This Day in History: Frances Slanger, U.S. Army Nurse

On this day in 1944, a U.S. Army nurse pens a letter to the American G.I. Frances Slanger’s words would ultimately be published as an editorial in the Stars and Stripes newspaper.

It meant the world to our boys!

“These Soldiers had been fighting every day since they landed,” historian Bob Welch writes. “They had lost their sense of humanity, lost most of their sense of dignity, and lost their sense of hope. Suddenly, along came this nurse who wrote this letter . . . and it absolutely melted their hearts and renewed their sense of hope.”

Winning World War II was personal for Slanger. Her parents were Polish Jews who had fled to the United States. Thus, Slanger knew exactly where she wanted to be when she graduated from nursing school and was commissioned into the Army Nurse Corps years later: Nursing soldiers who were helping the persecuted.

By June 1944, she was with the 45th Field Hospital, landing at Normandy in the days after D-Day. Later, she went inland with frontline medical units to Belgium.

It’s said that her service was marked by enormous compassion and an ability to improvise under pressure. Nevertheless, she felt that soldiers were the ones who deserved most of the gratitude.

She apparently stewed over how to best put her thoughts into order until a sleepless night on October 20-21 found her pulling out pen, paper, and a flashlight.

“We had read several articles in different magazines and papers sent in by grateful G.I.s,” she wrote, “praising the work of nurses around the combat areas. Praising us—for what? We wade ankle-deep in mud. You have to lie in it. . . . Sure we rough it … But you, the men behind guns, driving our tanks, flying our planes, sailing our ships, building bridges, and to you men who pave the way and to men who are left behind—it is to you we doff our helmets.”

She spoke of the grit that characterized the typical American soldier.

“The wounded do not cry,” she concluded. “Their buddies come first. The patience and determination they show, the courage and fortitude they have is sometimes awesome to behold. It is we who are proud of you . . . .”

The next morning, Slanger mailed her letter to Stars and Stripes, with the encouragement of the other nurses. Later that day, her field hospital came under fire.

Slanger took a mortal hit. She would never know how much good she did for our soldiers in the weeks that followed.

The editors at the Stars and Stripes loved her heartfelt letter, publishing it on November 7. Hundreds of responses poured in. “Frances Slanger, Army nurse, is becoming a legend among the troops in the European Theatre of Operations,” one paper concluded.

“The important thing is that you could be at home,” one soldier responded to Slanger’s letter, “soaking yourselves in a bathtub every day, putting on clean clothes over a clean body and crawling between clean sheets at night . . . . Instead you endure whatever hardships you must to be where you can do us the most good.”

If Slanger were a legend before, you can imagine this feeling intensified when people realized that she was gone.

“As she made the supreme sacrifice for America and all living Americans,” one journalist concluded, “Death wrote the most convincing reply to the modest demurrer of Lieutenant Frances Slanger.”

Slanger has since received several posthumous honors, including a memorial, a hospital ship named for her, and a posthumous promotion.

But don’t you think she’d have been happiest to know that her letter allowed her to keep helping her boys, even after she was gone?

Rest in peace, Lt. Slanger.

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Primary Sources:

• Army Nurse (Idaho Statesman; Nov. 28, 1944) (p. 4)

• Brave Nurse Gave Her Life to Ease Pain of Doughboys (Commercial Appeal; Dec. 17, 1944) (Section 1, p. 8)

• Editorial Reaction: Army Nurse (Asheville Times; Nov. 30, 1944) (p. 4)

• Frances Slanger (Asheville Times; Nov. 27, 1944) (p. 4)

• Home of Frances Slanger (Boston Women's Heritage Trail)

• Julie Calohan, Journalist brings to life story of Jewish-American Army Nurse Corps nurse (U.S. Army; April 12, 2010)

• Nurse, Killed in Battle, Paid Tribute to Soldiers (Tampa Morning Tribune; Nov. 24, 1944) (p. 20)

• Profile: Frances Slanger (National Museum of American Jewish Military History)

• Tara Metal, Frances Slanger, Purple Heart (Jewish Women’s Archive; May 23, 2014)

• That These Dead (The Sentinel; Dec. 1, 1944) (p. 4)

• William P. Frank, The Man About Town (News Journal; Dec. 18, 1944) (p. 6)