Noble Words From Another War

Frances Slanger was not remembered amid the hoopla that D-day and the new World War II Memorial triggered last spring, nor during ceremonies for American soldiers dying in Iraq. But Thursday marks the 60-year anniversary of someone whose life and wartime death, a New York radio show host once said, “surpassed anything Hollywood has ever dreamed of.”

On Monday at the statehouse in Boston, a ceremony will be held to honor Frances Slanger, a fruit peddler’s daughter and Polish immigrant who, on Oct. 21, 1944, became the first nurse to die after the landings at Normandy on June 6 that year. What made her death so notable--beyond her being a woman in a man’s war--was a letter she wrote that paid tribute to the American GI. She wrote it by flashlight in a tent and mailed it to the Stars and Stripes newspaper the next morning. The following night, Germans shelled her field hospital. She was killed.

When Stars and Stripes published the letter in November, not knowing Slanger had died, her words triggered scores of letters from grateful GIs. More came later when the newspaper reported her death.

“She wrote as a GI Jane to a GI Joe deeply involved in a bloody business called war, asking not for understanding, expecting no mercy, but giving to her limits in both,” wrote “Spec” McClure in Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood gossip column. He had worked for Hopper prior to serving as a soldier in Belgium. “And we knew there wasn’t a false word in the letter . . . and we grinned in appreciation, knowing that we read the letter of a girl already dead, and her words fixed beyond alteration. They were sealed with her blood.”

Slanger was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1913. Her father had left for Boston and the rest of the family was unable to join him when the outbreak of World War I nearly brought immigration to a halt. At one point the city became a German-Russian battleground. For years residents were racked by starvation, disease and bitter cold. At age 7, Slanger arrived at Ellis Island, where she was initially detained because of an eye infection.

Despite such hardships, she grew up curiously unselfish. “I want to serve [those] who are less fortunate than I,” she wrote as a young woman. “I have always loved to comfort those who were sick.”

Her parents opposed her becoming a nurse. So did some supervisors at Boston City Hospital’s School of Nursing, where Jewish students were rare and sometimes only grudgingly accepted. After she earned her degree and joined the Army Nurse Corps--aware of Germany’s mistreatment of the Jews--she was initially relegated to stateside duty because of her poor eyesight.

But Slanger persevered. With the other nurses in her unit she splashed ashore from a landing craft four days after D-day, her 5-foot-1 frame cloaked in men’s fatigues and a three-pound helmet. She nearly drowned. Once ashore, she and the others--the first nurses in France--were greeted by 17 truckloads of wounded soldiers, the kind they would see daily as their makeshift hospitals followed the front lines east into Germany.

Just miles short of the German border, as an October storm howled and shells thudded in the distance, Slanger penned her letter. Soldiers had been praising the nurses, but Slanger said the GIs had it wrong. “We wade ankle deep in mud. You have to lie in it. . . . Sure, we rough it, but in comparison to the way you men are taking it, we can’t complain, nor do we feel that bouquets are due us . . . it is to you we doff our helmets . . . but after taking care of some of your buddies; seeing them when they are brought in bloody, dirty with the earth, mud and grime, and most of them so tired. Somebody’s brothers, somebody’s fathers and somebody’s sons.”

Slanger compared the lives of the wounded soldiers to the fire in the tent’s potbelly stove. “If it is allowed to run down too low and if there is a spark of life left in it, it can be nursed back. . . . So can a human being. It is slow, it is gradual, it is done all the time in these Field Hospitals.”

The soldiers’ concern for each other touched her: “The wounded do not cry. Their buddies come first. The patience and determination they show, the courage and fortitude they have is sometimes awesome to behold. It is we who are proud to be here. Rough it? No. It is a privilege to be able to receive you, and a great distinction to see you open your eyes and with that swell American grin, say, ‘Hi-ya babe!’ ”

Since the D-day landings five months before, the GIs had been living a kill-or-be-killed existence. Suddenly, someone was telling them that they were honorable men. In Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland and France, scores of letters poured in to Stars and Stripes. And when the paper reported her death, others followed, tinged with sorrow. Something must be done to honor this woman, the GIs demanded. Perhaps the finest hospital ship in the fleet should be named for her.

McClure, in the piece that ran in Hopper’s column, reflected the hopelessness that many soldiers felt: “In weariness I have told myself a thousand times nothing remained to believe in--that the ancient enemies of mankind, greed and ignorance, were too great for our mortal strength to conquer. But now I know that this is not altogether right. . . . For somewhere in the sordid, selfish, shameful business that makes up most of our petty lives there is a nobility that will not perish.”

Beneath a wooden Star of David, Frances Slanger was buried in a cemetery in Belgium, next to the fighting men she had served. Shortly after the war ended, a newly refurbished hospital ship--the finest in the fleet--set sail to bring home America’s wounded. It was named for a fruit peddler’s daughter.