The Cherry Ames Page: War Nurse, page 3

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Cherry Ames, War Nurse
Fiction Meets Reality, page 3

In this section

The Need for Nurses

Recruiting Nurses

U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps

The Need for Nurses

Recruiting Nurses

Cherry Ames repeatedly reminds us how essential nurses are to the success of the war effort. For example, after she has joined the army, when her Spencer unit nursing colleagues arrive at Port Janeway in the Pacific to travel to Island 14, Cherry, who is now their supervisor, addresses the group:

"We nurses are the only women who go right up front with the soldiers. If we weren't serious, we wouldn't have taken the Army oath or the Florence Nightingale pledge, in the first place. I don't have to remind you," Cherry said with some difficulty, and her voice dropped, "that we are here to dedicate our lives so that others may live." (Chief Nurse, pp. 17-18)

As Cherry and the other nurses work frantically in a terrible emergency, trying to save as many lives as they can, they are exhausted and overworked, desperate for help:

That night and even the less turbulent nights that followed tested Cherry's idealism and her worthiness to be an Army nurse to the utmost. For all the tragic things she saw, there was no horror ... she only felt, more strongly than ever before, the glory, the beauty almost, of the service she could give. But something else worried, almost frightened, Cherry. As the war deepened, and there were more and greater battles, more and still more nurses were going to be needed ... if thousands of men were to be healed and returned to battle ... if we were to win. Cherry wished she could cry out to other girls, and her voice carry beyond this crowded pitiful room, far across the Caribbean and all over the United States, how desperately nurses were needed. (Army Nurse, p. 193)

In reality, nurses were desperately needed. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, which had been established in 1901, had very few nurses. Through extensive recruitment efforts, there were 12,000 nurses in the corps six months later, and between July 1943 (when the army instituted a month-long training course for nurses) and September 1945, more than 27,000 nurses underwent army training. Even so, late in the war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a bill to draft nurses into the military, which came within one vote of passage.

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All about World War II nurses in girls' series books, from Susan Merton to Nancy Naylor to Ann Bartlett. Click here to read more!

When Cherry eventually becomes chief nurse for her unit, she is responsible for scheduling ward assignments--a frustrating task because the shortage of nurses is acute:

With at least one nurse, and several corpsmen, needed for each twenty patients, and with their sick list growing, Cherry found there simply were not enough nurses. ... "The only solution," Cherry scowled, "is to load each girl with forty patients or get more nurses. But there aren't more nurses! And there aren't going to be more nurses until more girls become student nurses! Oh-h!" (Chief Nurse, pp. 60-61)

But it is not only student nurses who are needed: older women can, and do, help also, as illustrated when a new nurse anaesthetist is flown in to join Cherry's unit. (The skills of nurse anaesthetists were in high demand during the war.) The new nurse, Bessie Flanders, tells Cherry that she had trained as a nurse ten years earlier, but left the profession to marry. When her husband was killed in action a year before:

Bessie's first thought had been to return to nursing. She had wasted no time on grief, she only wanted to serve. ...

"So I went back into a civilian hospital at first," Mrs. Flanders told Cherry. "They certainly do need more nurses! My, there are lots of older, retired, patriotic nurses returning to help out in this shortage. Some of them grandmothers, that's how shorthanded we are. The real young student nurses are a great help." (Chief Nurse, pp. 96-97)

Naturally, the demand for nurses in the military severely strained the resources of civilian hospitals, and the shortage provided the impetus for the federal government's successful U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps.

U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps

Recognizing the dire need for nurses, the U.S. Congress, in June 1943, passed the Bolton Act, named for Frances Payne Bolton, a congresswoman from Ohio. This act created the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps under the auspices of the United States Public Health Service.

The Cadet Nurse Corps was a federally funded program to subsidize the education of nursing students, who in return agreed to serve in essential

Figure 3

military or civilian nursing after their graduation. The program also subsidized nursing schools that accelerated their training programs to two and a half years instead of keeping to the customary three-year timetable. Lucile Petry was appointed as chief of the Division of Nurse Education, the federal office charged with administering the program.

Each of the first five books in the Cherry Ames series features at least one scene in which the merits of joining the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps are extolled. Becoming a Cadet Nurse is presented as a way to serve both the national interest and one's self-interest, because those young women lucky enough to be accepted into the corps will receive free career training and acquire skills that will always be in demand (see Figure 3, a Cadet Nurse Corps recruiting poster that promises "A Lifetime Education FREE"). For example, one evening in the dining hall at Spencer Hospital, Cherry's classmate Vivian Warren comments:

"Do you know that half of the probies coming in now are on government scholarships? Miss Reamer told me they're aided by the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps."

Gwen gave a low whistle. "They sure must need nurses, to give training and maintenance free!"

"That's not exactly news," Marie Swift said. "Always need more nurses in wartime. Not only on the battlefronts either. Look at the shortage right here in Spencer, with nurses leaving for war fronts."

"No, no, not only because of the war!" Vivian said. "We'll be needed just as much after the war. Nursing isn't just a temporary war job. There is an awful shortage of nurses. It's a war job with a future." (Student Nurse, pp. 174-75)

Cherry and her nursing school classmates are even a bit jealous of the Cadet Nurses, especially of their distinctive uniforms, with scarlet epaulets and a Maltese cross--one of the earliest symbols of nursing--on their left sleeves:

Cherry noticed, in growing numbers, a certain stunning red-trimmed gray uniform, worn with a dashing gray beret. Most of the new girls sported it. Cherry half envied them. She knew what it was: the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps. Those lucky girls were getting their nursing training free, with their rooms at Spencer and their meals and uniforms and pocket money provided for them, too. (Army Nurse, pp. 30-31)

The "pocket money" was a monthly allowance that ranged from $15 to not less than $30, depending on the length of service in the corps. High school graduates up to age thirty-five, both single and married, were eligible to participate.

Highly successful, the Cadet Nurse Corps provided an impetus to the establishment of additional nursing school programs throughout the country and provided some 150,000 nurse graduates, giving the United States a large pool of nurses to meet both military and civilian demands, before the program was discontinued in 1948.

Even Cherry's madcap young friend, Midge Fortune, is imbued with the desire to join the Cadet Nurse Corps. She writes enviously of a mutual hometown friend who has been accepted, and notes: "Golly, if I ever escape from high school, I'm going to try for the Cadet Nurses. I'm bound and determined to have a profession and go places like you, Cherry!" (Chief Nurse, p. 142).

Next: Civilian Nursing or Army Nursing? -->

Figure 3: "Cadet Nurse: The Girl with a Future." Recruiting poster for the U.S. Public Health Service. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.