Forgotten Heroine
Book honors courageous GI nurse who was one of the first American RNs to arrive in France during the Normandy invasion

By Lydia Anderson, RN, MPH
June 78, 2004

In December 2000, columnist Bob Welch received a call at the newspaper where he works, the Register-Guard in Eugene, Ore. The call was from a retired man, Nathan Fendrick, who puts on World War II Holocaust programs in high schools. Fendrick had come across a letter by a Jewish-American GI nurse, and he wanted Welch to write a column about the woman, Frances Slanger.

At 5-foot-1, Slanger, RN, was one of 18 nurses to splash ashore on Utah Beach wearing Army fatigues and 3-pound helmets four days after D-Day in June 1944. Along with another unit, Slanger and her fellow nurses were the first American nurses to arrive in France.

Welch resisted initially, but acquiesced to Fendrick’s persistence. Soon after the column was published, Welch received a phone call from a local reader, 82-year-old Sallylou Bonzer, who served as a nurse in the 45th Field Hospital Unit in France with Slanger. Her husband, John, was a doctor in the same unit. “Goodness,” she said, “you wrote about my friend Frances Slanger this morning.” In disbelief, Welch marveled at the chances that a woman who lived 10 minutes from his home had known a woman who had been born in Poland, grown up in Boston, and died in Belgium.

That afternoon, Welch was at Bonzer’s home looking through her and husband John’s photo albums of the 45th Field Hospital. Bonzer had kept in touch with a handful of nurses. Though most were dead, some on the East Coast were still alive. As he drove home, Welch thought, “Could I write a book about Frances Slanger?” A month later, he was working on a trail that had been cold for nearly 60 years.

True patriot

“Three things made Slanger different from the other nurses in her unit,” Welch said. “First, she was Jewish, which was extremely rare in that the Jewish culture was dead-set against its young women getting into nursing in the ’30s and ’40s. Second, she was a Polish immigrant who had an extra-keen appreciation for her freedom as an American. She was uncommonly patriotic, her poetry and prose full of thanks to God for America. And, finally, as a writer, she had a deeper-than-normal sense of what was going on in the world — she was well aware of what the Germans were doing to the Jews in Eastern Europe in the late ’30s — and well aware, really, of herself.”

Slanger’s relatively short life was characterized by hardship, starting with her first seven years in Lodz, Poland, a city notorious for the suffering of its civilians, especially those who were Jewish like the Slanger family. Although her family immigrated to Boston, all of her relatives who remained in Poland died in camps.

From early on, Slanger was intent on being a nurse. “I want to serve [those] who are less fortunate than I,” she wrote in her admissions letter to Boston City Hospital’s School of Nursing. After briefly working in a factory, she entered the school in February 1934 and graduated three years later.

Some of her supervisors found her headstrong, commenting that she “spends too much time with her patients.” She worked at Boston City Hospital for about three years, and then went into private home nursing until joining the Army Nurse Corps in August 1943.

Certainly, all of the nurses of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps involved in that historic endeavor were brave, but the diminutive and reserved 30-year-old Slanger left her mark on thousands of U.S. soldiers through her passion for words. “It was the way she saw more deeply than the rest, and took time to chronicle what she saw in words,” is how an observer described Slanger.

Enduring legacy

Months after arriving in France, she wrote a letter by flashlight in her tent one evening that paid tribute to the American GI. The piece was published in the Stars and Stripes military newspaper, and received widespread recognition and praise. Slanger never read her own words in print. She was killed the next night by shelling from German troops, the first American nurse to die in Europe after the D-Day landing at Normandy.

Hundreds of GIs wrote in after Slanger’s letter was published, and again after word of her death.

“Slanger, after her death, was honored by hundreds of GIs for her substance as a human being — for her courage, compassion, and willingness, along with the other nurses, to be in a war that, unlike the men who were drafted, they had no obligation to be in,” said Welch, author of American Nightingale: The Story of Frances Slanger, Forgotten Heroine of Normandy.

In June, it will have been 60 years ago since this young Polish-born RN joined other nurses in the 45th Field Hospital Unit. The Second Platoon of which Slanger was part of moved more than 30 times, Welch said, living four nurses to a small tent. The 45th’s three units treated 4,950 patients and performed a thousand major surgeries. The doctors and nurses saw 223 people die while in their care.

“The American nurses were far grittier than anyone would imagine,” Welch said. “Try Frances Slanger, in a 3-pound helmet, boots, and fatigues, nearly drowning while getting ashore at Utah Beach,” Welch said. “Sallylou Bonzer used alcohol to wipe down a saw in the middle of 12-hour shift after a soldier’s leg has been sawn off. Nurses served as close to the frontlines as any medical battalion could get. More than 70 were taken prisoner. And yet, unlike Pvt. Jessica Lynch, a lot of Americans never even knew it. Sixteen nurses were killed in action.”

The World War II Memorial was unveiled May 29 in Washington in anticipation of the 60th anniversary of D-Day on June 6, the massive Allied force invasion on the five beaches across a 60-mile stretch of the Normandy coast.

“In a world filled with pain and selfishness, there are giving people who inspire us all to live for a higher calling,” Welch said.

“Following her death, a GI wrote about Slanger: ‘For somewhere in the sordid, selfish, shameful business that makes up most of our petty lives there is a nobility that will not perish 85’ Slanger, he was suggesting, was that nobility, and I agree. I’m honored to be sharing such nobility through the telling of her story.”

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