This Day in History: Lille Margaret Steinmetz Magette, WWII Nurse

On this day in 2014, a former Army nurse passes away. Lille Margaret Steinmetz Magette was among those who heroically served in military hospitals during World War II.

These women didn’t experience a particularly dramatic battle, earning a place in history books. Instead, they simply served, making sacrifices day after day. The accumulation of their contributions was vital to victory.

Lille was just your prototypical American girl, born and raised in small town Missouri. Yet an early experience shaped her life: When she was nine, she went to St. Louis to have her tonsils taken out. “I just thought nurses had wings,” she smiled.

As she got older, she wanted to be a nurse, but her mom objected. Lille ended up getting married instead, but her husband tragically passed away a year into their marriage.

“So I was a young widow,” she later told the Veterans History Project, “and I said to my mom, I’ve been married, I’m a widow and I’m on my own and I’m going into nurses training.”

Which is why Lille was a nursing student when Pearl Harbor was bombed. Naturally, she wanted to join the Army Nurse Corps. “I was quite blue and didn’t care if they killed me,” she said. “I just wanted to get into service.”

Once in the Corps, she trained at Fort Jackson—and learned more than just nursing skills. For instance, she was taught to survive a gas attack.

“[We had] to go through the gas chamber,” she recalled. “We had to carry our gas mask in with us and then put it on in so many minutes. . . . they sprayed these gases, and we had to identify them. I got a little mustard burn.”

Stateside training complete, she was soon headed to England. Lille remembers the soldiers at her first hospital—a psychiatric ward: “Some of them had seen their foxhole buddy killed. Some of them just couldn’t take the service.”

But she was still training for her final mission: crossing the Channel into France. “Here we also had to go through an obstacle course,” she said, “under barbed wire with live fire. Of course, we were in our helmets and our fatigues. We all survived it, but you look back and wonder how you did it.”

She landed at Normandy in July 1944.

Lille remembered the difficulties, later telling a local journalist that “[w]e wore combat clothes, lived in tents, ate the famous K and C rations, bathed in helmets and waded in mud . . . . We learned to nurse with every conceivable type of equipment including tin cans and wooden crates.”

Yet she also remembered the patients who made her job worthwhile: “I think the soldiers thought of us as their sisters, or their mothers.” She felt that God had called her to be a nurse. “I loved [the patients] and they loved me, and I think the first patient that died, I was the chief mourner.”

Later, she went with our boys into Belgium.

“[Buzz bombs] were a terrible menace,” Lille said. “We never knew. A lot of times we would be in the mess hall [with chaplains]. We would dive under the tables . . . they would pray and give us general absolution. We went through that for a long, long time.”

Not long after the war, she began working at a veterans hospital.

One especially tough medical case came in the form of F.J. “Red” Magette. He was on his death bed and had even been given last rites. Naturally, Lille nursed him back to health and ultimately married him.

They had a daughter and four grandchildren when Lille passed away at the age of 101.

Our history books often recount the dramatic battles and sacrifices. They don’t always focus on women like Lille who simply showed up every day, doing what needed to be done. Yet those efforts, too, were vitally important.

Another reason to be eternally grateful for the Greatest Generation.

Primary Sources:

• Clarence Castrop Died Wednesday Morning (Home Adviser [Vienna, MO]; Dec. 1, 1938) (p. 2)

• Into Service as Army Nurse (Glasgow Missourian; April 1, 1943) (p. 1)

• Megan Harris, D-Day Journeys: Nurses on the Ground and in the Sky (Folklife Today [LOC blog]; April 15, 2019)

• Lt. Castrop Here (Glasgow Missourian; Dec. 6, 1945) (p. 1)

• Lt. Castrop Nursing in Belgium (Glasgow Missourian; Jan. 4, 1945) (p. 6)

• Mrs. Lille Castrop Married in Nebraska (Columbia Daily Tribune; July 11, 1951) (p. 14)

• Obituary: Lille Margaret Magette

• Oral History (Lille Margaret Magette Collection)

• #VeteranOfTheDay Army Nurse Corps Veteran Lille Margaret Steinmetz Magette (U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs)