Women’s Work: Fighting to Serve — Black Nurses in World War II

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, just 1,000 women served in the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) nationwide. One of these nurses was Gertrude Margaritte Ivory, who had joined on May 1 of that year. She had just finished her nursing education, and the United States at that time remained neutral in the midst of a growing global war. By the time Ivory marked her first-year anniversary with the ANC in 1942, America was at war and there were 12,000 nurses in the ranks. Ivory one of those 12,000 nurses, but she was one of just 56 Black nurses who had been allowed to join the ANC.

Ivory had not even known it was possible for her to join the Corps. When she finished her nursing degree and passed her board examinations in the fall of 1940, Ivory began working at Brewster Hospital in Florida. An administrator suggested she should take the American Red Cross Examination to qualify as a Red Cross nurse. When Ivory passed the exam, she received a letter from the ANC, asking her to arrive for military duty at Fort Bragg — now Fort Liberty —North Carolina.

Fort Bragg was one of two locations in the United States where Black nurses could serve. Inez Holmes also arrived there in May 1941, after four years as a nurse in a New York hospital. At Fort Bragg, Holmes was designated a head nurse in surgery. Because of the military’s racial segregation policies, she oversaw the division of surgery that cared only for African American soldiers.

On December 8, 1941, the United States declared war on Japan, but the quota of 56 Black nurses remained in place even as the Army Nurse Corps grew quickly. Recruiters were eager to sign up nurses, but only if they were white women. Black women continued to receive rejections. The quota for Black nurses rose only slowly, up to 65 in 1942. Two years later, there were 250 Black nurses in service, a small fraction of the thousands of qualified women working across the nation.

All military branches maintained segregationist policies, and this extended to medical care — unless the patient was an enemy. In addition to Black soldiers, Black nurses were also allowed to care for prisoners of war. This was also part of the War Department’s justification for keeping such a small quota; leaders assumed they could only use Black nurses in a small way. It didn’t matter that all registered nurses in the United States, regardless of race, had fulfilled the same requirements to become nurses in the first place.

Although military leaders expected Black nurses to serve in these limited ways, the reality was that Black soldiers were soon fighting around the world; Black nurses would need to be there too. This was a contrast to the experiences of most Black women in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC): All Black WACs served stateside until 1945, when the 6888th Central Postal Delivery Battalion became the only group of Black women soldiers to be sent overseas during the war. Their service in Europe has been receiving increased, well-deserved attention in recent years. Black nurses, in contrast, have often gone unrecognized.

In fact, Black nurses were assigned to Liberia at the 25th Station Hospital in early 1943, two years before the 6888th shipped out to Europe. In 1942, the United States agreed to help defend Liberia from attack and, in return, would be allowed to build an airport there. They would also build roads and other infrastructure that would help with stationing American troops, and this included the creation of the 25th Station Hospital, built to serve American troops in Liberia, mostly for routine medical care and illnesses. Many, but not all, of the American servicemen sent to Liberia were Black.

In February 1943, Gertrude Ivory boarded the SS James Parker with 29 other nurses and crossed the Atlantic to serve in Liberia. At the 25th Station Hospital, the nurses served under First Lieutenant Susan Freeman, who had been the first Black nurse at Camp Livingston, Louisiana to earn the rank of first lieutenant. For eight months, the 30 nurses lived, worked, and socialized together.

The mosquito-borne disease malaria was a huge problem in Liberia. At night, the nurses were required to wear gloves and helmets. In a time when women wore skirts and dresses regularly, the nurses in Liberia wore slacks to protect them from the mosquitos. They had netting around their beds, which were also sprayed for protection against mosquitos. It did not work. Despite all their precautions, Gertrude Ivory later recalled that everyone got malaria. “[W]e had to wear the slacks and the gloves and the long slides and all but we still were ill with malaria.”

Nine months after they arrived, the nurses left. The medical needs were not enough to justify keeping them there; most of the routine care could be done by medical corps servicemen, and the nurses would be of greater use elsewhere. In recognition for their excellent service, the military awarded citations to Ivory and nine other nurses. Ivory received a citation for going above the call of duty, and Lt. Freeman was recognized by both the military and the Liberian government. All but two of the nurses went immediately from Liberia to new posts overseas, along with more nurses. Ivory, still suffering from malaria symptoms, asked to return to Fort Bragg, where she supported a unit researching the use of penicillin.

In December 1943, Inez Holmes – who had also arrived at Ft. Bragg prior to the war – was one of 15 nurses sent to the 268th Station Hospital, the first facility created specifically for Black soldiers’ medical care in the Pacific Theatre.

For the next two years, the 268th operated out of locations in Australia, New Guinea, and the Philippines, depending on where it was needed. In that time, Black nurses were also tasked to support the 335th and 383rd Station Hospitals in Burma. These were on the Ledo Road, a passage that connected China to Great Britain’s colony of India. The Allies relied on the Ledo Road to get vital supplies to China as part of the fight against Japan.

By 1944, the U.S. military was in dire need of nurses. Officials announced they would no longer limit the number of Black nurses in the Army Nurse Corps. That summer, for the first time, Black nurses were sent to England to care for POWs at the 168th Station Hospital. This was a very different environment than the POW care that Black nurses provided in the United States.

In the aftermath of D-Day, POWs began arriving with extensive injuries, which gave many of the nurses the opportunity to show their skills in ways they had not previously been allowed. For four months, the 63 nurses cared for more than a thousand POWs. They finished their work in England just months before the Black WACs of the 6888th shipped into Birmingham, less than 100 miles away, to do their work.

When the war ended in 1945, there were 59,000 women serving in the Army Nurse Corps. Just 479 of these nurses were Black. The Navy Nurse Corps finally began admitting Black nurses in the months before the war’s end, commissioning just four women to start. It had taken nearly the entire war for the United States government to begin setting aside its prejudices about whether Black nurses should serve. It would take much longer for working conditions to improve; in many ways, the fight for equality for Black nurses was just beginning.