaper showed Reeve and other nurses bivouacked in Hawaii, where they had gone on 20-mile hikes with troops in full field gear. They were timed as they crawled along a 75yard course under machine-gun fire.
Air evacuations were new in the military. The article described how a GI who had been shot by a Japanese sniper was rushed to an air base in the jungle; put on a plane with an Army flight nurse; and within days safely arrived at a hospital in Southern California.
“The flight nurse who played a major role in this miracle of wartime transportation was one of the hundreds who are writing a new chapter in medical history,” the article said.
An Associated Press story published in May 1944 called it the “longest air evacuation service in the world.” In the span of five months, the nurses helped bring home 1,700 wounded troops who fought on the Marshall and Gilbert islands to hospitals in the U.S.
Reeve described one of those long flights in a letter she wrote in September 1944, the one read by Ready every Memorial Day.
“My day began at 4:30 this morning,” Reeve wrote. It was cold, and she wore seersucker slacks, a flight suit and a flight jacket. She was responsible for 20 patients, many of them wounded months earlier on the island of Saipan, where the Japanese had refused to surrender.
“There are arms, shoulders, legs and backs in casts,” Reeve wrote. “None of the fellows can walk alone; some can’t walk at all.”
This flight was surprisingly tranquil, Reeve assured her family. At 8,000 feet, the temperature outside was 12 degrees, but a heater kept the plane toasty. Reeve could see beautiful islands, ships in the harbor, the changing colors of blue and green in the water and low, billowy clouds.
Her patients were recovering from major surgeries, and Reeve said her job was to make sure they were comfortable, well-fed and entertained.
The plane’s navigator loaned her some headphones, and some patients took turns listening to a baseball game. “How’s that for entertainment?” she asked.
To Mandel and Ready, Reeve’s story resonates today as the world fights a different kind of battle against an invisible enemy.
“All of us all over the world are suffering from the coronavirus, and the people on the front lines are the doctors and the nurses,” Mandel said. “They’re on the front lines fighting this invisible enemy. We were looking for doctors or nurses who were in the same situation in the war, sacrificing their lives, basically, to save others.”
Nursing runs in Reeve’s family — her sister was a nurse, and three members of the family are nurses today, Ready said.
“Being a nurse isn’t easy in the best of times,” Ready said. “At times like this, they’re struggling. And they keep going.”
After years of caring for others as a nurse after the war, Reeve was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, which has no known cure. The Veterans Affairs hospital in Atlanta initially refused to treat her, Ready said, and Reeve’s father, Jim, had to “fight tooth and nail” to change their minds.
Reeve was hospitalized for two years, her body racked with pain, according to a tribute her father wrote in December 1962. Yet Reeve didn’t complain or show any resentment.
Reeve died a month later at the age of 49.
Ready lived overseas at the time, and she regrets never getting the chance to meet her aunt. The articles and letters about Reeve helped fill in some gaps about her life.
“She’s left a legacy, that’s for certain,” Ready said. “Whether we knew Margaret or not, we’ve been touched by her in some way. I wish I had been able to get to know her.”