WWII killed women, especially nurses, right along with men—an equal opportunity disaster. The War killed Ruth Gardiner.
Ruth entered the world in 1914 in Calgary, Alberta; came with her parents to Eastport, Idaho at age three. The Gardiners wandered a bit through the lower 48—Noyes, Minnesota then Pennsylvania. Twenty-three old Ruth trained as a nurse at Philadelphia General Hospital.
Japan brought war to the United States at Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941, and the Army and Navy found themselves struggling to cope with thousands of injured soldiers and sailors. The Army Nurse Corps stepped up and female recruits rushed to the flag. Ruth rushed among them.
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. Ships could carry them to hospitals, but only slowly—often too slowly. The Nurse Corps turned to airplanes—and the Flight Nurses. 2nd Lt. Ruth Gardiner came to the Army and became a flight nurse.
A system quickly developed, almost by itself. Under fire, Corpsmen tended the wounded men as best they could, carried them from the battlefield to Surgeons at Aid Stations. From there corpsmen carried hurriedly patched patients to a primitive field hospital. Inevitably many of the wounded soldiers needed far more treatment.
Evacuation planes flew to a rough, hurriedly constructed airstrip. Corpsmen carried up to eighteen patients into the cavernous planes, delivered them to the care of the Flight Nurses who tended them while the planes took off to fly them hundreds, sometimes thousands, 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 of Alaska. The nurses of the 805 Medical Air Evacuation Service stepped up and Ruth stepped 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 and the plane stalled, “mushed”, and plowed into the ground.
That day, at the northwest end of Bristol Bay, wreckage and cargo piled onto young Lt. Gardiner, pinned her. The plane exploded. And Ruth became the first of these heroes, the lady flight nurses, to die for her country.