A 100th Birthday Salute

My wife’s mother, Margaret Catherine Stout O’Donnell, was born on June 26th, 1920, and for her 100th birth anniversary, I put together for family and friends a report on her service in the Army Nurse Corps from 1943-1945. It was enjoyable to fill in some missing details as to time and place in her movements from Normandy across Europe with the 30th Field Hospital, providing support primarily for elements of Patton’s Third Army. She was in the Battle of the Bulge as well as part of the liberation of a large prison camp in Ebensee, Austria in May 1945, as the war in Europe came to an end – now 75 years ago.

Margaret was born in Bristol, Tennessee of parents with lineage in East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia. The family moved to Belle, West Virginia, where Margaret’s father worked briefly in the coal mines, but got a job as a machinist in nearby Charleston. After graduation from high school in 1938, Margaret went to the McMillan Hospital Nursing School in Charleston, graduating in 1942; by then she and seven of her classmates had already decided to become Army nurses.

Margaret went first to the Erie Proving Ground, near Toledo, Ohio, for basic training, which included gas mask drills, marching, and teaching corpsmen simple procedures for caring for the wounded. Then she went to Camp Atterbury in Edinburgh, Indiana, where she was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant in the Army Nurse Corps in August, 1943. At this time the 317th Station Hospital was formed, and they went through more training, and also served in the base hospital. In December they left for Camp Kilmer, near Stelton, NJ, which was the main staging center for embarkation from New York. Here they received their equipment, including helmets.

The 317th embarked from New York on December 28, 1943, arriving in Belfast, Northern Ireland around January 9, 1944. Margaret was not seasick, so she helped in sick bay, giving IVs and medicines. Once in Belfast, the hospital was set up in Quonset huts in an area called “Orange Field;” the huts were heated with coal-or-wood-burning stoves, but it was still quite cold. They were in Northern Ireland for about six months, during which the invasion of Europe took place on D-Day – June 6, 1944.

In early July came the orders to go to the south of England to the staging area for embarkation to France. The 317th Station Hospital was broken up, with nurses assigned to new units; Margaret, her friends, and a number of others were assigned to the 30th Field Hospital. They were to be connected with Patton’s Third Army, which had provided the Germans a fake landing on the actual D-Day, but were now secretly assembling in Normandy. The 30th assembled in Tisbury, Wiltshire (west of Salisbury), until July 22, when they left for Normandy.

The purpose of a Field Hospital was to be a moveable hospital that could treat severe surgical needs close to the front; after patients were stabilized, they could be evacuated to a Station Hospital that was in a permanent location far from the front. A typical Field Hospital consisted of three Hospitalization units, or platoons, each of 100 beds. When combined, the whole hospital could contain 400 beds. Each platoon had at least 5 nurses, corpsmen, doctors, surgeons, and laboratory and other technical workers: 35-40 people.

After an overnight journey across the Channel, the SS “Longford” arrived at Utah Beach, and the 30th Field Hospital debarked, climbing down on rope ladders to landing craft, on July 23, 1944. That night they slept outside the church St. Mere Eglise. For the next several days, they set up the hospital tents in a hedged-in cow pasture at Barneville, about 1 mile north of Les Moitiers-d’Allonne, Basse-Normandie. This was a time of transition when the troops were breaking out of the Normandy Beachhead, and the Battle of Normandy was becoming the Battle of Northern France. In August, Margaret’s platoon, the 1st Hospitalization Unit, went into Brittany – a “hot, dusty journey” to Brest, which surrendered on September 19, 1944.

The First Platoon rejoined the rest of the 30th hospital somewhere east of Paris in late September, about the time that General Patton’s Third Army ran out of gasoline, when Eisenhower had directed many supplies sent to General Montgomery in the Netherlands. When Patton was on the move again, the 30th Field Hospital crossed into Lorraine at Rampont, just west of Verdun. The battle to control Lorraine and get to the German border took three long and costly months, fighting against an enemy well-entrenched in old fortifications built during the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War. But by mid-December the Third Army had liberated Lorraine, and were poised at the German border along the Saar River.

It was then, on December 16, that the German offensive began called the Battle of the Bulge, or “Wacht am Rhein.” Patton pulled out his 12th (XII) Corps (4th and 5th Infantry Divisions, 10th Airborne Div), sending them into Luxembourg to meet the German threat there (see blue line going through Thionville). The 30th Field Hospital was divided at this time: 1st Platoon (Margaret’s) and 3rd Platoon followed the 12th Corps into Luxembourg, while the 2nd Platoon went to Veckring on December 23rd, and continued to support the 20th Corps, who during the rest of December and January were holding the southern salient (the right-angled front to the left of the name “Veckring” on the map) during the siege of Bastogne.

It was during this time that Margaret’s most often-told story took place. On Christmas Eve Day 1944 the hospital was in a school basement somewhere in Luxembourg – probably Luxembourg City; a delirious patient knocked over an oxygen tank onto her foot, and broke her toe. That same day, the platoon was ordered to set up in a different location, but Margaret, another nurse, a corpsman, and a doctor, remained with some patients that couldn’t be moved. There were Carmelite nuns from a nearby convent attached to the school who were worried that Germans in the vicinity might come and find them. Indeed, they had to be very quiet because German troops were marching by. Margaret was deeply moved by the faith of the nuns, as they prayed with the four Americans and their patients; this feeling stayed with her after the war, and she studied to become a Catholic when she was working at Gorgas Hospital in the Canal Zone. On Christmas Day, the patients were moved to an evacuation hospital, and the four were taken in an ambulance to join the others at their new location.

At the end of January, 1945, the battle won, the Allies drove into Germany on seven fronts. The 30th Field Hospital continued to support Third Army Divisions as they went through the Rhineland-Palatinate region, and crossed the Rhine at Zeitz, in Saxony. By April 16 they had advanced to Rochlitz, following the Sixth Armored Division, the deepest Allied advance into Germany at the time. Then they moved down into Bavaria, supporting the 80th Infantry Division, and on the 29th were in Pfaffenberg, at the time that Hitler committed suicide.

As V-E Day was declared on May 8, 1945, the 30th Field Hospital did not have time to celebrate. The 3rd Cavalry Group of the 80th Infantry Division had liberated a concentration camp in Ebensee, Austria, on May 6, and the 30th was packed into 2 1/2-ton trucks to treat, along with two other hospitalization units, thousands of prisoners who were emaciated and still living in disease-ridden, overcrowded barracks. The treatment of prisoners continued until the remaining cases were transferred by June 23 to an Austrian civilian hospital in Bad Ischl, Austria.

The 30th Field Hospital departed Ebensee on June 28, 1945, and set up at Bad Wörishofen, east of Mindelheim, Germany, supporting the 80th Division once more. By July 1, enlisted personnel became eligible for discharge, based on a point system; the system was designed to get people with little battle experience over to the Japanese conflict, which was still going on. With the dropping of the atomic bomb in August, 1945, the war was soon over. Margaret arrived back in New York in November. She never forgot the emotion she felt on seeing the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Tears ran down her face as all the soldiers cheered and wept at their homecoming at last.

Margaret and her fellow Army nurses remained friends for life, writing to each other faithfully about their marriages, children, and careers. Margaret worked with pride as a registered nurse after the War in:

• The Veterans’ Hospital in Asheville, NC
• Gorgas Hospital in the Panama Canal Zone (where she met and married Daniel O’Donnell)
• Hospitals in Golden, Colorado and in Huntington, WV (where her son Dan was born), and King’s Daughters Hospital in Ashland, KY (where her children Peggy and Mike were born)

and after an eleven-year break raising children:

• Rochester General Hospital in Rochester, PA
• Peoples’ Hospital in Peru, IL
• St. Margaret’s Hospital in Spring Valley, IL (from where she retired in 1985).

She remained a Red Cross Nurse and hospice volunteer into her 80s. She died on February 10, 2008, at the Veterans’ Hospital in LaSalle / Peru, Illinois.