At 500 feet, the sound of the flak was deafening, and the C-47 was coming apart around them. Reba Whittle woke from a dead sleep to the roar of exploding shells and the sickening sight of blood running down her surgical technician’s left leg. The port engine was on fire. The fuselage was full of noise.
She started to pray as the plane dropped fast toward the snowy field below. She was a flight nurse on a routine run from RAF Grove in England to an advanced landing ground in Belgium. By the end of that September day in 1944, she would be the only Allied servicewoman captured by the Germans on the Western Front in the entire war, and her captors would have no idea what to do with her. On the Western Front in World War II, the Allied armies did not ordinarily permit women to enter the line of fire.
With the exception of some female members of the British Special Operations Executive and the American Office of Strategic Services who parachuted behind enemy lines to support the French Resistance, servicewomen rarely saw a shot fired in anger. In Britain, women manned searchlight batteries and anti-aircraft guns and saw some service against German aircraft, while large numbers of women in Britain and America served in auxiliary army, air force, and naval services, performing supporting roles from administration to vehicle maintenance to free up men for frontline service. Other women served as ferry pilots, moving replacement aircraft to frontline squadrons—a dangerous job, but none were actually shot down by hostile aircraft. The one job that placed British and American women directly in harm’s way was nursing.
Military nurses often came under fire, particularly from artillery, mortars, and enemy snipers, as they manned aid stations and field hospitals close to the frontline and within range of German guns. A number would be killed or injured. In the days following D-Day on June 6, 1944, over 500 British and American Army nurses came ashore to help deal with the huge volume of Allied casualties during the bitter fighting in Normandy. As the Allies advanced toward Germany, more and more nurses ended up in the combat zone.
There was one particular job that nurses could volunteer for, a daring form of nursing involving real dangers: the flight nurse. The US Army Air Force created the first training program in autumn 1942. The first 39 flight nurses graduated in February 1943. Many more would pass through the new school of air evacuation at Randolph Field, Texas before war’s end.
In Britain, a similar program was established using volunteers from the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, nicknamed the Flying Nightingales after Florence Nightingale, the mother of modern nursing. The US Navy also created a similar school at Naval Air Station Alameda, California. Unlike in the British Armed Forces, all US Army nurses were commissioned as officers, so that if they were captured, they would be treated better by the enemy. Flight nurses received a great deal of military training over a course of between six and nine weeks, including map reading, field survival, camouflage, and survival skills in case their aircraft went down—ditching and crash landing procedures, and how to use a parachute, though this was theoretical.
They did not actually undertake parachute training. Much emphasis was placed on physical fitness, getting used to the noise of military weapons, living in the field, and even dealing with simulated enemy attacks, since the airfields the nurses flew into were frequently under some form of attack and they needed to know how to look after themselves. US medical air evacuation squadrons were divided into four flights, each led by a male flight surgeon with six teams of flight nurses and male surgical technicians. Flight nurses were allowed to wear a flight surgeon’s wings with a maroon N for nurse attached.
Evacuation flights were made using specially modified C-47 and C-46 aircraft, converted internally to accommodate stretchers. During a flight, the flight nurse was the senior medical person on board, commanding a male surgical technician. The nurse would deal with IVs and oxygen and handle any medical emergencies that occurred during the flight, including patients going into shock, hemorrhaging, or requiring sedation. Flying itself was dangerous, and many flight nurses saved lives during dire emergencies when aircraft ditched in the ocean or caught fire.
Flight nurses successfully loaded patients aboard life rafts at sea, evacuated burning aircraft following crash landings in the North African desert, and loaded stretcher cases under Japanese fire in Burma. One flight nurse even parachuted clear of a stricken aircraft over China. In one famous incident, a C-47 carrying 13 nurses but no patients became lost during a flight from Sicily to Italy and crash landed in Albania behind German lines. Saved by Albanian partisans and special Allied personnel parachuted in to assist, the nurses, flight crew, and surgical technicians walked for two months, hunted by German patrols across mountainous and snowy regions, before being rescued.
In total, 16 American flight nurses were killed in World War II. One little-known incident involved the only Allied servicewoman taken prisoner by the Germans on the Western Front—a flight nurse. Both British and American aircraft involved in medical evacuation flights were not marked with red crosses. This was so the aircraft could also be used to bring in military supplies and bring wounded out on the return, but it meant the aircraft could be legally targeted by German fighters or flak.
So, from dodging German artillery and mortar fire at forward airfields, British and American flight nurses also had to worry about being shot down in aircraft lacking red cross insignia. And it did happen on occasion. Born in Rocksprings, Texas in 1919, Reba Whittle became an Army Reserve nurse in San Antonio. College-educated, she was 5 feet 7 inches tall, but actually under the weight required.
She was accepted because of her educational background and assigned to active duty in 1941. Until early 1943, Whittle worked as a general duty war nurse in various base hospitals in New Mexico and California before volunteering for the school of air evacuation. She completed six weeks of training in October 1943 and was assigned overseas to the 813th Medical Aeromedical Transportation Squadron at RAF Grove in England. Between January and September 1944, Whittle chalked up 40 missions in C-47s, 500 hours in the air, including 80 hours in combat.
On Wednesday, September 27, 1944, she embarked on a routine mission from Grove to advanced landing ground A-92 at Saint-Trond in Belgium. At some point during the flight, a navigational error was made that put the C-47 off course. Apart from the flight crew and Whittle, there was also a surgical technician on board. The plane carried supplies that would be unloaded at Saint-Trond, and then it would load up with stretcher cases for the return flight to England.
Such was the plan. But the C-47 had drifted some 70 kilometers, about 46 miles, from Saint-Trond when all hell broke loose. The aircraft found itself close to the heavily defended city of Aachen in western Germany. Whittle was asleep at the rear of the plane when she was awakened suddenly by incredibly loud detonations as German flak shells exploded all around the C-47.
She glanced at her surgical technician, who had blood flowing from his left leg. The noise inside the fuselage was tremendous, and Whittle saw that the port engine was on fire. She started to pray as the plane descended rapidly for a crash landing. The pilot managed to make a difficult crash landing in a snowy field four kilometers, about two and a half miles, outside of Aachen.
Everyone aboard was a casualty. One of the pilots was dead; the other had multiple injuries. Surgical technician Sergeant Hill had shrapnel wounds to his arm and his leg. Whittle was concussed and had lacerations on her face and back.
The C-47 was burning, and the survivors crawled from the wreckage. Initially, Whittle and her companions thought the soldiers coming toward them across the fields were British, but they soon realized they were German. One German immediately wrapped a bandage around Whittle’s head, as she was bleeding profusely. The German soldiers were shocked to discover that one of the Americans was a woman officer.
The injured Americans were placed in a German truck and driven to the nearest village, where medical treatment was administered. Then came a long journey aboard the cold and dirty German army truck, with frequent stops in villages and towns for meals or discussions about what to do with the prisoners. Eventually, the Germans moved them to a hospital for further treatment. The Germans were unsure how to treat a female Allied prisoner.
An army doctor told Whittle, “Too bad having a woman as you are the first one and no one knows exactly what to do. ” The entire German prisoner of war system was designed for male captives. The only Allied women held were civilians in special internment camps in old castles, citizens of enemy nations. For the moment, Whittle and the rest of the crew were sent to the central Luftwaffe interrogation center at Oberursel near Frankfurt.
All captured enemy aircrew were interrogated to try to extract intelligence before being sent on to a prison camp. The Allies did the same with German airmen. Following a polite interrogation, the Germans transferred Whittle to the hospital attached to the interrogation center, used to treat wounded Allied servicemen. After some debate, the Germans decided that an American nurse could be used to help Allied POWs.
Whittle was transferred to Stalag 9C, specifically the camp’s detached reserve hospital at Obermasfeld, arriving on October 6. On October 19, Whittle was transferred again, this time to Reservelazarett 9CB, another hospital attached to the wider camp at Meiningen. She assisted the camp doctors treating burn patients and those who had lost limbs. The capture of a US woman officer had attracted the interest of the protecting power, Switzerland, as representatives of the International Red Cross regularly inspected German POW camps.
The Red Cross gave details of Whittle’s location and status to the US State Department, which opened negotiations through the Swiss to have the Germans repatriate her. Repatriation of prisoners deemed too ill, injured, or psychologically unfit to Switzerland occurred regularly during the war. The reasoning was that these men would be of no further use to the Allied war effort. Of course, Whittle was perfectly fit and could resume her work for the Allied war effort as a nurse if released, but the Germans found housing and administering one single Allied female soldier too much bother and preferred to send her back.
On January 25, 1945, Whittle was shipped on a train with a batch of repatriated cases to Switzerland. From there, she boarded a plane to England for onward shipment stateside. Whittle received several decorations for her ordeal. She was awarded the Purple Heart for wounds received in the crash and the Air Medal for her 41 missions on C-47s evacuating the wounded.
She was promoted to the rank of first lieutenant in March. But the concussion she had suffered in the crash left her with lasting problems. Though returned to active duty in Miami Beach, Florida, headaches led to her flight status being suspended. Whittle did receive a telegram from President Franklin D.
Roosevelt thanking her for her service and recognizing her ordeal as a POW of the Germans for four months. Whittle was transferred to work as a ward nurse at an army hospital in California. She married and eventually was discharged from active duty, honorably, on January 13, 1946. Her post-army life was marked by physical and psychiatric problems.
She received several payments from the US Veterans Administration following lobbying. Reba Whittle died from cancer in 1981, officially unrecognized as a World War II POW despite the president’s telegram. She was finally accorded that recognition two years after her death, in 1983.
