Flight nurses in WWII, took frightful risks and all too often paid for it with their lives. When flight nurse Ruth Gardiner’s plane “mushed” and plowed into the ground on Unmak Island, it exploded and Ruth died. WWII, an equal opportunity disaster, killed women as well as men.
Link to another story “Marauding Japanese Forces”
Ruth entered the world in 1914 in Calgary, Alberta. She lived in Calgary for three years before her parents moved to Eastport, Idaho. From Eastport the Gardiner’s wandered a bit to Minnesota and then on to Pennsylvania. Twenty-three-year-old Ruth trained as a nurse at Philadelphia General Hospital.
When, at the end of 1941, Japan yanked the United States into WWII at Pearl Harbor, the Army and Navy found themselves struggling to cope with thousands of injured soldiers and sailors. They needed nurses as much as they needed warriors. Female recruits rushed to the flag and Ruth Gardiner rushed among them.
Then, as increasingly gruesome battlefields sprouted all over the Pacific and North Africa, the problems facing the Nurse Corps multiplied. Torn and mutilated bodies littered battlefields, and they couldn’t be repaired there. Trucks, trains and ships could carry some of them to hospitals. But often they didn’t have train tracks, roads, or navigable water. And trucks, trains and ships travelled slowly.
The Army and Navy turned to airplanes; would use them as air ambulances. And they would train brave volunteer nurses as flight nurses to tend to the wounded in the air. Lt. Ruth Gardiner stepped up and became one of those flight nurses.
Evacuation planes flew to rough, hurriedly constructed airstrips. Corpsmen carried up to eighteen patients into the cavernous planes, delivered them to the care of the Flight Nurses who tended to them while the planes flew them hundreds of miles to hospitals. Ignoring the danger, flight nurses kept the men alive in the air.
Of the places flight nurses flew, none proved more hazardous than the Aleutians. When the 805 Medical Air Evacuation Service came to Alaska, Ruth Gardiner came with them.
On July 27, 1943, Lt Gardiner’s plane flew to Dutch Harbor on Unmak Island to pick up casualties. A mountain loomed, the pilot pulled up but the plane stalled, and plowed into the ground. There at the northwest end of Bristol Bay, wreckage and cargo piled onto young Lt. Gardiner, pinned her. The plane exploded.
Ruth died for her country.
I really enjoy these stories. Very interesting.
Marlene, I’m glad you like them. Especially Flight Nurses… Our seconnd book released in January. And we are now working on one about flight nursjes