OPPOSITE: Lenore and Bud Rickert shortly after getting married in 1945
I attended the Orange County Nursing School. At that time to get into the Navy, after basic nursing training you had to go on and get more training. So I went up to Oakland and trained for another year before applying for the Navy. I joined the Navy rather than the Army because in the Army you did only bedside nursing. In the Navy you also taught the corpsmen, so that when they were on ships they would be able to do the nursing. It was the teaching aspect that appealed to me.
So they sent me to Pearl Harbor in 1940 for a two-year duty assignment. I was assigned to the eye-ear-nose-and-throat wards, three of them, at the Navy hospital on Hospital Point. It was very low key there at that time. I was working in the wards and also training corpsmen. If they passed certain tests they could become Navy corpsmen. Over the weekends only about a fourth of the nurses were on duty, and they’d have a lot of wards to take care of. Hawaii at that time was very very nice! I was glad to get assigned there because i’d heard a lot about Hawaii and was tickled to death I got a chance to go.
While I was on the wards there at Pearl Harbor, this Marine had three different surgeries, two of which he didn’t need at all, just to get back in the ward that I worked on. On the weekends we had captain’s inspection, and everything just had to be perfect in the ward. The little stands beside the patients’ beds could only have three changes of underwear, a toilet bag with toothpaste and toothbrush and that kind of thing, and that was all that was allowed. Well, this fellow comes up to me, and I’m already wondering why he’d been there three different times for surgeries he really didn’t need, and he came over with a portable typewriter. So while I was waiting for the captain to come down for inspection, I’m standing by the window. He says, “Miss Terrell, what am I going to do with this?” And it’s a portable typewriter in a case. So I said, “You’re going to have to drop it out the window.” And he did! So that got me, because it smashed all over the ground outside! But then he passed inspection—his unit beside the bed was okay! But that really got my attention. His name was Bud Rickert.
We nurses weren’t supposed to go out with servicemen. In fact, nurses at that time weren’t supposed to have any contact with males at all. If you did it, you did it very secretly. But of course there were a certain number of nurses who had boyfriends.
In Hawaii where the cruise ships come in at Honolulu Harbor there is a landmark called the Aloha Tower. Well, down below that there was a basement, and they had units in there that you could rent. So he rented one and put a set of civilian clothes there. I was the only nurse who had a car, so mine was kind of the community car. When I’d go to bed at night on the second floor of the nurses’ quarters, I would tie a string around my toe and drop the end of it out the window. The nurses who wanted to borrow the car would pull it, and I would get up and come down and take them over to meet their boyfriends. It was a Ford coupe, and coupes then didn’t have a back seat—only just a little ten-inch space behind the front seat, so there wasn’t much room to haul many people around! But I would squeeze in as many of them as necessary!
The Marine Corps base was attached to the Navy hospital grounds; there was just a fence between them. We could talk over the phone because nobody could tell who I was talking to. So we would arrange to meet, and he would tell me when he was going to be relieved. I would go down and flash my lights off and on as I drove down that long fence, and he’d come out of the bushes and jump in the car with me. Once in a while he’d have somebody who wanted to go to town with him, so he would just bring him along. It would be like we didn’t know each other at all, that I was just giving him a ride. So after we had dropped off any others who came with him, then I would drop him off down there at the Aloha Tower. He would change into his civilian clothes, and then we’d go out for a picnic. There was a Chinese couple who cooked for us in the nurses’ quarters, and they would always pack picnic lunches for me. So we would go around on the other side of the island where nobody was, have a picnic, and spend whatever time we had together. There was a lighthouse right over on the far side of Diamond Head, and there were landscaped grounds with no one around, and that’s where we’d go a lot of times. We couldn’t go together to Waikiki or in Honolulu because we couldn’t risk being seen together. So after our picnics, I’d bring him back and drop him off at the Aloha Tower. He’d change back into his uniform, and then I’d take him back to the Marine base.
We were having a great time, but then he got orders to ship out to Wake Island. That was hard, and I was pretty upset. This was before December 7, so he was there on Wake when the war started, and when Wake fell he was a POW. Most of the fellows captured by the Japanese were shipped to Japan, but he was in the group they kept on Wake. He was there until later in the war when they found out he had worked as a newspaperman and could write. Then they took him to Tokyo where he was supposed to write scripts for a soap opera that Tokyo Rose would broadcast over the radio to American troops in the Pacific. And that saved his life, because not long after they shipped him to Tokyo, they executed the American POWS on Wake. I got five postcards from him while the Japanese had him as a Pow on Wake. I think they came through Greece somehow. The cards were all a year to a year and a half old, and they were all blacked out except the date, “Dear Lenore,” and “Love, Bud,” and that was it, period. But that was better than what they allowed the other Pows to do in Japan. They never got to send any word out that they were all right.
So anyway I was on duty on Sunday morning, December 7. Right across the water from us was the seaplane base, but those planes would never fly over the hospital. So that morning I was waiting for the captain to show up to make rounds, and I heard a plane flying real low. I’d never heard a plane that low over by us at the hospital, so I ran over to the window and down comes this plane with a huge red circle on the side. I could see the pilot and I could see he was Oriental, but I didn’t know what that big red circle was. It went right by the window real close, headed down, and the pilot waved to me and I waved to him. Then the plane crashed right there, right down to the ground just outside the window! Later on, one of the corpsmen cut a piece of aluminum from that plane and made a watchband for me. He even etched palm trees and things on it.
Immediately after that plane came down I heard bombs going off. I looked over toward Ford Island and could see things blowing up, and I knew we had a problem. When the captain came to the ward he said the Japanese were attacking. The wards were full, and our patients all got up right away when the attack started and ran down to the water to see if there was anything they could do there. Just near the hospital were some docks and ships, but when they got there the water was on fire, so they couldn’t do anything. By this time new patients were starting to come in, and they were burned from being thrown off the ships and into the water where there was burning oil. They were terribly burned.
There was a man in the ward who had had eye surgery the day before, and both of his eyes were covered with gauze patches. He pulled the spread off his bed, put it on the floor, and laid down on it because he figured someone else would need his bed, and we did. I rushed over to the nurses’ quarters the minute the attack started, because some were still sleeping and some were at the Catholic church, which was a couple of blocks from the hospital. So I got over there, rounded everybody up, and told them to get back to their wards, because we had patients all over the place.
So when our old patients returned to the hospital, they wanted to help. And these were patients who had had tonsillectomies or nose operations or things like that, and they wanted to help with the people who were being brought in. We had all these burn cases with huge, horrible blisters that had to be cut off, so I would ask patients who had been in the ward the night before, “Can you cut flesh?” If they said they could, I’d give them scissors. If they said they couldn’t, we’d give them a big bucket full of water with about six drinking tubes, and they’d go around and give these burn victims water. They all wanted water. They wouldn’t be screaming or yelling, but they’d just lie there and gasp, “Water… water… water.” So those guys just went up and down the wards giving water to the burn patients.
And cutting burn blisters was pretty gruesome. These were big blisters, some six inches high and over large patches of skin. That all had to be cut off. After the blisters were cut off, we painted the raw flesh with something, but I can’t remember what it was. And we had so many patients to take care of I think it was five days when I didn’t go to bed at all. In the morning after working all night, I’d go over to the nurses’ quarters and take a shower and then come back and be at the hospital all day and all night.
Before December 7, we’d put in requests for supplies once a week, and we were lucky if we got half of what we asked for. So I thought, oh, gads, we’d never have enough equipment or supplies. But everything just came rolling out on that morning. We didn’t have to write requests or anything; we just had to send somebody over and say we needed something and out it came, right now. So we were able to keep up with what we needed to treat the patients.
As all these sailors were being brought in with burns, some were dying right there in front of us, and that was pretty traumatic. But you couldn’t let it bother you too much. We just had too much to do. I’d never worked with burn patients before, and it was bad. But those guys were just wonderful. As much as they were suffering, they were just glad to be alive. They would do anything you asked them. We were doing a triage as the burn patients came in. I would try to put the more severe cases close to the front, because the ones in bad shape needed most care. I think the pain was so much they didn’t feel it, because they didn’t complain. All the while the attack was going on we could hear bombs going off and explosions, but I never looked out the windows. I was too busy dealing with the burn patients that were flooding into the hospital. The doctors knew what to do and they told us, so I became an expert on burns very quickly!
We had these burn patients lined up in the wards, and we had their clothes off. They didn’t have any dog tags or wrist bands so we tied tags on their toes with their names. That’s the only way we had of identifying them. And they just lay there with their raw burned skin, and we treated them as best we could.
After the attack was over, we got into a kind of routine in the burn wards. The worst cases were flown back to the Mainland, and we attended to the rest. Shortly after the attack I heard that Wake was attacked, and of course I was worried about Bud. And then when Wake finally fell a few weeks later, I didn’t know what happened to him until about a year later I started getting these postcards from him. They had a date on them, so I knew he was at least alive.
I stayed there at Pearl Harbor for another year to finish out my two-year assignment. After that I went back to San Diego, and they sent me down there to talk to women’s clubs and things like that, because I had been at Pearl Harbor and could tell my story and they would buy war bonds. But I didn’t like that, so I asked for a transfer and they sent me to New Caledonia. We didn’t know where we were going. I was told to report to San Francisco, and when I got there they said I’d be told what ship to go on. We had no idea where we were going. When we got there, none of us had ever heard of New Caledonia. There were two Navy hospitals in New Caledonia. Navy ships came in there, and if they had casualties who needed more care than what they could give them on the ships, they’d leave them with us.
The captain of the hospital we were assigned to was there on the dock to meet the ship. We lined up, and he asked which one of us was the most senior. It had taken about a month to get there, but we had never really talked about how long each of us had been in the service. We finally determined who the most senior nurse was, and she was a real tall redheaded girl. The captain wasn’t that tall, so then he asked who was next in line as far as seniority was concerned. Turned out I was the next most senior. So right away the other woman was sent on to Australia somewhere, and I stayed there in New Caledonia and became chief nurse.
The hospital and our quarters were long buildings, and the captain had fixed up the chief nurse’s quarters, which had its own shower and its own private toilet. The other nurses had to go up the hill to a shared toilet. While I was there, the president’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, came out to visit us in New Caledonia. And you know, she was a wonderful woman. She went from bed to bed to bed to bed, and she said she would like to have the addresses of the men she saw. Quite a few of the patients were still there a few weeks later, and they heard from home that Mrs. Roosevelt had contacted the families of everyone and told the parents that she had talked with their sons and that they were doing well. But while she was there, she got to use my toilet since it was the only private toilet around there! She thought that was great, not having to go up the hill!
In New Caledonia there was social life for some of the nurses, but I didn’t have any because I was still hoping my love life was still alive, and I was hoping that some day we would get together again. My assistant nurse and I got along well and we did a lot together. There was only one car for the hospital, and that was the captain’s car, and he would let me use it any time I wanted to. And I was driving around the island one day and found a tree right at the edge of the water, and it had roots that went out into the water. I stopped and looked at it, and then realized it had oysters hanging on the roots that went into the water. So I pulled them out. My assistant loved oysters and was able to fix them up with sauce and eat them. She loved those oysters! But that tree was the only one I found that had oysters on it. My assistant ended up marrying a man she met there in New Caledonia. I would arrange for her to be able to use the car so they could go out and get away from the rest of us. That way she was able to keep the relationship going.
So after my two years in New Caledonia, I went back to the West Coast. And you know, all I have to do is live one day at a time, because things have always worked out for me in unbelievable ways. When I got back from Noumea I got sent to Long Beach to sell war bonds and get blood donations. I went around to all the different plants where mostly women were working, the aircraft plants and so on, and I did that for about three and a half months. Then I went to the captain and said, “You know, this is not what I joined the Navy for.” He said, “I know you haven’t been the happiest about your work, but we have never sold this many bonds or gotten this much blood than since you’ve been here. But I understand how you feel, so I will see that you get transferred.” So he got me transferred to Bremerton, Washington, and this was right as the war was ending. I arrived at Bremerton the day the Pacific war was over. So no one was around at the base and everybody was out celebrating. There was no room in the hotels, and people were out in the streets. I reported in to the hospital, and they said, “We got a call from Washington, D.C., for you to go to the airport.” So I said, “What’s at the airport, and where is it?” And they said, “All we were told was that you were to go to the airport as soon as you checked in.”
So I went out to the airport and I’m standing around, and there were no planes on this field and no one around, but I can see a man clear across the field coming toward me and he’s in a Marine uniform. And I’m looking at him and he’s walking toward me. And as he got closer, I suddenly realized who it was, and I couldn’t believe it—it was Bud, my boyfriend from Hawaii who had been captured at Wake. At the end of the war he’d been in Tokyo working on the scripts for the Tokyo Rose radio show. When the Japanese were getting ready to sign the surrender documents, Governor Stassen was sent over to Tokyo, and he had something to do to with organizing the capitulation papers. And while he was there he met this Marine, and so Stassen put him in the plane with him and brought him back with him, and the plane landed in Bremerton. So there he was in Bremerton, coincidentally where my new assignment was. That’s the way life has been for me. I don’t have to make decisions, they’re made for me! So when he came walking up to me I couldn’t believe it. He’s six feet tall and was standing there weighing 117 pounds and looking terrible, but at the same time he looked great to me! He came right up to me and put his hands on my shoulders and said, “We’ve got so much catching up to do.” And I thought, “What he’s been through, if he can have this kind of spirit, he’d be all right for a husband!”
So we decided to get married that very day and went down to get a license. During the war, some women were marrying more than one man so they could get their stipends from the government. When the authorities found this out, then they started checking up. You couldn’t get a wedding license until they had checked that you didn’t have three or four of them already. We had to go to the judge there in Bremerton, and he wanted to know why we wanted to get married, you know, that sort of thing, and we told him about our story and Bud being a POW and just getting back, and that judge couldn’t sign the papers fast enough!
Then I said I didn’t care what church it was, but I wanted to get married in a church. We found out that the ministers were all somewhere at a conference, and we could only find one minister. I said, “I don’t care what church it is, I just want to be married in one.” So we got married in a Lutheran church, and the executive officer stood up with us. And this all happened on the day Bud got back. So I knew it was meant to be. Luckily Bud came back okay, and he wasn’t sour or bitter or anything, even after all he went through. Everything just worked out right. These things were just supposed to be!
When I got out of the Navy after the war I didn’t belong to any veterans’ organizations or anything. I stayed in touch with some of the nurses I had served with, but I never thought too much about that time period. Then for the fiftieth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1991, they decided they were going to honor some of the women who had been at Pearl Harbor on December 7. The first thing they did was invite us nurses over for a Memorial Day ceremony in May 1991. I gave a talk at the memorial service, and I guess they must have liked it because they invited me back for the December 7, 1991, ceremony. They wanted me to give the same talk about my experiences the day Pearl Harbor was attacked. Well, about two weeks before we were set to leave for Hawaii, I get word that the president, the elder Bush, was going to attend. So instead of me giving my speech, they wanted me to introduce him. I said okay, so when we got there they sat down with me and went over what I should say to introduce him, and that’s what I did. Afterwards I wanted to see the old hospital, but we had been told before that it had been torn down. However, on that trip they took us over there, and the hospital is now some top secret facility, with the windows blacked out and everything, but it’s the same building and it’s still there. And by chance at the ceremony I met a burn victim I treated on December 7, Everett Hyland. Yes, I saw the movie Pearl Harbor. They flew seven of us nurses who had been at the Naval hospital on December 7 over to Hawaii for the premiere. They set up a screen on the deck of a brand-new aircraft carrier in Pearl Harbor, and we all sat out there with a lot of VIPS and watched the movie. At first I didn’t think much of it. First of all, none of us nurses had our hair down like the nurses in the movie. Either your hair was short, or if you had long hair you had to braid it and put it up under your cap. You couldn’t show any hair, and in that movie they had hair down to the middle of their backs! They showed some nurses going to pieces in the movie, and I don’t know about that. As far as I know all the nurses did what they were supposed to do. I didn’t hear of anybody who came apart because of that, and I didn’t see anybody who didn’t do their job like they were supposed to. So at first I didn’t like the movie much, but afterwards when I saw young people watched it, at least they found out roughly what happened on December 7, and they learned that at least something went on there at that time. Maybe it’s good that they made the movie so that it would appeal more to those young people.
My experiences in WWII definitely affected the rest of my life, no question about that. I think it made me appreciate everything that is good. You know, a good day, good people, good experiences. It certainly broadened my outlook. It put a whole new set of things I wanted to accomplish in front of me and affected the way I wanted to live my life. I want to get the most out of it. I try to do that very definitely, and it’s 2004 and I’m ninety years old now, and I think I’ve accomplished that.