Dorothy Kohlars; World War I Army Nurse Was 104

Dorothy Kohlars, an Army nurse in France during World War I who at 104 may have been the oldest American veteran, died Monday at the Veterans Home of California in Barstow.

Kohlars, who had vowed to live into the 21st century, died in her sleep, officials at the home said.

Born in Hanover, Mass., in 1895, Kohlars graduated from nursing school toward the end of World War I. She joined the U.S. Army Nurse Corps and was sent to France in 1918, one of 200 nurses staffing an Allied hospital near the Meuse-Argonne front.

She cared for the wounded in hospital tents lit by flashlight and visited by a doctor only once a week. Bandages and other basic supplies were often in short supply.

Even eight decades after the Great War ended, she could recount in grim detail the rumble and boom of warplanes and artillery and what it was like to deal with the carnage of war in such primitive conditions.

“We thought the world was coming to an end,” Kohlars told the Riverside Press-Enterprise in a 1998 interview. “I wandered around in the dark feeling pulses and I once put my hand into an open chest.”

She treated some German soldiers in addition to the American doughboys. Many of the Americans staggered in after assaults with mustard gas.

“The victims of mustard gas,” she recalled, “you could be sure they would not survive.”

She returned from France in 1919 and was posted to an Army hospital at Nogales, Ariz., on the Mexican border, where the famous black cavalry regiment known as the Buffalo Soldiers was stationed. The Buffalo Soldiers guarded the western frontier against Indian attacks from shortly after the Civil War until the early 1900s.

As a white woman, she was not permitted to treat the black soldiers but cared for their wives and children, said Edward Cole, a longtime friend of Kohlars.

She remained on active duty until her discharge in July 1920. She married Murray Kohlars in 1932 and worked as a nurse in veterans hospitals in Los Angeles and La Jolla until 1943. For the next 20 years, she and her husband ran a gas station and rented cabins in the desert near Las Vegas, later moving to Oceanside. Murray Kohlars died in 1970.

Kohlars, who had no children, moved to the veterans home in 1996.

In December 1998 she was awarded the French National Order of the Legion of Honor, France’s highest honor, for her valor on French soil. She was the first woman and among the first 100 American veterans to receive the award.

She received an honorary commission from the Retired Officers Assn. in 1997.

In a tribute read into the Congressional Record on March 17, 1998, Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands) called Kohlars “a living national treasure.”

Kohlars, whose mind was not dulled by age, later said Lewis was “mistaken” in his praise. Neither was President Clinton spared a gentle poke from the venerable veteran. Noting that he signed the card “Bill,” she quipped, “You’d have thought I’d known him all my life.”

She collected stamps, shunned computers and credit cards, and got around the Barstow facility on an electric scooter until a few weeks ago, said deputy administrator William Rigole.

She offered no recipe for long life, noting only that she lived a full life and never drank, smoked or abused drugs.

Last December, she told an interviewer that she wanted to live until 2000 “to see how the world changes with that date.” She entered the new millennium with greetings from high-ranking military officials and a dozen roses from Tomas Alvarado, secretary of the California Department of Veterans Affairs.

A chapel at the Barstow Veterans Home will be named after the woman whom the staff called Miss Dorothy.

“I used to call her the queen,” Rigole said. “She ruled--in a lovely way. She’s going to be missed.”