Nurses During WWII Essay

Words: 1292
Pages: 6

Nurses served a vital part during WWII. Nurses that were apart of the Army and Navy were the first to be incorporated into the military. They came to the aid for sick and wounded soldiers. They endured many harsh conditions from working in over crowded hospitals. They often had to deal with a shortage of nurse staff and working long hours and days without breaks. The nurses who went over seas, traveled with severely injured soldiers, the nurses were close to combat, so they experienced bombings, enemy fires, having a lack of supplies and camping out with the soldiers in tents. The nurses had different coping strategies on how to not focus on the negative side of the war, knowing the fact that they were helping the soldiers feeling better give them a sense of gratification. They never spoke negatively about anything about the war even after it ended and their main focus was to keep the morals of the soldiers up. The areas I am going to focus on for this paper …show more content…
This attack killed over 2400 american soldiers, leaving approximately 1200 military personnel and civilians wounded. The navy lost a lot of their battle equipment so that put an hinderance on them participating in the war for several months. During the pearl harbor attack there was a total of 44 Navy Nurses stationed. The Navy Nurses were on site from the start of WWII, there were Navy Nurses on hospital ships and others on land they still experienced enemy attacks after the big pearl harbor attack, some of the nurses were even taken as POWs. (Run on) At the start of WWII there was less than 1000 Navy Nurses on active duty within the next year that number more than tripled. Even with this large increase in nurses there was still a high demand for nurses. The red cross helped in recruitment for both Army and Navy Nurses. Towards the end of 1944, the Nurse’s Corps had almost 9000 nurses