LAKEWOOD - Barbara June Gage just wanted to fly.

And in 1943, with the United States fully involved in World War II, the 24-year-old Massachusetts native soon found an opportunity to do so, with the help of a developing program: the U.S. Army Air Forces Flight Nurse Corps.

Celebrating her 100th birthday at Hearthstone Estates Assisted Living in Lakewood, the veteran recently looked back at her service days transporting injured soldiers to hospitals throughout the Pacific and the United States mainland.

"I love the air. I wanted to make my living in the air somehow," said Barbara, who took her husband's last name, Gruning, after marriage. "I was going to be an airline hostess, but you had to be a registered nurse. ... After I got my RN, I went to sign up for American Airlines and I realized I would be more useful as a nurse. So I signed up for overseas duty."
That was the beginning of a two-year stint helping American and Allied soldiers recover from combat wounds. She was stationed at Hickam Field, today's Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu. Her close to 1,000 flight hours took her to Guam, Saipan, the Philippines and even Japan.

"What I cherished the most back then was seeing the wounded helped, and seeing them headed for their home and their people, and getting to see their loved ones again," Gruning said.

Some 500 Army nurses served as members of 31 medical air evacuation transport squadrons during the war. Their role was key in saving lives; out of the 1.17 million patients air-evacuated throughout the war, only 46 died en route.

But the work was not without peril: at least 17 flight nurses lost their lives during the war, according to the National Museum of the United States Air Force.

Gruning was part of an elite group of volunteer nurses who paved the way for developments in medical care and, most importantly, women's empowerment, said Kim Guise, assistant director for curatorial services at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans.

"Everyone knows about women workers, women in factories and Rosie the Riveter and those trailblazers," Guise said. "But there are various other small aspects of all kinds of women's experience that may not be as well known. And this is one chapter."
When the U.S. entered the war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the idea of air evacuation from combat zones had been explored. Not fully explored was the imperative of providing care in the air, Guise said.

With an ongoing war now producing thousands of wounded American servicemen, the U.S. Army provided accelerated training for nurses who were then dispatched to combat theaters around the world.

"So these women went in with little training specific to the air and they all volunteered for this particular duty. So they were not afraid of risk or danger," Guise said. "They were very adventurous women."

Gruning signed up for service and headed to the School of Air Evacuation at Bowman Field, Kentucky. She completed her four-week training in September 1943 and soon was in the Pacific transporting wounded soldiers as part of the 823rd squadron.

The same planes used to carry the injured were used also to transport war materials, which didn't allow for the planes to be labeled with the big red crosses usually marking medical facilities and transportation, hopefully protecting such facilities from enemy attack.
In letters to her mother, she wrote of the dangers and horrors she and her squad encountered on a daily basis.

"Mom, some day this terrible war will end, but there are so many things that can never be erased from our memories," Gruning wrote to her mother in a March 1945 letter.

There was the time a Japanese combat plane flew so close to them they thought they would be shot down. On another occasion, they were loading injured soldiers into an airplane when the base was attacked, prompting her team, in a matter of seconds, to unload the injured and find refuge.

"[With those letters] I wanted to express myself," Gruning said. "And I knew she (my mother) would understand what I was going through. So I wrote to her and I could tell her my feelings."

There's one memory that still haunts her. For one of her flights, the field hospital had 27 patients in need of being evacuated, when the plane could only accommodate 26.

Somebody had to be left behind.
She decided on a soldier with severe head and abdominal wounds. The experience made her feel she was leaving behind someone she ought to have helped.

"I had to decide on him because he probably was the least able to make the trip. Everybody else was a little more capable," she recalled. "I had never done that before and I hated to do it then, but I had to."

After the war, Gruning moved to Philadelphia and got a job there as a nurse. Looking for a way to meet people, she and her roommate, a fellow nurse, joined a local theater group. There she met Carl Thomas "Tom" Gruning, a fellow World War II veteran who served on the European front as an Army Air Forces sergeant.

The couple married six months after meeting and moved to Shamong Township, where they raised their only daughter, Lisel Fantry. While her husband worked as an independent insurance agent, Gruning worked as a school nurse and ultimately as an industrial nurse for Hercules Inc. out of the company's Burlington County plant.

In 2014, along with Fantry, Gruning gathered the letters she wrote to her motherand published the book "Flight Nurse: From Pearl to Tokyo,"available on Amazon.

The 90-page read puts the reader right next to the young nurse making life-and-death decisions while wondering all along when or if the war would ever end.

"It was a very brutal time and I don't think people today appreciate it and that's why they call them the greatest generation," the 68-year-old Fantry said. "I mean, the guys that just had six weeks of training and went on a beach and were just slaughtered. I don't think anybody can appreciate that today."
Japan surrendered on Sept. 2, 1945. Although the war had ended, there was still one last mission in store for Gruning: a Sept. 12 mission to Tokyo to recover recently liberated American prisoners of war.

"That was really exciting to see how happy they were to get out of prison and get into a plane and head home," Gruning recalled. "I felt that I was doing something that needed to be done, and I was glad that I could. Some of the boys, they didn't have anybody to talk to, and sometimes they just like to talk to you. Even just talking to them, caring for their wounds and taking care of them was all part of helping win the war."

Gustavo Martínez Contreras covers Lakewood. He is a graduate of the University of Texas at El Paso and the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Contact him at gmartinez@gannettnj.com or at 732-643-4061.

Nice snapshot. Thanks for posting.

When I was a kid my neighbor was a quiet, laid back kind of guy. He was my Dads age and they were good friends. Ted was a pilot in WW2. He flew P51’s. He never left the states. Taught young guys how to fly them in Texas.

Ted Pavelec. One of the unsung heros.

That was interesting. It's unfortunate that there are so many 'unknown' stories from WWII that will soon be lost to history.

An interesting reminder about how commercial stewardesses in the early days had to be registered nurses. I always wondered if that was a “See what we’re doing to protect our passengers” publicity thing or if someone really believed that having an RN of the era on a plane would make any difference in a medical emergency.

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:
An interesting reminder about how commercial stewardesses in the early days had to be registered nurses. I always wondered if that was a “See what we’re doing to protect our passengers” publicity thing or if someone really believed that having an RN of the era on a plane would make any difference in a medical emergency.

I read somewhere that stewardesses had to be nurses to help calm nervous passengers and those who experienced airsickness.