The Secret Rescue (5 page)

The
Santa Elena
arrived in the Bay of Bizerte outside Tunis in the morning on September 4 with five other ships from their convoy, and it was only then that the men and women of the 807th learned it was where they would disembark.

When the members of the squadron finally stood on firm ground later that day for the first time in weeks and piled their barracks bags on the dock, they stood in awe of the destruction all around them. Bizerte’s strategic location along the Mediterranean allowed whoever controlled it to also control the Strait of Sicily. In German hands in 1942, Bizerte had fallen to British and American forces in May 1943 after bitter fighting during the North African Campaign, and the area now lay in ruins.

A handful of men from the squadron, including Hayes, remained on the docks to watch over the 807th’s bags, while McKnight and the others boarded a nearby barge that took them across a channel to waiting jeeps and toward the loud whistles and gasps of tanned soldiers who noticed the twenty-five nurses headed their way.

After traveling over bumpy roads and hiking a short distance, the squadron arrived at its temporary desert campsite, home to thousands of men waiting for their next orders. The camp was chaotic, with tents pitched in every direction, mess kits hanging from trees, and wet clothes strewn about to dry.

As they found a spot to rest, those in the 807th opened their first C rations and swigged water from their canteens while flies buzzed around them. The rations consisted of two tin cans, one filled with stew, hash, or chili, and the other containing biscuits, candy, a few sheets of toilet paper, some powdered coffee, and cigarettes. Originally intended for troops to eat for a day or two, the bland and monotonous C rations would feed them and soon make them cringe.

It didn’t take long for the squadron to realize that the nurses were the only women at the camp, and there was no getting away from the extra attention they attracted. While the enlisted men set up their pup tents, the nurses were welcomed with their own large tent already outfitted with twenty-five cots and electric lights from a generator. Other soldiers dug latrines for the nurses, and a few even dug foxholes for them. That same evening, British officers came by and invited the nurses to their tents across the road for tea and offered them the use of the shower they had rigged. One member of the 807th wrote, “It was soon apparent that our area would be besieged by soldiers coming to see what an American woman looked like, having so much time elapse from their last contact with them.”

The differences between the men and the women, however, were quickly forgotten the following night when those in the camp found themselves thinking only of their survival. When they first heard gunfire, some of the nurses and doctors were on duty in the sick tent they’d established. With many of the enlisted men spending their free time swimming in the Mediterranean and walking on the beach, the medical personnel had kept busy removing old shrapnel from swimmers’ feet and giving immunizations. Others in the 807th were sleeping in their tents or watching a movie outside.

As the noise grew and red flares erupted in the night sky, they realized they were in the middle of an air raid and scrambled for cover as shrapnel fell to the ground. “Still being rookies as far as war was concerned,” one enlisted man of the 807th wrote, “it was taken more or less as a joke, but in less time than it takes to tell, each and every one had wished that [their foxhole] had been many times deeper and made of the heaviest timber available, because more hell broke loose than any of us had ever experienced.” Those who hadn’t dug their own foxholes as ordered tried to find room in someone else’s as they choked on the sand swirling in the air. Jens crawled into the snug foxhole she’d built and covered it with branches as the British soldiers had taught her, to protect herself from the fragments of anti-aircraft shells that fell like rain. One of the flight surgeons kept yelling, “I’d like to get that guy that talked me into this!”

As Rutkowski ran for cover, a British lieutenant grabbed her arm and yelled, “Keep pumping!” The lieutenant guided her to an old German bunker now packed with a cot, a table, two chairs, and an opening in one wall through which soldiers were shooting anti-aircraft guns. He offered Rutkowski a chair and a glass of wine, and she eagerly accepted both. She hoped the wine would help calm her shaking hands. Watching the raid through the opening, she saw one of the flight surgeons, adrenaline pumping, lift a large log onto his shoulder, run toward a foxhole yelling, “Timber!” and throw the log over the top before jumping into the hole. When she saw him the next day, he was unable to move the log by himself.

The onslaught, aimed mostly at the ships in the harbor, finally ended after an hour, and the all clear was sounded, though further warnings continued throughout the night. One bomb had hit an oil tanker close to the
Santa Elena,
and though the blast rocked the ship and frightened those on board, including Hayes and the other men from the 807th, it was undamaged.

Those in the camp who’d chosen to play cards or go swimming over digging shelters as previously ordered furiously dug foxholes over the next few days. It was during this time that the 807th—along with the rest of the world—learned that Italy had capitulated to the Allies. Announced by Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower on September 8, the surrender had been signed five days before by Marshal Pietro Badoglio, Italy’s prime minister since the overthrow of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in July. President Roosevelt warned the American people that, despite this triumph, the war in the Mediterranean had not yet been won. “The great news that you have heard from General Eisenhower does not give you license to settle back in your rocking chairs and say ‘Well, that does it. We’ve got ’em on the run. Now we can start the celebration.’ The time for celebration is not yet.”

After several days in the camp trudging through ankle-deep sand, swatting at flies, and bathing in the ocean, the entire 807th, including those who had been ordered to stay with the ship, climbed in the back of military trucks and took a forty-mile ride through the desert to their next temporary home in eastern Tunisia near the capitol of Tunis. As the trucks drove along the desolate roads, they passed ancient Roman arches and a German fighter plane lying abandoned in the sands.

Word that twenty-five nurses were on their way reached the small town of Fochville before they did, and flyboys in P-47 Thunderbolts, P-38 Lightnings, and C-47 Skytrains, apparently eager to show off their skills and welcome the young women, buzzed the convoy as it arrived.

While most in the 807th settled into their new camp and waited anxiously for their next orders, the squadron’s flight surgeons were sent to various stations in the Mediterranean to watch the more experienced 802nd—the first squadron activated from Bowman—in action. The rest of the men and women had little to do as they waited for the arrival of transportation and supplies.

An old apartment building in the town functioned as the 807th’s temporary headquarters and as barracks for the men, while the nurses were billeted nearby in two small houses. Sports, movies, and gambling filled much of the men’s time, while local children camped out in front of their barracks hoping they would be given candy bars for themselves and cigarettes for their parents. With a continuous supply of young officers offering to escort the nurses wherever they wanted to go, the women spent their days shopping in the few stores still open in the nearby capital of Tunis, going to see one of the AAF bands playing at a local club, or swimming on one of the beaches littered with debris from the war.

More than three weeks after its arrival in Fochville, the 807th finally learned it was being sent to Catania, a small town on the eastern side of Sicily. Catania would serve as its headquarters, and from there the nurses and medics would fly to evacuation stations around the Mediterranean to pick up patients and accompany them on flights to better equipped medical facilities. It was a welcome relief for those growing impatient to help the war effort.

As the 807th packed its gear and chartered planes to relocate the unit to Catania, the squadron was called into action. Lt. Edith A. Belden, a nurse from Illinois, and medic Lawrence Abbott flew from Fochville to Corsica to pick up patients and successfully delivered them to Algiers.

It was early October 1943 when the 807th arrived in Catania, and the Allies’ recent victories were irrefutable. They had turned the tide in the Pacific by winning the Battle of Midway in 1942. By February 1943 they had achieved another series of victories in the southern Solomon Islands, and Hitler had suffered his first major defeat at Stalingrad. Three months later, the Allies had taken North Africa from the Germans and Italians, and on July 9, they had launched Operation Husky, which led to the successful invasion of Sicily. Mussolini had been deposed from power, and on September 3, the Allies’ 15th Army Group, composed of the U.S. 5th Army and the British 8th Army, had landed on mainland Italy and forced Italy to surrender to the Allies.

In response to the invasion, Hitler had rushed more troops into Italy, including into Rome, sent in paratroopers to rescue Mussolini from prison, and appointed him as the leader of the German-controlled state in northern Italy. The Allies were now struggling to capture the Italian capital, slogging their way north through the country while battling a brutal enemy.

As the fighting exploded in Italy, the 807th set up its headquarters in a former military school that had recently housed German soldiers. From there, McKnight and the other flight surgeons assigned the nurses and medics to go to specific evacuation stations. The medics were also stationed in the same building while the nurses and other officers were billeted in a villa overlooking the Mediterranean in a town just north of Catania on the island’s east coast. The setting was so picturesque that it was easy for some to forget, for just a moment, that the world was at war.

The nurses and medics began routinely evacuating patients from near the front lines to more fully equipped hospitals around the Mediterranean and were finally doing the work they had been trained to do. McKnight’s four flight surgeons oversaw six flight teams consisting of one nurse and one medic who cared for up to twenty-four patients per flight. While in the air, responsibility for the patients ultimately fell to the registered nurses, who had far more medical training and experience than the medics. Heavy fighting and the resulting casualties, however, quickly required the teams to split up and handle flights on their own, with the nurses receiving the more severe cases. The 807th’s primary responsibility was to care for British troops from the 8th Army advancing on the eastern side of Italy, while the 802nd was assigned to support American troops from the 5th Army as it made its way up Italy’s western side.

To help with the casualties pouring in from the front lines near Foggia on the heel of Italy, McKnight sent flight surgeon Capt. Edward Phillips and a few enlisted men to start an evacuation station at Grottaglie, a small town less than 120 miles from the fighting. Wounded and sick patients who had already received some medical care were taken by plane from Grottaglie to designated facilities.

McKnight sent Hayes a short time later to temporarily help the British operate a station at Bari—just seventy miles from the fighting and as near to the front lines as transport planes could safely reach—until flight surgeon Capt. Philip Voigt could arrive and take over. While Voigt secured the use of transport planes that flew into Bari, and a Royal Air Force medical officer ran the holding unit, the men faced significant challenges with coordinating planes and patients, and dealing with the unpredictable autumn weather. “Weather, no planes, no patients; too many patients, too many planes, delays in arrival of patients… lack of cooperation on the part of the hospitals, failure to have planes gassed up, delay in unloading freight, all conspire to make the job a hectic one,” wrote one member of the 807th.

Flights also required the nurses and medics to be ready for anything, and they were. On one of Hayes’s first runs, one of the plane’s engines stopped, and the pilots, who seemed unfazed by the development, calmly adjusted their flight plan to pick up another plane. On one of Rutkowski’s flights from Naples, she found the door of the plane missing. When she asked the pilot about it, he responded, “Yeah, we lost it on the way up.” Her patients on that flight included one German prisoner of war along with seventeen British soldiers. During the flight, the British patients noticed the German POW, and, while eyeing the open door, the men “started on how best to assist him to walk home from seven thousand feet over the Mediterranean.” The battle-weary British soldiers had just been in a fight with German troops a few hours before, and to Rutkowski’s growing concern, they seemed to be seriously contemplating taking action against the POW. It took her a moment to realize she outranked them, but when she did, she hurled threats at them and reminded them that they were soldiers, not murderers, until they settled down.

After transporting their patients, the nurses and medics were on their own to find available flights back to the 807th’s headquarters in Catania. They could usually board a plane within a few hours, but they all traveled with their canvas musette bags that carried personal items in case they had to stay for a night or two at one of the stations. A few of the medics and nurses, eager to get back to headquarters, caught rides on combat planes rather than waiting for space on a transport plane.

By the end of October, despite the difficulties faced by the flight surgeons coordinating personnel and planes and dealing with the weather, the 807th’s hard work was paying off. In its first three weeks, the squadron evacuated 1,651 patients to more advanced hospitals for further care.