Beyond the Call of Duty by Judith Barger

Author:Judith Barger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Kent State University Press

MAES in the Central Pacific

Unlike their colleagues in other MAES, members of the 809 MAES traveled to their overseas destination by air, not sea. Officers, including flight nurses, and enlisted men flew from Hamilton Field, California, in five ATC planes to Hickam Field, Hawaii, in November 1943. The 812 MAES arrived at the same location by the more conventional route in December, having sailed from California. The two squadrons pooled their resources, sharing a personnel office and operating jointly to evacuate casualties from the Gilbert and Marshall Islands to Oahu through June 1944.36

The flight nurses of both squadrons were housed initially in base quarters at Hickam Field, but, although they were less primitive than those of their colleagues on other islands, these accommodations were not up to the standards of 812 MAES chief nurse Elizabeth Pukas. When she learned that she and her twenty-four flight nurses were to be housed in two three-bedroom houses, she went to the commanding flight surgeon and requested another house, to make their accommodations more livable. When told that the housing was temporary, since her nurses would be out on flights much of the time, Pukas replied, “Yes, but there will be a number of us having to stay home in between flights to recuperate, to refurbish, to repack.… And I’m very sure you would not ask a male counterpart to live in such close quarters.” The nurses eventually were given more adequate housing, but not before their chief nurse had taken the situation through the chain of command to headquarters level. “I’m not too forward,” Pukas explained, “but I am a chief nurse.… My flight nurses are extremely important to me.” The amenities of home were also important to Pukas. Once she obtained the third house, she decorated them all with paintings on loan from a local art museum and stocked the kitchens with good foods from the nearby navy commissary. Pukas was, she said, the flight nurses’ “surrogate mother.”37

Shortly after their arrival overseas, flight nurses of the 809 and 812 MAES flew air evacuation missions from Oahu to other Hawaiian islands; six nurses of each squadron were stationed at Canton until the next month, when permission arrived to station them at Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands.38 Flight nurse Lieutenants Elsie Nolan and Victoria Pavlowski of the 812 MAES made a bit of history as the first two white women known to arrive on Baker Island, when an engine on their plane died en route from Tawara to Hawaii with patients on board.39

The flight surgeons of the 801 and 804 MAES provided squadron personnel with didactic instruction on the medical aspects of air evacuation, but flight surgeons of the 809 and 812 MAES carried their training one step further. When the flight nurses of both squadrons were restricted from flying into Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, resulting in downtime, their squadron leaders took them on bivouac in the Hawaiian mountains for an expected two weeks in May 1944. Flight nurses served as executive officer,

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