NAVY  FLIGHT  NURSE

On March 6, 1945, a Navy plane landed on Iwo Jima and made history.  The plane carried the first female Navy flight nurse to fly an evacuation mission to an active battlefield and land on a Pacific battlefield.  As a flight nurse she had been trained in crash procedures, survival and how to adjust treatments on patients in high altitude.  The flight was so successful that soon numerous female Navy flight nurses were flying on evacuation missions to battlefields.

LTJG Mae Hanson of Benson, Minnesota, was one of the Navy flight nurses who flew these missions.  She had undergone an eight week course where she learned such things as air evacuation techniques, physiology of flight, first aid with emphasis on shock, redressing wounds, water landing/crash scenario, and was required to swim under water, swim one-mile, and able to tow victims 440 yards in 10 minutes.

In May 1945 LTJG Hanson was photographed aboard a Naval Air Transport Service hospital plane evacuating wounded from Okinawa and is assisting to feed an infantryman who had been blinded by mortar fire.  Owing to the enormous casualty totals, Okinawa was the largest combat casualty evacuation operation in U.S. military history and marked the first time the Navy evacuated more casualties by air than sea. 

Navy flight nurses remain a footnote in most histories of military nursing as they never achieved any medals for their service let alone much notoriety.  Most would say that they were just happy doing their jobs and as one flight nurse remarked, “Our rewards are wan smiles, a slow nod of appreciation, a gesture, a word.  Accolades greater and more heart-warming than any medal.”

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