MARY LOUISE ROBERTS WILSON

“I don’t much like tents anymore.”

THERE ARE SO MANY impressive numbers connected to World War II that it’s difficult for one or two to catch your eye. Here are a few that caught me by surprise: more than sixty thousand women served in the Army Nurse Corps. Sixteen died as a result of enemy action. Sixty-seven nurses were taken prisoner of war. More than sixteen hundred were decorated for bravery under fire or for meritorious service.

One of them was Mary Louise Roberts, who was a long way from her Mississippi childhood the day German shells started ripping through the operating tent on the Anzio beachhead in Italy where she was working to save young American lives. But then her life never had been easy.

Mary Louise had just graduated from high school in 1930 when her father died, leaving behind Mary Louise, her five younger siblings, and their thirty-four-year-old mother. The Depression was setting in and the Roberts family had no money, so the family moved from Texas back to Mississippi to be near their grandparents. Mary Louise, a precocious child, graduated from high school early and went to work in a laundry. When the owners discovered she was just sixteen, however, they let her go. The family couldn’t lose the income, so her mother took the job and Mary Louise stayed at home to care for her brothers and sisters.

Two years later, Mary Louise entered the nurse’s training program at Hillman Hospital in Birmingham, Alabama. “I really wanted to do something to help my family,” she says. “I didn’t have any aspirations to be a nurse—I just needed to make a living for my family.” She was just eighteen.

After graduating, Mary Louise worked at several hospitals in the South before landing a job at Dallas’s big Methodist Hospital. After a year she was promoted to operating room supervisor. It was 1941. By then one of her brothers was in the military and two of her siblings had died from childhood diseases. She invited her remaining family—her mother, a brother, and a sister—to live with her in a one-bedroom apartment in Dallas. Mary Louise supported them all on her eighty-five-dollar-a-month salary. That’s twenty-one dollars a week for four people.

Mary Louise admits it wasn’t easy, but she credits her mother’s frugality and the family’s willingess to share for their survival. In those difficult times that was the code of survival for an untold number of other families across America. Everyone in the family tried to earn something and they all shared it, however little it might have been.

When the United States entered the war, there was an obvious and urgent need for people who could treat the wounded and comfort the afflicted. Mary Louise Roberts volunteered. “I guess it was a matter of wanting to do my part,” she says. “I thought it was my patriotic duty to do it. I know it sounds corny because there’s not much of that feeling anymore.”

Because of her age—she was almost thirty when she enlisted—and her experience, Mary Louise was made the operating room supervisor with the Army’s 56th Evacuation Unit. She trained in Louisiana and Texas for surgery under wholly new conditions—in the field and in combat. By Easter Sunday, 1943, she was ashore at Casablanca and assigned to follow the 36th, 88th, and 91st infantry divisions of the Fifth Army.

The women of the Army Nurse Corps wore helmets, fatigues, and boots. They lived in tents, used latrines, and had to guard their privacy constantly. They were often targets for air raids, and yet they were almost always thought of as girls out of place.

One of them, June Wandrey, wrote lively, newsy letters home regularly and later had them published under the title Bedpan Commando, the derisive nickname a male soldier had shouted at her. In it she describes several occasions when drunken soldiers invaded the nurses’ private space. On one occasion, near the front lines, a German soldier wandered into their latrine. He was gone by the time they summoned help.

Three Army Nurse Corps officers presented with Silver Star decorations for heroism (left to right): Mary L. Roberts, Elaine A. Roe, Rita Virginia Rourke

Surgery at Nocelleto: Mary Roberts, second from left

Fighting in North Africa was intense but it was only an overture for what lay ahead: Anzio, the beginning of the mainland invasion of Europe from the south. Mary Louise Roberts and her medical unit landed five days after the invasion. It was still a combat hot zone. She remembers, “At one point our commanding officer got the nurses together and asked whether we wanted to be evacuated. It was pretty bad, but we decided if the infantry was going to stay, we were going to stay.” She also remembers a male officer who was eager to get the hell off the Anzio beachhead. “But he said there was no way he was going to leave until at least one nurse agreed to go—so he stayed, too.”

It was a brave decision. The war was all around them and the workload was draining. “We got patients straight from the battlefield,” she remembers. The men were terribly wounded, bloody, and dirty. “In the course of the day we had twelve-hour shifts and eight operating tables, with teams assigned to each table. We had all kinds of injuries, from neurosurgery on down. But there were times when I thought, ‘How long can this go on?’ ”

In one of her letters home, June Wandrey, the proud bedpan commando, wrote from “Somewhere in Italy. . . . I am too busy and too tired to write but we must keep in contact; it’s all that keeps me sane. We’re working twelve to fifteen hours a day now, never sitting down except to eat.” Then she describes her ward, filled with

such young soldiers . . . nineteen years old. . . . They’re so patient and they never complain. I won’t be able to write . . . often and here are the reasons why:

She ended another letter home, after describing a long, terrifying night trying to hook up with her hospital unit on the front lines of the march to Rome, by saying, “This field-nurse business is not for the faint of heart.”

There was another role for the women of the Nurse Corps. They were surrogate mothers. Wandrey writes of working in a shock ward in Sicily and seeing an eighteen-year-old who was just brought in from the ambulance. “I went to him immediately,” she said. “He looked up at me trustingly, sighed, and asked, ‘How am I doing, nurse?’ I was standing at the head of his litter. I put my hands around his face, kissed his forehead, and said, ‘You’re doing just fine, soldier.’ He smiled sweetly and said, ‘I was just checking up.’ Then he died.

“Many of us shed tears in private,” she continued. “Otherwise we try to be cheerful and reassuring.” She said she saw doctors working for hours only to have their young patients die on the table. “Some doctors,” she said, “even collapsed across the patient, broke down, and cried.”

The nurses were not immune to death, of course. All of the nurses were traumatized by the death of one of their own, Ellen Ainsworth, killed by a German artillery shell—one of six nurses to die at Anzio. Mary Louise said they were all tempted to begin to think, “ ‘It could be me,’ but then in the heat of battle you don’t really have time to mull things over.” On February 10, 1944, the heat of battle was very hot.

As Mary Louise Roberts supervised several operations under way, German shrapnel started ripping through their surgical tent. She says, “We had patients on the table and we wanted to at least get them off. I said something like, ‘Maybe we can keep going before this gets to be too bad.’ It went on for thirty minutes or so. We just kept on working.” Her superiors were so impressed with her coolness and inspirational personal conduct they recommended her for the coveted Silver Star.

Mary Louise and two other nurses were awarded the medal, but because she had senior rank she went forward first and thus became the first woman to win the Silver Star. It was, she says, not an auspicious occasion. “We went to the ceremony in our operating clothes. It took twenty minutes. It was a quickie because we were needed back at work. Certainly I am proud of it, but others deserve credit, too. Everybody in our group deserved the medal.” That’s another common reaction from the World War II generation. Those who won medals often say, “I didn’t win the medal. I just accepted it for all who deserved it.”

Later, Mary Louise would also say of that particularly harrowing day, in her understated fashion, “I don’t much like tents anymore.”

Her unit advanced north through Italy, following the Fifth Army, setting up operating facilities, repairing the wounded, or when they were severely wounded, patching them up enough so they could be transported to more sophisticated medical facilities. Mary Louise remembers the day the good news came. She was in Bologna, Italy. “We had just set up and we were treating patients when we got word the war in Europe was over. Oh, Lord, everyone was so excited. I thought I’d be glad to get home and get a bath, a long, uninterrupted bath.”

Her sense of duty had kept her overseas for twenty-nine months, and she says during that time her unit treated 77,025 patients. Mary Louise isn’t the first or last veteran of those days to say, “I wouldn’t trade it for a million dollars but I wouldn’t give you two cents for another day of it. I learned an awful lot about people and how they react under pressure. The war gave me an appreciation for life.”

She returned to Dallas in October 1945, and by January the following year she was back at the familiar post as operating room supervisor, this time at the Veterans Administration hospital. She went back to school at the University of Texas medical school and got a degree in nursing service administration. The VA wanted to promote her to a chief nurse’s position but she wasn’t interested. She wanted to stay in the operating room.

In 1961, at the age of forty-six, she married another veteran, Willie Ray Wilson, a pilot with the 9th Artillery Corps during World War II, assigned to ferrying high-ranking officers from headquarters to the battlefield and back. Wilson, a computer programmer after the war, had three children from an earlier marriage.

Mary Louise Roberts Wilson, who got into nursing to send money to her family, came to love the profession for the opportunity it provided to care for others, but she retained the lessons of those difficult early years. She stayed with the VA because the chances of promotion were excellent and it had a substantial pension program. She also joined the Army Reserves and served as chief nurse for the 94th General Hospital unit, retiring as a lieutenant colonel.

She keeps her Silver Star in the bottom of a cedar chest, rarely bothering to take it out. Since her husband died in 1993 she’s tried to keep busy with Bible studies, church, reading programs for children of Spanish-speaking families, and an art-appreciation course at a local junior college. Mary Louise, who had to be so tough so many times in her long life, now admits that in her eighties, with her husband gone, her nights can be “awfully lonely.”

She remains a taciturn woman, tempered by her difficult childhood and the ordeal of combat nursing duty. She doesn’t volunteer much when asked to reflect on her life and all that she’s seen and done. She simply says, “In some ways I feel I accomplished a great deal. In other ways I feel I’ve done nothing. I really don’t have anything to show for it. I am just an ordinary person.”

An ordinary person who as a teenager supported her family, became a highly skilled nurse, won the Silver Star, and lived an exemplary life. In her modesty she typifies so many women of her generation.