Korean War Era

June, 1950

When the hostilities began in Korea on June 25, 1950, Army nurses were the first American women to be dispatched wit the Armed Forces to the combat Zone.  By the first week in July, the first detachment of nurses had arrived at Pusan with a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital.

July, 1950

The Air Force Nurse Corps came into being on July 1, 1949.  As it prepared to celebrate its first anniversary, it was faced with the grim but important task of supplying within a period of 48 hours, a large number of nurses to assist in the evacuation by air of battle casualties from the Korean area. 

January, 1951

On January 8, 1951, five nurses from North Carolina took a five day course on "Nursing Aspects of Atomic Warfare."  Nurses attending the calls will report to the State Civil Defense and Emergency Medical Committee to participate in organizing, developing and teach the second level nursing courses. 

March, 1951

A joint committee of six nursing organization called for the AMobilization of Nurses for National Security.  The following statement of policies should govern the mobilization of nurses and the distribution of nursing services.  It is based on three general assumptions:

1.  That military needs must come first.  Personnel should be requited according to functional category and field of nursing and make full use of men nurses.

2.  That, if there is a full-scale war, civilians as well as soldiers maybe on the battlefront.

3.  That, in the event of a total mobilization, the country will have some form of regulation so that there will be systematic allocation of supply among all essential services.

June, 1951

Three thousand additional nurses are needed in the Army Nurse Corps.  North Carolina's quota was set a 45.  The nursing profession has the responsibility of providing adequate nursing services for the Armed Services.  The Army does not conscript its nurses, but many young registered nurses will help by joining the Army Nurse Corps.

December, 1951

Nurses in North Carolina are taking and teaching courses related to Civil Defense.  Widespread information is needed regarding defenses against the effects of an atomic bomb, how to keep disease from spreading and how to protect our food and water supplies. 

March, 1952

With the next three months, the Army Nurse Corps seeks to commission some recent graduate of every approved school of nursing in the US.  There has developed in our country's defense thinking, a philosophy calling for a continuous flow into and exit out of our Armed Forces.

June, 1953

Captain Brenda Ann Quigley, Army Nurse Corps, has just completed three years in the Far East.  She reported that six months duty in a mobile Army surgical hospital in Korea increased her professional nursing experience three times as much as did the same period spent in a stationary hospital. "The great variety of case brought in from the front lines, the challenge to every ounce of nursing skill one possesses and the modern surgical miracles performed by the medical officer's right before our eyes was an experience that stands out as the finest professional six months I have ever spent." 

Captain Quigley spoke from an unusual Army background.  Almost half of her eight years in the Army Nurse Corps was spent on a ship engaged in transporting troops and displace persons to all corners of the globe.  Since 1950, these shipboard assignments have been given to members of the Navy Nurse Corps, but from July 1, 1946 to March 2, 1950, Captain Quigley said the high seas as a nurse assigned to the Army Transportation Corps.    In May, 1950, she was sent to Japan and by the end of that summer had begun her Korean duty tour.

July, 1954

US Lt. Genevieve de Galard-Terraube, "The Angel of Dien Bien Phu," was the honored guest of the US Congress.  She was presented with the Distinguished Service in the Profession of Nursing by the American Nurses Association.  It read as follows: "For her heroic devotion to the sick and wounded soldiers at Dien Bien Phu which has stirred the respect of all citizens and for her faithful adherence to duty as a volunteer for services and as a nurses through which she has symbolized and dramatized for all the free world, the high precepts of the nursing profession."