By RAY WYCHE

Elizabeth Stephens Simmons, a Hallsboro native, was three years into her career as a registered nurse in March 1941, working in a state hospital in Williamsburg, Va.

She had completed her nurse training at Medical College of Virginia in 1938. By 1941, war was devastating Europe and the consensus was that the United States soon would be involved.

In 1943, Simmons volunteered for the U. S. Army Nurse Corps, a military unit that was in need of more volunteer nurses.

“I just wanted to do it,” she says of her reasons for signing up. “My two roommates both volunteered and I did too.”

It was two years and two continents later before Simmons returned to civilian life, where she worked as a nurse in Whiteville until her marriage.

Simmons joined the Army at Camp Lee, Va., and immediately found out how hard the life of an Army nurse can be. The hours were long and the work demanding.

“We opened the Camp Lee hospital,” she said.
For Simmons, the shooting war started in March 1943 when she landed in Casablanca in French Morocco, North Africa, to help transfer the 45th Army General Hospital to its new home on a former college campus in nearby Rabat. The nurses were billeted in a hotel. General hospitals were the top of the line for Army medical facilities overseas, and normally handled only serious cases. It offered the best care available in a combat zone, with at least six surgeon-specialists on the staff who were able to undertake the most complicated procedures.

“We were like a regular, stateside hospital,” she says.

In Rabat, the wounded from the fighting in the African deserts to the east, along with injured German and Italian prisoners of war, arrived by train. Simmons says she remembers seeing stretchers filled with injured soldiers on the ground beside the tracks.

“We had worked long hours but we had to get up and go when the train came in,” she says. The nurses were given the responsibility of deciding which of the wounded men would get priority treatment.

“We had to evaluate the wounded. We saw them before the doctors did. I saved one man’s life by ordering blood for him. He had a leg blown off.”

Simmons was head nurse of the 45th’s surgical unit of 110 nurses. The hospital had surgical and medical sections housed in college buildings, with the overflow convalescing patients living in tents on the campus.

Most of Simmons’ patients had received preliminary treatment at aid stations and field hospitals before being sent for advanced treatment. Simmons says she saw all types of battlefield wounds, including many soldiers suffering from severe burns.

“We had a whole ward for burned soldiers, most of them from the Air Corps but some who were burned in tanks.”

With North Africa in Allied hands, the war moved northward through Italy, France and into Germany and Simmons and the 45th found themselves in Naples, Italy, in December 1943. Allied forces were slowed at Monte Cassino, where German forces turned a mountaintop monastery into an almost impenetrable fortress. Allied units were taking heavy casualties, and more medical facilities were needed in the area. Thus, the 45th and Simmons made their new home in a fairground, with the nurses quartered in a nearby apartment building.

It was about this time that penicillin, the wonder of all wonder drugs, became available to replace the sulfa medications then widely in use.

“It was golden-yellow and we gave it intravenously,” Simmons says of the new miracle drug.

A miracle antibiotic was needed at Cassino.

“We got a lot of patients from Cassino, and they had the worst wounds we ever saw.”

Conventional knowledge held that Army general hospitals were far removed from the battle action and therefore considered safe zones, but Simmons and the 45th soon learned that their hospital, located near the Bay of Naples where supplies were being unloaded, was in the target area for German artillery and bombers.

“They (Germans) bombed the Bay of Naples all the time. We had a sub-basement we could go into during air raids but a lot of times the nurses were too tired to go down there.”

The patients were used to artillery barrages and air raids.

“They would get under their beds in air raids,” Simmons says.

Some of the patients of the 45th, including American sailors who were wounded in the Bay of Naples air raids, were evacuated to the United States after their medical conditions were stabilized. Others, after a period of convalescence, went back to the front.

“We didn’t know where they went but the hospital stayed pretty full.”

Simmons’ duty as an Army nurse had been so demanding that she had been unable to take all the leave she had accumulated, although Army rules specified that nurses be free of duties after a specified period of work. The war in Europe was over when, in December 1945, Simmons flew from Casablanca to the United States with 120 days of leave to her credit.

She returned to Hallsboro and began work at Columbus County Hospital in Whiteville. Later she worked as a nurse in physicians’ offices until her marriage to Herbert “Chick” Simmons and moved to Holden Beach, where she and her husband operated a successful real estate business.

Simmons, who will celebrate her 90th birthday Oct. 1, lives with her son in Raleigh. Her husband, a combat veteran of World War II in Europe, died earlier this year.