Army & Navy – Where Are the Nurses?

No military force gives its wounded better care than the U.S. Army. But the Army’s patients may have to get along with less care in the future. It became even more apparent last week, as casualty lists swelled, that there may not be enough nurses to go around.

More than 150,000 soldiers are now in hospitals in the U.S. Since July there has been a 300% increase in the homeward parade of the sick and the hurt.

In the Army Nurse Corps there are some 40,000 women; 27,000 of them are overseas. Although many of them, in temporarily inactive theaters, are idle, they have to be kept at hand for any sudden inrush of patients. The Corps says it needs 1,000 more for overseas. The 13,000 left in Army hospitals in the U.S. are too few. The Corps is after at least 10,000 more.

“We on Capitol Hill.” The Army has little prospect of immediately filling the gaps. The Cadet Nurse Corps, set up and financed by the Government to give free training to women, has contributed only a small percentage of its graduates to the Army. The rest have dropped out or gone into nonmilitary nursing jobs which have been ruled “essential.” Major General Norman T. Kirk, Surgeon General, thinks the Army could draw 10,000 from the 209,000 women in civilian nursing without hurting the civilian sick. To 27,000 of these who had been classified as I-A material for Army service, Corps director Colonel Florence A. Blanchfield wrote letters of appeal. She got only 710 replies, only 210 applications.

Congresswoman Frances Bolton, mother of the bill creating the Cadet Nurse Corps, warned nurses after a trip to the European front: “If you do not respond, then we on Capitol Hill will be forced to find some way, because we will have our men cared for.” But there did not appear to be any way short of a draft. U.S. women had endless reasons for not volunteering.