And If I Perish: Frontline U.S. Army Nurses in World War II

Softcover: 528 pages
Size: 7.8" x 5.2"
ISBN 140003129X
978-1400031290
Knopf
November 2004
(click below for the very best currently available price for this item)

This book would be a great gift for anyone interested in the history of medicine.

A galvanizing narrative of the wartime role played by U.S. Army nurses - from the invasion of North Africa to the bloody Italian campaign to the decisive battles in France and the Rhineland.

More than 59,000 nurses volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps alone: 217 lost their lives (16 by enemy action), and more than 1,600 were decorated for meritorious service and bravery under fire.

But their stories have rarely been heard. Now, drawing on never-before-published eyewitness accounts - many heroic, some mundane and comic - Monahan and Neidel-Greenlee take us to the front lines, to the withering fire on the beaches of Anzio and Normandy, and to the field and evacuation hospitals, as well as bombed and burned hospital ships. We witness the nurses - and the doctors with whom they served - coping with the physical and psychological damage done to the soldiers in combat. We see them working—often with only meager supplies and overwhelmed by the sheer number of casualties—to save the lives and limbs of thousands of wounded troops.

With them we experience the almost constant packing up and moving on to keep up with advancing troops, foxholes dug under camp beds, endless mud, and treacherous minefields. The vividness and immediacy of their recollections provide us with a powerfully visceral, deeply affecting sense of their experiences—terrifying and triumphant, exhausting and exhilarating.

This fascinating book is a revelatory work that at last gives voice to the nurses who played such an essential role in World War II.

"Monahan and Neidel-Greenlee, two former military nurses who have co-written previous books about American nurses in World War II Japan and Albania, have collaborated again to produce this popular account of the Army nurses who served in the war against Germany. Based on interviews, correspondence and diaries, as well as on published sources and archival material, this book employs a descriptive, matter of fact style that makes a nice foil to its vivid use of reconstructed dialogue and primary source quotations. Though the book is divided into chapters that recount individual campaigns (e.g. 'Chapter 5: Nurses in the Sicilian Campaign,' 'Chapter 6: The Sinking of the HMHS Newfoundland'), Monahan and Neidel-Greenlee do follow the experiences of several nurses throughout their history, bringing a narrative cohesion to what might have otherwise been a fragmented series of anecdotes. Particularly fascinating are their graphic descriptions of medical conditions, like gangrene and malaria, and of hospital procedures, such as the then-cutting-edge operation of transfusing whole blood into wounded soldiers. Though the extensive background material explaining battles and campaigns can sometimes threaten to swamp the narrative, overall this volume provides a valuable account of an often-neglected historical topic: the frontline experience of the women of the Greatest Generation." - Publishers Weekly

(information above from the publisher)

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