SUPERINTENDENT  OF  U.S.  NAVY  NURSE  CORPS

DURING  WORLD  WAR  II

Sue Sophia Dauser, the fifth Superintendent of the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps, guided the Nurse Corps through World War II.  She was born in Anaheim, California, on September 20, 1888 and graduated from the California Hospital School of Nursing in 1914.  She became a Navy Nurse in September 1917, eight years after the establishment of the Navy Nurse Corps.  During World War One she served with Naval Base Hospital Number 3 in the U.S. and in Edinburgh, Scotland, holding the grade of Chief Nurse for most of that period.  Following World War One, she was placed in charge of nursing activities at the Naval Hospital, San Diego.  During the 1920s she served aboard several ships as well as in several U.S. hospitals, and overseas billets in Guam and the Philippines.  In 1923, Chief Nurse Dauser tended to President Warren G. Harding during his fatal illness.

In 1939, Dauser was appointed Superintendent of the Navy Nurse Corps and served in that capacity throughout World War Two.  She supervised the great wartime expansion of the Nurse Corps and its activities throughout the world as the corps grew from 436 to over 11,000 by 1945.  In July 1942, she was invested with the permanent relative rank of Lieutenant Commander and in December she received the temporary relative rank of Captain, the first woman in the history of the Navy to receive this rank.  In February 1944, her relative captaincy was changed to actual commission as Captain.

CAPT Sue Sophia Dauser retired from the Navy in April 1946.  She died on March 11, 1972 in Mount Angel, Oregon, and has been interred at Holy Cross Cemetery in San Diego, California.

Submitted by CDR Roy A. Mosteller, USNR (Ret)