STAFF WRITER

  In recognition of the 100th anniversary of the Army Nurse Corps, two World War II Army nurses shared their experiences with Geneva American Legion Post 75 members at the post's Veterans Day dinner Sunday.

  Former 1st Lt. Solveig Pederson of Elmhurst served from May 1943 to November 1945 in the 203rd Hospital Ship Complement assigned to the 7th Army. From its home base in Charlestowne, S.C., she boarded the hospital ship Algonquin and sailed on 18 different trips to such places as North Africa, Italy and southern France.

  "These were fellows that couldn't go back to the front, but they were well enough to make the trip back, because the trip took two weeks to get across," said Pederson of the men she took care of on the Algonquin.

  One of her patients, an Arab man who spoke little English, once directed her to his bunk and lifted up his pillow to show her eight ears.

  "For every one of the Germans he killed, he sliced off an ear," she said.

  Patients on her ship were well-traveled by that time. After suffering their wounds, they had to make their way from field hospitals on the fronts to tent hospitals short distances from the front to general or station hospitals far away from any action.

  Former 1st Lt. Helen Cross of Downers Grove served from 1942 to 1945 in the Army's 27th Evacuation Hospital in Oran and Italy, north of Naples. She crossed over the Atlantic to Casablanca on the troop carrier Billy Mitchell, and she cared for the wounded from the Battle of Cassino Monastery, a major German stronghold during the war.

  "We were never very far away (from the front lines) at all," Cross said. "That's where most of the casualties were coming from, Cassino."

  The 27th Evacuation Hospital was a tent hospital with anywhere from 750 to 1,500 beds, 60 nurses, 55 medical officers, three nonmedical officers, and 500 enlisted men. It functioned like a regular hospital.

  "I was always in surgery," said Cross, a surgical nurse. "It was just like a hospital but it was in a tent. We had radiology, pathology. We had everything."

  Everything including penicillin. Cross recalled the first time she saw the medication. She was specially assigned to a civilian hospital to care for a general. She expected to see a bad scene with tubes and wires running everywhere when she entered the room, but what found was a general sitting up in bed, reading a newspaper. The penicillin was flown over from the United States especially for him, she said. It was the first time anyone there had ever seen it.

  "So it pays to be a general," Cross said.

  The 27th Evacuation Hospital also cared for injured Germans.

  "We treated the German prisoners more or less like they were our own," she said.

  However, Cross claimed a momento from one of her German patients — an S.S. hat that she briefly wore when she told the story behind it.

  "This fellow was a patient, and he was a kind of nice young guy and we were just going to transfer him to another hospital, so I just arranged for him to lose his hat."

  But the defining experience of Cross' service, she said, was the liberation of Dachau, the infamous German concentration camp 10 to 15 miles from where she was stationed. She intended to take an afternoon off after the camp was liberated. She ended up working in the horrible mess of death.

  "We nurses went through each of the barracks to decide which were dead so that the boys could carry them out," Cross said.

  Both of Cross' brothers were in the Air Corps, and both were German prisoners for a time. One was in prison for three years, and somehow her parents even received notes from him during that time. Her other brother was officially listed as missing for 11 months, and when he was released, the first thing he did was call home.

  "It must have been terrible for my parents," she said of her decision to join the Army Nurse Corps. "I don't know how they took it."

  However, Cross did take home a husband from the experience. After her brothers were released in September 1945, Cross was sent home to be with her family. The war ended Nov. 11.

  "We only had one single officer, so that was all that I had to work on," Cross said. "He finally came home after Christmas, and he called me up and he said, 'Do you think we should get married?' "

  They did.

  Contact Tim Waldorf at (630) 416-5116 or twaldorf@scn1.com.

11/14/01