‍Kamikaze attacks USS Comfort hospital ship

‍“Kamaretta red, smoke boat make smoke"

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‍Our “Badger” Nurses in search of a ship

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‍Let’s meet the three Army nurses from Wisconsin aboard the Comfort when she was attacked. Their travels in search of a ship are absorbing.

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‍Myrtle Onsrud attended La Crosse Lutheran Hospital Nursing School and graduated in 1932. She worked as a nurse in Michigan and Madison, Wisconsin. She moved to California in the early 1940s. She had one brother in the Marine Corps serving in the Pacific and another in the Merchant Marine. She joined the Army in 1941. 

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‍Myrtle’s brother, Private First Class (PFC) Edward Onsrud, USMC, was killed in the Battle for Guam in 1944.

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‍Onsrud met up with Doris Gardner and Mary Rodden at the Torney Hospital in Palm Springs, California. Onsrud was the day duty nurse for the surgical and post-surgical ward at Torney.

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‍Doris Gardner wanted to become an airline stewardess. Back then, a flight attendant had to have nurse’s training. She attended St. Luke’s Hospital School of Nursing in Racine, Wisconsin, near Milwaukee, and graduated in 1941. 

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‍She took a job as an obstetrics nurse in Waukesha, Wisconsin, where she met Mary Rodden, who also worked in obstetrics. They handled pre- and post-natal care of mothers and their babies. The two nurses became close friends. 

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‍Like Myrtle, both women had brothers in the military during WWII. That motivated them to join the Army in summer 1942. Myrtle was one year ahead of Doris and Mary.

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‍Most nurses coming into the military service found the Army was not prepared for a large-scale and modern two-front war, and was not prepared for them. 

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‍The Army Medical Department’s evaluation of its performance, published in 1974, said,

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‍“At the onset of World War II, problems of unprecedented size and scope challenged the U.S. Army Medical Department simultaneously. These problems ranged from mobilizing and housing personnel to receiving, storing, and shipping supplies and equipment from constructing facilities to activating installations. None was more demanding than the task of training thousands of men and women to provide the fighting forces with the finest medical care in the history of warfare.”

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‍This evaluation honed in on the situation facing the Army Nurse Corps,

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‍“After entry of the United States into the war, the system suffered a complete breakdown … After Pearl Harbor, the Medical Department found itself unable to mobilize and equip them (medical staff) in time to accompany combat forces being shipped overseas.”

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‍Men by the tens of thousands were being shipped into combat, and the Army’s Medical Department was not prepared to respond to the influx of battle casualties. 

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‍Medical planners reasoned that there were over 500,000 nurses in the US, and the Army only needed 1-2 percent of them. Therefore, the Army brought nurses in a few at a time. The lessons of this reasoning were exposed quickly. The Army Nurse Corps (ANC) increased from 672 in 1939 to 55,500 at the end of the war in 1945.

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‍Most nurses came directly out of college. Supervising nurses were stressed by the constant influx of new nurses. There was no time for leisurely on-the-job training (OJT). Nurses had to learn while working on badly wounded men in a life-and-death struggle.

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‍Nurses had to learned how to operate under field and combat conditions. In the Pacific region, the environment was hot and humid, and they were under hostile fire. They had to upgrade their skills to meet the demands of wartime. 

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‍They had to focus their minds on treating and caring for a large number of patients, often coming in large numbers all at once, many with the most gruesome battle wounds. They had to learn to make do with what they had and recognize they were charged to safeguard the strength of our fighting forces.

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‍Hospital ships at sea placed even greater demands on training. As an aside, the nurses on a hospital ship had to learn how to walk around the ship, whether strolling or in the operating room, while the ship was rolling about on the ocean.

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‍One effect of the massive mobilization of troops, which extended to nurses, was that medical personnel often roamed around looking for a unit to join, or they would end up with a unit that was not expecting them, or whatever. The journeys of Lieutenants Onsrud, Gardner, and Rodden resembled this searching for a place to land. 

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‍Doris Gardner assembled a scrapbook acquainting the reader with their odyssey.

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‍Doris and Mary, after signing away their lives to the Army, were sent to the Medical Replacement Training Center at Camp Grant in Rockford, Illinois, a training camp for medical personnel, and a camp controlled by the Illinois National Guard. It had only opened in fall 1940. The first shipment of trainees was in late March 1941. 

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‍The women were housed first in barracks, then in tents. Classrooms were in short supply. Training equipment and training medical officers were in short supply. You get the idea.

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‍Gardner commented,

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‍“After our physicals, the doctors started laughing. I didn’t weigh enough, and Mary was flat-footed. However, we were both accepted.”

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‍Mary and Doris remained at Camp Grant for three months and probably received about five weeks of training. Not only did they have to learn about combat medicine, but they had to learn how to be an Army officer, how to wear the uniform, rank structure, etc. The good news was they emerged as second lieutenants.

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‍They both joined four other Army nurses and went to the Army’s Torney General Hospital, Palm Springs, California, arriving at the Palm Springs Train Depot on August 1, 1942. Dorrie has said the nurses traveled in groups of six. When they arrived at the train depot, Doris recalled, 

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‍“There wasn’t a soul in sight, six nurses all alone in the lonely desert, 'out in the middle of nowhere,' around 6 P.M. on a very hot day: August 1st, 1942, with no staff and no phone in sight to alert the Army we had arrived.”

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‍One of the nurses leaned against a wooden panel on a wall, and “wha-la,” a telephone popped out that had been encased in a cabinet to protect it from the dust. They called the base.

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‍A few jeeps rolled up to the station about an hour later, and off they went.

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‍The Army bought the El Mirador Hotel in 1942 and converted it to a 1,600-bed general hospital during the summer. It supported the Desert Training Center, which trained soldiers and airmen who were to be sent to North Africa and also cared for those returning home from overseas. The six nurses from Camp Grant met up with six other Army nurses already at Torney.

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‍These 12 nurses, young, impressionable, and new to the Army, converted the hotel to an Army hospital. The 1,600 beds had to be installed. The nurses had to order linen for the beds and all the medical supplies. They set up the wards, operating rooms, and post-operative rooms.

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‍I’ll note that there were about 250 German and Italian prisoners of war (POWs) at Torney. They had a separate compound next to the hospital and worked in the hospital laundry and kitchen.

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‍Myrtle Onsrud was the day duty nurse for the surgical and post-surgical ward at Torney. Because of her experience, she was the chief nurse in the surgical and post-surgical wards. Myrtle acquired the nickname “Mert.” Doris was known as “Dorrie.”

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‍The problem at Torney was that there were no patients. Once they had set everything up, they had nothing to do, so they toured the Palm Springs area. Dorrie said Torney was empty when she arrived and full when she left a year later.

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‍In April 1943, the three nurses were sent to Camp Stoneman in Pittsburg, California, a major staging area northeast of San Francisco, for troops destined to serve in the Pacific. Over a million troops moved through this camp.

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‍Camp Stoneman had to be built from the ground up. Construction began in February 1942, just a short while after the attacks on the Hawaiian Islands in December 1941—the first troops to pass through arrived in May 1942. Processing took about three days. The rest of the time was spent training. 

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‍Construction on a 1,000-bed hospital began in March 1942 and was finished by year’s end. Our Wisconsin nurses got there four months after the hospital opened.

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‍The hospital was called Station Hospital, which meant that its primary duty was to serve people on the base, in the immediate area. Most men received medical examinations to determine their fitness for duty. If needed, last-minute dental and medical care was administered. 

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‍Camp Stoneman was a huge base, 3,200 acres, able to handle 20,000 troops at a time. It was close to a pier, so the soldiers walked to the pier, boarded a ferry boat, and went off to the Army docks in San Francisco, and they then headed for war. 

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‍It’s interesting to note that soldiers and Marines passing through Stoneman had to be trained on how to live aboard ships on long voyages, including how to abandon ship!

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‍They were next assigned to the 521st Medical Hospital Ship Platoon (separate) to serve on a hospital ship. In June 1943, they sailed from California to Brisbane, Australia, on the SS Lurline, which had been a passenger ship. The Lurline had to “escape and evade” Japanese ships and aircraft on its way to Australia. They arrived in Brisbane in July.

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‍The three nurses were then assigned to the SS Monterey fast troop carrier, which had been a luxury liner. It arrived in Brisbane in July as well. 

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‍The Monterey was configured to hold over 3,000 troops. She could get her speed up to 23 knots. She typically sailed without an escort because of her speed, robust design, and her anti-aircraft artillery. Troop ships were often used as hospital ships.

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‍The nurses took care of wounded and sick patients hailing from the war in the Southwest Pacific, sailing from Australia to New York. They got to New York in August 1943.

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‍Our three nurses took a few days' leave in New York and then took a train to Chicago and then to Oakland, California, aboard the Overland Limited, an upscale train Dorrie termed as “first class.” They made it back to Camp Stoneman, by this time seasoned pros!

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‍The SS Etolin, later named the US Army Transport (USAT) Etolin, was waiting in San Francisco but delayed departure by a day, waiting for a spare part the engineer swore was mission essential if they were to make it across the Pacific. 

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‍The Etolin served as a troop ship in WWI. It was later sold to Alaska Packers of San Francisco, which was a commercial fishing company and a dominant force in the fishing industry in the Pacific Northwest. 

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‍The Army chartered her in 1940 to serve as a troopship. I do not know whether the Army was able to eliminate the smell of dead fish, but our nurses boarded her and sailed to Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. Dorrie described the Etolin as “small and largely defenseless.” She was to meet up with a protective convoy, but that did not happen, so they proceeded across the Pacific alone. 

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‍The Etolin left San Francisco in mid-September 1943 and arrived in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea (PNG) in mid-October. It is the capital of PNG and one of the last Allied bastions when the Japanese came. Allied forces staged out of this city as they went on the offensive. General MacArthur located his headquarters here.

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‍Many of us are not familiar with the Southwest Pacific area. I want to spend a few moments introducing it. Monumental battles were fought in this area.

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‍The Australians took control over German New Guinea in WWI and ruled it after the war.  It evolved into the country of Papua New Guinea on the eastern half of New Guinea.

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‍The Japanese invaded in 1942 and occupied the northern half of the island. The National WWII Museum said this about the fighting in New Guinea,

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‍“New Guinea was one of the most horrific battlegrounds of World War II. Dense jungles, intense heat, disease, and fierce Japanese resistance all combined to make service on the island—the second largest in the world—a misery. And it lasted a long time: From March 8, 1942, when Japanese forces first landed on the island, to the end of World War II in the summer of 1945, fighting took place across the island of New Guinea and in its nearby island chains.”

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‍The Australians and Americans led the way in fighting the Japanese on the main island of New Guinea along with Britain and the Netherlands. At the same time, the US focused on the Solomon Islands, including Guadalcanal to the east, and later the Mariana Islands to the north, which included Guam, Saipan, and Tinian.

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‍Our nurses landed at Port Moresby aboard the Etolin in mid-October 1943, in the middle of the thicket. 

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‍I’m not exactly sure how, but the three managed to get on board the AHS Maetsuycker, a Dutch cargo ship converted by Holland to a hospital ship, while in Port Moresby. The ship crew was Dutch oficers and Javanese sailors. She was administered by the Australian Navy with US medical personnel. 

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‍Maetsuycker was one of three foreign-flagged ships to become US hospital ships. She sailed to Brisbane by way of the Coral Sea and Townsville, Australia, arriving in Brisbane in November 1943. Our nurses were eager to get on board another hospital ship in Brisbane, but learned they were not needed.

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‍So, in January 1944, the three caught a hospital train to Sydney and back to Brisbane on Australia’s east coast. I am not sure, but I suspect they joined the Australian ambulance trains used by US forces. Use of these trains was dictated by the need to evacuate the sick and wounded from the frontlines to the rear. The experience of WWII was that some forward units had to get as many as 1,000 men away from the frontlines to save their lives, but also to clear the forward medical units so they could receive fresh patients. 

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‍It is helpful to remember that the Coral Sea bounded eastern Australia, the location of a major naval battle against the Japanese in May 1942. It is also in the region of New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, the Marshall Islands, and the Mariana Islands, scenes of bloody battles during the Allied offensives that would carry them to Okinawa.

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‍After their round-trip rides on the hospital train from Brisbane to Sydney and back, our threesome reported to the Brisbane docks in January 1944 along with 72 other medical people.

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‍They expected to be assigned to a ship. Hospital platoons would be called out, assigned to a ship, and then they would board. The 72 “others” were assigned to their ship, and Mert, Doris, and Mary were left on the docks standing there, once again alone.

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‍The ships carrying the other nurses each departed. After a while, the Badger Three bumped into an Army captain named Curlew and asked if they could board the USS Monticello (AP-61), a troop transport ship. The captain said it had a full complement of wounded, including mentally ill troops, and the ship had sufficient medical staff. But later, he said the ship was asking for more nurses, so the three got on board. It turned out they were the only three nurses on board. I suspect the nurses talked their way aboard.

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‍The nurses were put in a cabin behind the bridge and Marines restricted them to their quarters. After two weeks, an officer told them the ship was filled with mentally ill patients, shell-shocked, and with all the trauma that goes with war. He explained that the captain was reluctant to bring women aboard. Doris has said, 

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‍“The patients just wandered around. We tried to talk to each one of the guys. They were very glad to see us – a woman you know. It was kind of scary at first; but we got to know them and they us. There was another ward, which we found out about later. It was a gigantic room where all the severely, mentally ill patients stayed. We had to walk across a catwalk to get to them and treat them. You couldn’t look down; you’d be scared to death.”

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‍The ship departed from Brisbane and traveled along the South American coast to San Pedro, California. The Monticello arrived in California in March 1944. As their luck would have it, the USS Comfort (AH-6) was commissioned there in March.

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‍Meet the USS Comfort