But in the predawn hours, the Germans announced they were back, dropping over two dozen 280-mm artillery shells around the hospital. According to brief account of the attack in Jeremy Carl Schwendiman’s book “Saving Lives, Saving Honor,” shell fragments ripped through the walls of a surgical room, splintered a nurse’s desk, blew up an ammunition truck, badly damaged the mess hall and killed a sentry outside.
Undaunted, Mary and her fellow nurses and doctors soon were treating 96 injured soldiers who were brought in that day.
“We had a sergeant in charge of the mess and he got it all cleaned up and we still had a nice Thanksgiving dinner that night,” Mary said.
Later that night, the German shelling began again. This time, more of the camp was destroyed and one man was severely injured. And yet come dawn, Mary and the others again went back to work as 122 new patients were brought in.
“It was hard, but that’s what we were there for — to take care of the boys when they were brought in from the field,” she said. “We were always so busy that we didn’t think about anything else then.”
Mary Hohl is Mary Murphy now — has been since 1951 — and over the weekend before this Veterans Day, she did think about it. And talk about it, though it took some prodding. She doesn’t like to rehash a lot of this, never has.
Sitting in her apartment at the St. Leonard retirement community — surrounded by photos of her family, her cactus garden and a couple of the Kewpie dolls she collects — she told stories you would not expect from a white-haired grandmother who is just 12 days shy of 100 years old.
Don’t let that nearby walker fool you. Up until a few years ago, she could dance up a storm and she was active in the community. Her mind is still sharp. She is smart, opinionated, has a good sense of humor and a trove of stories worth hearing — especially today.
She is one of the Miami Valley’s most unusual veterans — a little bit of Rambo, Hawkeye Pierce and Florence Nightingale all rolled into one.
More than 59,000 American nurses served in the Army Nurse Corps in World War II. As Judith Bellaire of the U.S. Army Center of Military History has noted, many served under fire in field hospitals and evacuation hospitals, on hospital trains and as flight nurses on medical transport planes.
As part of the 39th, Mary — a nurse anesthetist — participated in five campaigns: Normandy, Northern France, Ardennes, Rhineland and Central Europe. She and the others received the Meritorious Unit Award for their nonstop work during the Battle of the Bulge, the bloodiest battle for U.S. forces in World War II. According to the U.S. Department of Army, there were 108,347 American casualties with 19,246 killed.
She had one of the more dangerous and certainly one of the most challenging and life-saving assignments in the war. And she and her fellow nurses and doctors were good at what they did.
According to Bellaire’s report, “fewer than 4 percent of the American soldiers who received medical care in the field or underwent evacuation died from wounds or disease.”
Hospitals like the 39th were the precursors to the Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals (M.A.S.H.) that were first deployed in the Korean War and later popularized by the 1970s TV show featuring characters like Hawkeye Pierce, Hot Lips Houlihan and Corporal Klinger.
TV laughs and real life are quite a bit different, and in World War II, 400 military women lost their lives. Only one nurse died with the 39th, but there were several close calls.
“One time we were going from our hospital to another to get supplies and someone started shooting at us,” Mary remembered. “We were lucky. The driver put his foot on the accelerator and we were gone.
“Another time we were set up along a road and German planes came along and strafed a convoy that was coming past. We got a little extra flak from that.”
On Christmas Eve of 1944 — eight days into the Battle of the Bulge — the 39th had moved from France to Virton, Belgium, where it set up in a Catholic girls’ school.
That night, according to Schwendiman, the nurses, doctors and staff attended a midnight Mass there that was accompanied by Christmas carols sung in Flemish, the whine of German war planes overhead and the sound of shrapnel pinging against the school roof.
Undaunted, the 39th took in another 167 casualties on Christmas Day. Most were American, some were wounded German prisoners.
By the end of the war, it was estimated the 39th Evacuation Hospital treated more than 20,000 people.
From humble beginnings
“Ever since I was a little kid, I wanted to be a nurse,” Mary said. “I remember seeing pictures of nurses in World War I and I knew I wanted to do that. Not really the war, just be a nurse. That’s all I thought about.”
Early on, though, that was a far-reaching dream. The Great Depression hit her family hard. As a young girl she walked along the railroad tracks picking up coal the family could use at home.
She lived on Kiefaber Street in Dayton and went to Holy Angels school, and at other times in Lakeview near Indian Lake and later in Indiana.
“We were poverty-stricken,” she said. “We had seven children and then dad lost his job and couldn’t pay rent anymore. They came and ordered us out. We were going to be in the street. Then a wealthy old bachelor my dad worked with let us live in a country home he had for a few months.”
By the time she was a senior at a Catholic school in Indianapolis, her family could no longer afford the tuition. “They were going to put me out of the school and my dad had a fit,” she said. “He said, ‘Her life will be ruined if she doesn’t graduate.’ So he offered to work there as a janitor if they allowed me to finish school and that’s what happened.”
With a diploma, she got into a nursing school, graduated, worked in a Noblesville, Ind., emergency room, returned to Dayton and in June 1941, she and three nursing friends joined the U.S. Army.
“Remember those signs that said ‘We Want You!’ I thought they were pointing at me,” she said with a smile. “But it was just the thing to do to help your country. They needed nurses.”
As an RN, she was commissioned as a second lieutenant and eventually was picked for a new medical project, the ever-moving evacuation hospitals that would set up right behind the front.
After 2 ½ years stateside, she and the some 200 other doctors, nurses and support personnel of the 39th finally headed to New York, where, on Feb. 8, 1944, they boarded the HMS Andes, an old, steam-powered British transport ship. It was only then that she and other others found out they were bound for England.
The orders had been kept secret because there was a real fear of attacks by U-boats. At one point, the Allies were losing 90 ships a month to the German attacks.
On to Europe
For the entire 10-day trip, the Andes sailed under blackout conditions. During evening hours all the ship’s lights were out or the windows were kept covered. No one was allowed on deck. To further protect from being targeted, the ship went on a zigzag course that took it up into the North Atlantic.
“I remember the loud speakers telling us to go to our rooms and stay there,” Mary said. “After that I remember the water getting rough and it got cold and we heard gunshots. We were being attacked, but we kept going. I remember being really scared.
“Then I heard planes overhead. Later I asked a soldier, ‘What in the world is going on?’ He said we were attacked by a U-boat. Then the Royal Air Force had come in and stayed with us ‘til we got to Liverpool.”
In England, among all the other preparations for the D-Day invasion, the nurses — who had traded their starched white uniforms for green Army fatigues, combat boots and helmets — were given commando training. Finally, on July 17, the 39th Evacuation Hospital unit boarded a Liberty boat and made a bumpy trip across the English Channel to Utah Beach at Normandy.
She said they slept in a field that first night as planes flew overhead nonstop and all around them were the sounds of gunfire and flak.
Within a few days, the hospital was set up at Sainte Mere Eglise, where, according to Schwendiman, the members of the 39th first saw unburied war dead on the streets. As records from back then state, the hospital took in its first 96 patients that day, treating everything from gunshots to land-mine injuries requiring amputations.
Mary said they worked 12-hour days, but often stayed on if the backlog of surgical patients was too great. Over the course of the next 10 months, she said their hospital moved nine times through France, Belgium, Luxembourg and into Germany.
She said they had to be ready to go almost instantly. “All we owned was a sleeping bag and a duffle. All you had in there was your tooth brush, some combs and medical supplies. You could go to the PX for everything else. I always had a book of poetry with me, too. And my prayer book, rosary and scapular medal.”
She also had writing materials, and throughout the war she wrote her youngest brother Jack, who was 13 and lived on a farm near Beavercreek. He is now 84, lives in Riverside and still operates an auto shop on Springfield Street.
He has copies of the letters his big sister sent him from the front. One postmarked Aug. 7, 1944, begins like this:
“Hello my cute little loving brother Jackie. How are you honey?”
She commends him for being brave during a tonsillectomy and then asks:
“Are you keeping everything under control on the farm, these days? Don’t work too hard. I’m living in a tent again these days but it’s pretty comfortable. We have been working and keeping busy… Hope to see you before next July 4th. Take care of yourself and tell everyone hello … Love Mary C.”
V.E. Day
On March 24, 1945, the unit moved into Germany, setting up first at the town of Bad Kreuznach and then 12 days later moving to Hersfeld, where it soon was visited by Gen. George Patton.
It was during this same time that the members of the 39th visited the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp, which had just been liberated.
Finally, on May 8 — V.E. Day — the members of the 39th, now working from a hospital set up in the town of Weiden, listened to a BBC broadcast of Germany’s unconditional surrender. Although it would be nearly six months until the entire unit would be moved back to the States, many of the pressures of war had lessened.
Before coming home, some of the nurses in the 39th married other soldiers they had met in the war.
“I got a lot of proposals, but none were serious,” Mary said with a laugh. “I had no intention of getting married overseas. People were full of emotions over there. Young men had been drafted and had never been away from home before. I said I was going to wait until I got home to be sure.”
She returned to the States and worked at a mental hospital for soldiers on Long Island.
“It was the saddest place in the world. All these handsome young men, now mentally deprived because of war. Their parents would come to see them and be so broken-hearted seeing what happened to their sons.”
She finally left the Army as a captain and then used the G.I. Bill to go to Catholic University in Washington, D.C., where she studied nursing education.
Afterward, she would work at a veterans’ hospital in Northport, N.Y. That’s where she met another veteran, Jim Murphy, who worked in the lab. They bowled together, hung out and especially went dancing.
Family members will tell you he’d joked he had had a card file of the pretty girls he knew and each one he’d graded on how well they could dance.
“Not that I know of,” Mary said with a smile. “But I was the best dancer … at least, I thought so.”
Jim must have, too. One day he asked her to take a ride to Montauk Point and while there, he proposed to her.
The couple wed, eventually moved to Dayton and started a family.
When Mary got pregnant, she quit working and also quit smoking, which she had picked up in the service. She never did smoke again, though she would try a drink once in a while. “I wasn’t a teetotaler,” she smiled. “I liked a good martini.”
The couple had two sons — Jim is now a pulmonary and critical-care specialist at Miami Valley Hospital and John is a scientist at the University of Dayton Research Institute — and after the boys were in high school, Mary went back to work as a nurse.
Through it all, she and her husband kept dancing. “One beat of polka music and he was on his feet,” she laughed.
Her husband passed away in 1999 and then some years ago she moved into St. Leonard, where she socializes, listens religiously to Cincinnati Reds games — she even keeps statistics — and stays entwined with her family, who are putting on a 100th birthday celebration for her there on Nov. 23.
“I never dreamed I was going to be 100 years old,” she said. “I outlived my friends and most of my brothers and sisters. But it’s been a treat. It’s been a normal life. A hard life, too, and there were some bad times.”
Although she doesn’t open up about this, you know some of the worst came in the war. And with some prodding, she touched on that. “It makes me so mad now when young people are sent off to these terrible wars. We should do everything to avoid that. People don’t realize how terrible war is if they’ve not been there to see it themselves. It’s just such a waste of life.”
That’s why she risked her own to save others. And she and the rest of the 39th Evacuation Hospital saved thousands of lives.
And today, that makes her a great veteran to salute.
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