This Day in History: The WWII Nurses who received Silver Stars

On this day in 1998, Army nurse Elaine Roe passes away. She is best known as one of four nurses to be awarded the Silver Star during World War II.

All four Stars came after an especially tough day at the Battle of Anzio.

That battle, you may remember, began with an Allied invasion on January 22, 1944. The initial landings met with less resistance than expected, but the German counterattack—when it came—was rough. Unsurprisingly, then, military nurses such as then-1st Lt. Mary Roberts and 2d Lts. Roe, Rita Rourke, and Ellen Ainsworth were working long hours at evacuation hospitals near the front lines.

“If we weren’t in a tent,” Roberts explained, “we were in a bombed-out building . . . . war is hell. We had amputees, eviscerated abdomens, open chest wounds—you name it.”  She remembered that the situation was so bad that the nurses were asked if they wanted to be evacuated. “[W]e decided that if the infantry was going to stay, we were going to stay,” she shrugged.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that the nurses who endured have been called “Angels of Anzio”?

February 10 proved to be an especially bad day. Roberts was then working as Chief Nurse of an operating room in the 56th Evacuation Hospital Unit. Ainsworth was in the same unit, working the night shift in a surgical ward. In the meantime, Roe and Rourke were at the nearby 33rd Field Hospital.

Suddenly, the Germans launched an attack on the hospitals, despite their Red Cross markings.

“We hear so many shells whistling over this tent,” Roe later explained, “that when the first one landed I paid no attention. Then the second one came and the patients told me, ‘Go to foxholes, that’s incoming mail.’”

Rourke, too, remembered patients who wanted her to find a foxhole and escape the incoming fire. “But the nurses stayed at their posts,” she said, “and tried not to show fear.”

Roe and Rourke worked determinedly, despite the incoming fire.  The enemy attack had knocked out electricity at the hospital, so they used flashlights to evacuate the 42 patients in their care. Their Silver Star citations describe the nurses’ “remarkable coolness and courage” and their insistence on helping the men, “with complete disregard for their own safety.”

Indeed, their efficiency and calm “under unnerving conditions” reportedly inspired the men and prevented the scene from degenerating into chaos.

In the meantime, Roberts had a different sort of challenge: As Chief Nurse of an operating room, she was dealing with surgeries already in progress when the shelling began.  Would you believe she kept that operating room functioning, even as shells fell all around?

“You could say I was fearful but not scared,” she said. “There were so many soldiers depending on us.”

All three of these nurses would survive, but Ainsworth was not so fortunate. She was able to move the patients in her ward to safety, but she took a hit herself that would prove fatal.

Would you believe that these nurses’ patients all survived—and Roberts even ensured that a few surgeries were successfully completed?

All four women would be awarded the Silver Star for their courage under fire.

Many years later, a journalist tracked down Roberts, hoping to interview her about her time at Anzio. Naturally, Roberts didn’t think she’d done much.

“She had to search in a bureau drawer to find the Silver Star medal in its box,” Thomas Turner reported for the Waco Tribune-Herald. “She seldom displayed it or discussed it.  She said it belonged to all those nurses at Anzio—especially the ones buried there.”

Just another member of the Greatest Generation, exemplifying the reasons that they received that nickname in the first place.

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Primary Sources:

• 2D U.S. Hospital Shelled by Nazis (Philadelphia Inquirer; Feb. 12, 1944) (p. 1)

• 2014 Hall of Fame (Army Women’s Foundation)

• Constance J. Moore, Colonel, ANC (Retired), ANCA Historian, WWII AN Silver Star Recipients Honored (Army Nurse Corps Association)

• Did You Know? (Baltimore Sun; March 10, 2016) (p. E18)

• Elaine A. Roe Pieper (Find a Grave)

• Mary Louise Roberts (Museum of Nursing History)

• Peter Worger, Mary Louise Roberts Wilson: First Woman to Receive the Silver Star (Texas State Historical Association; May 24, 2022)

• Radio Honor Given Nurse at Percy Jones (Battle Creek Enquirer; July 15, 1945) (p. 10)

• Reynolds Packard, Nazi Shells Hit U.S. Hospital on Beachhead, Two Nurses Killed (St. Louis Post-Dispatch; Feb. 12, 1944) (p. 1)

• Thomas Turner, From Anzio to Afghanistan—Texan Valor (Waco Tribune-Herald; May 25, 2008) (p. 10A)

• War Medals to Women (Philadelphia Inquirer; Oct. 31, 1967) (p. 23)

• Women in the News: “Doing a Fine Job” (Evening Express; Feb. 23, 1944) (p. 4)