All military nurses must be high-school graduates; a few are college trained. They must also be graduates of an accredited school of nursing connected with a hospital that gives a three-year course in medicine, surgery, obstetrics, and pediatrics.  The Army, Navy and Red Cross have recently approved two programs for speeding up student training at 250 nursing schools throughout the country. Initiates must be members of the American Red Cross and the American Nursing Association.  Citizens of friendly countries such as Canada and the Philippines are accepted by the Army.  The Navy takes only American citizens of ten years' standing.

Army nurses range in rank from second lieutenant to colonel; Navy nurses from ensign to lieutenant commander.  They conform to Army and Navy etiquette, salute when they are saluted, and acknowledge the rank of superior officers of either sex. Their base pay is $90 a month with maintenance, rising to $358 for a superintendent with more than 12 years' service.  A bill now pending in the U.S. Congress would allow them a minimum of $150 and a maximum of $400 a month. This would give them parallel pay with corresponding officers in the regular services.

Technically Army nurses have eight-hour duty, but when the need arises they cheerfully stay on the job until too fatigued to continue. At Bataan they suffered from malaria, dysentery and anemia from malnutrition, but none of them went to bed until unable to stand up any longer. They left just before Bataan fell and went to Corregidor, where they experienced their first heavy, bombing raid a day later. The wounded were in a tunnel hospital, but five nurses were "topside" on the Rock when the bombers came over. Accustomed to handling ten patients at a time, they took care of 150 each under the trees and in the long caves in the Rock.  They made nightly rounds with old lanterns to light their way – the Florence Nightingale emblem.  They ate the same food as the men – rationed canned fare while it lasted, then mule, caribou and even monkey meat.  They discarded their white uniforms for pants, khaki shirts, and over-sized boots. . One 125-pound blonde wore a size 42 khaki overall, enormous Army shoes and – to make her colleagues laugh – a small town hat and veil sent by a friend who thought she might like to wear it when she returned home.

One nurse took vitamin tablets and drove a jeep through no man's land to give them to an officer at his gun emplacement. .Others doled out sedatives to men they knew would be wounded and out of range of aid.  Their morale was good. Not a nurse showed funk as the Japanese approached.  Two days before Bataan fell, a batch of nurses left the comparative safety of the hospital and slogged their way to the front lines to give what aid they could.  They were finally rounded up, dazed and exhausted, by officers who put them in a jeep and sent them to a point of embarkation.
 

The nurses must accept foreign service without question. They must go where they are ordered. However, the girl from Florida is more likely to be sent to the tropics; the girl from the North to northern latitudes. Specialists such as anesthetists or operating-room experts are used to the best advantage for special assignments. A nurse is assigned first to home service; then a brief period of orientation follows before she is shipped abroad. Reserves are now subject to all the rules that govern the regular Army and Navy nurses.

The work of the Navy nurse is slightly different from the Army nurse's routine. The major part of her work is to train Navy Corps men, so that they can take over all nursing duties on combat ships.  She is not called on to sail on battleships, cruisers, and destroyers, but she follows the battle fleet on hospital ships, or is stationed at base hospitals.  She can usually be found on transports.  In this war, nurses of all types have had to cope with conditions undreamed of by American nurses in the past.  They are seeing the world, buying in the bazaars of Cairo, crossing the Equator, celebrating Christmas in the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem, worshipping in tiny missions in the far north, bicycling along Irish lanes, living in grass huts in New Guinea, in desert tents, eating the foods of many lands, trying to bring health, hygiene, first-aid and good cheer wherever they are.

Whether their taste runs to pumpkin pie, chocolate, coca-cola or ice cream, they take what comes in typical Army fashion.  They feasted on stewed turnips and bully beef with the American and Australian newspaper correspondents at Port Moresby.  When one of their number got married at Bataan, they baked a cake but rats made off with most of it in the night.  Sixty nurses, living in quarters built for 12, ate turkey and trimmings through two air raids on Christmas Day in another zone of battle.

The nurses share the officers' mess, participate in their recreation.  Since they enter the Army as second lieutenants, they may join the officers' clubs at their posts, enjoy golf, tennis, dancing, swimming, or other club activities. Many of them are good dancers.  They know the latest steps and the tunes that the radio brings to the most remote corners of the earth. Again, they must observe officers' etiquette when it comes to dancing partners and to dates in off-duty hours.
 

As always in time of war, romance blooms among the nurses and recently they have been dropping out to get married at the rate of 300 a month. In November this situation was recognized with an official ruling that the Army would accept married nurses. The Navy has not yet followed suit.

This served immediately to augment the Army Corps ranks from nurses already married, and to pave the way for girls now in service to marry as they see fit. The only provisos are that married nurses must not be assigned to posts where their husbands are stationed; that if they have minor children they will be accepted only if adequate provision is made for the care of their family outside military reservations; that they must accept assignments without reservation; that they must retain their maiden names unless a change to their married names is specifically requested.

It is estimated that 57 percent of the members of the second reserve of the Red Cross Nursing Service are married.  A recent inventory showed that the married ratio for all nurses under 40 was 48.4 percent, or a trifle higher than among other groups of professional women.  The new ruling serves automatically to qualify 16,000 additional nurses for military duty, and is a popular move throughout the U.S. armed forces.  There has been no adjudication yet on the delicate problem that will arise when a nurse of high rank decides to marry an Army private.

Meanwhile, the girl from the middle western United States plies her professional skill in a base hospital in Britain; the blonde from Chicago carries pails of precious water at a tropical outpost; the forty-year-old nurse from the mountainous West copes with various emergencies in Australia.  Wherever American troops are stationed, the sisters of mercy stand by, ready for danger, for instant service, for the quick call to action.

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Their destination is a secret — but this group of personable young army nurses, awaiting their turn to board an American transport, is prepared to go into action wherever duty may call. Their equipment includes steel helmets, gas masks and special field packs.  (Collection Shelby Stanton)

Here is a smiling group of army nurses getting their first glimpse of the Egyptian countryside. Yesterday they were on a transport — tomorrow they will be reporting for duty at hospitals behind the lines of battle.  (Collection Shelby Stanton)

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Somewhere in Australia is this spic-and-span American hospital ward, where U.S. army nurses get valuable experience before being sent to mobile field hospitals. Members of the Army Nurse Corps are graduates of recognized nursing schools with at least three years' training. (Collection Shelby Stanton)