This Day in History: Navy Nurses at Pearl Harbor

On this day in 1941, Pearl Harbor reels from a surprise Japanese attack. Have you ever thought about the Navy nurses present on that day so long ago? Like many others, those nurses were abruptly shoved into war when Japanese planes unexpectedly descended upon the American base.

It was the opposite of the Hawaiian assignment that, until then, had been a cushy one.

“I thought I was living a charmed life,” Lt. Ruth Erickson later said.  She was at the Naval Hospital and would note that the nurses’ lives before the attack were characterized by nice quarters and easy duty. “We were a bit spoiled,” she smiled, “along with iced tea, fresh pineapple was always available.”

Ensign Ann Danyo Willgrube agreed. She was stationed aboard USS Solace, the only hospital ship then docked at Pearl Harbor. That assignment made her “the envy of all the nurses,” she wrote. Solace’s Chief Nurse, Grace Lally, would also remember her nurses extolling “the luck which had sent them to the Pacific paradise that was the Hawaiian Islands.”

Lally was getting ready for church early on December 7 when the Japanese attack began. She reached a window just in time to see a dive bomber attack USS Arizona. For her part, Willgrube had been sound asleep, but she was jolted awake by the explosions. She and others aboard Solace were soon scrambling into their uniforms at Lally’s directive, reporting for duty as fast as possible.

At the Naval Hospital, Erickson had been eating breakfast when she heard the planes. She rushed to a window, spotting one directly overhead, its Japanese markings clear. “My heart was racing,” she concluded, “the telephone was ringing, [the chief nurse] was saying, ‘Girls, get into your uniforms at once. This is the real thing!’”

Erickson would never forget their first patient and “the tremor of Dr. Brunson’s hand as he picked up the needle [to stitch the patient up]. Everyone was terrified.”

Nevertheless, nurses in both hospitals got to work.

“I have never ceased being amazed at how quickly we reacted to the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor,” Willgrube concluded. “We never had disaster drills, yet when we realized that we were actually at war, every person on board [Solace] seemed to know instinctively what to do.”

Most of the patients were burn victims. One nurse remembered an especially traumatic case. “I was holding under the patients’ thigh and lower leg to raise him when his leg separated from the knee in my hands,” Naval Hospital nurse Valera Catherine Vaubel Wiskerson said. “I turned white as the sheet, and the doctor looked at my face.  I took deep breaths to keep from fainting.”

The smell of burns filled the air. “Our chief nurse kept a perfumed handkerchief in her pocket,” Wiskerson explained, “and while she was feeding a burn patient, she would sniff it. Once a patient asked if he could sniff it too . . . . She thinks it saved his life because he ate better then.”

The nurses worked nonstop that day, saving as many as they could, but Erickson remembers going to the hospital’s basement to catch a few hours’ sleep late that night. Planes were flying overhead. Was it another attack? “Our knees were knocking together,” she recounted. “We were praying to be spared. But it was our planes.”

Erickson treated burn patients for a week before boarding the ocean liner SS President Coolidge. She and a few other nurses cared for 125 critically injured individuals as they were transferred to San Francisco. That ship arrived home on Christmas Day.

In the meantime, other Navy nurses remained behind at Pearl Harbor. Despite the destruction, they managed to put together a Christmas celebration to cheer up their patients.

Stay tuned for that story on Christmas Eve.

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heroines can be found on my website, HERE.

Primary Sources:

• Alice Wertz, WWII Navy nurse celebrates 105th birthday, among last links to Pearl Harbor (KTVU FOX 2; March 16, 2024) 

• American Women in a World at War: Contemporary Accounts from World War II (Judy Barrett Litoff & David Clayton Smith eds. 1997)

• André Sobocinski, USS Solace (AH-5): Witness to Pearl Harbor (Dept. of the Navy: Bureau of Medicine and Surgery; Nov. 28 2023)

• Emory A. Massman, Hospital Ships of World War II: An Illustrated Reference to 39 United States Military Vessels (1999)

• Gary Kamiya, Portals of the Past: Christmas 1941 Arrival of Convoy Draws Big Crowd (San Francisco Chronicle; Dec. 7, 2013) (p. C1)

• Greg Sellnow, A Bond . . . Holds Us Together (Post-Bulletin; Jan. 10, 2009) (p. B1)

• Janet A. Aker, Crew Aboard Navy Hospital Ship Solace Saved Lives, Cared for Wounded Following Attack on Pearl Harbor (Military Health System; Dec. 5, 2023)

• Joellen W. Hawkins & Irene Matthews, “Tugboat Annie:” Nursing’s Hero of Pearl Harbor—Grace Lally (1897-1983) (Journal of Nursing Scholarship; 1991)

• Katie Lange, The Pearl Harbor Attack, as Remembered by the Nurses Who Were There (Dept. of Defense; Nov. 7, 2024)

• Kyler Hood, WWII Nurse Donates Cherished Bullet to Pearl Harbor National Memorial (Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, United States; Sept. 26.2025)

• Lieutenant Ruth Erickson, NC, USN: Oral History of The Pearl Harbor Attack, 7 December 1941 (Naval History and Heritage Command)

• Ray Westbrook, Hospital ship survived attack on Pearl Harbor (Lubbock Avalanche- Journal; Sept. 27, 2010)

• Solace II (AH-5): 1941-1946 (Naval History and Heritage Command)

• Valera Catherine Vaubel Wiskerson (United States Navy Memorial)