Cornelia Elliot took her job as a registered nurse at King’s Daughters Hospital in Yazoo City seriously and with pride. But her country was at war, and she was ready to do her part like many of the young men who had already been shipped overseas. Being a woman in 1943, she obviously could not fight beside them. But she could see that those same soldiers were properly cared for when they needed medical attention.
“Never in a million years will I ever forget my purpose for joining the Army Nurse Corps,” Elliot said.
In February of 1943, Elliot joined the Army Nurse Corps and was on her way overseas within seven months. American troops had already landed at Normandy a few months earlier and were by now heavily involved in fighting to wrench France, Belgium and Holland from the Germans. Casualties were heavy, and nurses were needed more than ever.
Before she ever helped her first patient, Elliot left Yazoo City on the Queen Mary to sail across submarine-infested waters. After safely arriving in Scotland, she eventually made her way over the English Channel.
Elliot and her fellow nurses were scheduled to land on Utah Beach but were unloaded on Omaha Beach instead. Having arrived unexpectedly, no one was honestly ready for their arrival.
“Omaha Beach was the most desolate place I’ve seen, “Elliot said. “We stood there in our best uniforms for about six hours thinking and talking about the men who had landed there on D-Day four months earlier.”
Transportation finally arrived, but it came in the form of a truck with no roof. And, then the rain poured down on them. Elliot said the young nurses were frightened the entire route. She said it was dark, cold and horrible weather with the fear that Germans were around them. In fact, Germany had been pushed beyond Paris at that point.
Elliot and her team spent the first night at a battalion aid station.
“Never had an Army cot looked so good, and hot food tasted so good as those did that 2 a.m.,” she said.
The next morning, Elliot headed to a cow pasture in Normandy. In what almost seemed like a trend, no one was prepared for their arrival this morning either. There were no provisions, food, shelter, heat or water. However, a tent hospital was soon set up with other tents available for the nurses to live in, each with two stoves.
“We were given kerosene from somewhere,” Elliot recalled. “We put it into whiskey bottles and tore some of our clothes up to make strips to stick into the bottles for wicks. That way we had lights. We saw some crates not too far from our tents, so we went to get those and anything else we could burn in our stoves.”
However, the next morning, the area where they searched wood now had warning signs everywhere. The fields had not been cleared of mines.
Water was soon rationed, with one canteen of water per day for drinking and one helmet full for bathing and washing clothes.
Elliot was assigned the role as assistant operating room supervisor. The operating rooms were tents with gravel floors. And conserving as much wood as they could for heat, most mornings were met with ice hanging from the tents.
Elliot was soon transferred to the First General Hospital in Paris. Then she was moved to Reims, where they were moved into a building, displacing the 101st Airborne Division, who were resting there after the Battle of the Bulge.
“The men were moved out into tents,” she said. “Those boys were good at helping us get settled in. They were so good, in fact, that our chief nurse finally barred them from the area.”
While the doctors performed emergency surgeries, Elliot worked on the ward. Her work allowed her to gain more experience, eventually earning a promotion to first lieutenant, the only nurse in her group who was promoted.
Finally, Victory to Europe arrived, and Elliot can remember gathering to catch a glimpse of General Dwight Eisenhower when he arrived. But her work wasn’t over since the hospital was turned into an Air Evac Hospital.
“First came patients from hospitals closer to the fighting,” she said. “Then came our boys who had been prisoners of war. Then streams of displaced persons. The POWs were so heartbreaking, so emaciated you could see every bone in their bodies. The ones who had been bedridden were a mass of bed sores down to the bones. You could see each vertebra, and their elbows and heels were virtually gone.”
There was soon word that the hospital was going to be sent to the Pacific, where war was still raging. Elliot volunteered to go. Along with 500 nurses, she was prepared to be shipped out. But that same day was the day the war in Japan ended.
Elliot would return to the United States, back to Yazoo. Due to the pleading of her mother, she withdrew her request to return overseas. And although she returned home, the memories remained with her.
“I will never forget the corporal who was brought to us,” she said. “He was being taken to a hospital in a Jeep when a German plane strafed it and riddled his body. Nor will I forget the soldier who was close to a mine when it exploded and filled his body with shrapnel after blowing one of his legs off. Those pieces of shrapnel would continue to give that man problems for the rest of his life. Nor will I ever forget the one who had been blasted by a flame thrower and was burned all over his body.”
“I thoroughly enjoyed my military stint and would not have missed the experience for anything,” she concludes. “But many, many of the soldiers who came through my hospital will remain in my memory forever.”
