Nurse LaRetta Matthews Garland at a rest camp in China, in image from Jim Lewter, who was stationed at the 95th Station Hospital in Kunming. Some of Nurse Garland's story below:
From autumn 1943 until summer 1945, Lakeland native Lt. LaRetta “Matty” Matthews was “over the Hump,” a nurse with the 95th Station Hospital in Kunming, China. Five thousand miles to the east, Lt. Bobby Stern of Jeanette, Pa., was patching up soldiers from Gen. George Patton’s 3rd Army at the 164th Field Hospital.
Today, on Veterans Day, in addition to the nation’s male veterans, we honor these two women as well as the 500,000 women who served in World War II and 2 million female veterans of all U.S. wars.
Over the Hump
Matty Matthews, now LaRetta Garland, 87, of Cape Coral, enlisted in late 1942. “It was the thing to do at the time,” she said. “It was a time for patriotism to come to the fore. I was always a little adventurous. I’m so glad I went. I never I never regretted a thing. But I did get homesick a time or two.” Her first assignment was Fort Barrancas in North Florida.
“They asked for volunteers for the West Coast,” Garland said. “That seemed like the end of the Earth to a little girl. I got to be a big girl quickly.”
Assigned to the 95th Station Hospital, Garland was sent to India, after stops in New Zealand, Australia, and finally over the Hump (the Himalayas) to Kunming.
“There was another girl, Arlie Collins, who was the same size as me and had the same interests,” Garland said. “They called us the ‘gold-dust twins.’ We went over together.”
The 95th was the only large army hospital unit in China; it treated battle casualties from various fronts in China and served as an evacuation hospital.
Air raids and handshakes
“When there was an air raid, everyone went out and got into slit trenches,” Garland said. “But if a patient couldn’t be moved, somebody had to stay with him. I felt it was a gift to be able to stay with patients. I’d talk to them, sing, tell funny jokes.
“They’d tell me about their families, and almost all of them would say, ‘You won’t leave me, will you?’ ”
While in India and China, Garland developed a daily routine.
“When I was first on duty every day, I’d check the information on everybody’s chart on the foot of their bed,” she said. “Then I’d check the seriously ill patients, and then I’d visit all the others and shake everybody’s hand. They never saw a woman, and I thought shaking everybody’s hand was important.”
Supply lines
In any theater of any war, supply lines are critical and can be logistically difficult. The only way to get supplies to the 95th and other outfits in China was for the Air Transport Command (ATC) to fly them over the Hump, a dangerous job that cost about 1,000 lives. “Our bandages, cots, gowns, dressings all came by air, the ATC,” Garland said. “We didn’t have proper refrigeration, and we rarely had ice — we used to bury the penicillin a foot deep in the ground to keep it cold.
“Sometimes we had what we needed, depending on the shipments. Same way with food — you’d yearn for things like strawberry preserves. When the ATC pilots would start back over the Hump, we’d run out and say, ‘Don’t forget the whole-wheat bread and strawberry preserves.’”
After the war — after air raids and monsoons, after caring for wounded, sick and dying men and shaking hundreds of hands — Garland returned to the States.
“When I came back, I thought, ‘Gosh, the war hasn’t changed things a bit,’” she said.
Garland went on to become a psychology professor at Emery University in Atlanta and to found the LaRetta Matthews Garland Scholarship for nursing majors. ...
(Cited from: http://www.militarian.com/threads/us-nurses.938/,
http://www.news-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071111/NEWS01/71…)