NURSED  THE  WOUNDED  AT  PEARL  HARBOR

Valera Catherine Vaubel Wiskerson was born on October 6, 1909, in Chatsworth, Illinois.  Her father was a minister.  She spent her childhood in Illinois and graduated from nursing school in 1930 at Deaconess Hospital in Freeport, Illinois.  In 1937 she left employment as a nurse in a Chicago hospital and joined the U.S. Navy.  Her first duty assignment was as a nurse at the Naval Hospital in San Diego, California.  In 1940 she was reassigned to the Naval Hospital in Pearl Harbor.  The book, “No Time For Fear:  Voices Of American Military Nurses In World War II,” contains the following description of Wiskerson’s Pearl Harbor experience:

“I’d just served breakfast to the patients who couldn’t go to the mess hall and was going across to get some food for myself, when I heard a horrible explosion.  I looked across the water at the hangar on Ford Island.  It looked like it was picked up into the air and dropped down – PLUNK!  There was nothing but smoke where there had been that great big airplane hangar.  A plane with a huge red circle came close enough to tell it was Japanese.  It dived over the hospital, and if I’d had a gun I could have killed him.  I was a sharpshooter at the time, because a fellow had been taking me with him to practice shooting.  They started bringing men in with burns and fractures by whatever means they could get.  Patients had tags on them telling how much morphine or whatever had been done for them.  Doctors decided who went to which ward or what treatment they needed.  I was an acting dietitian but also worked in other wards for the next several days.  The diets were mostly liquids because of so many burn cases.”

“An experience I can’t forget to this day was a patient who was in shock.  When I went to get him a blanket, none were there, so I went upstairs to get one.  A doctor called me over to help lift a patient in the burn ward.  We’d lift a patient up and draw the sheet from underneath, and because the burned skin came off, fresh oil was put on the sheet.  I was holding under the patients’ thigh and lower leg to raise him when his leg separated from the knee in my hands.  I turned white as the sheet, and the doctor looked at my face.  I took deep breaths to keep from fainting.  After the patient was put on the sheet, I found a blanket and took it downstairs.  The patient who needed the blanket had died, and a new one was in his place, so I covered him with the blanket.”