Tom Brokaw recounts in his superb book, The Greatest Generation, a story his mother told him of the day Gordon Larsen came into the post office where she worked. Larsen was usually a genial and popular member of their community, but that day he had stopped in to complain about the rowdiness of the teenagers on Halloween the night before.
Brokaw’s mother was surprised at his tone and asked him in good humor, “Oh Gordon, what were you doing when you were 17?”
Gordon had looked at her squarely in the eye and replied, “I was landing at Guadalcanal.” He then turned and left the post office.
How many men and women, who walk among us, now in their eighties and nineties, can say “I was at Normandy” or “I was in the first wave at Iwo Jima”? Brokaw’s book has helped us to recognize the valor and sacrifice of these veterans of a war unlike any previous war or any since.
It was a generation united by a common purpose and also by common values – duty, honor, economy, courage, service, love of family and country, and, above all, responsibility for oneself.
In this issue we salute all of these valiant warriors with the abbreviated recollection of a few.
Mary Catherine Hampton, Nurse, 44th Evacuation Hospital
Mary Kathryn Hampton, a resident of Homestead Hills in Winston-Salem, was a young nurse in Winston-Salem when she volunteered to serve with the 44th Evacuation Hospital in Europe. Crossing on the Acquitania in 1943, she and 39 other nurses spent seven cold months in Maidenhead, England, awaiting D-Day. (A pleasant memory was Lady Astor’s invitation to tea and an Easter Sunrise service, both at her estate at Cliveden.)
“Finally we boarded one of the 45 LCIs (landing craft infantry) for a stormy Channel crossing,” she says. “We disembarked at Omaha Beach 13 days after D-Day.” Setting up immediately, even before the area had been swept for land mines, the 44th was the first evacuation hospital to open. “We received over 500 wounded after the first battle in Manche province and lost only one patient. One young solider had been shot in the mouth and couldn’t speak. I remember watching him write a letter for another young soldier who couldn’t see.”
She worked 12-15 hours straight for 53 days in the “chest and belly” ward with brief respites between five major battles. She was at Malmedy during the Battle of the Bulge when the Germans captured and shot 85 American soldiers. The capture of one of the hospital’s truck drivers with hospital personnel by a small unit of German solders, her return with a bottle of Chanel No. 5 after a joyous celebration of the liberation of Paris and other memories are recorded in her memoir on our website.